Visualizing Carnatic Ragas

I have a newly found interest in visualizing the carnatic ragas. Music is a fantastic language of expression. Listening to sound is one thing; Singing out is another; Visualizing can be another form. The third form can connect the dots between music and visual arts. More on music visualization here.

Also check out this site - http://www.swarasindhu.in - that has good collection of primer materials on music.

Upcoming Cameras - gigapixels, post-processing, ...

"A picture is worth a thousand words". Still some words are useful for us to understnad the evolution of cameras, those little picture taking devices.

Cameras are one of the easiest and most exciting creative devices. Anyone in the world understands about seeing pictures and to large degree a lot of folks learn about taking pictures too. There are wide variety of cameras in the market. And interestingly enough I believe the camera market is set up for a big shift in technology and potentially disruption in the coming years.

Historically the cameras have stayed at a price range of $200 for simple beginner cameras. Thanks to the cellphone revolution, small pinhole cameras hvae become even more popular world over. It is possible that there are 100s of millions of cameras worldwide. At the high end you have cameras from the leaders like Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony, et al that sell for $1000 and above reaching into 10s of thousands depending on the lens package one gets.

Most folks desire to take great quality pictures. Photos are partly about emotions and settings. One can find subject, solace and depth in pictures from the legends like Ansel Adams (who focused on nature and outdoors), Anne Geddes (focuesd on baby pictures), etc. And the remaining part is about the quality of equipment that allows one to take pictures. Over the past two decades, the photo enthusiasts have mastered arcane set of technologies like: aspect ratio, pixels, depth of field, special software like light room to get great pictures. Now can we have the suitable equipment that may make it easy to take fantastic pictures with low degree of matery on the technical stuff?

When I visit children's events, I often find parents (especially dads) with their tiny little cameras taking shots (photos and videos) of their kids' performance. Sadly enough the quality of light and ambience is not conducive to produce great quality pictures. However I easily notice that there are at least 10+ cameras in the hall. What if there was easy shraing of pictures and video stream to create a better combined picture for the event? The constraints are usual stuff - where to share, what to share, what comes out, battery life of equipment used, etc.

And often enough some of my friends rave about their post-processing skills using many different types of software. Such geeky speek is great, but are not economical in time or money. What if there was a way to save time and make it easy to use the various tools easily to manipulate images? That was the success behind Instagram who pioneered a way for users to easily create vintage pictures through software post-processing.

There are some encouraging developments in this line.

Last week I learnt that the researchers at Duke University have assembled a gigapixel camera (also see here) from 98 small cameras that use 14 megapixel sensors arrayed around a spherical lens. The produt does not look exciting but the potential is immense to create the equipment that can capture high quailty image using sensors that are available cheaply in the market.

Lytro is a different attempt to create pictures. It captures the light rays instead of getting the finished quality picture. And later through post processing one can obtain rich detailed pictures of interest.

I believe assembling an array of 4-8 cameras one can easily achieve high qulaity pictures at low cost.  And who knows this can be built ino the cellphones as well.

Census can be beautiful (at least from Australia)

Australia completed its 2011 census to find that there are 21 million plus people there. Usually census tends to be boring with lots of statistical data by the state and region putting the reader to easy sleep. Lo and behold the folks from down under decided to violate the soporific statistical tables and have shown that they are masters of 21st century medium.

Visit http://www.sbs.com.au/news/census/ to check it out for yourself. The census data is nicely blended with maps and interactivity to provide a fantastic tour of the Australian population. Of course English is the most popular language spoken by nearly 77% of the population. The census also shows that there are almost as many Japanese speakers as there are Tamil speakers. And the heat map by province and region is fun to play with. Go Enjoy learning about Australia!

Domain Names cost a lot of money!

Today I ran into an old friend of mine. He picked up an entrepreneurial quest and has begun creating his own product. Keeping with times his product is a website powered with some cool technology behind the scenes. He described me the challenges he had in narrowing down a domain name and obtaining the same.

Boy! it is tough to get a good memorable .com address. He did find a few sites that were hoarding the domain names to resell at a higher price. Gone are the Adam Smith's (The Wealth of Nations) days of 17th century when folks hoarded grains to resell at a higher price during famine. Now it is the domain names, movie tickets, and electronic gadgets that merit the high price tags. My friend was resourceful and patient. He worked on the word list from his GRE days to pick suitable pairing of words that can be memorable and eventually found used good negotiations to obtain his favored domain name. He does not want to tell the name till he gets his stealth startup into beta stage.

Another thing that I learnt in the conversation is that the domain name sale is such a profitable business and filled with negotiations that it has given new life for used car salesmen :) The seller on call basically wants to sell the domain name in 10 minutes - they quote a price that is valid for 10 minutes after which there is no guarantee on what the new price might be. Forget the fact that no one would have chased the same domain names. Still it is fun to dangle a price in front of the buyer to entice the buyer to make the commitment rather than walk away to his or her second choice.

Anyways, I should remember that the domain names are pricey!

OLED lighting

Over the past month I am using an LED powered reading lamp. It is simple, cute, and powerful. Use of LED also means the lamp is 'cool', really I mean it. The entire lamp is powered by 3 AAA batteries. Wow!

I wondered how we can get bigger lights using the same technology. The first thought is to get an array of LEDs strung together to bring the effect. However such an array looks ugly. They would look like a corn with little bulbs projecting out. Instead what we need is a nice flat surface.

There is all this rage about LED TVs in the market. See
1080p 120 Hz LED LCD VA Panel HDTV, Black for an example. These LED TVs are supposed to offer high quality display at smallest TV size. Indeed they do. The display is cool. I am writing this blog using a computer that uses one such LED screen. The screen offers dynamic control of colors and images to provide better lighting. It is late night. And I also had turned off all lights in the home relying mostly on the LED Screen's backlight to help me use the computer. It is powerful and bright. Voila, we should use this.

Imagine having LED lights for our entire home. In theory these should reduce energy consumption while offering rich ability to project light - colors, patterns, intensity, etc. Imagine if we can have programmable lighting inside the house. Imagine the lights dancing to the moods, music, and people in the house. That will add a living personality to these lights. What may be required for the same. Need to think about this further.

A quick search through the internet revealed that there are nice panels on the way making to the US market. OLED Light Guide Panels are bright ideas that provide rich way for us to add brightness to our lives. I am committing to buy more LED based lighting products. And of course that means there is more delight waiting for me.

Music from India - Nice site and great quality music

I love music - particularly the instrumentals. In the 1990s when I used to return back from my India trips with boxes of cassette tapes. Then it was bringing music on CDs. Later these CDs became MP3 CDs packed with lots of music. It was amazing to see how the music was becoming compact to carry while quality was going up all the time.

I love the wonders of technology. 1000s of innovations by countless number of individuals in the music, technology, retail, manufacturing and other industries has paved way for such an amazing transformation for users like me. What used to be only for the rich is now available and accessible for everyone in the world.

One such latest innovation is the cloud based delivery of music. Over the past few months I am listening to music from Music India Online that features a LARGE number of music from India in the streaming format. Now I need to hardly carry anything around the world. The music quality is awesome. And I can almost access this from any PC or MAC. It is still hard to access this music from my car or my portable music player. I eagerly await the day when that next transformation happens.

Enjoy the Music while it lasts.

Domains, domains, ...

Who would have thought that one can sell just electronic records and make money. That is precisely what godaddy.com does. They sell registration records for internet hosted domains. It is simple, easy, and cool to have a domain of our own. and of course it is simple, easy, and profitable for godaddy.com. I have a few domains with them. I like the domains because it allows me to host dedicated content easily.

You can get your own domain too.
Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!