Shantanu’s Technophilic Musings

Just read over at groklaw about a ruling made last night by the US Appeals Court. According to it, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” [...]

Amit has written a detailed Satellite TV (DTH) Guide and Comparison about the scene in India. He compares the various players that are operating right now and gives suggestions on what should one look at while choosing out of all the available operators. If you are confused about what the advent of all these different [...]

I’ve known about ImageMagick tools for quite some time now but never dabbled with it. A couple of weeks ago I played with it for some time (notice the new cascaded polaroid pics header above) and was amazed even more. Few of its shining features:

It has almost unlimited features to manipulate your images through its [...]

Just read on BGR, that RIM will have to close down its BlackBerry service in India if they don’t allow our government to snoop on every little piece of data that goes through it. WTF? On an even more serious note, if they do comply, then will the same demand be made to all the [...]

A gaping mouth was all I had when my 3 year ol’ Canon Powershot S1 IS’s LCD/EVF went blank all of a sudden a few months ago. Nothing could be seen, clicking the picture button resulted in blank pics. Googling about it revealed an advisory by Canon, stating that it is a known issue with [...]

Came across this funny, but still thought provoking, definition of an engineer.
(Taken from “The Embedded Muse”, a useful embedded stuff related newsletter published by Jack Ganssel.)
“An engineer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis
of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude infinite strings of
incomprehensible formulas calculated with micrometric precision [...]