Harsh J » Fun

This is Epic

Harsh — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:11:27 +0000

With great horsepower, comes great responsibility.

Spider-Man on Johnny “Ghost Rider” Blaze’s bike. With a quote.

A simple email search trick

Harsh — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:33:27 +0000

Oh boy, I love standards.

When I was wondering how do I search for mails sent by me, where I’m also the thread originator, I looked at what GMail had to offer as it search fields and other such advanced options. In the end my search was simply:

in:sent from:me term -Re

Now am wondering why it didn’t strike me immediately to look for the “Re” keyword that makes a mail a reply de-facto. Of course, there’s a much more neater, more RFC-5322 compliant way of searching such mails, but I’m unsure if GMail supports such querying.

The world has a chance to get rid of annoyance

Harsh — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 20:28:31 +0000

Read this PDF of Paul Allen and Interval Licensing L.L.C.’s patent infringement complaint against AOL, eBay, Apple, Google, Netflix, Facebook (Yeah, Microsoft vs. Allen), Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube.

Interval and Allen’s four US Patents in this complaint here deal with the following aspects:

Identify, process and alert items of “current interest” to users of online content; i.e. what you’ve seen before as “Users who bought this also bought:” and “Most bought overall” like sections.
Displaying an attention message to the user unobtrusively; i.e. your smooth notification popups and/or bubble popups that display information. Also the way Mac’s Dashboard appears when activated (similar to Yahoo’s Widgets dashboard).
Displaying items of related interest around a topic; i.e. Related news/pages, etc.

This case is going to be quite fun to follow, as it defines a large chunk of the “related” web (or social web, if you hang that way) we have today. It almost could tear Facebook down to nothingness if justice were dictatorial (No FOAF!).

If you ask me, this is the height of a patent, to hold rights to an idea and also its out-scope itself, not a particular implementation of it. We have a chance now, and we should take it and abolish such stupidness.

Arkham Spider-Man

Harsh — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 19:46:07 +0000

I have to play every Spider-Man game produced, somehow. So I went ahead and got my hands on the most recent one of them, “Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions“, and oh boy. I’m blown away!

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions Box Cover showing all four playable Spider-Men -- 2099, Amazing, Noir and Ultimate (The Ultimate character comes with a Venom suit)

After playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, my bar that sets the definition of a good RPG action game just took a shot towards the sky. The game-play in it was the most involving for a comic character based RPG, based on a comic character who’s at human heights. The fights were great, the moving around the area fluid and just like how the character would do, etc.. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the game if you play it, cause the story doesn’t disappoint you either.

Along came the Spider-Man game, and brought in perhaps for the first time ever, the Spider-Man 2099 and the Spider-Man Noir characters into video games! I think they’re great characterizations. The former imposing the role upon himself to get rid of a drug addiction, and the latter just facing a twisted history with his timeless humor. Their comics are great too.

Spider-Man Noir -- Incapacitating a henchman. All in total silence. Way cool.

Now case-in-point: Spider-Man Noir. The Noir Spider-Man levels in Shattered Dimensions is very similar to what much of Arkham Asylum had to offer. Only, it has much more pace. Any Spider-Man game worth its salt would offer deadly combos and faster-than-eye-can-follow agility during battles, and Shattered Dimensions doesn’t disappoint. The way you could incapacitate a henchman in Arkham Asylum, you can do it with Spider-Man Noir using webbing. Sneak up on them in the darkness, and web yank them to blackouts. Its Arkham Asylum all over, but with webs and sticking on walls! I’m not getting enough of this, so am going and playing more of it now. What’s more is that it offers a great bunch of classic rogues from Spider-Man gallery, across different timelines; yet you don’t get lost!

You should try this game out, its good fun with not too repetitive themes. For Spider-Man fans, it is an imperative. Stan Lee has himself voiced over a few narrations. This one is surely a timeless classic.

Swype Beta APK [Zeitgeist]

Harsh — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:26:54 +0000

[This is a December 2010 Post -- mind it]

Here’s a quick way to download the now-available beta swype.apk if you don’t really want to download right onto your phone via their given link:

wget https://beta.swype.com/android/get/?download_NOW=androidBeta -U "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1" -O Swype.apk

There, nice and easy?

Sorry Swype, to make you count a N1 download instead of an SGS.

Random of the return!

Harsh — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:28:13 +0000

Kadoom of the boom! Ok, enough.

Going around the webs trying to find something I was looking to do with KDE’s plasmoid libraries, I came across this ye olde’ site: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/oa_plasmoid.htm

"Stable plasmoid at 1 atm"

I tried it out since it was simple in its requirements, and lo, ended up watching a “plasmoid”, though I had no proper clue on what it was until I studied further, after (FUN comes first, ALWAYS).

Anyways, now getting back to whatever it was I was trying to do with KDE Plasma.

Oh yeah, you do this at your own risk, and DO NOT INHALE that gas. NO₂ can kill you, it is toxic. It is in the reddish-brown colored mushroom-shaped smoke that various nuclear bomb tests might have shown you, so there you go, understand? No, am not gonna die after writing this post

Justice enough

Harsh — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:38:00 +0000

About the immutability of variables once bounded in Erlang:

Single assignment is like algebra.

When I went to school, my math teacher said, “If there’s an X in several different parts in the same equation, then all the Xs mean the same thing.” That’s how we can solve equations: if we know that X+Y=10 and X-Y=2, then X will be 6 and Y will be 4 in both equations.

But when I learned my first programming language, we were shown stuff like this:
X = X + 1

Everyone protested, saying “you can’t do that!”. But the teacher said we were wrong, and we had to unlearn what we learned in math class. X isn’t a math variable: it’s like a pigeon hole/little box…

In Erlang, variables are just like they are in math. When you associate a value with a variable, you’re making an assertion – a statement of fact. This variable has that value. And that’s that.

– Joe Armstrong, in his book Programming Erlang.

Anna University B.E. B.Tech (UG) 8th (Eighth/Final) Semester Results for April – May 2010

Harsh — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:19:48 +0000

Results for all (even) 8th (Eighth and Final) semester B.E. and B.Tech (Engineering Degrees, for IT, CSE, ECE, EEE, ME, E&I, etc.) are out These are for the exams that were held in April to May 2010.
Here’s a list of potential websites you can check for your results. Comment if you know some other ones!

Results are out!

More will be added once results get out.

Lightning, Monsters, Titans and Labyrinths

Harsh — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:24:10 +0000

Percy Jackson. You probably hate that name, after watching its film adaptation.

They got it all wrong, right from his opening scene underwater, his not-so-hyped up origin about being Poseidon’s son, the lack of explanation about the various camps in Camp Half-Blood and so on, till the end of the movie. Every chapter seemed to have been ‘hollywoodized‘. I watch many movies out of curiosity and I don’t feel bad about having watched this.

That is because the books were fun, Rick Riordan is quite a writer of teenage fiction books. I’ve read the first three in his series of Percy Jackson and found them equally enjoyable as the Inkheart Trilogy or The Inheritance Cycle. Right now, having found time and inspiration for revisiting a private library am quite fond of, I’ve laid my hands on the fourth book and its doing great in helping me erase those movie memories.

Slice of the Larger Pie

Harsh — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:14:32 +0000

Some bands/artists I enjoy listening to, for this current factor of time in which I enjoy trance/derivatives/near-trance:

OceanLab [#]
Paul van Dyk [#]
Armin van Buuren [#] (Thanks to Kalpik for the recc.)
Gareth Emery [#]

Psst. I left last.fm for … nothing, just left it. Like I left Twitter and Facebook. They are for people with no time and I got plenty, plenty, plenty.

The topics remain unrelated, as always.