In a free fall

Ever been in a free fall ? Those who have know what i am talking about. you know that the fall is coming even as you feel the thrill of falling freely the dread of reaching ground is busy in your head. I count days as time slowly withers past. Aimless and wandering I struggle through dreamy landscape full of nightmares of lonliness. I dont knowwhen I will get out of here but I will. But what I know is that when I come out I am going to be a lot stronger than I was going in. With her standing beside me we will get through this. Together and Stronger. Love you

Story of an Autumn

Yeah, That's right. The time when the environment is cooling off and shedding the rush of the summer. The world is at peace with itself again and we humans absorb the quality. I like the cool breeze that is neither too hot nor too cold. The falling leaves and the long evenings. I just like to stare at the world which is slowly but steadily healing itself.

The autumn holds a special meaning for me although i am the winters child. I think that the solitary nature of my childhood has made this the way it is. I always loved to take long lonely walks and stare at nothing and wonder about everything in the lit up solitary evenings. The feeling is the most wondrous one that I have ever known. I remember this picture from my childhood where there was a long lonely road and there were big trees along the edges. The leaves were all of a golden color and were covering the walk. There was a slight shimmering mist hanging around the picture. The leaves were gently drifting down in the slight breeze and seemed so soft and fragile that you would think that they would go twinkle and break in to a thousand pieces when they hit the earth. There was a halo hanging around the picture that gave the chilly complexion to the whole scene and just by looking at the shimmering mist you could feel the slight chill that the lonely guy walking away from you in the picture was feeling. There was no mention of sadness or remorse in the picture. No tears, no wails no lost soul or compassionate face staring up at you, instead there was this solitary man walking down an unknown and forgotten path to an invisible destination. The sadness or rather the remorse in the mans life was so solid and physically imposing in the picture that you would be forgiven for thinking that the image some sort of bad omen.

Well i have been feeling like the man in the image for sometime now. I think that the reason will become so obvious soon enough. The winds this time have been feeling colder and the air is far more chilly. The harshness of the world is really creeping upon me as I am reminded of the "Houses of Healing" from the Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King.

"The trees are now changing from green to gold"
"And the sun is now fading"
"I wish I could hold you closer"

I just wish the same thing.

Days in the Red Light District

Lately I have been a bit busier that usual and I think that you could have guessed it by now. The days are a bit hectic right now. I mean I almost always live life in the fast lane. But this is way beyond even this. Life in the ultra fast lane you can call it.

So what's new ? Well i have been giving some serious thought to the prospect of writing a novel!!! yep you read it right. A novel. Well the truth is that I have been always inclined to write. But I have been very lazy and not really interested in the prospects of writing with pen. But now as I almost live on the machine may be I could put something up as I blog. So right now I am searching for something to write on. Nothing strong have come so far my way. May be it is that I dont really get out any more. No more people watching, no more hours of lazy contemplation. And thus the lack of sources. But I will find something and start doing it. If there is anything that I learnt from the last few months, it is that I should do what I can when I can and when I should. So I am gonna write. The water may be murky but dosent mean that it once was clear and could be maded to be clear again. Thus off we go. Wish me a happy literary journey.

Nsotalgic Dreams

Lately there has been a strange feeling lurking inside me. Usually I am not the type of person who will feel giddy about the past and want a return to the glory days. I am a firm believer of the "let by gones be bygones" phrase. But lately i have been getting this deja vu feeling so strongly in my mind. It is neither apparent nor obvious. But it has been lurking beneath the already murky waters of my mind for quite some time now. And recently and idea has been taking form inside my head. That something from the past, some feeling relationship, some colleague or some connecction is gonna come back and show me the past in a glorified state. And to add to all of this, it is the autumn now. That time of the year that winds start to get cooler. The times when the trees turn from green to gold and times when the twilight streams through the falling leaves and casts the long shadows of the past. I dont know where this is leading us nor do I knnow what will be there at the end of the road. But I smell adventure and feel the smell of the ripe fruit in the air. I know that it is coming though unseen yet. The world is young still, so lets just wait and see how things turn out. Viva La Vida.

What we lost in the Fire

Molder said we could stay clam. Well we didnt loose anything important after all. It was just stuff. Yeah it was just stuff. Only it was not just stuff. We are fire-flies. On that island. We wreck our own plane and get ourselves stranded here. We wield the sticks and shout out now. The fireflies. The sinking hearts. Across the times we sail back to the lost generation. The breakers of the beam rise once again as the beast stands up to fight. What we lost in the fire may be nothing but it may eventually cost us everything. Sounds crytpic ? Well it was supposed to.

Finishing a Project

Guys we have been at work. Literally. The last 5 to 6 days have been very busy for me. It's been long and hard march but finally we have seen water and grass. I mean I had not touched VS2008 before this and have not seen any WPF app in action, only momentarily glanced at Expression (Blend for some of you) and didnt know a darn thing about battery testers. But the worst part of it was the architecture of the existing application. If I have ever seen an over-architected application worse than this, it is Word 2007. I mean the event handling was so complex that one perticular event cascaded in to 4 different events and went through 6 classes and 11 different methods. And yes I really did trace the whole execution as it was an event that i had to trigger and wanted to do some modifications on it. Thus I did try and trace it through. It was a NIGHTMARE. sorry for shouting but I had to. Anyways the good thing is that I have decided to put out the things that i see as the good practises in writing applications for testers. I guess this is going to be a kind of a "Applications for Driver Developers" kinda thing. See ya.

Two little gems

Hi guys, So been quiet for some time now and I have returned with some goodies for you. First of all I have been munching away at two problems now and have come up some interesting stuff

First of all a video saga. I have been wanting to extract frames out of an avi file and save any frame that I was interested in. For this we need to be able to see the movie entirely and select a a frame to save as a jpg or bmp. I created a simple solution for this I created a window with a trackbar in it and then set the trackbar maximum value to the no of frames encountered. And then the user is able to select the frame he want using the slider. When he selects a frame he has the option of selecting between saving it and exiting the programme. If you press space at anypoint then the image is saved with the frame number as the image name. Or if you press enter the program exits.

I will post the code in here. Please note that there is some borrowed code in here for calculating the no frames in here. I have since forgotten where the code was, but all the credit to the original writer for that.

#include "cv.h"
#include "cxcore.h"
#include "highgui.h"
#include
#include

int frameNumber;
IplImage *capFrame;
CvCapture *myCap;
int nFrames;

void CV_CDECL mainTrackCallBack(int pos){

if((pos > 0) && (pos <>
cvSetCaptureProperty(myCap, CV_CAP_PROP_POS_FRAMES, pos);
capFrame = cvQueryFrame(myCap);
cvShowImage("CaptureFrames", capFrame);
frameNumber = pos;
}

}

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
using namespace std;

char tempSize[4];
std::ifstream videoFile(L"C:\\car.avi", ios::in|ios::binary);
videoFile.seekg( 0x30 , ios::beg );
videoFile.read( tempSize , 4 );
nFrames = (unsigned char ) tempSize[0] + 0x100*(unsigned char ) tempSize[1] + 0x10000*(unsigned char ) tempSize[2] + 0x1000000*(unsigned char ) tempSize[3];
videoFile.close();

myCap = cvCaptureFromAVI("C:\\car.avi");
cvNamedWindow("CaptureFrames");
cvCreateTrackbar("FrameNumber", "CaptureFrames", &frameNumber, nFrames, mainTrackCallBack);
capFrame = cvQueryFrame(myCap);
cvShowImage("CaptureFrames", capFrame);
char fileName[100];
int keyPress;
frameNumber = 0;
while(1){
keyPress = cvWaitKey(500);
if(keyPress == 32){
_itoa_s(frameNumber, fileName, 200, 10);
int tempLen = strlen(fileName);
strcpy( fileName + tempLen, "Image.jpg");
cvSaveImage(fileName, capFrame);
}else if(keyPress == 13){
break;
}
}
return 0;
}