Synthetic Tracks in India

May 23rd, 2010 by hari No comments »

Nike has developed a technology, aptly named Nike Grind, that uses recycled material from used athletic shoes and scraps of their manufacturing process to create raw material that can be used to pave sports surfaces including tracks.

It got me thinking, forget creating sports surfaces from recycled material, how many synthetic running tracks do we have in India? Kerala, for instance, has only two — one in Trivandrum and more recently one in Kochi. The one in Trivandrum came up first, was made many years ago and is reportedly in tatters, quite literally, making it unusable. The one in Kochi, having been made recently, is in good condition. What about other states? After many futile searches, I stumbled upon a site that seems to have a list. You can find it here.

Only question is how up to date this list is. Nevertheless it is a a good compilation. In any case, for a country of a billion plus people, 56 synthetic tracks (assuming that all the ones listed here are in good working and usable condition) is abysmally inadequate.

I reproduce the list below:

NO	State	City	Location
1	Andhra Pradesh	Hyderabad	GMC Balayogi Stadium, Gachibowli, Hyderabad
2	Andhra Pradesh	Hyderabad	GMC Balayogi Stadium Practice Track, Gachibowli, Hyderabad
3	Andhra Pradesh	Hyderabad	SVP Police Academy Hyderabad
4	Assam	Guwahati	Indira Gandhi athletic stadium Sarusajai Guwahati
5	Assam	Guwahati	Indira Gandhi athletic stadium Practice track Sarusajai Guwahati
6	Chandigarh	Chandigarh	Sector 46 Sports Complex
7	Chandigarh	Chandigarh	Sector 56 Sports Complex
8	Delhi	Delhi	Nehru Stadium lodi road new delhi
9	Delhi	Delhi	Nehru Stadium Warm up track lodi road new delhi
10	Delhi	Delhi	Tayagraj stadium , New Delhi
11	Delhi	Delhi	Chhatrasal stadium, New Delhi
12	Delhi	Delhi	CWG Games Village , Akshardham Temple
13	Delhi	Delhi	Yamuna Sports Complex East Delhi
14	Goa	Peddem	Peddem Sports Complex
15	Gujrat	Gandhinagar	SAI Western centre Gandhinagar
16	Haryana	Hissar	Ch. Charan Singh Haryana Agriculture University, Hissar
17	Haryana	Sonepat	Motilal Nehru School of Sports, Rai Sonepat
18	Haryana	Panchkula
19	Himachal Pradesh	Dharamshala
20	Himachal Pradesh	Harimpur	Government Degree College, Hamirpur
21	Jharkhand	Jamshedpur	JRD TATA Sports Complex Jamshedpur
22	Jharkhand	Ranchi	National Games Stadium
23	Karnataka	Bangalore	Kanteerava Sports Complex Bangalore
24	Karnataka	Bangalore	SAI Southern Sports Centre Mysore Road Bangalore
25	Karnataka	Belgaum	Nehru Stadium, Belgaum
26	Karnataka	Chitradurga
27	Karnataka	Madikeri	Sports School, Kudige, Kodagu District
28	Karnataka	Mysore
29	Karnataka	Gadak
30	Kerala	Thiruvananthapuram	Kerala University Stadium, Thiruvananthapuram
31	Kerala	Kochi	Maharaja’s College Stadium, Kochi
32	Madhya Pradesh	Bhopal	Tatya Tope Stadium New Market Bhopal
33	Maharashtra	Mumbai	Priyadarshani Park Ground, Nepean Sea Road Malabar Hill Mumbai
34	Maharashtra	Mumbai	SAI Sports Complete Akurli Road Kandivali (E) Mumbai
35	Maharashtra	Mumbai	University Sports Complex , Kalina Mumbai
36	Maharashtra	Pune	Sanas Ground Opp Nehru Stadium Pune
37	Maharashtra	Pune	Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex Balewadi Pune
38	Maharashtra	Pune	Shiv Chhatrapati Sports Complex Warm up track Balewadi Pune
39	Maharashtra	Pune	Army Sports Institue Ghorpadi Pune
40	Manipur	Imphal	National Games sports complex Imphal
41	Orissa	Bhubaneshwar	Kalinga Stadium, Bhubaneshwar
42	Punajb	Ludhiana	Guru Nanak Stadium Ludhiana
43	Punajb	Patiala	NSNIS Sports Complex Main Track Patiala
44	Punajb	Patiala	NSNIS Sports Complex Track 2 Patiala
45	Punajb	Tarn Taran	SAI Tarn Taran Stadium
46	Punajb	Mohali	Mohali Sports Complex
47	Rajasthan	Jaipur	Sawai Man Singh stadium, Jaipur
48	Taminadu	Chennai	Nehru Stadium Periamet, Chennai
49	Taminadu	Madurai	District Sports Complex Madurai
50	Taminadu	Coimbatore	Nehru Stadium, Coimbatore
51	Taminadu	Trichy
52	Taminadu	Nagercoil
53	Taminadu	Tirunelveli
54	Uttar pradesh	Lucknow	Guru Govind Singh Sports College Lucknow
55	Uttar pradesh	Lucknow	PAC Stadium Mahanagar Lucknow
56	West Bengal	Kolkata	Salt Lake Sports Stadium Salt lake Kolkata

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Posted in Sports Infrastructure

Tags: Sports Tracks

Member operator vs Nonmember operator

May 23rd, 2010 by hari No comments »

Member operators vs nonmember operators

As I was recently reviewing some of the concepts of C++, this question popped up. So what is the difference between member operators and nonmember operators?

Well as it turns out there isn’t much of a difference as far as the language is concered, except the additional argument of the object type in the nonmember function implementation. Given an operation on a user-defined type, either the presence of a member or a nonmember operator would suffice to complete the operation. So then why does the language provide the option of choosing between the two?

The answer turned out to be simple.

A member operator is typically used when

- the operator modifies the value of the object to which it is applied, requring it access to the data type’s internal values.

- or the operator requires access to the object’s internal state, represented by data members which are not otherwise accessible (through a public method).

In all other instances a nonmember operator is to be preferred thereby ensuring that there’s less chance of the object’s data members getting iadvertently modified and also reducing the size of the object.

Examples for operators that explicitly modify the state of an object are +=, +-, <<=, etc. These operators are applied to an object an result of the operation is applied to the object to which the operator is applied.

Examples for the second case where member operators are necessary can be found in the standard library. The basic_ostream template class declares the ‘<<’ operator for all basic datatypes except ‘char’ (actually template parameter ‘Ch’) as member operators. This is because output of the charater representation of these datatypes depend on the various ostream state information as set by the user. Examples for these state include output number system (decimal, octal or hexadecimal), precision, width, display of ‘+’ sign, etc.

However, output of the ‘char’ does not require access to any state information. Consequently, ‘<<’ for various ‘char’ types (signed, unsigned, char*, etc) are achieved through nonmember functions such as:

template<class Ch, class Tr>

basic_ostream<Ch, Tr>& operator<<(basic_ostream<Ch, Tr>&, Ch);

So the golden rule to learn is that if an operator can be implemented as a nonmember function, that is perhaps the best way to go as it would have the least impact on the object concered.

As I was recently reviewing some of the concepts of C++, this question popped up. So what is the difference between member operators and nonmember operators?

Well it turns out there isn’t much of a difference as far as the language is concerned (except the additional argument of the object type in the nonmember function implementation). Given an operation on a user-defined type, either the presence of a member or a nonmember operator would be enough. So then why does the language provide the option of choosing between the two?

The answer turned out to be simple.

A member operator is typically used when

the operator modifies the value of the object to which it is applied, requring it access to the object’s data members. Or,
the operator requires access to the object’s internal state, represented by data members which are not otherwise accessible (through a public method).

In all other instances a nonmember operator is to be preferred. This ensures that there’s that much less chance of the object’s data members getting inadvertently modified (which is only possible from a member method) and at the same time not increasing the size of the object. Refer to 11.3.1, C++ Programming Language, B.Stroustrup.

Examples for operators that explicitly modify the state of an object are +=, +-, <<=, etc. A real world code example:

class complex {
    double real, imag;
public:
    ...
    complex& operator+=(complex& c);
};

Examples for the second case where member operators are necessary can also be found in the standard library. The basic_ostream template class declares the '<<' operator for all basic datatypes except 'char' (actually template parameter 'Ch') as member operators. This is because output of the character representation of these datatypes (which is what the inserter operator accomplishes) depend on the various state information as set by the user. Examples for these state include output number system (decimal, octal or hexadecimal), precision, width, display of '+' sign, etc.

However, the output of  a 'char' does not require access to any state information. Consequently, '<<' for various 'char' types (signed, unsigned, char*, etc) are achieved through a nonmember function such as:


template<class Ch, class Tr>

       basic_ostream<Ch, Tr>& operator<<(basic_ostream<Ch, Tr>&, Ch);

So the golden rule to learn is that if an operator can be implemented as a nonmember function, that is the best way to go as it would have the least impact on the object concerned.

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Posted in C++, Development

Tags: C++

Beta Qt SDK – Installation Issue

May 16th, 2010 by hari No comments »

I’m back to Qt again. This time prompted by my need for a simple application that will help me learn Chinese that I wanted to write for my cellphone. I have a Nokia N79 and I tried to venture into this adventure last year, but was put off by the S60 SDK and its flavor of ‘limited C++’. However, the announcement by Nokia of their plans to support Qt as the default application development framework for their mobile devices and plans to ship the runtime with the OS has re-kindled my interest in the framework.

Anyway, this is the issue. While installing the Beta Qt SDK, it fails to create the start menu shortcuts. The screenshot of the error is shown below. QtSDKInstallError1

This may very well be because of my peculiar environment. I’m running Vista on VMWare Fusion running on a Mac. For the first couple of shortcuts, I kept trying Retry to no avail. The Nokia Qt SDK – beta release and the Symbian subfolder are created correctly though.

When I got the error again, I tried this. I created the shortcuts manually (same name as what is being displayed in the error message) from Windows and then tried the Retry option. And it worked just fine. I have posted a comment to a Nokia developer’s blog about this, let’s hope that it’ll get propagated to the right department.

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Posted in Development, Uncategorized

Tags: Nokia Qt

Qt Research – Abort!

April 19th, 2010 by hari No comments »

In my previous post I had mentioned my plan to look deeper into Qt and it’s basics viz a vis MFC and wxWidgets. Alas, I have not been true to my plan and instead have digressed from this to a completely different topic.

It happened like this. I started with Qt. Downloaded it, installed it and watched couple of tutorial videos. Then I started with Qt Creator, their visual development tool, and suddenly recollected that it looks very similar to a demo video that I had seen a few years ago. Mind you this demo video that I’m talking about was shot more than 10 years ago. I am talking about the demo video of Interface Builder on NeXtStep as demoed by Steve Jobs (and I think the original creator of the tool).

So I went back to Interface Builder and started poking around with it. Spent couple of days with it after reading Objective C primer and was suitably impressed. Then came the iPad launch followed by iPhone SDK 4.0. The lack of Flash support in iPad and the rather strict licensing terms of iPhone 4.0 SDK disappointed me deeply. So I dropped Cocoa and started looking elsewhere.

Naturally, I ended up with Android. So far Android has been a revelation. Eclipse has been even more so. I particularly like the idea of Android applications being made up of multiple components each of which can be published independently for other applications to use. The lack of a visual tool to lay out the UI elements has been bit of a let down. However, I know from experience that building UI by hand is not such a difficult task, especially when the framework provides excellent layout widgets.

Not sure how long I’ll able to persist with my Android pursuit, but knowing a bit about the platform — its strengths and possibilities — will justify my efforts. At least I hope so.

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Posted in Uncategorized