Aadit's Thought Forum

My fears were very well realized last night when my train from Arnhem to Duisburg reached the destination late and the connecting train has already left. However the possbile connection problems had been already announced on the train itself and some hidden voice from train speakers had advised to contact the Information desk at Duisburg in case of any problems. It turns out that the advice given was excellent.  I was very readily given a room to stay in a nearby hotel and a ticket for the morning. It turns out my connecting train was the last one out of the station.

I really did not have to spend a very cold night on the station bench after well. I got my first taste of the 'well-organized' method of the Germans. Even though it was a train station hotel, the room was pretty good and there was a PC at the reception with free Internet which I used eagerly to update my facebok status. My train for Bremen was to leave at 7:47. The breakfast was supposed to start at 6:30 well in time for me to have a warm hearty meal before I caught my train. The reason I used supposition in the last sentence is that I woke up at 7:30 and had to miss my breakfast but thankfully not my train. I could not really blame myself for sleeping longer in that warm bed as the wind blew outside and it snowed all night. But my stomach is not at all happy about the eventuality of having to eat dry buscuits that I had brought and drink cold water from a PET bottle.

The train is now well on it's way to Bremen. I can see steeple roofed church towers and the sloped roofs of houses grouped around the church, all covered in snow. The train tracks and the trains which seem to have stayed overnight at the stations we are passing are all layered in white. The snow is not that thick but the scenery moving outside the large windows of this DuetchBahn ICE train could just as well be from any Christmas Card. If there was sled running alongside the train being pulled by Reindeers with a laughing Santa holding the reins, the setting would be perfect for Christmas in November.

The Dutch and the German people I have talked to say that snow at this time of the year is very unusual. In fact it had not been snowing at all for the past 3 or 4 years at this latitude. As I exeprience this unusual weather-pattern in Europe first-hand, I can't help but reflect on the title of the Workshop that I came to attend, 'Sensing a Changing World'. Is it Global Warming that is changing our world or is it something else? Is our world heading towards a dark future of doom and gloom? Is there something I can do about it? I don't know the answers to these questions exaclty and I don't know what the future holds, but I really wanna see and appreciate as much as possible of this world that I live in. 

Today was the last day of the workshop titled 'Sensing a Changing World' which I came to attend at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The Workshop had started on 19th Nov and my presentation was on the first day itself. I was presenting on Fieldservers and I hope I have generated some interest on these devices in this part of the world. There was a technical excursion today to Northern Netherlands where the Dutch are deploying a large scale and unique antenna array called LOFAR for radio astronomy. Their idea is to make it low-cost and easily deployable using small sized phased array antennas instead of the tradional large parabolic ones which were the norm. With the end of the workshop, I have left behind at Wageningen a small beautiful city with cobble-stoned streets and small brick houses with sloped tiled roofs. They remind of the small alleys in Bhaktapur and Patan back home. If there was a large temple at the town center instead of the church with a bell-tower, Wageningen would quite be similar to an old town in Kathmandu Valley.

I am now leaving the Netherlands behind on a train to Duisburg in Germany. The train has run 40 minutes late due to the bad weather and unexpected snow today. I hope I do not miss the connecting train. My tickets are for the last trains out of that city and I don't quite relish the prospect of having to spend a cold night in the train station.

I intend to see some cities in Germany before I move into Brugge in Belgium. I have to be back in the Netherlands on or before 29th Nov, when I have my return flight back. I have not seen Amsterdam yet, so I might as well come back to the Netherlands a day earlier and enjoy the (in)famous sights and sounds of the Dutch capital.

It has been quite a while since I have updated my blog. There are many things that I have missed out writing on. I would like to start from the most significant ones that I have not written about and the 9th APNG Camp  in Xi'an certainly qualifies as one of them. I have been attending the APNG Camps for several years now and the event brings together people working on different aspects of the Internet from through out the Asia Pacific. This time too, as before I had received a fellowship to attend the camp which sponsored my airfare and the stay there at Xi'an. Besides being a great opportunity for me to learn different stuff and meet lots of people, the venue itself was of great significance for me.
Xi'an, a place I have heard a lot about, read about in magazines and Wikipedia, and watched a lot of documentaries on, was a place I had always wanted to go to. The 9th Camp gave me an excellent opportunity to fulfill one of my dreams. The thing that I wanted to see the most in Xi'an, and with which the place has become synonymous, was the Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor, the person who unified China. The place holds immense historical and cultural importance, and the story behind the army sounds almost like a fairytale. The Qin emperor Qin Shi Huang after having unified China, wanted to take his glorious army into the afterlife, perhaps because he wanted to win more wars there. So he built a life-sized terracotta army, complete with archers, lancers and the lot, including horses, chariots, officers, generals and even a command center. The remarkable thing is that each statue's face is different from the other leading to the belief they were real life sized replicas of his army. He placed this terracotta army in front of his own tomb, which still under a hill and yet to be excavated. The tomb is believed to contain a replica of the world, with liquid mercury representing the seas and rivers. There is supposed to be immense wealth inside. Chinese scientists are using some microwave remote sensing techniques to figure out exactly what is inside. I think I could go on writing about this, but then it would not quite become a blog.
There were several other interesting places, including the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, which was built by the monk Hsüan-tsang after his return from India. I remember reading somewhere in our school history books that this monk had also visited Nepal and has written about life in Kathmandu in those times. Anyways the pagoda that he built, looked more like a tower to me. Climbing to the top of this structure, one step at a time and completely out of breath when i reached there, I realized that it was not much different from our own Dharahara, just much older and a lot fatter.
Besides the historical highlights, Xi'an was also famed for one of the culinary delights of China, delicious dumplings. Being Nepali, and a lover of momos, it was a great gastronomical pleasure for me to taste around 20 different types of dumplings, filled with chicken, duck, pork, different kids of vegetables and nuts and things whose names I don't remember but the taste I still do.
From Xi'an, I went back to Nepal. One the way, I had to change flight at Chengdu and the next flight that I took stopped over at Lhasa, both places I regret not stopping over for a couple  of days. Chengdu, I realized later, is the heart of Sichuan Province, famous for its spicy food which I found much similar in taste to Newari food, and for its Panda Research Centers. I really should have stopped over and taken some pictures with a Panda and stopped over at Lhasa to visit the Potala. Well .... maybe next time. I just hope life is not too short, of both time and money.

Since my latest entry, I have been to Nepal twice, to the mountains, to setup a wireless network for collecting data from a glacier. That was pretty interesting.
I went to China once for a conference and to Indonesia to setup more sensors.
Then I have been to Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen in Thailand recently.
I guess this is just an excerpts of longer entries to come.
I would like to write about those trips, but I don't know when I am gonna do it.
Maybe next year.

For quite some time I've been watching movies with downloaded subtitles, which are more readily available on the Internet than I had cared to know about. I had the need for subtitles when I got my hands on some good Latin American movies. Being not-so-proficient in Spanish, I set about looking for subtitles which were easy enough to find from the plethora of dedicated websites available.
What I came across next was even more interesting.... a program called Vobsub. It is capable of opening subtitle files in real time as the movie is being played. All you have to do is name the subtitle file (usually .srt) with the same filename as your movie (usually .avi for me) and keep both in the same directory. When you play the movie in your own usual way (for me it's on WinAmp), the susbtitles appear on the movie in real time.
Now that's something really amazing for me.... the movie and the subtitle files are separate. The subtitle files are in fact simple text files with timings written before every line to be displayed. For the subtitles to be played in real time, .... the way i understand it .... each frame of the movie would have to be separated, the text encoded onto the frame, then the all frames put back into the original video format. Seems like a hell lot of work to me .... I wonder how Vobsub manages to do it in real time. Maybe there is a simpler way to it.
Whatever the technology behind the scene, I thoroughly enjoy my movies more. Now I am downloading subtitles not only for foreign language movies but also for English movies ... it's specially useful when those Irish accents are so heavy you have keep stopping and thinking back what was just said even as the movie has moved ahead. Great work there ... Vobsub. One of the most useful freewares I have come across.