blog@Yantrajaal

বাংলাতে লিখতে গেলে প্রথমে আপনার চাই একটি রোমান হরফ থেকে বাংলা হরফে ট্রান্সলিটেরেট করার একটি সহজ উপায় । এর জন্য আপনি চলে যান এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা ওফ্ফলাইনে কাজ করতে হলে এই ওএবসাইটে গিয়ে একটি বিনামুল্যের ওযার্ডপ্রোসেসার ডাউনলোড করে নিন । মহাআনন্দে এই রকম কথা টাইপ করুণ । স্ক্রিনে যা দেখবেন কাট্-পেস্ট করে একটি উনিকোড UNICODE কম্পাটিব্ল ওয়ার্ডপ্রোসেসারে নিযে চলুন । । তার পর যে ভাবে সাধারন ইন্গরাজি ব্লগ পোস্ট করেণ সেই ভাবে নিউ পোস্ট খুলুন এবোন্গ নোটপাড থেকে আবার কাট্-পেস্ট করে দিন । এই বার সাধারণ ভাবেই পাবলিশ করুণ । দেখবেন ব্লগে বান্গলা হরফ দেখা জাছে ! যে মেশিনে ব্লগ লিখছেন আর যে মেশিনে ব্লগ পড়ছেন দুই মেশিনেই উনিকোড (UNICODE) ব্যবস্থা থাকা দরকার । সব আধুনিক কম্পুটরেই এখন উনিকোড থাকে সুতরান্গ চিন্তা করবেন না সব ঠিক কাজ করবে । একটু আধটু বানান ভুল হলে মাপ করে দেবেন । জয বংলা!

Long before there was Firefox, the browser, there was Firefox : the fictional Soviet cold war era fighter aircraft around which Craig Thomas had crafted a wonderful techno-thriller novel that had introduced the idea of controlling machines by thought. Twenty years later when I was writing my book on Vedanta the idea had cropped up again as I tried to reconcile reality with the idea of a maya or illusions . This was in the context of virtual worlds like Second Life and and it was my belief that these advanced technologies would one day blur the borders between the real and the virtual. But even while I was writing these, I had always felt that perhaps the usage of these technologies was way, way into the future and it is perhaps unlikely that I would get to see these being applied in my daily life. No more !! Given the rapid speed at which this technology is maturing I believe that we will see early versions of these technology being deployed in the next five years. Why do I say so ...

I believe I have found one of the most complete as well as easy to use Application Development platform. Why do I say so ? Consider the following features : A relational database for the persistent storage of data. A total GUI drag-and-drop front end forms builder with the ability to extend the logic with a scripting language. The database supports multiple tables linked through foreign keys and updateably both directly and from the application Easy integration with internet ( send mail ) and web. But the real icing on the cake is as follows There is NO SOFTWARE to buy and install. Both the RDBMS as well as the IDE are web based. The final application can be embedded into any website that allows Javascript. No support required for CGI / Perl / PHP whatever on your webserver. The entire service is currently FREE !!! and I really hope that it stays that way To see the kind of applications that can be built .... see Contact Manager Application or the Bank Transaction Application The two ...

Web 2.0 means different things to different people but perhaps the most authentic -- and original -- definition is given by Tim O'Reilly in his now classic articulation of What is Web 2.0. One of the key aspects of his articulation was the premise that Web 2.0 is less of technology and more of a platform -- or if you use the analogy of "Hindu" sanatan dharma, less of a dogma and more of way of life ! The word platform -- like the word architechure -- is widely used and abused in the world of computers. So to make things easier for us, let us first look at a more traditional platform : the ERP as implemented in SAP or Oracle. An ERP consists of a collection of applications developed using a one or more technologies. At the core there would be a database management software and on top of this would reside application, integration and presentation software. Woven into this is a set of business logic which in a sense should be common to or at least relevent to a vast number o...

We should be grateful to INTACH and HSBC for taking a very positive step to revive and rejuvenate the Strand along the Hooghly by organising the Prinsep Festival at the forgotten Prinsep Ghat -- that wonderful piece of architecture on the river. With the twin towers of the Second Hooghly Bridge towering in the background, it was a wonderful setting for the evening program featuring a very vigorous Manipuri Dance by Preeti Patel and an equally impressive interpretation of the Dasha Avataras in BharataNatayam by Bhanumati. Not being a dance critic I will not hazard a display of my ignorance by commenting on the quality of the presentations .. but from the perspective of a layman, it was a truly enjoyable experience. What was a little disturbing though was the immense ignorance about James Prinsep and the reason why he was honoured by his fellow citizens !! Neither the compere nor any of the other dignitaries had anything to say about the man who was the first to decipher the Brahmi Scri...

A change of job – or affiliation – is of course no headline news in today's vibrant economy, but even this otherwise simple event opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the reality of departure and absence ! A mail from an erstwhile colleague mentioned that the reality of my departure has become evident, not so much because of my physical absence from my place of work, but because email – on which I was on the cc: list – was bouncing back to the sender ! Which set me thinking ... what if my company had graciously allowed my email ID to exist ( in total violation of all corporate procedures) ... would it have meant that a lot of people would not have known that I had left ? And what if my erstwhile secretary had continued to respond to these mails .. in the manner that she knew that I would have ? In the globalised mega-corporation – which is anyway quite faceless – would anyone, other than a close group of friends, have known that I was no more associated with the company ? But...

We have been looking at what is possible with Virtual Worlds but for the next few minutes let us step out of the domain what is possible now and explore what could become possible in the next couple of years. From engineering, let us step into the domain of imagineering -- which is what this blog is all about ! Why are we constrained to 2D displays ? We are inherently 3D animals ... and the world that we are simulating virtually is supposed to be 3D. So why should we stick to traditional computer displays that render 2D images ? There are display technologies available that create 3D hologram style images ... that one can 'almost' walk around and see ( though not quite touch as yet ) Go to google and search for 3D displays and you will see stuff like what you see above and below. Just imagine what your SecondLife, or whatever 3D world that prefer to live in, will look when you view them on a display screen like this. And interestingly enough, the cost of these display devices i...

Unlike other professionals, the value of a person in the IT business does not necessarily go up with time. In the case of medicine, law or engineering, a customer is willing to pay a premium for someone who has been in the profession for a long time but a person who has been writing C code for 20 years or configuring SAP for 15 years is, in general, not more valuable than a junior colleague – at least not in the technical sense. IT professionals handle this niggling discomfort by transiting into management roles – which in effect mean shuffling CVs and juggling spreadsheets, not technology – and then claiming that it is beneath their dignity to do otherwise. One wonders if it is beneath their dignity or beyond their ability  My transition from Tata-IBM to Pricewaterhouse was a case of trying to defy this diktat of circumstances. At Tata Steel I had played a key role in introducing RDBMS technology into what was then the country’s first and largest enterprise wide integrated applic...

One of the most overused words in digital cyberia is paradigm but unfortunately there are instances when there is really no synonym that will suffice. Such is the case here where I describe a completely new way of doing business in the book publishing industry. After Encyclopedia Britannica, Travel Agents and other brick-and-mortar establishments that have been severely challenged by web based business models, it may be the turn of book publishers next ! The online publishing and print-on-demand (OLPPOD) business is all set give the established publishers a run for their money and offer new hope and unprecedented empowerment to unknown authors. Online publishing is old hat. I have been writing on the web since 1998 but have always felt that substantial pieces of work need to be in hard copy for the reader to first enjoy and second make sense of complex content. However efforts to get one's work in print has been very difficult. While JK Rowlings and other well known authors have no...

Why do companies exist ? Since companies consist of individuals who have the skills for which the market is willing to pay .. why is it that companies do not disintegrate ( or rather deconstruct ? ) into its constituent components ? Ronald Coase was the first to ask this question in 1937 in his essay on “The Nature of the Firm” and his answer was simple : The cost of doing a certain transaction – that adds value – is less inside company than it is outside. What he meant was that doing business by assembling all the right people and support services inside an establishment was more efficient than trying to find and coordinate the same things in the world at large. This answer was good enough for him to win the Nobel Prize because people saw for themselves how individual craftsmen in the cottage industry could not compete in cost and lost out to the mega corporation. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for many of us, this was not the last word on the subject. Jacques Derrida coine...

[ a more refined version of my earlier post on the same topic ] Movies created without a camera or human actors is nothing new. From animated cartoons by Walt Disney to dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park tools to create artificial characters have played an important role in movie production and of late productions like 300 have demonstrated the versatility of digital technology to transcend the limitations of physical reality. All this however pales into insignificance when we consider the immense potential of virtual worlds technology – as implemented in environments like Second Life and Active Worlds. Movie making as we know it today is set to change beyond recognition as producers and cinematographers realize the disruptive impact that this is going to have in the future. Virtual worlds have their origin in interactive computer games of the category that are commonly referred to as Massively MultiUser Online Role Playing Games. Technology that first appeared in games ...

St. Xaviers Collegiate School, Calcutta has organised a Computer Exhibition to help students look beyond the boring ( truly boring ) world of the Computer Syllabus that they have to follow. While most students stuck would still tend to stick to the straight and narrow, I helped my son and two of his class-mates create a movie based on and shot in location inside Second Life. If your bandwidth supports it, please watch ... but be aware that these are heavy files with embedded music & voice-over Part 1 Part 2 and here are two images ...........................................................................

I have been trying to access the article on Nandigram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram but have not been able to go past the wikipedia home page and into ANY of the articles. I am from Calcutta and this has been going for the past two days .. My brother-in-law however is able to access the same pages from Ahmedabad .. which I thought was funny. What is even more funny is that even in Calcutta, if I dial into my office LAN and then access the internet through the company firewall ( which happens to be outside Calcutta ) then I have no problems in accessing the same pages. I do know that wikipedia is banned ( or rather blocked ) in China .. by the Great Firewall of China. Is something similar happening here as well.

As virtual worlds, as epitomised by SecondLife and perhaps ActiveWorlds , comes closer and closer to real worlds, where is it that we will have first contact ? where is it that the borderline between these two worlds will get blurred if not dissolved first ? The obvious answer in the domain of entertainment. But how ? Today's Business Standard carries an article that explains how game developers are planning to work with the Mumbai film industry ( painfully referred to as Bollywood !) to develop interactive games based on actual movies ... and possibly using the the names and images of well known film stars. This is good but this has been done before with Angelina Jolie and some of her movies but the real challenge is to take it to the next level ... Why not shoot real movies, that is movies that will be shown in real life, using settings and actors in virtual worlds ? The movie 300 has been in the news recently because of the extensive use of digital technology for creating t...

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey , where on the banks of the Hooghly River, near the town of Murshidabad, Robert Clive and his Indian allies, defeated the Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal and laid the foundation of British Rule. There will be events to commemorate this Battle and the overwhelming tone and tenor of these events will be that of regretful nostalgia .. to commiserate with the subjugation of India and its loss of independence to a foreign military power. But is this really correct ? Should we not celebrate this event as the dawn of the Indian Renaissance ? Politically correct historians and semi-literate bards and dramatists have given this event an emotional tone that is quite out of sync with the real emotions that were felt by the common people who lived in those tumultuous times. I believe that the population was actually quite jubilant at the fall of the tyrannical Nawab -- and the utter lawlessness that his rule symbolised -- and a direct ec...

My article on what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future appears in the Economic Times today. You may read the full article here . There is one important prediction that I have made in this article, namely, "Today it is impossible to exist without an email-id in real life and who knows it may be the same with similar identities in the virtual worlds, which are on the horizon. " Let us see how far this holds true

My article on the what the future holds for Virtual Worlds or rather what what Virtual Worlds hold for us in the future has appeared in the Economic Times today ... Read the full article here .

The news that SecondLife will become opensource is a big step in the development of 3D Virtual Environments. Should it become a genuinely open platform then evolution of the resulting architecture could become very interesting .. Individual organisations maintain their own physical servers and these can be accessed through the TCP/IP protocol. Currently, on these servers, we run the same HTTP application server (the 'web server') .. and anyone anywhere in the world can connect to the HTTP application server through the HTTP client ( the 'browser') Similarly, going forward, organisations can run their own SL servers on their own hardware and and allow ( or disallow ) individuals to connect their SL clients .. and this 'visit' SIMs ( just as we visit websites today) On current HTTP application servers we run fancy stuff like java applets, Flash animations, RealAudio and YouTube style specific applications ... provided they comply with correct protocols a...

This is an account of a very personal quest for the Truth. There are many ways to reach the same goal and this particular effort seeks to reflect the Truth in the still waters of a dispassionate yet rational analysis. Sages and seers from time immemorial have held that the Truth is beyond reason, transcends the boundary of the physical world and can only be perceived at an intuitive level. This humble exercise is an attempt to see things from a slightly different perspective. a rational approach, based on physical phenomena, may have many limitations but the desire to abandon it is an act of intellectual laziness. While it is true that many mystics have perceived the truth intuitively, it may be more satisfying to take the intuitive approach as a matter of choice and not of necessity. This analysis begins with the principles of Advaita Vedanta and maps them against known facts from the world of science. Unlike in the past we have neither tried to invoke Quantum Mechanics and oth...

The Deccan Herald has an article that features yours truly aka Calcutta Cyclone. Though the article is rather sceptical about SL calling it a fool's paradise, the fact remains that this is how new technologies are initially viewed. But we know that Satyameva Jayate, Truth shall Triumph, even though truth is portrayed in an illusion. The original page is no more available but you can see a cached version of the page here. Given the confusion with transient links ... here is a 'permanent' image of the article.