The Definitive Blog on All Things Vague

Bambi is a small coding-fest that we organise in our group at GE Healthcare. It was inspired by Yahoo Hackday after I heard about it at BarCamp Bangalore last year. I still remember, I came back all charged up after BarCamp and with some help from Arun B, we put together the first version of Bambi. Ours was a small team, roughly about 60 people, so spreading the news was not much of a problem. Getting people out of their workload was a bigger problem. The load is high and the work is, I guess, somewhat exciting ;-)  It is sometimes tough to lure people out of writing indexing algorithms for proprietary image databases or mitral-valve plane adjusters for segmentation of the human heart.     Today we had the demos for Bambi 2.0 The quality of demos were much improved and people came on the last day with some utterly cool demos. Unfortunately, I do not think I can write about them in detail owing to Intellectual Property issues but a mash of  Biometrics, Bluetooth, MRI scanners and

    The Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, is turning the Internet lights off to force students to go to sleep early and be fresh as a flower for the class the next day.  Reminds me of what I sometimes sing my 3-year old to sleep.   Pray, now what will happen to those night-out coding fests ?   In a a previous post, I indicated how UWM was threatening to take away Internet connection as a form of punishment.

A good coverage of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's response on the RIAA P2PLawsuit appeared in the Consumerist . (Grant Robertson's now extinct blog has a good introduction to the issue). This page apparently loads up when you try to access the Internet from within the University network. The recording industry is threatening lawsuits against those who may have engaged in illegal file sharing. They are currently targeting students who live in university residence halls. Recently, UW- Madison and other universities have been notified that they will receive settlement letters that are to be passed on to the individuals whom the senders believe to be guilty of copyright infringement. Consistent with current network management procedures and our understanding of federal law, UW-Madison does not plan to forward these letters directly to campus network users. We will, of course, comply with a valid subpoena. If from this it seems UWM seems to take a reasonable "I -wi

  The selections for Desktopography 2007 is out. If you are looking for really spohisticated desktop wall appers, this is one expo you need to checkout.     This goes well with my XP Olive theme.

I got my Dell Latitude D600 to boot off a Sandisk 1GB CruzerMicro USB stick  running Knoppix 5.1. It booted much much faster than my normal Windows XP2 (which is a real pain). Booting off a USB was easier than I thought it would be. The screen passes my eye-candy requirements and the icing on the cake is a sophisticated female voice, arguably on the bridge of a USS Enterprise , saying "Initiating startup sequence" .   If you try this, you may need to change the BIOS bootup sequence, which may confuse Windows when you get back to your normal, boring life.   I had a good mind to boot up from my cell phone by extracting the Knoppix image on the phone itself. However, with just 512 MB of expandable memory, it would not have made the cut. Interestingly, I have  Motorola A1200 "Ming", which runs  a customised Linux distro from Motorola.   I could not get my WiFi to work with pump or Kwifi Manager. That was the sad part. I wish these things were easier. Is Linux re

  I was never a gamer.  My favourite games have always been playable on a computer which did not sport a fancy, dedicated video card. Some of these are so archaic, I could not even spot a decent link on the web. Bricks Test Drive Grand Prix Caesar Sin   Gaming.Wikia And today is a big day for the gaming community because Jimmy Wales, the poster boy behind the wiki movement announced the launch of gaming.wikia , a Wiki based gaming magazine. There has been Wiki-encyclopedias on gaming, such as GamerWiki , but this is a magazine, inherently of a different temporal characteristic. Will need to watch out how Jimmy Wales and his team spin this.   Evil Lord of the Rings ? Peter Jackson , Oscar-winning producer/director of The Lord of The Rings trilogy is going to work for Microsoft. Recently, it was announced that he is going to be developing some game-episodes  for XBox 360 based on ( the now-shunted ) Halo .   "And this year's Oscar goes to Microsoft.."

This is a blog. I write this. I am, as I write, a Senior Systems Specialist at GE Healthcare . Well, that is a good title to have. I am not what sure that exactly means though, but it is a mouthful. My in-laws are impressed. And so was my ex-landlord. Small things matter. I have been with GE Healthcare since 2000, the year I was declared to be mentally and educationally competent to hold a full-time job. That explains the seniority . Seven years is not exactly a short time. Especially, when you can learn Java in 24 hours. Or, the Bible . The team I am on, develops advanced post-processing applications in the Molecular Imaging and Computed Tomography. That's again, quite a mouthful, but this time I can stand to defend myself. The stuff people do on my team is pretty awesome, actually. Things like segmenting out the left ventricle of the heart from a gated PET cardiac scan and then detecting which muscle tissues are not getting enough blood . I try to help from time to t