Ebay India Orders Fuck Up

I purchased a 24'' monitor to replace my 4 year old 19'' monitor from eBay on 13th of December. The estimated delivery date mentioned on the product page was 17th Dec. On 17th Dec I received this email from eBay:

MC011 XXXXXXX: Update- Error in payment mode details updated with the courier

Hello, Thank you for shopping with eBay We have noticed that due to a system bug there are few transactions where a wrong information about the payment mode has been updated in the system. You might receive SMS alert or an Emails asking you to keep the cod amount ready with you at the time of delivery. Request you to kindly ignore this SMS/Email and not to give any cod amount at the time of delivery if you have made payment of your transaction by using Debit/Credit card or via Net banking. Kindly be rest assured this issues has been addressed and resolved, the correct information of payment has been shared with the courier to avoid confusion at the time of delivery. If the courier executive is asking you to pay the cod amount you can refuse the payment and expect the product to be delivered in the next 2-3 working days without the cash being collected. If your transaction is getting returned due to this reason, you will get the refund of your transaction as per Paisa pay timelines. We sincerely regret for the inconvenience caused to you and also appreciate your cooperation and understanding at this time. Regards eBay India

Next day I received this SMS from BlueDart courier company:

Ebay order will reach thru BlueDart Awb xxxxxxxxx on or after 19-DEC-13.Kindly keep Cash Rs.xxxxx ready.

Today (20th December) morning I received an email saying:

A refund has automatically been initiated on item "BenQ GL2450HM LED Monitor" on 20-Dec-2013 since our shipping partner has not confirmed pickup of your shipment from the seller within the timelines.

I called up the seller and asked about this refund thing, the seller did not have any clue about it. He told me that the item was already shipped. Around 3 PM the courier company guys appeared with the monitor at my doorstep and asked me to pay the whole amount again which I had already paid while placing the order. I tried to explain them that it was a prepaid item not a Cash On Delivery, it was of no use. Those guys took the monitor back and updated the status as: "Cnee Refused To Accept Shipment".
In the evening I got another email saying:

"Your refund request has been put on hold by PaisaPay on 20-Dec-13 as the seller has appealed against this refund"

I checked my account page and here is how it looked:

Notice the dates underlined by the orange line, they are all future dates. How on earth a company like ebay can fuck up so much and at so many levels ??
First they fucked up the order payment mode then gave wrong information about the shipment and now all the dates celebrating Christmas already.
This was indeed an enlightening experience, will probably avoid going to ebay any more. Its already 8th day since I placed the order and customer care guy told me to wait till 25th Dec. WOW!!

Keyword extraction in Java

Around two months back I started working on a Java library: NiceText, to isolate data mining stuff from Crowl (another weekend project!) and make it an independent lib. I already implemented a text extractor for web pages (hence the name NiceText), which I observed sometimes performs faster and better than boilerpipe library.

I also wanted to extract keywords (or keyphrases) from text. I considered widely used algo TF-IDF for this purpose. Since keyphrases can contain more than one word, I also considered n-grams (mono, bi and tri), e.g., consider the following text:

Astronomers have gotten the first-ever peek at our solar system's tail, called the heliotail, finding that it's shaped like a four-leaf clover, NASA scientists announced.
The discovery was made using NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a coffee-table-sized spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system.
'We always drew pictures where the tail of the solar system just trailed off the page.'
- David McComas, IBEX principal investigator
"Many models have suggested the heliotail might look like this or like that, but we have had no observations," David McComas, IBEX principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex., said in a statement. "We always drew pictures where the tail of the solar system just trailed off the page, since we couldn't even speculate about what it really looked like." [Images: NASA's IBEX Sees Our Solar System's Tail]
The heliotail is "a much larger structure with a much more interesting configuration" than scientists had previously predicted, McComas added during a news conference announcing the finding.
The heliotail is inflated by the solar wind of particles streaming off the sun, and the four-leaf clover shape is the result of fast solar wind shooting out near the sun's poles and slower wind flowing from near the sun's equator, researchers say. The finding is based on the first three years of IBEX's measurements of energetic neutral atoms.
In the interstellar boundary region, charged particles from the sun stream outward far beyond the planets toward the gas- and dust-filled space between stars. Collisions between these particles and interstellar material create fast-moving particles with no charge, known as energetic neutral atoms, or ENAs. Some of these particles speed inward toward the sun, where IBEX can detect them from its perch 200,000 miles above Earth.
"Scientists have always presumed that the heliosphere had a tail," Eric Christian, IBEX mission scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a Google+ Hangout announcing the finds.  "But this is actually the first real data that we have to give us the shape of the tail."
Though IBEX data has given scientists an idea of the shape and structure of the heliotail, they say they have not been able to measure its length particularly well. They think it is probably evaporating over something like the 1000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun, McComas said.
The $169 million IBEX spacecraft, launched in 2008, was built for an initial two-year mission, which has since been extended.  Early on in its mission, IBEX detected ENAs flowing toward the sun in an unexpected pattern: They were significantly enhanced in a mysterious ribbon on the edge of the solar system that scientists now think is a reflection of the solar wind, shot back toward the sun by a strong galactic magnetic field.
IBEX has made several other important discoveries throughout its mission. In 2010, the spacecraft turned its gaze back toward Earth and got the first-ever peek at the solar wind crashing into the planet's magnetosphere. Last year, NASA announced that the spacecraft made its first detection of matter from outside the solar system, finding alien particles of hydrogen, oxygen and neon in the interstellar wind.

The extracted keywords are (arranged in decreasing order of tf-idf score):

ibex, solar system, heliotail, interstellar, mccomas, nasa, solar wind, spacecraft, particles, tail, toward sun, shape

As you can observe keyphrases "solar wind" and "solar system" has a common word "solar" but it does not appear as a keyword, because the program takes care of this ambiguity by comparing monograms with bigrams and then bigrams with trigrams to check if certain words appear together at the same number of time. For example: if the word "solar" appeared 10 times with the word "system" and they individually occurred exactly 10 times each, then both words are merged to form a keyphrase "solar system".

The tf can be calculated in many ways, but in the above case it is calculate by the below formula (it worked better than others!):
$$tf = log(TermFrequency+1)$$
Another way to calculate the tf is (it is commented out, you can uncomment and comment the above one, if you decide to use the below one):
$$tf = {\alpha + (1-\alpha)*TermFrequency \over \max\{f(w,d): w \in d\}} $$
Above method somewhat takes care of the bias created by document length. You can read more about it here.

As we know tf-idf depends on multiple documents, more number of documents leads to a better accuracy. Above results are based on only 40+ documents present @ https://github.com/vikasing/NiceText/tree/master/data

CODE:

Code for extracting the keyphrases from the text is present in https://github.com/vikasing/NiceText/blob/master/src/com/vikasing/nicetext/TfIdf.java

I would suggest to take (or fork it to play with it) the whole project to avoid any dependency issues. This is still a WIP, I'll release a lib (a jar) soon after adding more features and fixing some bugs.

Ubuntu Fail

Recently I tried to switch permanently to Ubuntu, the logic was that I mainly do 3 things on my laptop: internet browsing, coding and watching movies/videos on VLC and none of them require Windows, so switching to the Ubuntu made sense, also it has got some tools which I wanted to learn, e.g. octave. I didn't want to loose my Windows 8 installation and wanted to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS parallel to W8. Earlier attempt of installing Ubuntu failed due to a lot of EFI related issues.

Ubuntu 12.04

Installation was smooth and I was able to get the grub screen, which displayed a number of options to choose from. I logged into Ubuntu. The familiar Unity interface came up, which I did not like so I went ahead and installed GNOME. But it ran in fallback mode due to graphics driver issues. My laptop has hybrid graphics: ATI with + Intel 4000 . I looked on the web for the drivers but found nothing, Intel stopped developing a graphics driver for 12.04 due to some dependency issues but there was a driver for 12.10.

Another issue which I faced due to the lack of the graphics drivers was the pixelated video play in VLC. So I thought of upgrading from 12.04 to 12.10.

Ubuntu 12.10

After upgradation was done, I could not get the grub, it got screwed somehow. I got a blank screen, nothing else. I ran the live cd and did a boot repair. It restored the grub, but when I selected the linux option in the grub and hit Enter, a blank screen appeared and kept appearing until I switched of the system. I tried recovery mode, which logged me into the command line mode. There was a message which said I could upgrade to 13.04 from 12.10. Having known that Intel has provided a good support for 13.04 I decided to upgrade.

Ubuntu 13.04

Again I had to run boot repair to fix the grub issues, even after that I was not able to log in, the blank screen didn't go away no matter what I did. This time I thought of installing 13.04 from scratch, a fresh installation. Everything went smooth and I was able to login. After using about half an hour I noticed a weird issue of my mouse pointer moving a little out of place, the motion was not precise. It seemed to be a driver issue for Synaptics touchpad. A latest driver for Synaptics was already installed. I tried tweaking Synaptics settings, but nothing noticeable happened. And this issue was affecting my whole experience, I was not able to open links I intended to open, I was not able to close windows etc. It was worse than that graphics issue I had in 12.04.

So I went back to 12.04 and this time I installed Xubuntu desktop. It worked ok for some time until one day, I had to connect my laptop to a projector. Due to no graphics driver only one display was supported, I selected monitor option and my laptop screen went blank. When the job was done, I disconnected the projector hoping my laptop screen will lit up, it remained blank.

Xubuntu-desktop had another issue, the fan would start spinning at full speed after waking the laptop from suspension. I tried a patch which I found on the net, it did not help.

Linux Mint 15

Finally I thought of giving Mint a try, since it came with a lot of pre-installed software and drivers. Installed it after wiping the previous 12.04 installation. When I tried to boot I got a grub rescue screen, I tried many things to restore grub but failed all the time. Now I was not able to boot into any of the systems, neither Windows 8 nor Mint 15. I gave up, removed grub and booted into W8 and formatted the Mint partition. Now I have decided to run linux on top Windows; in VrtualBox.

Final Thoughts

Ubuntu 13.04 with GNOME has better looks than Windows 8 but when it comes to hardware support, many h/w companies don't care about this market segment (linux). GRUB is another rotten area in the Linux territory, if you are damn lucky then only it might work. Linux guys need to work together to create a better alternative to GRUB. Finally I still hope that one day I'll be able to make a permanent switch to Ubuntu or any other popular distribution.

Angelhack 2013 Bangalore Experience

Angelhack 2013 was held at Microsoft Research/Microsoft Accelerator for Azure Office at Lavelle Road, Bangalore. We were given 23 hours to code/hack, from 2PM June 22nd till 1PM next day. Me and my partner divided the work and started to code. Soon we realized that there were issues with wi-fi connectivity at the venue, there was no internet for a long time and we were expected to code/hack without internet. After a couple of hours when technician could not sort out the issue, we were given a generic wifi access, which was slow to the death, occasionally inaccessible. For important things I relied on my mobile data connection, many had USB modem, this situation did not improve at all.

Organizers were happy to help/instruct.
Facilities were good, probably the best I've seen in an IT office.

I slept around 3AM after a 2nd git commit. Some did not sleep. I woke up around 6:30AM. We resumed our work around 7AM

Demo Time

Demo session started somewhere around 2:30PM, each team was given 2 Minutes for presentation + 1 Minute for QnA from judges. We'd prepared a video of whatever we could finish, it was not even half backed, just featuring some HTML mockups and FB integration.

Judging (Only reason behind this post)

Initially when the judges were ROFLing and making fun of the ideas and passing stupid comments, I was forced to think that these people really knew what they were talking about. But when a team presented an idea of querying the data by typing the human readable questions in a text field, one judge (the dominating one!) started to compare it with Wolfram Alpha, and went on saying that Wolfram Alpha was not present in Indian market, but when they come, your app wouldn't stand a chance.

Another team presented an app based on some medical data, it could tell you what disease you might have based on your symptoms. One Judge suggested him to participate in a kaggle competition "The Heritage Health Prize" . BTW that event ended in April 2013, it may re-start this year sometime, but no announcement has been made yet about the dates.

When we presented an idea about a generic platform for peer to peer learning, the judges responded with "many tried it and failed".

One guy presented an app which created cinemagram of a video, he explained how it worked and claimed that it was faster than the apps present in the market. When judges asked why it was faster, he simply said that he didn't know. Guess what? he won the hackathon.

Finding out that something like cinemagram already exists was just a google search away, in fact there is a company named cinemagram which has got apps on both Android as well as iOS app stores. And when you search cinemagram on Play Store you get more that 60 apps.

Why am I pissed?

My hackathon partner has a startup and he told me that he'd met most of these judges at least once for pitching his product. They are well known in India's VC circle, kind of celebrities in startup world in Bangalore.

This is what upsets me, at an event like hackathon we don't need celebrity judges, who can only focus on India when the event clearly wasn't about India. These people have a certain mindset, for example "this has failed before and would fail again" or "this already exists" or the ignorance about what has been happening around the world, like this cinemagram concept. Judges had great knowledge about Indian market and showed complete ignorance about outside world. Imagine about the people who seek funding from these ignorant people. Lots of great ideas may be dying everyday.

Now I am a bit concerned, because I'd be launching my startup in near future, and if the whole Indian industry is filled with such idiot VCs, I am going to face some really hard time.

Extracting (meaningful) text from webpages - II

I was looking at the Readability Java clone snacktory to replace the very slow boilerpipe lib in my project, snacktory seemed faster but did not produce better results than boilerpipe. For example for the following url: http://alumniconnect.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/a-monk-who-didnt-care-for-ferrari-teaching-to-serve-society/ snacktory extracted just a small paragraph, about 25% of the whole text.

I forked the project and tried to fix it, but soon it turned out to be a challenging job. Snacktory's approach is totally based on the HTML markup, which makes it fail sometime, for example text inside <span></span> is ignored. That's exactly what is going on in the above case.

I thought of modifying the snacktory in such a way so that it can ignore HTML tags and still give better results. But soon realized that I'd have to change the whole logic behind the lib so I went ahead and created my own project NiceText.

How does NiceText work?

Instead of looking for particular tags and block sizes, NiceText calculates the ratios of all the text blocks w.r.t. the largest text block. Then it excludes the blocks with a smaller ratio than a give limit (say a ratio of 0.15). After that it clusters the nearest blocks into multiple clusters by checking the distance between two blocks, each cluster contains several text blocks, the largest cluster is marked as the main text.

Here is the output of a TC article: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/24/google-launches-cloud-playground-a-browser-based-environment-for-trying-its-cloud-platform/

Google’s Cloud Platform is slowly becoming ay fully featured environment for running complex web apps, but it’s not easy to just give it a quick try. To get started with Cloud Platform, after all, you have to first install the right and other tools on your local machine. Today, however, Google is launching its browser-based Cloud Playground, which is meant to give developers a chance to try some sample code and see how actual production APIs will behave, or to just share some code with colleagues without them having to install your whole development environment.Cloud Playground, Google says, is meant to be a place “for developers to experiment and play with some of the services offered by the Google Cloud Platform, such as Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL.”For now, Cloud Playground only supports Python 2.7 App Engine apps, and Google considers it to be an experimental service (so it could shut it down anytime).To get started, you simply head for the Cloud Playground or, if you just want to see it at work, head for Google’s getting started documentation, which now features green Run/Modify buttons that allow you to run any of the sample code on these sites. The Cloud Playground itself features numerous sample apps and also gives you the option to clone other open source App Engine template projects written in Python 2.7 from GitHub.The project itself is open source and consists of a basic browser-based code editor and , a Python App Engine app that serves as the development server.

Which is what we need !! I'm also working on a summarizer, which will be integrated in NiceText. Some part of it is already there, but it needs a lot of improvements. Here is the summary of the above text; produced by SimilaritySummarizer.java (present in the repo):

Today, however, Google is launching its browser-based Cloud Playground, which is meant to give developers a chance to try some sample code and see how actual production APIs will behave, or to just share some code with colleagues without them having to install your whole development environment.

I have yet to create a jar, however you can download the files from github repository. NiceText has a dependency on Jsoup.

Installing apache 2.4.x and php 5.3.x from source on Centos

I used apache 2.4.3 and php 5.3.22 for this guide.
Before installing anything from the source you need to remove old libs/packages from the Centos. You can remove PHP by typing:

yum remove php

run following command to remove other php-libs:

yum remove php-cli php-gd php-mysql php-mbstring

There is no need to uninstall the existing apache http server, however you need to stop the process for new installation of apache httpd to work.
Prerequisites:

• Create a directory where you will download the tars, e.g. /usr/tmp/
• cd to this directory
• Download the src of apache web server, apr, apr-util and php by using following commands:

wget http://apache.techartifact.com/mirror//httpd/httpd-2.4.3.tar.gz
wget http://apache.techartifact.com/mirror//apr/apr-1.4.6.tar.gz
wget http://apache.techartifact.com/mirror//apr/apr-util-1.5.1.tar.gz
wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.3.22.tar.gz/from/us1.php.net/mirror

You also need to install gcc and openssl-devel (for ssl support).

yum install gcc
yum install openssl-devel

Installing Apache HTTP Server:
Extract all the 4 archives downloaded in the /usr/tmp/ dir using following command:

tar xvfz httpd-2.4.3.tar.gz
tar xvfz apr-1.4.6.tar.gz
tar xvfz apr-util-1.5.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz php-5.3.22.tar.gz

cd to the httpd-2.4.3 and run the following command (if you want to install Apache with ssl support add --enable-ssl option):

./configure --enable-so --with-apr=/usr/tmp/apr-1.4.6 --with-apr-util=/usr/tmp/apr-util-1.5.1

Run following commands to install the Apache:

make
make install

Start the Apache server using the command:

/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

Installing PHP:
cd to php-5.3.22 directory and run the following command to see the configuration options available with PHP installation:

./configure --help

Select the php modules you want to install, also add the --with-apxs2 option to configure the php with Apache server we installed, following command contains common php modules:

./configure  --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apxs --disable-debug --enable-inline-optimization --enable-mbregex --enable-gd-native-ttf --enable-mbstring --enable-zend-multibyte --enable-sockets --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-zip --with-gettext --with-mcrypt --with-mhash --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex --with-pear --with-zlib --with-xsl 

Compile and install the PHP:

make
make install

Restart the Apache server and you are done. I have tested this on Centos 5.x but it should work on Centos 6.x. Following are the important paths:

• Default web directory, where your all web stuff go: /usr/local/apache2/htdocs
• http.conf path:/usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
• php.ini path:/usr/local/lib/php.ini

PITA 6: PHP Warning: Unknown: open(/var/lib/php/session/...., O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) ...

Recently I compiled php 5.3 on my Centos 5.x machine, everything worked fine until I noticed that the HTTP session was not getting created.
I checked the apache error logs and found this php warning getting repeated:

 PHP Warning:  Unknown: open(/var/lib/php/session/...., O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0

I tried to look for the solution on the net, couldn't find a proper solution except someone saying that apache sever should have write access to the session directory (/var/lib/php/session in my case). I did: 

chmod 777 /var/lib/php/session

and restarted the http server, no warning this time in the error logs, everything started working as expected.

My ls -l looks like following:

drwxrwxrwx 2 root apache 270336 Feb 23 14:27 session

A note on Matrix Multiplication in Java

I needed to calculate the B = AxA^T for some task. Here A is a matrix of some size. Initially I considered a few open-source libs e.g. Colt, Parallel Colt and JAMA, I found JAMA to be a bit easier to use and also it had better documentation than the other two. The size of my matrix A was around 1700x2700. It used to take around 65 secs for getting B matrix with JAMA. It was fine with me util recently, my matrix size grew to 7000x14000. First let me make it clear that this matrix A is sparse and does contain values between [0,2]. I tried JAMA on this new matrix and tried to calculate the matrix B, first it threw Out of Memory error, when I increased the heap memory to 4GB (max I could allocate!) it took some time in calculation and at the end again threw Out of Memory error.

I tried to run the program on a higher memory machine and allocated 10GB to heap. Here is the code for JAMA for matrix multiplication:

double[][] matrix // your pre-populated matrix
Matrix aMatrix = new Matrix(matrix);
Matrix bMatrix = aMatrix.transpose();
Matrix finalMatrix= aMatrix.times(bMatrix);
double[][] finalArray = finalMatrix.getArray(); // this step is not necessary

On this higher configuration machine the JAMA ran around 3 Hours before I killed it. I started looking for other libs and other ways to calculated this matrix in as less as possible amount of time. For me a time between 15-30 minutes was acceptable. While googling I got this link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/529457/performance-of-java-matrix-math-libraries, I found this benchmark page: http://code.google.com/p/java-matrix-benchmark/ and decided to give EJML a try, basic code for multiplication is:

double[][] matrix // your pre-populated matrix
SimpleMatrix aMatrix = new SimpleMatrix(matrix);
SimpleMatrix cMatrix = aMatrix.mult(aMatrix.transpose());
SimpleMatrix cMatrix =  aMatrix.mult(bMatrix)

EJML calculated the smaller matrix multiplication (1700x2700) in 6-7 Secs, which was way faster compared to JAMA which took more than 60 Secs for the same calculation. So I went ahead and ran it on the bigger matrix and left it running on my home machine which has 12GB RAM and an Intel i7 Proc. When I returned from my work after 9 hours the program was still running. But after half an hour I saw the output. It took 9 hours and 30 minutes for EJML to finish this calculation and a total of 5.5 GB of RAM during this operation.

Meanwhile I was also looking at JBLAS, but due to its dependency on some native libs, I was not able to run it on production as well as on my home machine which runs Windows 8. I had to install cygwin to make it work on Win 8. I ran it against the small matrix and output appeared on the screen in no time. Total time taken for the 1700x2700 matrix was 0.6 Secs, it was exciting to see the output so quickly. Following is the code for matrix multiplication using JBLAS:

double[][] matrix // your pre-populated matrix
DoubleMatrix aDoubleMatrix = new DoubleMatrix(matrix);
DoubleMatrix bDoubleMatrix = aDoubleMatrix.transpose();
DoubleMatrix fDoubleMatrix = aDoubleMatrix.mmul(bDoubleMatrix);

I ran the program on the big matrix, and got the results immediately, in 6 Secs. It uses the native libs BLAS and LAPACK, which make it so much faster than other purely java based libs. Also it uses all the cores available on your machine. Support from the author of the library is also great, he went some extra miles to resolve the issue I was facing, when I used the lib on a Centos 6 box (due to some older GLIB installation).

Gadgets I am looking forward to buy in 2013

Here are a few gadgets I am looking forward to buy in near future:

Leap Motion Controller (https://leapmotion.com/): The reason why I want this device is because I am lazy, I don't want to get up from my bed to skip the current song or to play the next episode of a TV series. Plus it doesn't cost much. Right now its open for pre-orders just for $70. I wish Leap Motion will come up with a wireless version soon, may be a Bluetooth based. Check out this really cool video:

Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/): Raspberry Pi created a lot of buzz last year. People are doing lots of experiments with it e.g. creating a media server, for tiny http server, home automation, NAS and lots more. You can check out the site to watch some crazy stuff people have managed to do with this thing. It interests me because of its low power consumption and it can run Linux. My primary use of it is going to be as a bluetooth audio receiver. I am just waiting my order to arrive.

Pebble Watch (http://getpebble.com/): I liked Casio watches and always wanted a Protrek model which comes with a thermometer, a barometer, an altimeter and a compass. But then realized none of these features were any use to me so never bought one. Since last couple of years a few companies have showed a lot of interest in making a smart watch. The main problem with these watches was their battery life, you need to recharge these watches as frequently as your phone, probably once in a day. Pebble is simple and has a black-white screen (E-Paper Screen) and that's probably the reason behind its 7 day battery life. Pebble also has an SDK for building new apps. The whole idea looks great, now lets see how things go from here. I pre-ordered mine today, now waiting for the shipment date. Check out the video from CES 2013:

Belkin AirCast Connect (http://www.belkin.com/in/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=546314): This is not a new gadget, but its a must have one for the people who don't have a built in Bluetooth functionality in their cars. That's all I have to say, check out the video of this thing in action:

A Graphics Card: My last graphics card died just after the warranty period expiration. It was an ATI 4870. This is going to be a big investment because I'll also have to buy a new power supply. Nowadays higher end cards need around 600+ watts. I have yet to decide the manufacturer, but I am leaning towards nVidia because I can get a 5 Year warranty from Zotac. I am still not over with Skyrim and other games are queued up already e.g. far cry 3, COD, Walking Dead, Amnesia, NFS and many more. A still from Far Cry 3:

A Smartphone: I was desperately waiting for Nexus 4, but it kinda disappointed me. I have a Nexus One which runs the ages old version of Android (Cyanogenmod 7.2), I like its uni-body design which feels good. Galaxy Nexus it way too plasticy and its camera sucks!! Nexus 4 looks somewhat similar to Galaxy Nexus and also its always out of stock. I was hoping for a full HD screen from the next Nexus device plus some great design like the HTC phones have and the battery life of Motorola Droid HD Max. I already have a Nexus 7 tab for the latest Android experience, now I am just waiting for an amazing phone from Google + Motorola. If next Nexus phone takes a lot of time I may drift towards a Windows 8 Phone, Lumia 920 is so tempting right now, except a full HD screen it has got almost everything I need in a smartphone.