ctrl.altered.mind

Hi there. My name’s Sameer and this is my personal website, which I mostly use as a blog. This is also a place I use to upload my photographs and other random stuff. I work as a firmware engineer for Seagate Technology. Professional interests include but are not restricted to electronics and embedded systems design. If your interests are similar, you might be interested in my projects and resume. To find more that I have to talk about, and for contact information, click here.

Val Landi, author of the book A Woman from Cairo, has a novel idea for enhancing reader networks by means of a P2P/word-of-mouth approach. He is offering a free autographed copy of his latest novel to everyone who writes about the book on their website/blog. So, here’s my entry about the book. I’m sure this idea has worked well, for Landi has had more than 5,000 unique click throughs/visitors to the A Woman from Cairo website over the weekend from more than 20 countries.

Val Landi’s Weblog: Free Copy of A Woman from Cairo

Buy the book from Amazon.com

While catching up on my growing pile of unwatched Rocketboom video blog posts in iTunes, I was shocked and surprised to see the CD jacket insert on the new Coldplay album that has rather strict usage guidelines: “This CD is a copy protected CD”. There’s a long list of warnings stating that the CD cannot be burnt onto a CD-R or hard drive. Essentially, the disc wont play on some car stereos that have CDR/RW playing capabilities, or those with satellite ‘guidance’ systems. Even more surprising was the fact, clarified by Amanda in the Jan 10 vblog post, that this insert only applied to the discs sold in India! Does it apply only to CDs purchased in India, or can I take my Coldplay collection back home as mp3s? How are Indian music-listening styles different, Virgin Records?

CD-insert picture

The holidays are here, and its the end of yet another semester - a very satisfying one in terms of the work I got done and the way I went about doing it. Well, so the holidays are here. Did I mention that already? As if you didn’t know. If you’ve visited my home page lately, you must have noticed the little snowman. It was nice to get back to dabbling with Flash once again, a once-favorite pastime that I had neglected for quite some time. A nice way of keeping myself in the game would be to design small logos, Google style, for my home page - with themes to reflect events. If you want to try the snow effect yourself, there are good tutorials online, such as this one by kirupa, which let you design snow effects which look a lot better than mine.

My new GoDaddy.com server gives me php support and a mysql database, so why not make use of it! This new blog is structured by Wordpress, a free download from Wordpress.org; WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability, exactly as the website says!

I would have been able to see this in person.