Previously.
Web Runtime Widget on Nokia E51
Web Runtime Widget is a relatively new technology on Symbian phones. Basically it is an application written in html + javascript + css + ajax. Nothing but a complex web page. Nokia's attempt to catch Web 2.0 on their mobiles before it becomes obsolete. Unfortunately, it is available in new phones only. Like it supports some s60 3rd Ed FP1 with software updates, but not E51. I checked Nokia forums but there was no confirmed report that E51 will support WRT, even after a software upgrade.I was upgrading the software of my E51 anyway, so I decided to try a WRT post upgrade.
The easiest (and probably useful) candidate was Accuweather Widget, which shows (pretty good) weather information about a city. The whole package comes as .wgz file, and at least post software upgrade the file manager found an association with the extension and allowed me to explode the tarball as an application. So far so good. Now the application launches, but keeps showing me the weather of Paris. Not too useful for me, and I wanted to change the city to Bangalore.
And this is where unsupported platform hurts. I can't edit a text box in the widget. It'll just take the first keypress and hang. No further input is possible in a textarea. Damn, now I can't change the city. I wished I lived in a city started with A, D, G, J ... (ok you get the pattern). Then a brainwave hit. It is all Javascript so maybe I can edit that file to change the default to Bangalore. And yes, accuweather.js says somewhere if (!zip) zip = "EUR|FR|FR012|PARIS". Now to find out the Bangalore code, I had to search Bangalore in accuweather mobile site and from the URL location found it to be ASI|IN|IN017|BANGALORE.
But I am sure other WRT widgets will be complex enough, and won't fall for so easy hacks.
Metro Pillar in a Year
 More than a year ago, in February 2008, they barricaded Indiranagar 100 ft road for Namma Metro work. Most of the time is consumed in erecting the pillars of the elevated railway. So the first action they took is to claim most of the 100 feet road, leaving two narrow lanes on both sides. Not before long, the single narrow lane gave up, and it became really painful to travel through it. I didn't have much choice myself as my workplace is right there, so I chose to document the pillar erection process itself. In early March, we saw heavy cranes coming in, and they started working on making foundation of the pillars. The places were already carefully marked on the road. |
 Next came the drilling machines, which proceeded to make 4 deep holes at four corners of a square. The noise was exceeding our tolerance level by several decibels. But the machine was an engineering beauty. Armed with a spiral drill, it would be able to cut through almost any earth material, and the spiral automatically carries the debris up. This exercise went on for a few days, till they finished four neat holes, and moved on about 100 ft (or more) to build the next pillar. When they were doing this, because of debris clearing, too many heavy trucks will move around, which broke whatever left on the road. |
 The holes were pretty deeper than we thought. They were dug close to 35 feet deep. (How did I know? Well on completion, they threw a metal line inside each with a little weight attached to the end. And then they lifted it and laid straight to measure it using a tape. Obviously I couldn't read the tape, but I counted number of steps a guy needed to walk from one end to the other. He needed ~25 steps.) Once the holes were ready, they poured concrete to create 4 underground pillars. And finally covered the top with mud and leveled them with the road. Now unless you looked carefully, you can't find the positions of the pillars. So, April 2008, we had the foundation of the pillar done. |
 Fastforward SIX months. After complete quietness of half an year, they exposed the heads of the pillars once again. They chopped the heads a little bit to make all heads at the same level, and roughened the surfaces a lot for further concrete to hold. Then dug a square shaped ditch around them. |
 The ditch happened to be the place of a table top, built on the top of four pillar buried in ground. The ditch is drained out, and a huge cube shaped mesh is built there. The top ends of the four pillars went inside the cube. Some days later, they filled up the mesh by concrete, and the base of the pillar was complete as soon as it was dry. The whole thing they have made till now is still completely underground, and top of the 'table', which is a flat platform of say 10 feet x 10 feet, is at the same level of the road. |
 Move your time machine again by six months, and we reach mid-March of 2009. Again the place became active; and we can see just like OpenGL wireframe rendering, a metro pillar have raised its head. It is nothing but circularly arranged thick vertical steel rods, held together by steel rings and tie-ups. Once the vertical cage is up, they covered it by metal semi-circular panels, kept in place by square frames and huge sized nut and bolts. Finally a big mixer machine came in and poured in liquid concrete in the cylinder. |
 And finally, in April it was time to build the top platform of the pillar on which the metro pathway will rest. If you look carefully, there is a pipe to drain water through the pillar which opens up at the ground level. Another matter of concern was the safety of the workers, you can see people working at the top of the 40 feet high pillar with a helmet that wouldn't stand a drop of 5 feet, and they are too poorly harnessed themselves to arrest a fall. It is a wonder that we don't hear about major accidents during such big construction activities with so little care about workers' safety. |
 At last, 3rd week of April, we are almost done. What is to be done now is to spray water regularly for curing, so that air cracks do not appear. They cover it by jute wrappers to retain moisture. This is it. In last week of April, our office has shifted to Koramangala. So no more updates :-) |
The God Interview
Tickled by Life is conducting an interview about God, and luckily /me too was invited to answer the questions. Unfortunately my answers were possibly too harsh and unpopular, so it is still unpublished :-) (EDIT: I guess I jumped the gun, it's been published, was the cover story during the last weekend, and is in editor's picks) But I wrote those anyway, pausing to think before answering them. So I decided to post here before it goes into oblivion:
1. God is ...
a hypothesis (that there exists a super intelligence who created this universe, and controlling the fate of individuals by communicating with them). Apply all your scientific mind and you'll realize there is very little chance of the hypothesis to hold true. The concept is a wishful thinking for *most* of us.
2. God or the Big Bang? (or both)
Big Bang; and God doesn't have any role to play in that. The singularity of the Big Bang doesn't let any information to pass through. So even if God instrumented the Big Bang, he would have no way to tune the fundamental physical constants.
3. God or Darwin? (or both)
Darwin wins by a large margin. Complex life (which can even wonder whether there is a God) evolves via the process of gradual evolution. Post Big Bang, the universe has been on its own, and life appeared where the condition is right for it, and we (the Boltzmann's brain) came as the end product (as of now, maybe in a few million years earth will be dominated by a newer species) of a slow and extended evolution process.
MORE
4. God or Darfur? (How can Darfur happen if there is God?)
Darfur conflict is a fight for limited resources in an overpopulated place. There might have been religious and ethnic unions on the conflicting sides, but at the end, it is a group of desperate genes that are trying to survive at the cost of another group. The catastrophe is created because people can't access basic resources for survival without violating someone else's.
5. Who is God’s God?
Whosoever he is, if he wants to exist, has a bigger problem. We are already challenging the idea of supernatural intelligence creating the universe. We say God himself is extremely improbable as a designer of the universe, and the same question would be even harsher on him.
6. Will the real God please stand up? (Why do we have so many religions?)
Every leader wants his followers, and encashes on human weakness. As I said most people find God's existence as "desirable", and hence each religious leader finds their way to "satisfy" people's need. Just like evolution, I am sure there would be hundreds of theories floated to make people gratify their desire of God, and only the best 4/5 ones survived so far. And once achieved the critical mass, they
concentrated on crushing the competition to increase their own follower count, resulting violent human conflicts. I wonder if "real" God ever existed, whether he'd approve the behaviour of such fan clubs.
7. Is this just a big lab and are we just guinea pigs and God just a researcher?
No, it is the dolphins :-) Humor apart, even if God existed, things wouldn't have been any different. I said the singularity wouldn't have allowed to set initial conditions of his experiment. No one can research this way, where you set off an experiment without getting to set the laws, and even tweak them. The best he can do is to be a silent observer. Best to consider ourselves as Boltzmann's brain who
wonders of his own existence before second law of thermodynamics makes further information processing impossible.
8. Unexplained phenomena = God?
Nope; it is an opportunity for a scientist to work on a problem. Attributing gaps in knowledge to God is a glorified way of giving up. As someone else explains the mystery, we find that God is having lesser and lesser space to hide in.
You too can try answering the above questions and mail them to interview @ tickledbylife . com. They'll publish if they like your answer!
1. God is ...
a hypothesis (that there exists a super intelligence who created this universe, and controlling the fate of individuals by communicating with them). Apply all your scientific mind and you'll realize there is very little chance of the hypothesis to hold true. The concept is a wishful thinking for *most* of us.
2. God or the Big Bang? (or both)
Big Bang; and God doesn't have any role to play in that. The singularity of the Big Bang doesn't let any information to pass through. So even if God instrumented the Big Bang, he would have no way to tune the fundamental physical constants.
3. God or Darwin? (or both)
Darwin wins by a large margin. Complex life (which can even wonder whether there is a God) evolves via the process of gradual evolution. Post Big Bang, the universe has been on its own, and life appeared where the condition is right for it, and we (the Boltzmann's brain) came as the end product (as of now, maybe in a few million years earth will be dominated by a newer species) of a slow and extended evolution process.
MORE
4. God or Darfur? (How can Darfur happen if there is God?)
Darfur conflict is a fight for limited resources in an overpopulated place. There might have been religious and ethnic unions on the conflicting sides, but at the end, it is a group of desperate genes that are trying to survive at the cost of another group. The catastrophe is created because people can't access basic resources for survival without violating someone else's.
5. Who is God’s God?
Whosoever he is, if he wants to exist, has a bigger problem. We are already challenging the idea of supernatural intelligence creating the universe. We say God himself is extremely improbable as a designer of the universe, and the same question would be even harsher on him.
6. Will the real God please stand up? (Why do we have so many religions?)
Every leader wants his followers, and encashes on human weakness. As I said most people find God's existence as "desirable", and hence each religious leader finds their way to "satisfy" people's need. Just like evolution, I am sure there would be hundreds of theories floated to make people gratify their desire of God, and only the best 4/5 ones survived so far. And once achieved the critical mass, they
concentrated on crushing the competition to increase their own follower count, resulting violent human conflicts. I wonder if "real" God ever existed, whether he'd approve the behaviour of such fan clubs.
7. Is this just a big lab and are we just guinea pigs and God just a researcher?
No, it is the dolphins :-) Humor apart, even if God existed, things wouldn't have been any different. I said the singularity wouldn't have allowed to set initial conditions of his experiment. No one can research this way, where you set off an experiment without getting to set the laws, and even tweak them. The best he can do is to be a silent observer. Best to consider ourselves as Boltzmann's brain who
wonders of his own existence before second law of thermodynamics makes further information processing impossible.
8. Unexplained phenomena = God?
Nope; it is an opportunity for a scientist to work on a problem. Attributing gaps in knowledge to God is a glorified way of giving up. As someone else explains the mystery, we find that God is having lesser and lesser space to hide in.
You too can try answering the above questions and mail them to interview @ tickledbylife . com. They'll publish if they like your answer!
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