Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 15, 2010

Augmented Reality: Tattoo that transforms into a flying dragon

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 7:52 PM

Augmented reality, the words bring to mind a science fiction world where people wear glasses hooked up to computers that give additional information on the item being looked at. I have read scores of novels where this technology is in use by humans (both in a positive and negative sense) but till date this technology was still in the realm of Science Fiction.

Now this has changed. ThinkAnApp studio based in Buenos Aries has developed specialized software that allows them to create a tattoo that when viewed through a camera gets transformed into a flying dragon. Or anything else you want. Pretty cool eh?

Here’s what the Tattoo looks like when viewed through a camera:

Check out the video demoing the tattoo in action here.

This is just a prototype and isn’t released for public use yet. But it is a step in the right direction and slowly but surely we are moving closer to the day when the virtual world will overlay the real world and open up all the awesome possibilities that entails.

Source: ThinkAnApp – Augmented Reality (tattoo).

– Suramya

February 11, 2010

South Carolina now requires ‘subversives’ to register

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts,News/Articles — Suramya @ 9:55 PM

I always think that politicians don’t think and most are dumb as a doorknob (Just as an FYI my mom is a politician but is an exception to the above rule 😉 ). They just don’t think and make these stupid rules that are supposed to make life better or easier or something.

But once in a while they come up with rules that make so little sense that even a five year old would know better… Which makes me wonder how they survived long enough to become politicians. The latest example of their folly is a new law in South Carolina, US that requires all ’subversives’ to register with the government.

Basically the law states “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means, who resides, transacts any business or attempts to influence political action in this State, shall register with the Secretary of State on the forms and at the times prescribed by him. “.

Where “subversive organization,” means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means; “ To top things off there is even a $5 filing fee for this.

When I first read about this, I thought that it was a joke or a prank. However after a little digging and reading up on it I realized that they are serious and that this is an actual law passed last year. Are the politicians/bureaucrats in SC stupid enough to actually think that any “subversive organization” is going to register with them?

I had a list of other such idiotic laws that I posted on the 1st version of suramya.com back in the early 2000’s. I removed that section when I reorganized the site but this article reminded me of that list. So I will see if I can dig up one of my backups of the site and recover the list of stupid laws that I had. Once I find them I will post them here for your amusement.

Do you know of any other silly laws like this? I wonder if I can find some Indian Laws that are similarly stupid online. (There is no way I am going to try searching for this offline)

– Suramya

Details: Rawstory.com Article
Original Source:

January 21, 2010

Floor collapses at Weight Watchers meeting

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 11:52 PM

Ok, I know this is politically incorrect but still damn hilarious. A group of 20 members from the local weight watchers in Växjö in southern Sweden gathered together over Christmas to compare the no if pounds lost by each.

Unfortunately for them their combined weight exceeded the tolerance levels of the floor at their meeting location and the entire floor collapsed. Thankfully no one was hurt during this, but this should give the members that little extra motivation to loose weight.

Source: Floor collapses at Weight Watchers meeting – Times Online.

– Suramya

October 5, 2009

Weird MSN Password reset logic

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:45 PM

Yesterday I was organizing my system and found log files from an old MSN account I had which I used mainly for chatting with friends. I decided to enable the account in Pidgin and see if the account still worked. When I tried logging in to the account it didn’t let me because I guess the account had gotten locked down due to inactivity.

So I went to the MSN site and tried to login to the account. At first it didn’t let me, so I tried resetting the password for the account. But that didn’t work as I couldn’t remember what information I had initially filled when creating the account so I asked the system to email me the password reset instructions.

Now came the funny part. The system was going to email me the password reset instructions to the same account that I was requesting the password reset for. Below is a screenshot I took of the process.


Weird MSN Password reset logic

How I am supposed to access the account to get the reset instructions is something that they didn’t quite explain. The funny part is that the system finally let me login with the same password I had tried with originally. *shrug* Atleast it worked, though I am surprised that the account wasn’t deleted considering I hadn’t logged in for over 2 years.

– Suramya

September 1, 2009

Bio-computers – The downsides.

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:23 PM

Was watching Eureka (Its a TV show, about this town with brilliant scientists) and they had an episode a little while ago where an organic computer got infected with a virus and got transmitted to a person when they used it.

This made me think, this can really happen once organic computers start becoming commonplace. After all human beings are pretty much an organic computer with a pretty face. So it would become possible to send an email attachment to a target group (lets say an enemy country) and infect their bio-computers. Then the virus would copy itself over to the human operator and set itself up as a background process in the human mind (There is more than enough processing power in the human brain for this) and once its set up it could monitor all actions/thoughts etc and keep a log of everything that person does, this data would then be sent back to the creator of the worm/virus to be used as seen fit by them.

The virus could even take over the human and make them do stuff that they wouldn’t normally do (like treason, or espionage) and I don’t think there is an easy way we could detect something like this and prevent it from happening. It reminds me of a novel I read a couple of years ago where humans had chips implanted in their heads to allow them to process/store data and one of the character’s chip got hijacked and they could no longer control their actions. Now the same thing will be possible without any extra hardware implanted in the target.

I guess to counteract this we would have to have an anti-virus program for the human mind: “Scan your brain for virus’s and trojans today”. Before any secret meetings all participents would have to have their brains scanned.

To make things scarier governments could release a worm that let them keep an eye on their subjects and stop any activity they don’t like before it got far. Think “Big Brother” in your head…

Makes you think scared doesn’t it?

– Suramya

July 3, 2009

Chinese airline wants to use ‘barstool-style’ seating instead of regular seats

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 9:27 PM

Don’t know if its true or not but its been getting a lot of press. Apparently Spring Airline in China doesn’t have enough planes to support all the customers they are getting inspite of them ordering new planes. So they have found a unique solution to their problem; in some portion of their planes they will replace the seats with ‘barstools’. This will allow them to fit upto 40% more passengers.

However if any of you have ever sat on a bar stool, you will realize that its not the world’s most comfortable seating option and I just can’t imagine people sitting on them for long periods of time. Although if the bar-stools were next to a bar, I am sure they will get a lot of takers.

The second problem I see is the safety issue. I can’t think of any safe way they can attach a seatbelt on a bar-stool. If this was possible then I am sure it would have already been implemented in bars around the world to keep their drunken clients safely seated… 😉

I am sure that this is just a what-if exercise that was leaked to the press and not something serious. Although, if it was serious it might be a good way for them to carry more passengers on short flights.

Source: DVICE.com
Thanks to : The Raw Feed for the original link.

– Suramya

February 12, 2009

India Partners with EU to prevent India’s traditional medicinal knowledge from Biopiracy

Filed under: My Thoughts,News/Articles — Suramya @ 10:58 PM

India has a huge medical repository that is not available online anywhere. In some cases the knowledge is not even written down but is passed verbally from teacher to student. For example there was a Vaidh (Ayurvedic Doctor) in my mom’s village who was an expert but none of his knowledge was ever written down. Unfortunately his son wasn’t interested in medicine so when he passed away all his knowledge was lost.

This initiative will help document the repository of knowledge and prevent bio-piracy from happening. So now that the database is up the people providing the patents will know that the healing properties of “Neem” for example are well known for thousands of years and they can’t award a patent on it.

Here’s some background information on how the database came to be created and was set up:

The genesis of this maiden Indian effort dates back to the year 2000, when an interdisciplinary Task Force of experts was set up by AYUSH and CSIR, to devise a mechanism on protection of India’s traditional knowledge. The TKDL expert group estimated that about 2000 number of wrong patents concerning Indian systems of medicine were being granted every year at international level, mainly due to the fact that, India’s traditional medicine knowledge exists in languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Tamil etc. and was neither accessible nor understood by patent examiners at the international patent offices due to language and format barriers.

The TKDL breaks these barriers and has been able to scientifically convert and structure the information available in languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Tamil, in open domain text books into five international languages, namely, English, Japanese, French, German and Spanish, with information contents in 30 million A4 size pages, with the help of Information Technology tools and a novel classification system – Traditional Knowledge Resource Classification (TKRC).

What I would love to see happen (which is probably not going to) is that this database be opened to the public also so anyone can search through it and see the medical advances that India had/has made in the past few thousand years. Afterall most of the stuff in there is already “common knowledge”

Additional Information: PIB Press Release

Thanks to Open… for the link.

– Suramya

September 26, 2008

China space mission article hits Web before launch

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 11:44 PM

This is funny:

A news story describing a successful launch of China’s long-awaited space mission and including detailed dialogue between astronauts launched on the Internet Thursday, hours before the rocket had even left the ground.

I guess this shows the reliability of the Chinese media. 😉

Source: Yahoo! News

October 11, 2007

UK Police Can Now Demand Encryption Keys

Filed under: Computer Security,News/Articles,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:18 PM

Under a new law that went into effect this month, it is now a crime to refuse to turn a decryption key over to the police. So lets say you have an encrypted file on your computer and you are traveling through UK, if the cops feel like it they can force you to hand over the decryption key. If you don’t comply you face a 5 year sentence in jail if the investigation relates to terrorism or national security, or up to two years in jail in other cases.

But what they don’t seem to have considered is that sometimes people do forget passwords and keys. Back in 2003 I went through a phase where I started encrypted all my data backups (MySQL database dumps etc) using PGP for a couple of months, which was all well and good. Then I had to upgrade my OS so I formated my computer managing to loose the decryption key which was stored in my PGP keyring. I do have a physical copy of the key but thats sitting in one of the boxes in storage. So if I went to UK and they asked me for the key I can’t give it to them because I really don’t have it. But if I tell them that I will end up in jail for 2 years if the judge refuses to believe me.

So I think I am staying away from UK for the time being.

Thanks to Schneier on Security for the news.

More information available at The Register

– Suramya

June 15, 2007

Microsoft Vista WOW factor…

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 1:30 PM

A lot of must have seen the advertisements on MS Vista where they talk about the wow factor. Well today I used it on a clients machine and it certainly made we go wow. Read on for the details…

I had a 90 MB file that I needed to extract on their system (224 MB uncompressed), so I copied the file to their system,right clicked and chose extract. Then came the wow factor. Vista told me that it out need ~13 hours to extract the file. Waited for a few mins and it didn’t go down. It really was going to take it 13 hours + change to extract it. Certainly made me go wow.

I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but then as I was telling my cousin about it, I decided to blog it so needed to take a screen shot. When I took the following screen shot it was telling me that it would take 5 days to extract. I waited for a couple of mins in case it was just exaggerating like Windows XP and it would show the correct time in a few mins. But alas it kept showing me the same time.

So here goes:


MS Vista WOW
MS Vista WOW!!!

BTW, just as a comparison, my Windows XP system on a 1 GZ system with 512 MB of RAM takes ~2 mins to extract this file. Haven’t timed it on Linux yet. And this vista install is a running on a new machine thats pretty powerful. And i am not the only one who saw this. Another guy was complaining about it on one of the forums that I visited. His file was taking ~15 mins to extract on vista while on Linux it took about 11 secs to extract.

Ah well. I think I can do without the wow in my life. Pretty happy with Debian and XP for my systems. Don’t think I will be upgrading to Vista anytime soon.

– Suramya

« Newer PostsOlder Posts »

Powered by WordPress