বাংগালোৰত ৰঙালী বিহু

যোৱাকালি বাংগালোৰত ৰঙালী বিহু উদৃযাপন কৰা হৈছিল ৷ আমি অনুষ্ঠানটিলৈ গৈছিলো ৷ আমাৰ খুবেই ভাল লাগিল ৷ পুৰণি বন্ধু কেইবাজনকো লগ পালো ৷ নতুন কিছুমান চিনাকি হলো ৷ খোৱা-বোৱা বঢ়িয়া আছিল ৷ মুঠতে ভাল লাগিল ৷

অসমীয়াত ব্লগ

অসমীয়াত ব্লগ! প্রথম চেষ্টা (Testing if I can blog in Assamese)

Where to post?

I go back 10 years in time using a time machine. I meet someone on the street and ask him: I wanted to post something. But I don't know where to post it? He replies, "There is a post office drop box just across the street. But if you want to send it by Speed Post or Registered Post, then go straight on the main road and in about half kilometer you'll get the Post Office." Cool. I said thanks to him.

Now I come back to the present time. I ask my friend the same question where to post. He said if it's brief, I can post it in Twitter; if it's mid-size, then I can post it to my Wall at Facebook; else I can post it in my blog!

In ten years' time, the meaning of post is changing. And there're just too many places to post: Twitter, Facebook, Orkut, Blogger etc etc. This morning I was wondering if there is any application by which I can say that blogger is my primary place to post and then create one pipe from it to every other secondary places like Facebook, Twitter etc. Then I came across Twitterfeed. I've just enabled it and connected it to Twitter and Facebook. If it works, then I don't have to post in multiples places.

The purpose of this post is to find out if the pipe created by Twitterfeed from my blog is working or not.

Down with supersitions! I'll celebrate my bihu

Last two weeks whenever I spoke to my relatives in Assam, they told me essentially not to celebrate rongali bihu this time. Well, they didn't tell me exactly that; but they told me not to buy new cloths for myself, not to give new cloths to anyone, not to prepare any food etc for bihu. I was a bit shocked and wanted to know the reason behind it. They told me that this is a molla month. I asked them what is that? Is it only in Assam or is it the case in whole of India or whole of this world. Most of them couldn't exactly define what they meant by molla month; but I collected two views from them:

1. There are two amavasya (i.e., new moon) in this month
2. There are five Saturdays.

Ok, let us believe that both the statements are true.  But why is the fear psychosis then? Are we living in the stone ages or in twenty first century? How two new moons happening in the same month will affect me? It's a natural celestial activity.

I heard that some news channels in Assam are responsible for creating this hysteria over molla month. 

I'm definitely going to buy some new cloths for me as mark of protest against this superstition. Are you also joining me?

From EDA to drug-discovery!

Some EDA veterans are using the skills they developed in EDA to simulate the behavior of therapeutics. Sounds cool; isn't it? The company is CellWorks Group. They are in stealth mode and their website doesn't reveal anything about what they are doing now.

CellWorks Group is founded by two of my ex-colleagues from Cadence - Pradeep Fernandes and Taher Abbasi. Pradeep was the Business Unit head of RTL Compiler (RC) synthesis and Taher was the Director for Field Operations for RC. Then CWG's India Managing Director is Anand Anandkumar who was Magma India's MD before joining CWG. Pradeep, Taher, Anand etc are all EDA veterans.

Anand's linked-in profile mentions CWG as an extremely exciting and hot startup  which is in the area of Pharma therapeutics, using a novel principle called Virtual Proteomics. This company has the opportunity to revolutionize how drugs (particularly combination therapies) will be designed and brought to market.

Pradeep's linked-in profile reveals this about CWG: CWG is creating a comprehensive library of disease platforms. These platforms enable the predictive analysis of drug-disease interaction in-silco. This predictive analysis enables safer and more potent drugs to be designed in a shorter time, by enabling fast-failing and fast-scaling methodologies.

CellWorks started an India R&D center in bangalore in 2007. This news reveals some more information about CWG:

1. CellWork Research India Limited (CRIL)’s research focus would be in the areas of oncology, inflammation, metabolic disorders, CNS and Skin.
2. Their research is based on Systems Biology approach.
3. It involves development of in silico platforms of disease physiology at the metabolic and bio-chemical pathway level
4. The in-silico approach enables drug discovery teams to use these platforms as a virtual experimental system.
5. The drug discovery teams would have the benefit of using the in silico system in conjunction with currently used in vitro and in vivo techniques.

Why am I so excited about this news? There are two reasons:

1. I'm happy to see the EDA knowledge being applied in Bio-Medical research. We actually do cool stuffs in EDA :-).
2. I always feel that mankind should have overcome killer deseases like cancer by now. But the reality is that we're still not able to prevent and cure cancer completely. I look for the day when there will be some vaccines against cancer. I hope efforts like CWG will bring us closer to that day when we shall overcome cancer.