Whitenoise

Today is election day in our  place.  This years election was a bit different from earlier years. The campaigning has reached a new low with people going all out with personal attacks like  ‘weak’, ’slave’ , and swearing like ‘I will crush his head  with a road roller’ and so on.

In the start of this election season I had high hopes on some new faces who ‘realized that they should give  back to the society’  and got into politics.

But then came the manifestos  ,virtually every party’s manifesto was rife with freebies. All the promises look short lived.   If one is ready with a color TV,  the other party promises a Laptop’. ‘All loans will be annulled’ says one,  ‘we will send you money every month’ ,’our leader will take care of your education’, ‘don’t be afraid of job loss/recession,  our leader will create 2 million jobs every year’

Even the new ‘give back to the society’ guys were busy showing off their on-screen gimmicks  to enthusiastic
“followers” .   Another new (and bad) development this year was the money distribution that was SO rampant that the  police had to run ‘crackdown’ operations almost everyday.  Towards the end of the campaign and as the elections neared, I was totally disgusted with really no good choice.

Election day came.. democracy didn’t have anything better to offer this time.And then there was  the ‘Jagore…lets do something’ camp giving a clarion call to vote.  Yes I woke up..and I am ready to vote, but every party had nothing but populist offers in their manifesto . Voting for them would mean I support that

Luckily, there was at least one party in our area which didn’t offer anything and was talking some sense. I wish all the best for this party .I am not sure if they would win the elections.

But I am happy this time my vote  would be counted as a one of those who didn’t like the free TV or the new laptop .

Hello all and welcome to another episode of this column which has become quite infrequent. This in part due to a new assignment that I took up at work . The work is quite interesting. Will make a post on it quite soon.

One of the many events that happened this month was OReilly ETech conference. I am not a big fan of this event but this year had nice talks that might interest you.

Real hackers program DNA : While you were guessing about the  next avenue for hackers, here is   someone from MIT who is hacking into DNA!  Reshma Shetty has done a PhD on Biological Engineering from MIT and is now part of ginkgobiworks ,a  synthetic biology startup .

She is one of the speakers at the recent ETech conference. One of her interesting works was  tinkering into an E.coli bacteria  with genes from a petunia plant and made E.cloi ‘smell nice’.  For more on this and the field of  synthetic biology have a look at this interview .

New YouTube features: You Tube got an overhaul recently and with some new features to its armor.I could also see a lot of HD videos and it has become quite seamless  in switching to HD vides from the normal ones. The site also integrates Twitter functionality,that allows you to share the video link as a tweet.

Another upgrade is better mobile integration with the company  launching its official YouTube application
for Symbian and Windows Mobile.  I remember of a beast called Android. But I couldn’t find a version of the YouTube app  for this.. Surprising! as YouTube is from the Google stable.

Designing for Gestural UI: The mobile and PC UI design is getting ready for the next disruption – Touch   and Gestural UI. With the huge success of iPhone and its fabled multitouch,

‘Gestures’ have become the new areas of interest in the mobile application world with most users opting for ‘touch based UI’.

If you are into this domain and are working on designing of better usability for Gesture based UI ,then here are some suggestions from the  SXSW2009 interactive conference that happened recently. There was a  session on Gestural UI with examples from some cool apps on the iPhone.

Bruce Eckel on C++ and Java: The C++ 0x standard is coming up with new features (one of them is named as ‘futures and promises’ ) I don’t know where/how these functions might be used and how many are still using this language and these new features on a daily basis.  Here is a short comment by  Bruce Eckel’s on what languages like Java/C++ and brought in to the programming community.