Stupid people doing Stupid things

Everyone living in India must have heard about Dalits in Maharashtra causing a lot of trouble and damage to its citizens and property. Apparently a desecration of the late Dr Baba Ambedkar's statue in Kanpur has sparked of the violence. Since yesterday they have been making Mumbai's suburbs close down, breaking windows of shops and vehicles and generally harassing people. But violence escalated to new hieghts some time ago with the torching of two trains, one a mumbai local and the other the Deccan Queen, a link between Mumbai-Pune. I marvel at the idiocy and illiteracy of the people who are reduced to such low levels. I mean, if someone annoyed you by damaging your leader's statue why don't you crappy people just find that guy and kill HIM. And that guy's not even in Maharashtra. If you do not have the basic civic sense to not hurt other people, if you are so stupid that you do not know tolerance and non violence, if you fail to understand the value of money and time, don't go about begging for reservations in IITs and other institutions, you are not worthy of them. I wish I could get my hands on one of you and strangle you. And cut the crap, its about time the issue died down.
I don't use ultra profane words or you would have a shit load of them here.

Ambigram Nikhil Marathe

This is my full name in a rotational ambigram. Its really cool how the k splits into a a and t on the other side. Needed a fair bit of work and could be made better. The only problem spot was the 'k' to 'at' part. The rest of my name is an extremely straight stroked typeface. I also liked the way the L and M joined gracefully with the extra bit acting like a serif for the M.
Next I should try to preserve the case.

Glowpad

Glowpad is a small Python/Pygame program to read in a file and generate a word/pattern with randomly coloured squares which morph to white. I basically wrote it after seeing the cool effect that appears at the end of one of the Sony ads(the robot one) where the same effect happens with the word feel. So I hacked this program in just half an hour.

To run the program, extract it to any place on your computer. you NEED to have Python and Pygame installed before you can run it. After you install them just run the program by executing

python glowpad.py 

. Two patterns FEEL and LINUX are included. So to apply the effect on Linux use

python glowpad.py linux

.
To create your own patterns just create a new file in any editor. Make the pattern you want using an uppercase B. The colours are chosen randomly. You can add padding or whatever you want around the characters. The only thing Glowpad makes sense of is an uppercase B, any other character is ignored. So this is an example. Just save the file and run it as shown above

##############################
-B----BBBBB-BBBBB-B---B-B---B-
-B------B---B---B-B---B--BBB--
-B------B---B---B-B---B---B---
-B------B---B---B-B---B--BBB--
-BBBB-BBBBB-B---B-BBBBB-B---B-
##############################

DOWNLOAD:http://22bits.exofire.net/downloads/glowpad.tar.gz

Ambigram Harry Potter

Harry Potter both ways. Directly rendered in Inkscape with no pre-planning.

What the blog tagline means

If you are wondering why my tagline is a wierd string of numbers, they are all extremely important to the world, except the second, which is only important for a few in the world.

• 42 - The Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything
• 22 - My birthday
• 3.14 - Pi
• 2.718 - e
  
• 1.618 - The Golden Ratio
• 0 - Defying quite a number of laws of mathematics

Ambi Nikhil Revised

This is a way better version of my name, My friends said the K wasn't easy to read in the first and looked like nifkil, so this one is with the name split over two levels . This not only makes it readable it gives a tightness to the word, and doesn't leave excess whitespace

Ambigram Shreyas

Another friend, not the best ambigram, can be done loads better.

Ambigram Konqi

The KDE Mascot, good ain't it?

Ambigram Alok

Another friend. Sorry for the bad PNG quality somehow Inkscape's export isn't very good. Also the O is quite bad. Alok is a really hard name and the ambigram could really use some improvement.

Ambigram Nikhil

I realised that I had never posted about my own ambigram. This is one of my oldest, probably a year old, and can be made a lot better by using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape. But for now this will do.

Ambigram Mridul

Ambigram of a friend's name.

Beryl Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of my computer running Beryl.
The customary Cube:


Windows can be made to look like a negative(Konqueror here) and so can the complete desktopHave too many windows and don't want to Alt+Tab, get a view of all the windows on all desktops or on current desktop depending on which screen edge you take the mouse too(configurable)

Transparency. The Konqueror window on top is partially transparent(Alt + mouse scroll) and shows the blogger window beneath

Beryl is AMAZING!

I have got Beryl working with AIGLX and all its cool effects on an i845 and 256mb ram with almost no difference in performance than non beryl. This is absolutely amazing. The beryl devs are really great. Compiz used to be really slow. Now I can finally have all this eye candy on all the time.

Learning

I have decided to take a break from creating software to learning some new things for a few days. So I have started learning Ruby, advanced JavaScript which I didn't know before, especially DOM scripting and Ajax. And I am also reading Beginning Algorithms which is a really good book for an introduction to algorithms in a easy to understand concrete way. That said I am starting to like Ruby and feel the same enjoyment that is felt when coding in Python. I have not entirely abandoned projects though. They are on the drawing board and in the design process.
School begins from tomorrow after three weeks of Diwali vacations and we have lots of exams coming up which will severely curtail my computer time. I will be freed only in the second week of December when preparations for the school Sports Day begins and studies take a backseat.
This is the last day of enjoyment so I go of to enjoy...

Barcelona vs Chelsea

I stayed up yesterday night to watch the match, and the sleep lost was well worth it. A quick goal by Deco had me worried that Chelsea would lose, but a stunner from Lampard solved that problem. Gudjohnsen struck back at his old team, but a 93rd minute goal by Drogba(he is now scored 5 goals in 4 matches) put the match on a draw, enough to ensure chelsea goes clear and a small chance of Barca getting eliminated at this stage. Anyway the referee was REALLY bad, they should bring someone more tolerant of fouls instead of handing out cards(11 yellow).