A Journal of the Lost Warrior

Trying to implement Widdows's paper on "Automatic Extraction of Idioms using Graph Analysis and Asymmetric Lexicosyntactic Patterns" on three books of Arthur Conan Doyle: Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Forthcoming: LSA on the graph.

Occasion: A Workshop
Duration: 5 days (Mar 7, 2006 to Mar 11, 2006)

A sysadmin script at our place diligently replies to all mails (including spams) to inform them that the email address has changed.

Most replies to spam mailers will bounce. I got one such bounced mail.

This is precious  (Read the last few lines carefully):

From: postmaster@vodacom.co.za
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:25:57 +0200
To: jjhegde@... .in
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)

[-- Attachment #1 --]
[-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.3K --]

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.
...
...

Final-Recipient: rfc822;dwmbssswl@vodacom.co.za
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1

[-- Attachment #3 --]
[-- Type: message/rfc822, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 1.9K --]

From: ITSS <itss@... .in>
Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:50:13 +0530 (IST)
To: dwmbssswl@vodacom.co.za
Subject: Re: look no more

The domain <ncst.ernet.in> has been changed to <cdacmumbai.in>. Your mail has been delivered but henceforth please send mail to the new email-id
+<jitu@cdacmumbai.in

www DOT ncst DOT ernet DOT in → www DOT cdacmumbai DOT in

My new email address
... AT ncst DOT ernet DOT in → ... AT cdacmumbai DOT in

A silly question, no doubt! Logos are important; but do we take the task (of designing logos) seriously?

Designing logos seems a very innocent looking task; a task seemingly so easy that any employee should be able to do. Few even consider the ramifications of designing a logo. Even fewer have a planning process and consider the types of logos and the trends; and there are companies that avoid the logo designer altogether.

No one considers that in the long run the logo of the product (or a brand) can give out the wrong sort of signals. People refuse to consider the the fact that even experienced people have a difficulty getting it right.

We arrogantly rubbish the fact that there are people who go through some rigorous education in this field for several years together.

Let's hope that we learn to rely on experts for some of our tasks.

One of the tools that our team finds useful while working on our projects (in NLP/IR) is this:

A tool for
converting Romanised hindi (ASCII) into Devanagari (Unicode).

The readable-hindi is called as Rupantar and is an NCST product. It is based on Prof R K Joshi's idea of a pure consonant approach.

I hope you find it as useful.

The good news for Bandra reclamation residents: Amitabh has been discharged from Lilavati Hospital, Bandra Reclamation.
Hopefully, he'll complete his recovery soon.

The other good news is that, hopefully, the media and some very 'concerned' fans will now stop herding outside Lilavati, or driving slo...[yawn]...owly past Lilavati.

Bandra Reclamation will once again be less crowded — even if, for a short time .

PS: Also posted to mumbai.

PPS: 'Right Here Right Now' from Bluffmaster in continuous play. Extremely addictive foot-tapping number. :)

After the presentation, cocavita decided to go to her aunty's house, and I decided to go to M G Road.
Someone told me its a good place to shop around for sweets.

Hung around M G Road for a while searching for a good sweet shop. No luck there. So, I went to Higginbothams for browsing. Purchased My Experiments with Truth.

Waited for an hour-and-a-half for cocavita to arrive. We went to vivekm's place. Talked about the various photographs he had taken at CMU, Pittsburgh, NY etc.; had a nice Rajasthani meal (daal bhaati et al.); and then headed for the NCST hostel.

Forgot the book at vivekm's place. Hopefully, he'll remember to courier it to me.

[update: Dec 20, 2005] vivekm flew to Mumbai to give me the book. :)

Nothing seems to ever go according to plan.
We were told that some "Marketing person" and the CEO of the funding organisation for our project have arrived for a project review in Bangalore. This would have been the first such marketing-oriented project review for me.

We (cocavita and I) were pleasantly surprised to see a semi-technical person being present for the presentation. We discovered this when we tip-toed into the previous jam-packed demo (It was something about Simputer and eforms).

Going by the attendance, it seemed as if no one, except this person and ourselves, was/were interested in our demo. Head count for our demo presentation - 3 (Him, cocavita, and me).

Kavitha gave the demo presentation and, together, we answered a few questions — and we were done. A breeze.

He seemed to give the impression that he was enthusiastic about the project. I hope that this is indeed the case [fingers and toes crossed].

Many thanks to all in the NL group.

Cheers.

I'll be in Bengaluru this week along with cocavita.

There is nothing special about this week:
only 4 assignments to be completed,
project synopsis to be finalised,
a project review,
a project release, and
a module handbook to be completed.

As I said, nothing special. :)