TrafficView®: Awesomely solving India’s traffic problem.

Or

Where I ramble on before getting to the point, and then get really tired so I cut it short. And also use excessive commas.

Google Maps have really upped their game in India. They've added traffic information in the Metros, and are planning to bring in street view soon too. With your Android phone, you can tell where your friends (victims) are, and what their ETA of arrival to a location is. Google Navigation has come to India on Android. Maps now have a textured background to indicate topography. You can geotag your photos and people can view them on a map. And most interestingly, Google maps now even has an overlay to show the location of Wikipedia entries on your map, allowing you to see the places of interest close to you.  Both the Traffic as the Wikipedia view can be turned on from the overlay panel on the top right.

Traffic and Wikipedia overlay on Google Maps

All in all Google Maps really shows the power that technology wields in this information generation.  And also, it’s not Apple Maps. Zing.

Hold on. Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security. Trusting GMaps has led to some awesome fiascos, like turning off a well lit and broad highway into a narrow pitch black road surrounded by fields, which goes by an innocuous name like St Andrews Path of Redemption on Google Maps, but is probably better known to the locals as Rape Lane. After turning onto such a road on the way back to Norwich from the Peak District thanks to Google, it took about five minutes for our fear to overcome our faith in technology, and we performed a hasty u-turn, leaving the axe murderers frothing in frustration down the road.

On the positive side, Google Maps have allowed us to experience wonders previously unknown to civilized man.  Driving in Wales, we decided to toss our paper map and caution to the winds, after which Google decided to show us the meaning of fear by balancing us on the edge of a cliff somewhere in Snowdonia. The view was very nice, though.  Or that time we turned off into a dirt track and had to drive for five miles followed by an angry farmer in a tractor before we found a field to turn in. On reflection, I can’t really blame Google for that; it may have been a product of a driver/navigator conflict (to clarify, I was neither).

But as bountiful as the bloopers were while driving around the UK, they cannot really compare to the magnificence of the mistakes we made blindly following our phones, while driving around the Indian subcontinent. On our way to Choki Dhani at Jaipur (more about that later) from Bharatpur recently, we put our trust in dear faithful Google. Highway, highway, highway… oh hold on; that turn looks super awesome and will get us to our destination faster than a unicorn can shit out a rainbow. ‘Dear Google’, says I, ‘you wouldn’t ever steer me wrong; let us take this turn and embark on this magical journey hand in hand.’

This was the last time I smiled for a month.

The road tapered off till we found our self in the center of a village market in a dust patch which followed the outline of my car exactly.  Google Maps had by now decided that we were in the centre of a lake, and indicated we swim in a north by north west direction. Times like these bring out the iron in a man’s soul, and I bravely struck out in the aproximate direction Gmaps indicated, followed by feral dogs nipping at my tires and cow’s scratching their arseholes on my side view mirrors.

The aforesaid iron turned out to be not in my soul but in my head, as the road took us deep into one of those Rajasthani villages where automobiles are probably outlawed by the Khap Panchayats, and old men with bright red turbans and skin the colour and consistency of tanned nutsack stared silently at us with eyes which screamed, ’We will burn you and use the ashes to fertilize our corn’.  The road grew narrower too, obviously just meant for bicycles and lynch mobs, and sparks flew off the side of my tortured vehicle as I accelerated through the enclosing walls, knowing that to stop would be to seal our death warrant.

At one point I think I drove through someone’s courtyard.

We emerged from the village like Meatloaf’s bat out of hell, leaving a few puffs of feathers to mark where the chickens had exploded as I hit them, and were soon driving through fields of sugarcane: the kind where the axe murderer hides the bodies in all those movies. 

Scenic Detours!

The road, which had long since abandoned any pretense of actually leading somewhere, was now just a mud track, and we soon skidded to a halt in front of a pit half full of glutinous clay. ‘WE CAN MAKE IT!’, screamed my intrepid navigator. ‘KEEP ON GOING!’, screamed Google.  ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIE HERE’, screamed my bladder!  And so, I reversed for ‘bout half a kilometer , past a gawping goatherd, and drove back to the highway, rejoining it a few kilometers after where I had originally turned off, thus ending both my adventure, and the excessive use of commas in this sentence.

I once used quintuple negation separated by commas in an English essay, causing my teacher to go into retirement.

So, besides these very minor inconveniences, Google Maps is great! It’s the wave of the future, and this brings me to the meat of this post, which hyperbole and punctuation have prevented me from reaching till now.

The problem: My daily commute to office involves driving from one city into another (Indirapuram to Sector 62 in Noida) across a national highway. It’s a 3 kilometer drive. It takes me an hour. Why? Because the average office going Delhi person is a crazed rabid wanker with shit for brains and the traffic sense of an autistic orangutan. The daily dose of traffic rage that Delhi brings will take me to an early grave. Though there are 4 routes to cross the highway, one never knows which route will be FUBAR by some asshole trying to go horizontally through a tunnel, or a pack of insane auto rickshaws driving in the wrong direction. The time and location of these traffic snarls cannot be predicted in advance and change hourly.

Route options for my commute

The solution: TrafficView ® - A web camera at each of the 4 route options steaming live video onto a site. Before I set out, I’ll just fire up the feed on my laptop or phone, and make an informed decision on which route will be less likely to make me kill myself.  The interface and pricing will be simple… an overlay on Google maps will show you which locations cameras are available at, and you can subscribe to a feed for a fee per camera per month.

TrafficView!

TrafficView® could also be clubbed with the route options of Google and their live traffic information, recommending cameras to subscribe to based on the destination you want. As more and more people subscribe to a particular camera, its icon grows larger on the Map overlay, indicating its heightened usefulness.

I’ve just blown your mind, haven’t I? Google, are you listening?

Iphone Pwned

Dude.. I did it! iPhone 2.1 running fine. Jailbroken and unlocked!

MDTL Tutorials - Fedora and XP

Well the Google Docs publishing is shite, so link here for

Viren Joky's

Quick and Dirty guide to dual booting Windows with Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

Have sex NOW. The world ends at 1pm.(or maybe not)

Well, the large Hardon.. er Hadron collider will be switched on around 12:30 pm Indian time. And of course, we don't believe in CERN's safety nonsense. Heres how it'll go..

In about 3 minutes it'll have produced Strangelets and Vaccum Bubbles and Magnetic Monopoles.

At 7 minutes , scientists will discover the God Particle (even more fantastic than the Jesus phone) and will almost instantly come up with the Grand Unified Theory which will be so magnificent, so stupendous, that scientists, at a flash will understand how to achieve faster than light travel, solve global warming, and even make Sarah Palin VP.

Just past 9 minutes, a stable black hole will be created which absorbs enough matter to be self sustaining.

Ten seconds past this the event horizon will overtake Earth.

In twenty minutes, the black hole will crash into the sun, extinguishing it. Jupiter has already been swallowed and Neptune will be spiralling into the hole.

One hour later, the solar system does not exist.


So, my advice is; grab your towel and hitch a quick ride from a passing Volgon ship. The end of the solar system should be quite a spectacular sight seen from a couple of light days away.

Update - apparently today was just a test run. We have till Oct 21.

The Jesus Phone crucified.

Okay, so for those of you who follow my blog, you will recall me posting abt the latest list of gadgets on my have to have list ie http://lifeofviren.blogspot.com/2008/03/gadget-crazy.html. Anyway, two of them have been delivered into my grubby, clutching lil' mitts, namely the MyBook and the Nikon D60. The Nokia N96 however has eluded me by being, most frustratingly, still unreleased.

So what do I go out and do? Well, buy the Jesus Phone obviously. Yes yes, I know the 3G iPhone is imminent, but the CarPhone Warehouse were practically giving them away at £169. Of course, you were supposed to get a 2 year contract with O2, but hey, I'm willing to forego my warranty and get it unlocked.

I've got to hand it to Apple; they really DO do things in style. The phone comes in a sexy little box within with is the phone, a tiny manual, a usb cable, headphones and a jigsawesque power plug, all wrapped in yards of plastic. I was in the last stages of packing (this was the day before I was to leave for India), and my luggage was already approaching critical mass, but I just had to take the box back home. So, out went all my underwear, and in nestled the box between a James Herriot and a fleshlight. Of course, I haven't got around to buying any undies yet, but I'm quite enjoying the freedom.

err.. Anyway, back to the iPhone. After charging it a bit, I installed iTunes on my PC and upgraded the phone's firmware to 1.1.4.

Rant #1- What's it with Apple and their proprietary software? Whatever happened to good ol' drag n' drop? This always pissed me off no end, which is why I bought my self an iRiver d40 all those years ago and not an iPod.

Unlocking the iPhone next was a snap. ZiPhone does a pretty good job, both unlocking and jailbreaking it in a snap; and its ready to use. After playing around with the interface, I was genuinely impressed. Till I tried to make a call.

Rant #2 - WTF, the iPhone does not pick up your contacts off the SIM. Which is just horrible!

So, I had to first sync all my contacts from my Razr onto Outlook, and then sync them back to the iphone. And I saw it. And I used it. And it was good. Especially browsing the net, for which the iPhone is really built. So it's all joy and dreams... as long as you have wifi. Switch off the net however...

Rant #3 - My iPhone does not recognise the ad hoc wifi conn I set up from my laptop. Though this may be more a defect in me than in the iphone.

Rant #4 - Why does the SMS keyboard not appear in widescreen mode? I mean they've done it for the internet entry. How hard is it to put it in for the sms mode?

Rant #5 - Apparently, the bluetooth on the iPhone pairs only with the Apple bluetooth Headset... and NOTHING ELSE. Fun, innit?

Rant #6 - A 2 megapixel camera? Really?

Sigh, and lets not talk about the lack of 3G shall we? And neither of the fact that it will almost surely be outdated in a few weeks when the 3G iPhone arrives.

But for all this, it is a slick piece of gadgetry; an iconic crowd puller. And it's mine. And that's all that counts really. So now all I haveta do is sit back, whip it out (the phone, not anything else you pervert!) and wait for the ladies to come flocking. As I'm sure they will. Won't they?

3004 and Counting

Wow. This has been the fastest 1000 hits; just took little over two months. The reason for that may be that I posted quite regularily in Jan, and consequently hit refresh on my blog a significant number of times. But anyways, for those of you who visited my blog: thanks a lot and do come again.

Well it's here - my 750 gig MyBook. People have read my last post and apparently I've come off greedy and avaricious. I don't know why; this latest purchase just brings the amount of storage space I travel with up to a measly 1.4 Tb. What I tell them, is that storage isn't everything - my old PC at home has a 2 Gb hdd. 2 Gb; phew, the RAM on my current laptop is double that size!

Well, all I can think of nowdays is my upcoming dSLR purchase. I've almost settled on the D60, and good news - Nikon has released a very affordable 55 - 200mm VR lens. And this makes me happy. Well, maybe I AM greedy.

Gadget Crazy!!

Have you ever experienced this? You're walking along the month, saving your money, investing prudently in stocks and IPOs, when suddenly you decide you need this gadget. The purchase is usually small, but suddenly it opens the floodgates and you find yourself buying more and more gadgets, till suddenly you find yourself friendless and left sitting in the bathtub in the dark and crooning to your gadgets while rocking softly.

It all started when my Seagate external 500 GB HDD began behaving weirdly. Rather than find the problem I decided this was the ideal time to buy that Western Digital MyBook I'd been yearning for. After some deliberation I settled on the 750 GB Home Edition which I deemed worthy to store my extensive and important data collection. The Home edition is similar to the basic Essential edition with the addition of a capacity gauge and a FireWire 400/ eSATA connection, which would help me when I connect it to my PC.

Okay so that was a mildly justifiable purchase. Not so the phone I'm now obsessed with buying. Am leaning v v heavily towards the N95 8GB. Now I know it looks like crap compared with it's older, sexier sibling, but the larger screen and improved battery life have sold me. But then the iPhone tries to steal me with its seductiveness. Or so my n00b friends would have me believe. But I have yet to consider other smart phones on the market. Or else hold out for that totally droolworthy N96. Yum. Of course it will probably cost me an arm and a leg and BOTH kidneys.

So the N95 8gig is the way to go. http://multimedia-cell-phone-review.toptenreviews.com/ bears me out. And if any of you think the iPhone is better plz to see the comparision here. And the comparision between the two models of the N95 is here.

But all this is just dross in front of my next planned purchase, as I just heard the Nikon D60 has finally come out which nearly caused me a technologically induced orgasm. And all of a sudden, the dSLR which I had always been planning to buy popped up bright and clear in my mind.

Now I am a total camera n00b, not knowing my f stops from my ISO setting. The only thing I DO know is that you haveta crouch down and take pics, so you LOOK professional, no matter that you dont know what you're doing ^_^. Anyways, this photographer friend of mine swears by Nikon, and shes pretty hot-shot, and this seems to bear her out. And of course the D60 adds a lot of stuff to its arsenal, not the least of which is the dust reduction system, white balance bracketing, and best of all it ships with a vibration reduction lens as standard, which will help a lot with those night shots. See what you get with the extra 50 quid over the D40x here.

Well, if you guys have some suggestions regarding the phone, or especially regarding the camera, please do comment. Is the D80 worth the exta money. Anything I haven't considered?