[mobilePic] The goats of château de Versailles. Seen during bike ride back from work.

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[mobilePic] Rice, Dal, and Tilori: une bonne diner pour le world cup finals. :)

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[mobilePic] Driving through a long and not-tall tunnel near Paris. Ours was the only car apparently.

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[mobilePic] The bigots of Versailles have a home now. :)

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[mobilePic] Preparing for a delicious italian dinner

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[mobilePic] Take your bike to work day. Hopefully the beginning of a habit.

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Froyo'd: Thoughts on Android 2.2

This morning, I was treated to this Engadget post, about Froyo being released officially by Google. Finally. [What is Froyo? you ask? Click here then :). In short, Android 2.2]

I waited till the evening for an over-the-air update on my Nexus One, but then, decided to take the plunge during my train ride home in the evening. Using the instructions from this comment, I downloaded the latest update from Google's servers, started the update process, and waited.

and waited.

and waited.

After the update, the phone rebooted to its pretty boot animation, but nothing else was going on. After waiting for a bit, I pulled the battery out, put it back in, and rebooted it with crossed fingers.

And it worked!

So I now have Android 2.2 running on my phone, and have also installed Flash 10.1 on it :). [Take that iPhone folks!]

First impressions:
So, is Froyo all that is was hyped to be? Well, here are some initial thoughts (after 30 minutes of playing around)
- Give it some time to sync etc. after upgrade. The speed is sluggish at that time.
- The home screen is snappier. I like the minor bounce it gives when settling on a screen.
- The move to SD card option for apps [accessible under settings->applications->manage applications] is great! I can finally install new puzzle apps :).
- The ability to switch between gmail accounts from right within the compose window is also very useful. Makes sense when you click "share" from the image gallery, and want to use your office gmail account. Now only if it gave me the option to send mail "from" another account, like it does from within Gmail.
- The overall feel is definitely faster. Which is nice :).
- Flash installed. Have not used it yet. But saw a setting for "plugins" in the browser, which I set to "on demand". So I hope it will not auto-show me flash ads from all sorts of pages [I am looking at you, ToI!]. It is also interesting to see that a lot of flash game websites are now targeting android as their platform, so that should lead to an explosion in the number of 'apps'. [update: confirmed that in this manner, Flash in browser gives me the ability to enable only certain animations. Win!]

So, those were my first impressions. More to come as I play with it. I have changed my voice recognition settings to "English (India)". Let's see if it leads to any improvements :).
[Update: The phrase "This is a test" was not recognized properly under "English(India)" settings. When I changed it back to "English(Generic)" it worked. I guess I do have a random/generic English accent now :P]

Some other reviews can be read here: PC World, Engadget.

[mobilePic] Fullmoon Dance and Sian Mai at Num.

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[mobilePic] Saw this family move a car onto a boat on the Seine this evening.

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The Cake is Back!

[Edit: This post has videos. Those of you reading it on Facebook or Buzz are requested to go to the original post on my blog to see them.]

First, the teaser [direct link]


Then, the hands-on demo [direct link]


Yup. Portal 2 is coming! Am so happy :).

And lastly, where we left off last time. [direct link]


[and for those who don't understand what this post is about, some background]

[mobilePic] Wonderful (Bangla)deshi meal chez Riyadh and Rini

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Captions, on Varun's request, from left to right, top to bottom: Chicken cutlets, shrimp with capsicum - chinese style, Chicken curry, salad, "koi" fish curry [with entire fishes], egg korma, pulao, and chicken with veggies. And there was amazing cake-topped custard later, not pictured :)

Eight years on, still alive.

It has been eight years now since that car accident in 2002. Time surely flies fast.

So happy re-birthday to (Ashish) Chandra, Akshay, Rahul and Me!! :)

-A
P.S. Met Chandra in London last month. Good times. :)
--
sent from my Google Nexus One

[mobilePic] A.R.Rahman is coming to Paris. Jai Ho!

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[mobilePic] Mom, Dad, Big Bro and me at Neha and Piyush's Wedding

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[mobilePic] Off to India for 4 days.

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Revisiting Maxims

This post is a redux. Because some maxims should be re-remembered. [ref: old post]

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But I guess the part that has been bothering me the most are maxims such as the one above, which make very strong claims, which are not true, at least not to the extent they claim.

...

As another case, take the following

Good things happen to good people.

or its much stronger cousin

Bad things do not happen to good people.

WTF?! That is _such_ a strong claim. How about saying

Bad things can happen to good people, but usually they have a strong social net of similarly good and understanding people to rely on, and that helps reduce the recovery time.

which, in my opinion, is much closer to the truth than its simple, absolute version.

Yes, I understand the above is hard to fit on a bumper sticker or a motivational poster, but some of us here are trying to lead more logically rigorous lives!

Well, enough of my rant. Have _you_ seen maxims that you think should be altered/improved/deleted?

And to end, I leave you with the song of the day, my favorite one from Ek Chalees ki Last Local (must watch, for desis and non-desis)


++++++++++++

This post goes out to all those who are going through tough times. I hope that with time (and support from friends), things will start to look up.

[mobilePic] Fajitas for dinner. Yum!

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[mobilePic] The aloo vadi curry turned out awesome. And my French neighbors liked it too. :)

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Oops for Indian Electronic Voting Machines

I was pointed to the video below by an article on slashdot on this topic. The researchers show how to tamper with an EVM so that it shows wrong vote counts after the elections. Let me know what you think, especially about whether this can be done in a real scenario on a meaningful scale.

Update: Link to website, which has abstract, and link to paper.



[Note their use of an Android app to reprogram the display :)]

Personally, I would prefer a EVM-based system where the machine also printed out a paper ballot, which the voter could see and then put in a box. The main counting happens via EVM, but in case of a lawsuit, the paper ballots could be used to verify the results. Total cost will not be much more than the earlier system, while still retaining the security and anonymity.

So, what say?
-A

[mobilePic] Indian sweets, snacks, and mom's pickle at work. :)

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