StumbleUpon | vvk's blog posts

http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/6949178/

Wed, 16 May 2007 11:36:03 -0700

My name is Vivek (a.k.a. vvk). (About me)
Thanks for visiting my photoblog !

This blog is a repository for my views & reviews on a cornucopia of topics.
You can stumble upon interesting websites, beautiful photos and fascinating people here.

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I would be pleased know about my dear visitors from around the world.
Go ahead, click to mark your spot on my google guest-map :

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How did you like the CSS theme for my blog ?
Kindly take a pot-shot at my theme poll :

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Learn some useful tips & tricks, and meet some great Stumblers here.

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I hope you enjoy my blog as much as I enjoy putting up interesting stuff on it.

Please stay awhile and peruse through my blog archives:
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http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/7988007/

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:24:34 -0800

WHY I CALL MY BLOG A PHOTOBLOG

A couple of people have asked me why I do not embed mp3 songs or videos directly in my blog -- I do have all these photos/images on my blog, so why not music & videos ?! When we have StumbleUpon Extreme and StumbleVideo, then why not join the bandwagon ?

Here's why not ...

I personally dislike landing on a website and finding that some Flash-based song or video is auto-loading in the background. Hey, I would like to know what I am going to watch, before I hit the play button. I don't want to waste internet bandwidth before I decide.

These days, most of the web-adverts seem to be flashy (pun intended) gimmicks destined to waste your (precious) bandwidth.

For this very reason, I specifically use Flashblock (a great Firefox extension) to block all Flash elements on a page by default -- each flash thingy appears as a disabled gray block with a big "play" button. If it's really a video I want to watch, I can "enable" it by clicking on it, and then having it start buffering. When the video buffer seems to have enough of a "head start", I hit Play.

This does not mean I do not like music or videos. On the contrary I am a certified music junkie, and a keen follower of the latest stuff to hit YouTube, Google-Video, MetaCafe, vMix, GoFish and other video sites.

If I like a video, I create a small "screenshot" of the video and post in my blog to give my visitors a chance to decide whether to watch it. The actual video is only a "jump" away.

With online mp3, usually there are DRM issues, so I refrain from posting questionable song links. However, there are sites such as Download.com Music, Legal Sounds and Jamendo,� where you can get legally free songs and even sample the latest commercial chart-toppers on their way to the Grammy's. You can always find music stumbles sprinkled in my blog -- look for tags such as music, songs, mp3, MIDI, audio.

"Perceived speed" is sometimes more important than actual speed -- the speed at which your pages first show up to your visitor is critical -- you can lose visitors if your pages load too slow.

That's one of the reasons why my CSS theme has a small file as the background image. I also resize large photos/images and upload the resized images to Imageshack or PhotoBucket, before posting these image links to my blog. This way my blog loads faster, yet looks cool.

Sometimes though, it is easier to "hotlink" directly. :-)

Most webmasters are nowadays lenient about this since they have realised that hotlinked images tend to drive new traffic to sites. Mind you, some sites do frown on hotlinking and may block hotlinked images. I usually browse through my archives once in a while and attempt to restore old posts to their original glory.

Almost all my posts with hotlinked images have "linkbacks" to the original site (links without the 'no follow' attribute, so I can help drive some traffic to those sites as a sort of thank-you gesture).

Hope some of the lingo in this post was not too arcane, and the info was helpful in some way.

If you wanna share any tips with me, in improving our StumbleUpon pages, give me a shout.

http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/7211829/

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:26:44 -0800

http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/7211360/

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:00:32 -0800

Interesting trivia about roots ...

A unique device to find square roots, was a 17th century abacus called Napier's Bones

The root symbol is said to have been derived from an altered form of lowercase r, representing the Latin radix (meaning "root")

Roots of a function are also known as zeroes in complex analysis

The number 0 (zero) was first discovered and used by Brahmaguptha, the Indian mathematician and astronomber, in his treatise Brahmasphutasiddhanta which was written in early 7th century B.C.

This treatise contained some remarkably advanced ideas in many areas of Mathematics (including calculation of square roots). Fascinatingly, it was written completely in verse!

Most of the methods of computing square roots are derivatives of the Newton's method

In numerical analysis, we can computationally arrive at the nth root of any real number, using the simple Bisection Method or the fast-converging N-th root algorithm

One of the most famous unsolved problems in Mathematics is the Reimann Hypothesis, which describes the roots of the Reimann-zeta function. These roots can be regarded as the harmonic frequencies in the distribution of prime numbers.

In fact, there is a million dollar award for solving the Reimann Hypothesis! There are even numerous awards for finding primes !

So, now you see... finding roots is not only brain-teasing fun, but a get-rich-quick scheme too !

http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/7113891/

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 10:33:12 -0800

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The Simpsons - Christmas Special

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http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/6692149/

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 12:11:47 -0800

THE FOLDING
~BoundFeet

cruel logic
pointing your wand at me
i am unfond
of your tendency
to accuse
me of poor strategy
an ill propensity to drink
and general low intensity

i writhe pinched by your scrutiny
and it trips me, sends me tumbling
you might be a touch kinder to me
if i hadn't abandoned loyalty
to the brotherhood of Earth-- of science, and that
which our respective languages will not permit
either of us to fully comprehend
the subtle nuances of the words

cruel logic
how coyly you tempt me
i am depleted
by your brazen dignity
begging for mercy

http://vvk.stumbleupon.com/review/6652868/

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 22:38:25 -0800

World's Deepest Hole -- Quest For The Mohorovičić Discontinuity

If you liked my last post, you'll like this one too.

Over forty years ago, researchers in the Soviet Union began an ambitious drilling project, whose goal was to penetrate the Earth's upper crust and sample the warm, mysterious area where the crust and mantle intermingle -- the Mohorovičić Discontinuity, or "Moho".

This project was called -- the Kola Superdeep Borehole. It's deepest borehole, SG-3, was completed in 1989, creating a hole 12,262 meters (7.6 miles) deep, the deepest hole ever made by humans !

There have been similar attempts by others, including the cancelled Project Mohole by the United States in 1957, and the present Integrated Ocean Drilling Program .