A spiral around the earth

 There is a point on the earth that is closest to the Sun. This is called the sub solar point. Incidentally, this is also the point that has zero shadow at that very instance. The way the earth rotates and revolves around the sun, causes this point to trace out a very interesting path. It makes a complete round about the globe near a latitude and slightly changes it's latitude with every rotation of the earth.  This results in a spiral wrapped around the globe, between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. This spiral cycle repeats every year!

आज का बंजारा नामा

तू फोन और टेबलेट छोड़ मिया

क्यों हर पल चिपका रहता है

क्यों रहता है उस दुनिया में

क्यों जाल में उलझा रहता है

जब असली नाते लोग यहाँ
तो वहा पे तू क्या पावेगा

सब एप्प पड़ा रह जावेगा
जब इंटरनेट ना होवेगा

क्या क्या मंगवाएगा तू अब जब
सब कुछ तो ऑनलाइन मिलता है

चंद पैसे बचाने के लिये
घंटो डीलें खोजा करता है

क्या flipkart ebay snapdeal और
amazon myntra olx

सब एप्प पड़ा रह जावेगा
जब इंटरनेट ना होवेगा

कुछ ज्ञान ना आवेगा तुझको
तू क्या क्या यु पढ़ पावेगा

पुस्तक पढ़ने का धैर्य नहीं
मंथन तू कब कर पाएगा

क्या google, ted talk, coursera
क्या youtube, udacity और Quora

सब एप्प पड़ा रह जावेगा
जब इंटरनेट ना होवेगा

जो दोस्त है तेरे, अपने है
वह तो मिले न अरसो में

जिन से न कभी पहचान हुई
उनके दर्शन हो हर पल में

क्या facebook twitter google plus
क्या whatsapp में जी पावेगा

सब एप्प पड़ा रह जावेगा
जब इंटरनेट ना होवेगा

सब एप्प पड़ा रह जावेगा
जब इंटरनेट ना होवेगा 

रोहिणी है गुस्से से लाल

रोहिणी है गुस्से से लाल
बोली चाँद से
तुम यहाँ हर महीने तो आते हो
लेकिन मुझसे कभी मिल नहीं पाते हो 
यु ही आगे बढ़ जाते हो
चाँद ने कहा
मुझे तो सब से मिलना है
सिर्फ तुम ही नहीं हो आकाश में ।
फिर ऐसा मौका भी आया
जब चाँद रोहिणी से मिलने आया
चाँद जब मिला तो
घंटे भर रोहिणी के साथ रह पाया
न जाने उसका गुस्सा कम हुआ या नहीं
पर तब उसका चेहरा लाल तो न दिख पाया।
लेकिन चाँद फिर चल दिया अपने रस्ते
और अब फिर से
रोहिणी है गुस्से से लाल ।
Context: Occultation of Aldebaran by Moon, 14 March 2016

Journey of Indian Sky Map

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alokm.android.stardroid

Today I am happy to release Indian Sky Map, a fork of Google Sky Map. I have added an extra layer of Nakshatras. And changed the name of objects from western to Indian, but only those that I could find.

Also added the positions of Rahu and ketu. Had to search a bit to find it. Couldnt get a readymade solution though. I found a tutorial for calculating the Ecliptic longitude and latitude though. And that was enough, as I reused and tweaked the lunar computation to transform the nodal ecliptic coordinates to RA/Dec.
Nakshatra mapping was a laborious task. There seem to be no consensus on what are the exact nakshatras. To incorporate groups of star as nakshatras, I had to implement a circular region of variable size to accomodate different sizes. And then manually picked the RA/Dec center and radius for each one of them.
There is still a lot of scope for updating the names from western to Indian. But I am not sure how authentic the sources would be.
There is a huge bug though on the Sky Map app. If it is being launched by a search intent and the app has not already started, then the pointing arrow shows the wrong direction. I tried to implement the solution to this given by a guy on the forums. But still results were not satisfactory. Finally I had to implement a workaround to show the search box again if the app is being started through the search intent.

Hoping that this app does well.

70s dont get to Play (Google Play that is)

I was tinkering around with my Chinese android tablet Momo9c. I had loaded it up with the ICS firmware. It was terribly slow. I searched for a solution, it seemed overclocking might be the way to go.   Strangely enough, only installing the overclocking app (after rooting of course), and applying the default values fixed the cpu speed. That did gave me scare as the tablet crashed and I had to restart it.

Now I was happy that the tablet speed is usable, but to my horror Google play was showing the error "No Connection". The internet was working fine. I feared that this might have triggered the disable of the Google play, and I would have to reflash the tablet.

I was looking for solutions, when I thought of opening the play market from the browser. And I saw an security warning that this is not a valid site. I wondered whether there is a problem with Google Server. And that's when I realized that the Date/ Time of the tablet is not right. I checked and saw that it was reset to 1970.

So the secure connection could have only been made when the servers certificate start date comes into effect. (So much for having a secure communication through a time machine , atleast through current protocols :) ).  Then after just fixing the date/time I was good to go.