Attending a workshop on Machine Learning

I'm excited about a workshop on Machine Learning organized by International School of Information Management, University of Mysore, which is going to be handled by Prof. S N Srihari of State University of New York, Buffalo.

Update: The course went on very well. The course material is available here.

Indian Real Estate Search

My brother Ajith came up with the idea of propert.in when I was explaining to him about Google Custom Search Engine. It was easy enough for him to write a few of lines of HTML and get his idea up and running in no time. properT.in is a custom search engine for Indian real estate search. Another motivation for this is Rajiv's Stockoogle.in which is a search engine for Indian stock market enthusiasts.

Update: Ajith decided not to continue this but instead try something different later

Gold, Platinum, Titanium & Fraud

The motivation for this post is a mail thread going on in one of the mailing lists back in office where people have been discussing about fraudsters who claim that they are from one of the known credit card companies and are luring people to go in for Platinum/Titanium/Gold credit cards with attractive credit limits and in the process get application forms forms filled-up and take photocopies of documents like Company ID/badge, PAN card, Salary slip etc. 99% of all this is just identity/information theft. One could easily misuse this information.

On the other hand there have been cases where genuine companies take undue advantage of the affiliate credit card company's brand name. A representative from "SBI" credit card calls you up and says that you are been offered a lifetime Platinum credit card from "SBI" and after all the formalities of filling-up of forms, 20 days later you are delivered a TATA credit card which is an affiliate of SBI cards. Cheats!

This definitely rings the bell of paranoia in my mind and would like to suggest to all to be extra-careful with credit cards (and off-late have been hearing about fraud when it comes to health cards). If you want to apply for a credit card, go to the company's website and apply instead of falling into the trap of tele-marketing calls.

Yahoo! India Ads

For those of you who were looking out for the Y! India Maps and Movies ad on TV, here are the links:

Yahoo! Maps http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2311112/7264327
Yahoo! Movies: http://video.yahoo.com/watch/2311297/7264772

The Y! - M$ saga took an interesting turn when M$ set a deadline and Y! replied accordingly.
By the way if you haven't yet got a chance to see the Investor presentation Y! did, you can see it here. The presentation clearly states why Yahoo! was grossly under-valued and also I wonder if this is the reason why M$ made this desperate move of setting a deadline.