Infinity Unbound

The oldest known color photograph: 1872 Before the Autochrome process was perfected in France, this photograph of a landscape in Southern France was taken. No, it is not hand-tinted. This is a color-photograph. (Note: It was published in a Time/Life Book entitled "Color" in 1972, "courtesey of George Eastman House, Paulus Lesser.") You are looking at the birth of color photography seven years after the American Civil War. 130 years ago this view of Angouleme, France, was created by a "subtractive" method. This is the basis for all color photography, even today. It was taken by Louis Ducos du Hauron who proposed the method in 1869. It was not until the 1930's that this method was perfected for commercial use. Color Photos from the Russian Empire Monastery from the Solarium Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of...

Prof Hawking is in "no hurry to die" The human race must move to a star outside our solar system to protect the future of the species, physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has warned. He told the BBC that life could be wiped out by a nuclear disaster or asteroid hitting the planet. But the Cambridge academic added: "Once we spread out into space and establish colonies our future should be safe." Prof Hawking, 64, was speaking before receiving the UK's top science award, the Royal Society's Copley Medal. My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me Professor Stephen ...

Ya yah... I've been posting too much news these days... By Stan Beer Monday, 27 November 2006 The buzz that is starting to build around one of Apple's most anticipated pieces of vaporware resembles the atmosphere at a rock concert before the big act appears. It is now at the stage where if Apple doesn't unveil an iPhone on or before MacWorld Expo 2007 next January, fans will tear the house down. Microsoft's Zune marketing team must be shaking their heads in wonder. Apple has spent exactly nothing on promoting or pre-marketing a product that the company has never acknowledged but somehow everyone knows is on the verge being announced. There have been leaks from unnamed sources of course. There was the tale of an order being placed for 12 million iPhones to be made by Taiwanese iPod manufacturer Foxconn. There were reports of registration of the iPhone name by Apple (which doesn't prove anything really). However, in stark contrast to the controlled drip-fed deliberat...

DNA by design? Officially the teaching packs are frowned on Science teaching materials deemed "not appropriate" by the government should be allowed in class, Education Secretary Alan Johnson has been urged. Chemistry teacher at Liverpool's Blue Coat School, Nick Cowan, says the packs promoting intelligent design are useful in debating Darwinist evolution. Education officials insist intelligent design is not recognised as science. It argues that evolution cannot explain everything so the Universe must have had an intelligent creator. The packs were sent out to 5,000 secondary schools by a group of academics and clerics known as Truth in Science. The Department for Education and Skills said they were inappropriate and not supportive of the science curriculum. ...

Everything from OS to email By Christophe Guillemin Published: Friday 24 November 2006 After the gendarmes and the Ministry of Culture, it's the French MPs' turn to switch to open source. From June 2007, PCs in French députés' offices will be equipped with a Linux operating system and open source productivity software. The project, backed by MPs Richard Cazenav and Bernard Carayon of the UMP party, will see 1,154 French parliamentary workstations running on an open source OS, with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and an open source email client. A spokesperson for the parliament's administration said a decision as to the choice of OS and email client hasn't yet been taken. Currently, some of the parliament's servers have been running Linux, with Apache web servers and the Mambo content management system. The project was the subject of a study by Atos Origin, whose conclusions convinced the French parliament, the Assemblée N...

Well, after working on this blog for a while, I've decided to make it free for my friends to add content as well and model it as a customized news site that really matter to us... You can think of it as an aggregator of the news on the internet over custom tastes. It is no more just a personal blog site but a collection of information... hopefully true to its name infinity unbound.. I'd prefer to see technical text pertaining to these but not limited to these topics Open Source Hacks Interesting jokes Pictures educational material .... just about anything if you think you can contribute, mail me at prasannagautam(at)gmail(dot)com

this is one of those texts that defined Microsoft.... By William Henry Gates III February 3, 1976 An Open Letter to Hobbyists To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000. The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC...

Many people are not aware that programming on Linux, if you are fond of your mouse, is very enjoyable. If you are fond of your command line, it is also very enjoyable as well. The _CHOICE_ is up to you. A lot of visual development IDEs are available. I have been noticing, posts on Digg and other places, that people think there is no Linux equivalent of tools like Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. Here, I list some of the tools that you can expect on a linux Desktop. I am using Kubuntu Edgy and all these nice eye-candy tools are available in the Ubuntu Repositories. Other non-free Visual Tools are also available on Linux, e.g. Delphi, Oracle JDeveloper, etc. Click on any of the images to enlarge QT. QT is one on the best development environments on a KDE platform. QT also works with Gnome. You can develop C++ database driven applications by dragging and dropping. http://www.trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/x11 Gambas T...

This guy made this pic using MS Paint http://www.deviantart.com/view/17908194/

An old news I just read today.. really happy.. we need a govt which can do this... George Iype in Kochi September 02, 2006 The Communist Party of India (Marxists)-led government in Kerala headed by Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan is not just against American cola majors -- Coca-Cola and PepsiCo -- alone. Nearly three weeks after the Achuthanandan government banned the sale and manufacture of Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products in Kerala, Microsoft has been logged out of the state-run schools. Here on, nearly 1.5 million students in the 2,650 government and government-aided high schools in the state will no longer use the Windows platform for computer education. Instead, they have switched over to the free GNU/Linux software. "We have decided that we will use only free software for computer education in Kerala schools. We have implemented the Linux platform in high schools; it will be implemented in other schools step by step," Kerala Education Minister M A Baby told rediff.com. H...

A rather inspirational piece of text that never ceases to inspire.. by +++The Mentor+++ Written January 8, 1986 Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"... Damn kids. They're all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike. I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..." Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike. I ...

Not too long ago Sun CEO Scott Mcnealy made a comment that he saw no point in giving away java in GPL and in response to the FSF evangelist openly recommend us not to use Java because they felt it's too easy to get trapped in a proprietary sansar. I know RMS once said FSF cannot recommend OpenOffice "on ethical grounds". It severely depend on Sun JRE. The solution would be to improve GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ), and the GNU Classpath. OpenOffice folks refused to refactor their code to meet GCJ and classpath. Whatever GCJ and gang claimed was not to the ground. It still lacks several features. Gosling vowed against the parallel re-invention and development of java classlib.. As known GNU Classpath, folks were refuted against his remark. Its not new though, there were already a plethora of java product based on GPL and Apache License, The significant of those are from ASF, recently plunged into JavaEE market, that happens when JBoss lead engineer frustrated and decl...

Finally, this thing really looks like a blog... I made a couple of revamps mostly from hectro's place's codes and using the minimum style look. I removed a lot of the ads as well. It's really funny how this blog began and how it developed. I've finally decided what to do with this blog... I'll explain that in detail later...

Interesting stuff I saw on the internet!! March 9, 2004: NASA releases a single image taken by the Hubble Space telescope that proves a fatal blow to the concept of God, but despite the compelling evidence, many simply don’t comprehend the significance of the image. According to many interpreters of the Bible and the Book of Genesis, there is proof that the Earth and Universe is only 6,000 years old . Even scientists like Dr. Michael Brown, the Director and Principal Researcher of the Molecular History Research Center who graduated with a Ph. D. in Biology with an emphasis in Molecular Biology, will scientifically show you that carbon dating is wrong, the universe is stable and that we all descended from one 6,000 year old mother, Eve . Man was created by God in his own image for a special purpose. Different religions offer slightly different descriptions of that purpose , but clearly, it is widely accepted that we are God’s children and the Earth is the most important place in the ...

Wow!!! Tihar seems to be here.. Dipawali.. is it over already? nah it isn't and I'm reaping all the benefits off this great time of the year... It's 12:30 well after midnight and as always, I'm not asleep, lots of thanks to Nescafe (Do I get some money for free advertising?). I rarely miss sleep but today we have the often cacophonisc and repetitive sounds of deusi and bhailo. I won't say melodious because that's becoming a rare circumstance. I do remember when I was just a little small when we made a group and went to sing deusi with all the friends. Had so much fun. I do miss those memories and those times. I don't know where all those friends went as I haven't been in contact with most of them. Aaargh.... this is turning out to be really disturbing now...

I was gasping at my creations, looking pleased and possibly with a smile on my face... "Wow!!! I've never written that much all my life" well writing for money or good grades, I might have, for good colle I will, but for just plain writing would be plain laughable. A blog is just that. I must admit that I wasn't too selfless though.... I wanted to earn money from this blog as well. However, today, after possibly two weeks of blogging and around a week of earning money from them which current;y stands at a total of $105(not bad for a nepali student in a week, eh?) which is a little short by around $244 to buy this cool ebook reader by sony http://sony.com/reader/ I'm seeing myself as a character in the classic Chekhovian story "the Bet" who places himself in a room for 20 years for a huge sum of money but then finds that knowledge is far more precious than any money he can earn, which he has earned now... thus he leaves the room just before he completes...

I'll be starting a new blog on book reviews..... http://me-studies.blogspot.com well, I have a pretty eclectic taste... so reviewing on a single blog for books seems to be a good idea

I believe the first tenet of the modern maths and sciences falling under "rationalism" is objectivity. You have to be objective.... Numbers aren't like humans... wow!!! this must've been one of the greatest inventions man has ever done after inventing numbers(forming the base of maths).. you may say that first they invented numbers and then went into a world without numbers... into abstract theorems people can rarely spell, let alone unerstand some day. My idea is , there's some kind of emotional bond with maths among humans... even aliens... Basically, if we are similar and living in the same universe, we'll be governed by the same rules and hence the universal language can only be maths....... The need of ojectivity in reneissance was to send humanity away from the clutches of the church. Hence, many of the revolutionary movements took shape.... namely, the Romanticism... and most importantly the revival of maths and sciences... After the 19th century whe...

Wow! It’s been about a year since I've heard the word blog, ironically in a blog site. Back then, it seemed totally absurd idea of sharing your intimate information publicly with the world. However, after moving away from dialup it seems the roads to information super highway is opening up although the speeds are still really low compared to other countries but the question is what makes these blogs so special? This sudden upsurge of neo-bloggers giving news, even anonymously leaking information shows what the internet is really capable of. A well known cliché of our times is "By the People, for the people and from the people", taken from the famous Gettysburg speech by Ab Lincoln during the Civil War, seems to be coming true at least in blogs. Take for example the recent revolution in Nepal. Although the government had banned a lot of sites (especially the blogs), people were still discussing the conditions in Nepal very similar to the Bulletin Boards during the 90’s whe...

Probably the most important question we ask to ourselves might be "What am I going to do with my life?" well it just might be the most frequent and still the hardest to answer... Nobody knows what the future beholds... I don't.. yet I can make it the way I want to... The way I think.. you just go to such a point only if you have an ardent desire to be there.. i.e, if you deserve it. Its funny to see how people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, et cetra... have gone so up while they did have equal potential to be down as average joes like you and I. I must admit, it's a pretty wierd way of putting things. I view it as a reflection of their desire to succeed.. you cannot go higher than what you think you can.. Maybe some people might like to shrug it off as mere ego. But who doesn't have some form of egotistical behaviour? I know I do. The main point is not that you can get what you desire, I believe that talents play a great role in that.. However, it's not alway...

There has been a lot of interest over where google is going? Is 'the internet' going to be just 'the google'? Well the recent effort to buy YouTube seems like yet another plan for total global domination by google.. Well someday we might divide the evolution of computing in 3 eras: 1. The IBM era: Hardware was the king.. Mainframe the temple... well this led to this super-giant's downfall... 2. The Microsoft era: Software is the king... Even untouched by antitruust.. Although it won the browser wars by the virtue of its ubiquitous "Windows" operating system.. 3. The Google era: Content is the king.. Although there doesn't seem to be a clear winner here... but I guess the winner this time is the consumer who is getting better services at free or cheap prices.. Who would've given 1000 Mbs back in the days when GMail Began.. It was considered a spoof.. now GMail sprawling with 2.7 gb and still increasing.... this eternal beta has become synonymous wi...

This seems to be interesting.. have a look NASA is making an unprecedented investment in commercial space transportation services with the hope of creating a competitive market for supply flights to the International Space Station (ISS). Two industry partners will receive a combined total of approximately $500 million to help fund the development of reliable, cost-effective access to low-Earth orbit. The agency is using its Space Act authority to facilitate the demonstration of these new capabilities. NASA signed Space Agreements Aug. 18 with Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) of El Segundo, Calif., and Rocketplane-Kistler (RpK) of Oklahoma City to develop and demonstrate the vehicles, systems, and operations needed to support a human facility such as ISS. Once the space shuttle is retired, NASA hopes to become just one of many customers for a new, out-of-this-world parcel service. Image at right: Artist's concept of Rocketplane-Kistler's K-1 Orbital Vehicle. Credit NASA...

Another blog.... Finally something is going smoothly... It's a pretty cool stuff with this ad sense thing. Like making money and all.. Well that's cool. However, I was missing the point here... A blog is meant to have some actual blogs not just fantastic ads that nobody will click... Well I've decided that now I seriously need a web site and few more blogs.. I'll use this one for posting some of my scientific and mathematical findings... if you can call them so. Maybe book reviews and even some tips where to get them.. I'll be doing that after the exams... Well the days are passing by. SAT is coming on like a hurricane. I've always liked to have a web site but there was never a serious motivating factor about what I'd do with a site... what possibly can be done? Sorry if I sound like Jerry Seinfeld... but after trying a lot of different combinations, I'd decided that it was not my cup of coffee... Went on to go for programming and studies.. now since the...