One program–on Food TV–that I like to watch, is Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. He is such a powerful person, who is into what he does for a living. He has inspired me to get of my couch and cook decent food. This is a recipe from his book, Fast Food. Every guy who wants to cook decent food should have on his shelf. A simple book, with simple recipes that any idiot (aka me) can follow. Most dishes are less than 30 minutes of cooking time. I’m a very imprecise cook, and subtitute freely when I can’t find a specific fish or condiment. I have taken the same liberty with this recipe as well. ...

You know something is seriously out of whack, when you download a 12 MB application that is just a step above an ftp application. I know, a rant at such an ungodly hour! Yup! I have been up 2 hours past bed-time trying to upload a few high-resolution photos. I found these shots of fireworks that I captured about two months back, and finally managed to sneak in some time to process these shots. I started my attempt at putting these on my flickr account, and the pitiful uploader V3, has been failing for the last 2 hours! I doesn’t seem to be the servers, since the 2.5 version works fine. Although, I must confess, I’m uploading files that are more than 5MB, and it’s really just timeout issues. ...

Over the last few months, I have re-discovered some unix commands (it’s been such a long time) Eliminate duplicate lines from a file #sort -u filename > filename.new List all lines that do not match a condition #grep -v ajsk filename Copy contents of two files to one #cat file1 file2 > file3 Append output of a command to a file #cat file1 >> file2

Finally it’s out in the open. The ultimate weapon in Google’s powerchest to combat desktop applications, render the need for a specific platform meaningless - the browser. I guess this has been in the making for the last decade, and here it is. A browser by a company that downloads pretty much most of the internet every day. If you are still reading this, you shouldn’t be. Get outta here and read this. (Actually just open in a new window, and continue reading this). ...

Chicken Curry with Eggs served on Rice, originally uploaded by Shivanand Velmurugan. Thank you Mr. Raghavan Iyer. This is the man, that wrote the book 660 Curries, that has initiated me into making proper Indian food. In the last month or so, since my return from my vacation to India, I have tried eating good food, and have found cooking a very rewarding activity. It helps you think more about what you want to put in your mouth and somehow, also makes you eat less! ...

In a moment of mild insanity (actually more like boredom), I decided to watch the last show last night. I was plesantly surprised to find that the movie was playing in 2 theatres @ Silvercity, Coquitlam. With all the hype, and the huge revenue generation in the first week, the movie does deliver most of what it promises. Before you start reading the rest of the post, there are few items, that could give away the plot. I wonder if one needs to worry about the plot in Batman. Here’s the short version of the review - watch it if you haven’t done so as yet. NOW! ...

Shooting Star, originally uploaded by shivanandv. As I was rummaging through my old pictures, I found this one and liked the pastel colours of the evening sky. This was shot a few months back, I have over 3 months backlog of images to be processed. Let me know what you think.

Conversations on the web have evolved quite a bit, in the last 4/5 years. During the late 90s, conversations on the web, was pretty much non-existant, except for a few, who used their websites to engage in conversations. The advent of the blog, made available tools to start and continue conversations. In the last couple of years, there has been several attempts to normalize comments, across the blogging ecosystem, and several ways have been tried. Disqus, is a company, that is in the business of aggregating comments for your blog. Seesmic, a video communications startup, has partnered with them to integrate video comments. Even after all of these innovations, getting people to comment on a blog, is still pretty difficult. ...

The simple way to retreive the list of changed files would be to update the tree, which would then list the files updated. #cvs update . > filelist.dat The problem with this, is that if there have been changes to other files after your last update, you will have to manually glean the files that you have changed. I tend face this, particularly during the last couple of weeks before a release, since you don’t want to risk updating your tree everyday, but still have to make 2/3 checkins. I did some googling today, and found how to find the list of files changed without updating your tree. ...

I am at the end of my trip to India, and I will miss this fella sorely!