Skip to main content

It's bright and sunny at Chennai, but the fuel queue is long

All at Tamil Nadu would have faced the spurts of acute fuel shortage and chances are, you too, like me had spent some time on the queue waiting to fill your tank. The last few days had been 'exciting' looking out for every fuel station on the way to see a line of already queued vehicles waiting for the fuel tanker to arrive. The recent fuel hike just added to the woes.

We are accustomed to travel long distances, and imagine if for a week or two, the fuel tanker fails to arrive? A tank full of fuel may sustain you for a few days, but after that, you are left with your own foot (or other animals) for travel.

Public transport (fuel driven) will not function and as traveling by foot would be difficult to span the distance that we once used to travel in mere minutes. Bicycles will be in great demand and possibly, we would start considering bullock-carts and horse riding.

But, somehow, solar energy does not seem to be exploited by us, being in a very sunny place. Perhaps this free / cheap energy source that has been neglected for so long would see a spurt of new advancements to make fast fuel-less (Petrol / Diesel) travel a thing of the past.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of Wesnoth Been on the lookout for a free turn based strategy game and chanced upon the Battle of Wesnoth . Despite it being an open source game (meaning, you get the source), it was incredibly polished akin to any of the other turn based strategy game (Alpha Centauri), be it the background score or the graphics or the tutorials. The game itself is set in a period similar to the D&D or nethack era. For the film buffs, if you have read or seen the Lord of the Rings, you would probably be able to relate to the clans that populate the game world. The game play, as with any turn based strategy game requires background information on each of the units that you own, their strengths and weaknesses and a lot of planning (a kin to chess, but with a lot more parameters) where factors like day - night cycles are taken into account (e.g, humans fight well during the day, but the orcs are better during the night). It is encouraged to keep your older units as they gain experience and beco...
Going forward... Happy Diwali to anyone who has managed to reach this site! With this being a long weekend, by next novel that I recently read was NEXT by Michael Crichton, based on the new advances that are being made in the world of genetic engineering and the implications of their effects in the social world. Good read which changes the perspective of the darker side of generic engineering in the ever changing world.
The Quest The quest for a free UML tool has been going on for the past few years until I chanced upon StarUML . Capable, with support for UML 2.0 constructs except Timing Diagrams, this is a good tool compared to others like ArgoUML . StarUML is developed using Delphi and is COM compliant so that plugins exist to extend the existing framework to support or provide configurability. The base installation supports document generation and well as rudimentary reverse engineering support. I tried reverse engineering a few C# code and only a few classes were imported. This being an open source project, there is no stopping you from acquiring the source and fixing any open issues and submitting a patch. The UI is snappy and unlike other tools that are over 250 MB in size, this is 1/10 in comparison. A great tool for quick modeling.