Sharada Prasad

From today Nikon D300 will be history. It was released two years back around same time of the year. I remember the pain people had to go through after pre-ordering their cameras. I had to wait till Feb 2008 to lay my hands on my camera. I got mine from Crutchfield.

Today, just two days after the release of D300s – a much improved version of D300, Amazon and other major retailers are shipping it out under ‘1-day’ expedited shipping. D300 costed me $1812 with shipping. Today D300s costs you $1800 while the price of D300 is around $1700. I wonder who would buy those D300 still lingering in the market.

In few days, a new version of legendary Nikon 18-200mm VR lens will be out. It costs $100 more than its previous version.

Business always runs in this auto mode of making things obsolete – whether we like it or not.

My first devanagari language was Hindi. I was in third standard then. I used to take classes in Chitradurga from a lady called ‘Radha’. Since the scripts of Hindi and Sanskrit are same, I started taking classes in Sanskrit when I was in fifth standard. But the focus then was more on passing the exams and earning the certificates and not appreciating the language as such.

Hindi became a very handy language since we had tenants from north India. With the advent of TV and national programs, I was the only person in the family, apart from my mother, who could translate Ramayan and Mahabharat for the rest in our neighbourhood.

Hindi was ubiquitous. I started watching Hindi movies and buying Hindi audio cassettes.

In high-school I took Sanskrit as my first language. The language was relayively easy because of my early exposure. But usage of Hindi was more practical. So soon after my 12th, I lost touch with Sanskrit. But my association with Hindi continued.

Hindi was my trump card when I went around India on my motorcycle last year. It helped me during most part of my journey (except in North east and south India).

My fascination for languages made me dabble my hands in German and French. But as my love for languages spread to Spanish and Arabic (I know none of these well), I decided to revisit Sanskrit. This time I want to learn this language for its beauty and not for certificates.

I found Samskrita Bharati as the best place to start. It is well known as Aksharam in the Girinagar area of Bangalore. The correspondence course allows me to learn the language with good amount of flexibility. Samskrita Bharati also organizes a 10 day workshop on ’spoken Sanskrit’. There are other options too. Check this link – http://www.samskritabharati.org/sb/learn-samskritam

I and my family members registed for ‘Pravesha’ course yesterday. If you are comforatble with Sanskrit, you can give multiple exams, if timings don’t overlap. Most common option is, giving ‘Pravesha’ in the morning and ‘Parichaya’ in the evening.

I am planning to visit Mattur, Karnataka, the only village where Sanskrit still the native language, sometime in November.

Inspiration comes in many flavours, in many sizes and from different directions. Over past few months I have come across new friends because of my involvement with cycling, twitter and Google RSS reader. It is really amazing what social media can do to you.

Though I have been on Orkut and Facebook for a while now, I rarely come across inspiring personalities. Most of the times the feed in Facebook diminishes the life of a good shared content. Even twitter gets littered with non-sense. But google reader has been helping me share good stuff with friends.

With the help of social media I came across two sources of inspiration – Thejesh and Swaroop. [img_assist|nid=277|title=Logo|desc=My Logo|link=none|align=right|width=150|height=141]Instead of me listing out the reasons, it is better if you visit their websites and realize it for yourself. These two have inspired me to be disciplined, when it comes to life and blogging. I would soon me sharing my views, opinions and my learnings with you all.

To start with, I have come up with a symbol that represents my personality – if you can see, it is a combination of pi and square root of -1. If you know the importance of pi and i, you would realize the true meaning of the symbol.[img_assist|nid=278|title=pi and i|desc=|link=popup|align=center|width=640|height=640]

More on Atheism and Environment soon. Stay tuned.

Today I finished watching the much anticipated documentary – The Story of Mathematics – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00dwf4f

Mathematics, the exact science has been one of the least emphasized studies in India. There is focus on maths in schools and colleges only because it can get us into well-paid jobs, not for the beauty of it. Hence most people end up hating maths. For few maths is a nightmare. But mathematics, in its absolute form, can be one of the best pre-occupations. One does not need a laboratory or any costly investment to investigate maths – the complexity lies in its simplicity.

In ‘The Story of Mathematics’ Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy takes us through the best approach to understand maths – knowing the history of science. The series is a wonderful depiction of the effort that has been put knowingly and sometimes unknowingly, by the mathematicians all over the world to make this world a better place.

In the second episode of the series, Sautoy talks about the contributions of East, specially China and India. I am sure that many Indians would be amazed with the kind of breakthrough our ancestors could make in mathematics.

Sad part about maths is, most people in the world are not in a position to appreciate either its elegance or its importance in the overall development of humanity. But mathematicians will continue to solve the unsolved – for they are neither driven by fame nor by money but sheer passion.

I clearly remember the day I held the first issue of Resonance in my hands. It was sometime in 1996. I was a pre-university student fascinated with Indian science journals (not that I understood any of the papers). Current Science almost stumped me. But Resonance was much better – I was impressed by the quality of paper and print. It took me a while to appreciate its contents.

Now a days I am watching a documentary series called ‘Story of Mathematics’. The documentary has re-kindled my interest in maths. Hence I decided to download previous issues of Resonance.

Here is where you can find them – http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/

I am on Ubuntu. Hence I used the omnipotent ‘wget’ to get all the contents of the website. Here is the line that will help you to download recursively. The command also checks for existing files and ignores them if there is no mismatch in timestamp or size. wget is cool.

$wget -r -c -N http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/back_issue.htm

The first problem one would face with Drupal hosting on a shared server is – enabling clean URL. My website is hosted with http://lypha.com . Here is how I solved it.

Create a .htaccess file in your root directory with following code

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

   RewriteEngine on

   RewriteBase /

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

</IfModule>

Note that rewrite module in Apache should be on. Contact your service provider to enable this.

Another issue would be with increasing php memory. Here are four ways to fix it – http://drupal.org/node/29268 . I could reolve it by adding ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ‘16M’); to sites/default/setting.php file.

Here is a good reference from http://drupal.org on webhosting issues – http://drupal.org/node/34022

[img_assist|nid=271|title=E2F|desc=|link=popup|align=left|width=250|height=128]

Environmental Engineers of the Future (E2F) offers funding for students interested in studying environmental engineering. The funded students must work for the sponsors for three years. Many good universities have partnered with E2F. Check them out. Best time to appy for funding is between October 1st and December 1st.