Raasukutty's

Tag: Books

  • Ponniyin Selvan on Kindle

    My current employers, Sagitec Solutions LLC, presented a Kindle Touch as the  Christmas and New Year 2012 gift. I have been long wanting to buy one as I gifted my Kindle Keyboard to my dad when I went back home for my marriage.

    I have been downloading books from Google Books, mostly classics that are free and have been reading them till now. My wife wanted to read tamil books on her iPad and I have been downloading HTML files from projectmadurai website and converting them to ePUB format that is compatible with iPad. Here I have to mention the good work of people at projectmadurai. They have a good collection of tamil literary works which is made available to everyone in unicode tamil and TSCII tamil formats.

    After I received the Kindle Touch, I wanted to read the tamil books on the Kindle. So I was looking all over to get the Font Hack installed on the Kindle Touch to have it display Tamil Fonts. But the new kindle supports Unicode. So I didn’t need to jailbreak or install any hacks on the Kindle. What I needed is to convert the files to MOBI format that is parsed by Kindle.

    The first book that I converted was ‘Ponniyin Selvan’, the great tamil classic by Kalki. To convert the book, all you need is the software ‘calibre’ which is a free software and the UNICODE html version of the book found in projectmadurai website. I am not publishing the books that I converted because, even though the books are released under GPL license, I have no written consent from the authors that allows me to publish the books.

    I was originally not interested in reading the book as everytime I took the book, I got put off by the lengthy introduction to the hero, Vanthiyathevan. But this time, I thought I should not give up. After moving through the first chapter, I feel that this book is not the kind that I thought. It is fast paced and contains a lot of historical facts over which the story is spun. I am impressed.

  • Books to Read

    I had read a lot of books since childhood. In this post, I would recommend some of the nice titles that I had found interesting.

    Disclaimer: I had read most of the books when I was in the class 6th to 10th. So it may not be interesting to all audiences.

    Following are the list of book, in no order of importance

    • Sherlock Holmes, Complete 4 novels and 52 short stories
      My most adored character in all the books I have ever read. His intelligence, sense, analytical skill all impress me.
    • The Black Tulip – Alexander Dumas
      One of the good and short books I have read long back. I don’t remember much about the book. But it was an interesting read.
    • The Scarlet Pimpernal
      A nice book to read. A superb storyline.
    • Enid Blyton’s – Mystery Series
      Stories for children. The Five Found Outers. This is one of my favourite series of children novels.
    • Five Point Someone
      A nice and wonderful book to read and have a nice time. It might take you to your college days.
    • One night @ a call center
      Again from the author of Five point someone. This book made me think.
    • Why Men can’t listen and women can’t read maps
      A good book.
    • Code Name God – Mani Bhaumik
      A definite book that will change your outlook on life.
    • The Da Vinci Code
      Superb, racy, fast and interesting. You can’t put the book down once you have started reading.
    • Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
      Another interesting title. Wonderful, fast paced. Takes one through a complete journey of Rome. Must read.
    • Deception Point – Dan Brown
      Not so good as the previous two but okay.
    • Tao of Physics – Frijtof Copra
      Still reading.
    • Phantom
      A complete series of Phantom adventures from Rani comics

      • Happy reading!

  • Sherlock Holmes

    Among all the detective stories read worldwide, there is one character that remains on top. Sherlock Holmes. A tall, lean man, with a smoking pipe and used to cocaine and playing solo on violin from Baker Street in London that is how Sherlock Holmes is described by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle’s tells the adventures of Holmes in the voice of his roommate Dr. Watson.

    Sherlock Holmes

    I started reading from the novel ‘The Study in the Scarlet’, where Watson, Holmes are all introduced to the readers. I liked ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ the most among all other stories. The style in which Doyle narrates the stories make the reader believe that there was a man Holmes who lived and solved the mysteries.

    The approach is analytical and logical. Holmes was such a character that when Doyle decides to put an end to the character, he was forced by his readers to bring the character back to life. The address No.7, Baker Street in London where Holmes was told to reside has become a landmark.

    Holmes still lives in the minds of his readers.

  • My tryst with Digit!

    This post is dedicated to the magazine Digit, without which I would surely not developed interests in computers.

    Way back in the year 2000, when the magazine was called CHIP, I got to have a look at the magazine in my friend Naseen’s house. He wanted me to read the book. That is where it all started. Love at first sight!

    Chip_Magazine

    Then I didn’t understand ROM, RAM, sound card, PCI slots, ISA and all these technical jargons. It was CHIP that enlightened me on all these. It increased my interest in computers. It was due to this interests that I started to learn computer hardware and troubleshooting. The articles in the magazine was so nice and easy to understand by a newbie. Also they gave away 2 CD’s (remember then DVD media was not available for computer users and DVD-Writers were a royalty. Even CD Writers burnt at a mere 8x max. The CD’s were titled ‘Mindware’ and ‘Playware’. One dedicated to software and other to entertainment.

    I got a second hand P-II (266Mhz) Slot based processor system, running on 256 MB of SDRAM, 8 GB of HDD space, a creative sound blaster card (ISA) and no graphics card in 2001. Then I used to try out all softwares and games (that didn’t require a graphics card) provided in the CD’s in my machine. I was not a subscriber to then. I used to get the magazine out of newspaper stand and my mom used to provide the money. It was Rs.100/- for an issue and special isssues would be sold at Rs.125/-. Now the cost of an issue is Rs.125/-. But a hundred for a month in itself is huge money to spend for a 11th grade guy. My mom gave me the liberty to afford to CHIP and sometimes to DeveloperIQ, PCQuest.

    Digit First issue

    The best part of CHIP was that it was interesting to read. They had reviews on the latest product on market. In the reviews they also explained how things work. Say a review on Sound card will have a box saying how they worked. These things surely boosted my understanding of the various hardware devices. With internet and bandwidth a nightmare and an hour’s browsing at a net cafe costing Rs.50/-, it was easier to read about all these updates in CHIP. Marco D Souza, Karan etc. are some names I still remember from the CHIP Team.

    In June 2001, after their third anniversary, CHIP was renamed as Digit. The reason they provided was to break free out of the collaboration with Chip and to cater to a varied technology readers. From then on, the journey of Digit has been smooth. I still enjoy reading the magazine. I subscribed to Digit in 2007, when I joined Cognizant, since I didn’t want to miss out an issue amidst all the work I do.

    And the best of all digit i like

    The changes that I notice between CHIP and Digit are

    • The pages have reduced. From 200 to 150.
    • A lot of content on how things work have stopped

    They still have Agent 001, Diary, DroolMaal and stuff. The Fast Track series is excellent. A good book to start out your journey into the world of computers…. Digit! Atleast it was for me.