It's raining

I was hearing this music (just the music, not the video :P) and suddenly I heard a very familiar sound. Yes, it's the sound of rain. Right now the temperature is 0 degree celcius. I know people of north Europe don't like rain and gloomy weather but since I am from Bangladesh, I have a very adorable feeling for rain. It started raining around 15 minutes ago and I am enjoying it :)


Programming Solution

Got a Nokia N900 temprarily

I was never been a user of smart phone before but I wanted to. The fact is I still cannot afford a smart phone of my own but right now I have a Nokia N900 on my table. No, it's not a dummy, it's original and I can use it for two months.


Few weeks back I saw a poster in my university corridor saying about a pilot project of Nokia in TUT. The project is called TWIN pilot.


TWIN is an adhoc social application developed in a co-operation project by TUT/Department of Computer Systems and Nokia Research Center. TWIN devices operate in adhoc WLAN, and create a local community through peer-to-peer networking when other users and devices are within range. TWIN has been implemented on Nokia's new N900 mobile devices.


TWIN is used for sharing experiences, thoughts, flyers - anything you want - and for tracking old and meeting new friends. With TWIN you can chat, send messages, and search other users, and share photos, videos, songs, stories.


TWIN project carries out, first in the world, a large scale user pilot for local social networking applications. The pilot collects experiences, tests the technologies, and develops new application and usage scenarios for social networking.


They were looking for 250 users to participate in the project. To these 250 persons they would give Nokia N900 to each for tow months and they will use the TWIN. For this time period they can use this phone as their personal device. I applied for it but as always my luck did not favor me. I was not selected. Three Bangladeshi guys were selected. Shaikat vi is one of them. Yesterday he told me that he is quite busy, and cannot participate it well. So he wanted to give the device to me to use for this two months. I was so happy to hear that. That is how I got the chance to use the world's one of the best mobile phones :D As far I know this is the first mobile device from Nokia that is totally developed in Maemo platform. Let's have a taste of N900 :)


Programming Solution

Eating with chopsticks

Almost two decades ago, I watched a Japanese tv series, Oshin, dubbed in English. My mom was a fan of this series. I was a young child then. This tv series is not the subject of my post. I watched one thing in that tv show for the first time in my life. The thing I watched is "eating with chopsticks" which seemed so impossible to me, and this is the thing I am going to write about in this post.


I always thought it is quite impossible to eat with chopsticks. I was amazed to see people eating with it in movies. I even saw them eating rice with it which I can't imagine. I watched Liz eating with chopsticks in front of me while I was in London last year. I was looking at her, how easily she was eating with it. I asked her how to do it. She told me I just have to start eating with it. She didn't show me the technique. May be that's how girls are - don't wanna go in detail. I became more interested about it after seeing it in person but I could not start until last week.


Last week I went to Farzan vi's home and I found chopsticks in his kitchen. He has a Chinese house mate and those belong to that guy. I curiously took two of those and said "how come people can eat with this?". Farzan vi smiled and said I just need to know the holding technique and then start trying. He said he learned from his house mate and now he can eat with those. Then he showed the holding technique and suddenly it seemed possible to me. Later I just requested that Chinese guy if I can take two of his chopsticks so that I can learn. He happily gave me :) The most difficult part comes after that - trying.


I started on that very night during dinner. My menu was rice and salmon fish. It seemed so difficult at first. I was hungry but I could grab only a small amount of food with it. Sometimes the fish dropped from it. My hand was aching, I was loosing my patience but still continued. It took me almost 30 minutes to finish half the amount I usually eat in dinner. The next day I tried again and again it was difficult. The first 3-4 days were really difficult. Now, it's been more than a week that I am eating with chopsticks and I don't have much difficulties :) Now I can say that I can eat with chopsticks; well, not an expert but I can.


Those who are interested to learn it, I can tell them things from my experience:

• Holding technique is the key. So hold it properly
  
• Move only the top stick. The lower stick will be fixed
  
• Start eating with it :)
  

I am giving a video link here that demonstrates how to hold chopsticks.





Programming Solution

Course completed

Day before yesterday I got mail from one of my teachers that I am going to get 8 credits from his course. That confirmed the completion of my course work for masters.


I needed to achieve 90 credits to complete my masters degree. There are 4 modules in this 90 credits. I had completed all three clusters a bit earlier but the I lacked exactly 8 credits in my advanced module. I was doing this course Software Engineering Project since the starting of this academic year. The credits are variable in this course. You can achieve 6-10 credits based on Ur working hour. In our school 1 credit hour equivalent to 26.7 working hours. In this course project my reported hours were 196. So I was not sure whether I am going to achieve 7 or 8 credits. So I sent mail to the teacher asking about this and he just replied day before yesterday that I am going to get 8 credits. So the advanced is also completed now.


The only thing left right now is my thesis. Well, I am attending three more courses (Finnish for Beginners II, Artificial Intelligence & Analysis of Algorithm) right now but those are just for my own interest and for fun. I am writing the thesis also. Let's see when I can finish it :)

Programming Solution