Dasavatharam

Plain nonsense.
I went to movie, despite bad reviews, hoping it would at least be watchable once.
Result: Severe headache.
No comment about kamal roles. Asin is irritating at best. Why the hell does he write screenplay when he is not capable of even a semi-decent one?

Someone wrote "People whoever written good about the movie are talking more about Kamal and whoever written bad about the movie are talking more about the Movie itself." I see a film for its story and screenplay. I don`t give a damn if Kamal dons 10 characters or works hard to act as an old lady.

P.S.: I want my money back.

OOXML On Hold

Due to protests from South Africa, Brazil, India and Venezuela, ISO put on hold the OOXML standardization process two days ago.

The OOXML format is not fit for anything, let alone an international standard. It is full of bugs(sample), non compatible with itself(!?, forget ISO/IEC compliance) and more. It is carefully designed to enable only MS to build applications that can handle the said format. It is a move to monopolize the market and is against public interests.

Microsoft heavily influenced the standardization process with all the means one could imagine. It even lodged complaints against BIS committee members that they are acting against national interests.(Apparently, to Bill Gates, national interests means Microsoft's interests.)

Here is an open letter protesting that, by Prof Deepak B Phatak, IIT Bombay, India. He is one of the BIS committee members. A Tamil translation of the same(in part) can be found here.

Top 10 Life Tips

Nassim Taleb's life tips and more presented here are really useful.
The ones that caught my attention were:

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

Hat tip to Ben.

Learning FEA. Is there an open source FEA software?

Currently I'm learning FEM(Finite Element Methods) for structural problems from my HOD. We use computers for solving those problems fast and in our lab the software used is ANSYS. I'm an ardent supporter of free software and am searching for an equivalent Final Element Analysis software in Linux. Or at least GPLed Windows software. I saw some of those using Google search. But I'm not satisfied with their capabilities.

Anybody know such good software? If so please comment.

PS: Twisted DNA suggested doing a post on 'navel bra' as my first post. But my research(;)) on that is still under progress(!). Hence I write a different first post.