Holi...

Spring time!
In Mumbai, that just means summer.
I gave up playing long ago..after it had degenerated into using grease, metallic paints..stone filled balloons...and other generally unhealthy practices...
always loved the free 'thandai' handed out by gujaratis..and of course the 'bhang'!
will probably go out looking for it this time..;-)

In other news, my apartment has a holi program for the residents, featuring beer.....
whoever heard of beer for holi??? what happened to tradition? (there was no holi fire either...)
I suppose its a sign of the times....the next generation will probably have nano-tech colour bombs!!

Travails of a DVD creator!

Making a DVD isnt as easy as it sounds. I had a few AVI files from which I wanted to create a DVD that could be played on my DVD player and viewed on a standard TV. Sounds simple, doesnt it?

Turns out it *is* easy, if you're not trying too much customization.I'm using Vista currently, and it has a cool program called Windows DVD Maker. Just point it to the AVI file, choose the DVD menu template, and it will transcode the AVI to the DVD format, and burn the result to your DVD.

However, if you want to do things like

a) Put multiple movies on one DVD

b) Adjust the height/width of the movie to look better on your TV

Then you need to look at other tools.

The Basic process is this:

1) Look at what kind of file you have AVI,WMV,DivX etc. These are not supported by some DVD players(your computer can play them). You need to convert them to the DVD format. This is called transcoding. I found WinAVI Video Converter and and ConvertXtoDVD useful here.

2) The DVD format basically has a AUDIO_TS and a VIDEO_TS folder with VOB files in the video_TS folder. This can now be burned onto a DVD as a DVD movie (NOT as a data DVD) using special software. Windows DVD Maker cannot write a readymade DVD folder.to a DVD disc, you need software like ConvertXtoDVD, or Nero or Roxio to do this. Some people convert the DVD folder to an ISO image that can be written by any burning software, but I havent tried it.

3) The conversion process is slow, and you may not like the result, so first try out your menu and other settings on a DVD-RW, which you can resuse in case you want to make changes.

I spent the better part of the weekend figuring all this out...and there are other things to take care of, like - what is the aspect ratio you want (4:3 for standard TV and 16:9 for widescren TVs) , whether you want PAL or NTSC (PAL for India), and what speed do you burn with (depends on the type of DVD), etc etc..so I hope this proves useful to someone!

Searching nuggets in budgets...

The word budget originates from the french 'bougette' which means a 'little bag'.
Every year, India eagerly waits for the Finance Minister to open his 'little bag' of carrots and sticks. I'm not aware of any other country where the budget is so eagerly expected, monitored, dissected, and generally analysed to death - why can't the Indian economic policy be largely decoupled from this yearly jamboree?
Speaking of deaths, the FM announced the loan waiver for farmers. I admit to not knowing much of agriculture, but it strikes me as strange that:
a) the scheme is tied to the size of the farm holding and not the size of the loan/ability to prepay and other more relevant parameters.
b) the scheme will encourage fiscal indiscipline and more 'scams' in future. If you know the government is benevolent in such matters, why would you repay?
c) Couldnt the FM come out with a scheme to bring more farmers into the institutional lending fold by giving relief to those in the net of unscrupulous moneylenders? Maybe he could have helped them transfer those loans to banks? Its the 25-40% interest on informal loans which is really killing the farmers. This way he could have acheived two objectives with one program.
d) Just wondering - If enough middle class salaried people with defaulting home loans had committed suicide, would the FM have given similar relief?
On the other hand, I'm quite amused at the critics - they're saying most of the measures are to ensure early elections. Fine. So when there is something in the budget for the common man, its called populist and election-focussed. When there is nothing, its denounced by the same people as having ignored the common man...!!

Overall.I think the FM was conservative. He could have taken bolder decisions in power,telecom, income tax, GST, but he seems to be having the US recession in mind.
I was disappointed to see nothing in it for Mumbai's infrastructure, but then thats more the rule than the exception.
Well. Thankfully we're past one more budget, and next time the 'little bag' opening will not be so important....