Found this gem while going through some old files. Answer the following questions after watching the video:

1) Why did Aruney bunk his convocation?

2) How much was Maasi’s car’s KBB value? What vehicle condition does this value correspond to? How much did she managed to sell this car for?

3) “Khoda pahad, nikli _____” ?

When will one of these come into existence??

On the down side, need to make more money by then

Damn Apple, stop luring people!

Ezegoo, a new, much advertised online air ticket booking service sucks bigtime! Their phone support is non existent. They don’t seem to respond to emails or send confirmations the way it is done by others, like, cleartrip, yatra, etc. It works as long as you have to do a plain booking and are sure you won’t need to ever talk to them for any modifications/cancellations or any other such job. My recommendation, just stay clear off them!

As long as I am ranting about traveling over Indian skies, Indigo airlines is another big sucker. I first flew with them on my Pune-Bangalore trip and found them to be quite okay. I have since tried booking a ticket with them twice, and the flights were canceled on both occasions. They just give you a call, a day or two in advance and cut a sorry face. By that time you find that the fares have already shot up on all other options. You are struck and have no option but to shell out another grand or two to make it to your destination on a different airline. Din’t have this problem with any other airline in India so far.

Here is the test flight video of the fixed-wing micro aerial vehicle (under 30 cms in diameter) under-development at Coral Digital, Bangalore (chief designer: Shyam). This was a manual flight of this vehicle. Automation of this platform seems doable in about a month’s time, given management will!

And here we have a video of the outdoor attitude stabilized free flight of quadrotor.

The vehicle was redesigned in October to improve payload capacity, and to reduce its dimensions. This was achieved with brushless motors, carbon tubes and LiPo batteries. The vehicle performed quite well in the outdoor free flight tests. The next thing would be to add GPS, and magnetometers, for it to fly way-points. Thanks for the video, Sapan!

Checkout the video of our recent experiment with attitude stabilization of a quadrotor.

This was shot in September ‘07 at JVV Badminton court in Bangalore. Here only the IMU (consisting of accelerometers and gyroscopes) is used for attitude stabilization of the vehicle (inner loop). In the video, you see Shyam first gets the vehicle to trim by commanding the desired pitch and roll angles, using the R/C transmitter. The vehicle maintains its pitch and roll angles (and yaw rate) once it is trimmed. Sapan is carrying the battery to power the vehicle.

The next phase would consist of vehicle redesign to allow for extra payload, and implementation of the outer loop (translations, way point navigation).

The most organized/clean folder on my laptop seems to be the Trash! That’s because I am used to purging it every now and then for need of more disk-space. Besides trash, the frequently used folders are in somewhat organized state. Everything else is a kind of mess. I say a mess, as I don’t really know what is where, or even WHAT ALL is exactly there! Its primarily the spotlight results that remind me of some or the other ‘hidden treasure’. The problem is that you just keep accumulating so much info everyday that you would probably never use/need again but you wouldn’t want to delete it either!

Can’t think of a good solution. Frankly, I am not sure if I am even able to clearly define the problem itself ditch.. just get an external HDD and dump it all there

So what did I do during the last four months? If you really look at it, nothing worthwhile; just pretending to be busy with some or the other arbit/random work which could as well have not been done and nobody would have noticed, except maybe, my boss.

How do we decide whatever we do in life? When does doing something justify one’s existence? Is getting paid enough of a good reason to spend your time doing something?

yeah…. I have been waiting for this for so long! One might wonder why would I wait to get a desktop when I have an awesome Macbook that is super-simple to use and makes life so much easier. Well, I just wanted to try out Ubuntu (without disturbing anything on my Macbook)!!

And here I am, blogging from my new desktop with a fresh Ubuntu installation.  When did Linux become so awesome! For the first time in my life, I had such a smooth installation of an OS (yup it was even easier/better than an XP installation)! It detected the graphics, LAN, etc. and everything just worked. Well, I haven’t tested the audio yet, but i don’t really care about it anyway, since its my office machine. The only little problem I had was with Synaptic. The proxy configuration in Synaptic does not work. I found a fix on the Ubuntu forums (edit apt.conf to include a line for proxy settings) and that made it work.

I have a lot more exploring to do. Will try to keep blogging as I progress. Other stuff that I need to start using: Scilab, Octave, Python, and CAELinux!

If you don’t keep track, its not so hard to lose all time while still keeping (or pretending to keep?) yourself busy with something or the other. There are so many things that one can do, but there is limited time. Out of these innumerable things to do, one needs to prioritize and attempt/finish the most important/urgent/rewarding things first.

I have a bad memory. I tend to take up things as they come on my mind. In the end, I end up spending most of my time doing things that were not necessary and could have been left for later, or even totally avoided. This is not working for me! I need to either work on my memory, or at least keep a note with the priority-based listing of things-to-do. Will actively work on this from now on.