Ye Dilli hai mere yaar !!!

I emailed our DC gang about watching Delhi 6 at a theatre nearby. Watching a movie on First day Last show is a thrill in itself. In any case, after a lengthy discussion involving 50 emails over a period of 2 days, 9 of us went to watch Delhi 6 on Friday.

It was an amazing day for me, as I managed to get my stuff to work after a long time. Drove back home in just 4 hours, took a different route to avoid the traffic. Reached home, booted my system (bole to mast nahaaya) and off we went for the movie.

Delhi 6 is a collection of vignettes revolving around Roshan (AB Jr.) the main protagonist of the movie. But it's not the romance between Roshan & Bittu (Sonam as the feisty Dilli ki kudi) that captures your attention. IMHO, it's the ensemble star cast, where everyone has a definite role in taking the movie forward. Waheeda Rehman, Om Puri, Pavan Malhotra, Deepak Dobriyal, Vijay Raaz, Atul Kulkarni, Divya Dutta, Rishi Kapoor, etc..Also not to forget the cute Rama Bua..!!! A R Rahman's music is extraordinary and plays in the background for most of the time letting you enjoy the visuals. Rahman's songs flourish amidst the background of Delhi 6, watch out for the most creative collage of Times Square and Delhi 6. This week Rahman's work will be judged at the Oscars..and Delhi 6 is another award winnning score by the maestro. The movie has a message and though it gets a bit filmy in the end is immensely watchable. Take a bow, Mr. Mehra, this is a worthy follow-up to RDB.

Techie Influence

I had a tough time configuring CUDA on my laptop, ahem CUDA is Compute Unified Device Access (NVIDIA's compiler for general purpose computation on GPU). So I decided to start a blog about my experiences with High Performance Computing. In general AcceleratedComputing will talk about hardware accelerators for HPC.

Also a quick note to myself or to anyone who wants to paste code from TextMate:
1. Open a blank document in TextMate and select "Create CSS from current Theme" from the Gears icon. This will generate a CSS template.
2. If you are using Blogger, go to Layout->Edit HTML and paste the CSS template in the Edit Template section. This ensures that you get the TextMate theme in your blog template.

Happy Valentine's Day !!!

Software necessary for a Grad student

I usually come across so many friends who have questions about what software they need for their laptop. My conversations always end up in a demo showing how to make their laptop use more productive. So I thought of writing a blog to address the question:

"What software do I need on my laptop to make my Grad life more productive?"

(a) Bibliography Manager: First of all as a Graduate student, we are exposed to scientific conference papers/journals. It's always good to come up with a filing system to access all the papers you have read or intend to read at some other time. Most of the times it's all about filing intelligently, so that the next time you don't waste time searching for the correct reference. For Mac OSX, I recommend installing BibDesk. This is a free application and is the best bibliography software on Macs. For Linux or Windows, use JabRef. I will not mention EndNote for Windows, as it relies on proprietary formats.

(b) Typesetting documents: Though MS Word is the most commonly used format to typeset documents, it is not the preferred work flow in most academic institutions. Use Latex to typeset all your documents.

For Mac OSX, keep track of the latest Latex software packages from MacTeX. The MacTeX package includes the Latex distribution, BibDesk, Equation editor, Excalibur (spell checker) and TeXShop (front end). As a side note, I recommend TextMate for advanced Latex users.

You can install Latex on Windows using MiKTeX. The front end TeXnicCenter is very useful and integrates well with Windows. This way you can avoid installing Cygwin on your Windows laptop for Latex.

Latex is inbuilt on all Linux distros. I have used Kile on a FC/Ubuntu box and have enjoyed the experience.

(c) Diagrams: I use OmniGraffle for making all diagrams on Mac OSX. I have used Dia on Linux machines and found it to be a very good application. Visio may count as a good alternative on Windows machines, though I don't use it.

I will keep updating this blog as and when I find interesting software that's a must for Grad students. Hope someone finds this blog useful. Thanks to MT for his guidance :)