Prashant's Weblog

New IP

2009-11-19T20:14:00.001+05:00

This blog has a new ip. Catch you there.

Good bye Blogger.

Why no activity on this blog?

2009-05-09T09:01:00.005+05:00

So are the days of anything longer than 140 character over? Is the concept of blog slowing dying if not already dead?

Update:

Just realized that this post was less than 140 characters..hmm.

A beautiful short film..

2008-09-27T16:28:00.003+05:00

This was the winner at the Cannes Short films contest. Simple and very effective.

One hell of a trip

2008-09-05T08:03:00.008+05:00

Recently had been on a bike trip from Delhi to Kardung La(Highest motorable pass in the world). Have to say, it was one hell of a trip. Enjoy the memories of the trip. Write-up coming soon.

Biggest drawing in the world

2008-05-28T08:36:00.004+05:00

(Source : BiggestDrawingInTheWorld)

Though fictional, this is a really cool idea..6 continents 62 countries and 55 days. Reminds me of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman traveling around the world in Bucket List. Yeah thats some life :)

life = risk

2008-05-21T14:00:00.002+05:00

This is a good video which I stumbled upon the other day. The message is even better, If you have not failed you have not lived.

Best perk you can get at work

2008-05-09T07:59:00.002+05:00

As corporate policy, Baskin-Robbins employees were allowed to eat all the ice cream they wanted

(link)

Thats probably the best, yummy perk you can get at work :)

Code Quality

2008-04-28T18:08:00.003+05:00

Quantifying code quality cant get any simpler :)

Randy Pausch's last lecture and obsession with death

2008-04-17T22:25:00.006+05:00

Today was seriously reading something at office when the outlook new email alert flashed with a subject line announcing "A Beautiful Lecture"...I was like..hmm ok, lets see whats this all about..so opened the email. It had nothing but said "Good Morning" and had a link..so with nothing else to do I clicked on the link. When the page loaded I was ..NO, PLEASE, NOT AGAIN...yeah you guessed it right, it was link to Randy Pausch's last lecture.

I really loved the lecture when I first saw it at a friend's blog, but was not prepared for "forward" hysteria I have seen associated with this video. I really started to wonder, Randy's speech, thought very inspiration , is not the first of its kind or the only of its kind. I am sure You Tube is filled with such videos, so why such a reaction to this video? Why are we so obsessed with death?

Its not with just Randy, but you will find umpteen examples, from Buddha to now Randy, where in you will find that when you focus on topic of death, it propels you into self awareness, morality, life etc. Why is this so?

In the movie "Bucket list", Cole and Carter have the best time of their lives only after being diagnosed with terminal Cancer. So why does knowing the fact that you will die soon triggers "developments" that probably wouldn't have been seen other wise?

Through death, you dissolve in to the global "Carbon pool" and there are good chances of you being picked up and casted in to say a ring in bark of a spruce tree, which allows you to live much much longer than being part of fragile human body, so going by this logic, why don't we feel good about death and why are we so afraid of it or feel so weak about it?

Live life, Zara Hat Ke

2008-04-07T11:05:00.007+05:00

When you read the stories about Jonathan Dunham, Georgia Getz or Andy, you really need to think hard to answer the question, How do you categorize these people? Are they insane, foolish or are they just living life to the fullest?

Jonathan quits his job and decides to find the meaning of life by walking the earth!! and if thats not good enough reason to classify him as a "HIGHLY INSANE" consider this..he has a found a partner in Judas to accompany him in his journey, all sounds fine until you find out that Judas is a Donkey, yeah a Equus asinus.
Georgia's story sounds a bit more sane...she bid good bye to her family for five weeks in a sponsored hybrid car to "date", 250 bloggers across 182 cities in 42 states, if thats not crazy enough, she says more are being added every day.
Andy quit his job with probably one of the best company in the IT industry and decided to travel the world for a year.

So whats with these people? What drives them to renounce the safety and comfort of their job, family, house and depart from known surroundings to explore the unknown, encounter new people and places? Is there a purpose or a motive behind such travels? What do they or what have they achieved out of it so far?

Well I don't have any such first hand experience, so its difficult to pin point the factors of motivation for them, but personally be it trekking the barren desert land of Leh or Ruins of Hampi or the thick forests of Munnar etc.. one thing that keeps driving you is the possibility of uncertain outcomes. You never know what you will encounter next. Will it be breath taking view of Leh's frozen mountains or exquisite carving of temples or herd of wild elephants in Shola forests, you never know and probably this expectation of the unexpected keeps you going.

Be it the physically taxing ascent of brahmagiri peak or spending the night in the nerve chilling cold of Bharathpur, the reason you do it is probably because these circumstances challenge you be it physical, emotional or intellectual and probably its the adrenaline rush which you experience when you overcome these keeps you going.

After coming back from the Leh trek, I was wondering what were we thinking to cycle all the way to the Kardung La pass(Worlds highest motorable pass)(we could go only half the distance)...It was probably just to experience that "at the peak" experience, that was the reward for which we were ready to tax our plump body, ready to push ourselves beyond the edge, so to say. Probably its the same with those guys..just to experience that "at the peak" moment they keep going.

Leisure stroll of the Hampi ruins was not "adventurous", but enjoyed every moment of it. But why? Probably because I was experiencing something new, new place, new food, new people, new culture and thats what simulates the excitement and a will to carry on. It should be the same with them. Exploring new place and new culture.

Another reason I loved the trip to Hampi was probably the boring, dull,slow routine that life had become(not that its any different now) . Job-home-job and the eternal cycle continues and this trip helped to break and escape that shackles. I guess it might be the same for them. Shed the dull,boring life and grow a new life.

What ever it is thats motivated them, one thing is sure, I seriously envy them. From the bottom of my heart. Life gets entangled in the web of EMI's, SIP's, Job's, family commitments etc so much that you start to believe that this is all there is to life. But then when you read stories like these only then you realize how much of a "Matrix" world you are in subdued by the Blue pills which we ourselves swallow or are forced by the society to swallow. But then these guys have swallowed the Red pill to see probably the real life. Both living same life, same existence, but they are living life, zara hat ke.

Is Dr. Dolittle phenomenon possible in real life??

2008-04-03T23:46:00.006+05:00

Received the link to this video as a email forward. Trust me, I was completely floored by what I saw in the video. I am not sure if this a doctored video, but if we assume the other way then we do have lot to think about;

- Are animals intelligent to have a sense of shape and proportionality?
- Can animals develop the cognitive ability to visualize objects?
- If they do develop cognitive abilities to visualize objects, can it develop to such high order that they can see objects in 3D(how elephant actually looks) and then reduce it to 2D(on a drawing sheet)?
- It had the dexterity in its trunk to start from the point where it had stopped. Is such dexterity common among animals?
- If you see the final image, three legs are in the ground while the fourth is in air. This is how they walk in reality. How is it possible for a animal to self evaluate (how it walks) and then reproduce the same as a painting?
- At the end of the film you will see that the elephant re-traces all the lines in the picture which are not bold because of lack of ink in the brush while drawing those lines. This is two step process, first, realize that the line is not bold and second trace the same line once again. If you ask me this is simply amazing
- When it drew the flower, the leaves are placed in a symmetrical fashion. Now you need a sense of symmetry to accomplish that task. Do animals have that?
- Also the elephant did not overshoot the drawing page and it made sure it drew all the objects of the painting within the boundary of the paper canvas. This is another skill of very high order.

So after watching this video I wonder;

- Can non-humans be trained to develop skills and cognitive abilities which equate to so called "uniquely human" faculties like Language etc. in short, is "Dr. Dolittle " phenomenon possible in real life?
- Looking at it the other way, are there any aspects in the way humans communicate that makes conveying certain messages unfeasible but is possible to do so by the way other animals communicate?

I don't have the answers. But am sure seeking answers to these would be one really fascinating journey touching upon diverse fields like linguistics, biology, physical anthropology , sociology etc..

Global Warming - Why we need to act?

2008-01-22T11:48:00.000+05:00

Does data like..

Increase of 0.14 degree Celcius in 1906-2005 100-year linear trend when compared to 1901-2000 100-year linear trend

Increase in average Artic temperature is twice the global average rate in the past 100 years

There is very high confidence that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750
has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W/m2

or graphs like

from environment assessment reports leave you overwhelmed with tons of data which makes little or no sense or jargon like radiative forcing, surface temperature of permafrost layer leave you completely confused as to whether you need to do something or not and you end up doing nothing.

So here is a "keep it simple stupid" argument as to why each of us need to act in our own capacity to at least slowdown the global warming and thus avert the impending doom we are slowly but surely heading towards..

Whats the big deal climing a hill which is taller than all others??

2008-01-13T21:05:00.000+05:00

Its was on 29 May 1953, amid most inclement and in-human environment conditions, two people, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, dragged themselves to a point where heavens seemed just a hand-stretch away. They were the first to climb to the highest point on this planet, peak of Mount Everest, standing tall at 29,029 feet. By doing so little did they know that they would become the icons who would inspire the spirit of Adventure for generations to come.

Today after almost 6 decades, both the icons are no more with us. The unsung hero of that epic journey, Sherpa Tenzing, expired in 1986 and on Friday(11 Jan 2008), with the arrival of the sad news of Sir Edmund Hillary's death a chapter came to an end, a chapter that tells stories of real heroes who represented the indomitable human spirit.

So what the heck is the big deal about climbing to the highest point on this earth? Why is an act which did not help any cause continues to inspires and is still remembered? Why two people who were just normal people before accomplishing this climb, were catapulted to iconic status after this act?

Jane Morris of Time in a brilliant article titled "The Conquerors" says

Geography was not furthered by the achievement, scientific progress was scarcely hastened, and nothing new was discovered. Yet the names of Hillary and Tenzing went instantly into all languages as the names of heroes, partly because they really were men of heroic mold but chiefly because they represented so compellingly the spirit of their time

represented so compellingly the spirit of their time.....thats exactly what they did. They showed the world how even people with ordinary abilities but extraordinary perseverance can reach stellar heights.

Jane in another part of her article says;

it was a measure of the men that over the years they truly grew into the condition. Perhaps they thought that just being the first to climb a hill was hardly qualification for immortality; perhaps they instinctively realized destiny had another place for them. For they both became, in the course of time, representatives not merely of their particular nations but of half of humanity. Astronauts might justly claim that they were envoys of all humanity; Hillary and Tenzing, in a less spectacular kind, came to stand for the small nations of the world, the young ones, the tucked-away and the up-and-coming

This is probably the reason which makes them heroes and so eligible to become your role models. When you speak of Hillary and Tenzing, its not about the name and fame(which they achieved after the climb), both of which they had in abundance, but its what they did with that name and fame.. both used it to stand-up for people who were less fortunate than themselves and to me this is truly the measure of man. Hillary and Tenzing spent rest of their lifetime working towards environmental causes and conjure humanitarian efforts on behalf of Nepal and the Nepalese people. The spirit of this selfless service to a country which consumed almost his everything is something to commend on.

So I guess climbing a hill which is taller than all others is indeed a big deal because once in a while it leads to discovery of man like Hillary or Tenzing, a man to match his mountain.

The quintessential Kiwi - Sir Edmund Hillary

2008-01-13T19:56:00.000+05:00

Sir Edmund Hillary(1919-2008)

"you defeated me but you wont defeat me again, you have grown all you can grow but I am still growing"

- Sir Edmund Hillary

You will continue to live on forever in our memories, fueling that spirit of adventure in our lives.....

Why do we pray??

2008-01-07T11:13:00.000+05:00

Last week end was not like the usual laze around week end, thanks to my mom who was on "mission Temples". What started as a excursion trip to Mysore and Bandipur was actually a mini-pilgrimage in disguise. Starting with Ranganathaswamy temple, Nimishamba temple, Chamundi temple, Gopalswamy betta, couple of temples inside the Mysore palace, Nanjundeshwara temple, Sri Ganapati Sachchidananda Ashrama and the Venkateshwara temple inside the ashram.. The weekend temple dosage was so high that I am like.. Did I ask for that shining new red Ferrari in Nanjundeshwara temple or the Venkateshwara temple? yeah I was that confused soul whose "must have materialistic pleasures" list had gone completely
haywire..shucks!! I forgot to ask for that magic wand to make my boss disappear :(

Anyways when I looked back on the trip in the comfort of my bed back home..I was left with many lingering questions... why do we pray? Whom are we praying to? and as the famous quote from Bible goes

"shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith"

does this
"he shall have whatsoever he saith"
really work or is it like
"he shall have whatsoever he saith*"

* Conditions apply

so with these questions started a conversation, a conversation with myself;

me to myself: Whats a Prayer?
myself to me: Its probably a language for you to interact with this source of energy which when we embody, becomes the one with eternally ebbing spirits, infinite body and immortal life, something we have labeled as the divine. Its a conversation that inspires you, a conversation that reveals the profundity, the gratuity, the fragility of a blessing called Life, which we often tend to ignore because of our preoccupation with "myself" and "my problems".

me to myself: "which we often tend to ignore..."....why would we do that, not appreciate the blessing?
myself to me: probably we don't know to recognize a blessing thats why the indifference or practicalities of life is such that you are forced to construct a facade and hide the real you. Probably that for some extent explains the success of "Second life"

me to myself: So is Prayer like scrubbing the pretense off yourself and looking at the true "Naked" you?
myself to me: Yes, when you strip yourself of the pretense you wear and look at yourself, thats when the real introspection happens. Probably this is the reason prayers are called for when you need to structure your life or need a honest "balance sheet" accounting of your life

me to myself: So whom do we pray to?
myself to me: As mentioned you construe that source of energy by embodying it and calling that entity as God. As you need a recipient for your prayers, the entity called God is not that bad a choice. So you pray God.

me to myself: But who is this God we are talking of anyways and why pray God only?
myself to me: There is probably no answer to that. But for understanding purpose things can be made simpler by looking at this problem in a different perspective. Consider a nuclear fission, you bombard a heavy elements with neutrons, so the question here would be is it worth the effort to find the exact atom of the radio active fuel which would be the first to split thus triggering the nuclear fission? I am sure you agree its wasted effort to find such information(if you can find it in the first place). Why the heck would I bother until I can control the energy generated. So to paraphrase in spite of our ignorance towards some details we are able to meet our objective of harnessing the nuclear power. So if we apply the same logic, we might be ignorant of the fact as to who exactly is this God we are praying to, but like in fission analogy, it might be irrelevant and we will do as good in spite of the ignorance.

me to myself: Why does God have to be this someone with eternally ebbing spirits, infinite body and immortal life, why cant that entity be someone like us, more human to say so that we can relate to him?
myself to me: As said prayer is kind of code review and you would want some one better than yourself to accompany you for this review and as humans are flawed creatures in themselves, it makes sense for us to look-up to someone who is more-than-human, someone who is inscrutable, someone before whom humans feel humbled.

me to myself: When to pray?
myself to me: Hmm..not sure...When you went to the Leh trek and when you saw that stunning beauty of Nature what did you do? You would have some said something on the lines of "thanks lord for making me be here today"..yeah a prayer. What would you do if you were to be on titanic on that fateful day when it sank.."I should have listened to mom and learnt to swim, lord my life jacket"..yeah again a prayer...so it not just in adversity that we pray but other times too..So I guess whenever you are confronted with events which trigger a passion in you, you pray.

me to myself: How to pray?
myself to me: According to Christianity there are five steps to any prayer praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition and intercession which basically tell you how to pray. Even in Hinduism you will find similar patterns, for example if you take the two most famous prayers

Meaning:O God Ganesh (large bodied with a large belly), radiant as millions of Suns, Please, remove obstacles in all of my tasks all the time

As we can see there is praise(radiance compared to million suns) and petition/Intercession(remove obstacles)

Similarly when we see in

त्र्यम्बकं यजामहे सुगन्धिं पुष्टिवर्धनम्

उर्वारुकमिव बन्धनान्मृत्योर्मुक्षीय मामृतात्

Meaning: We Meditate on the Three-eyed reality. Which permeates and nourishes all like a fragrance. May we be liberated from death for the sake of immortality, Even as the cucumber is severed from bondage to the creeper

Again we can see there is praise(fragrance) and petition/Intercession(liberate us)

This way the conversation is still on with many more questions like whats the significance of silence in a prayer, What are the do's and dont's for petition section of the prayer?, Bible says its fair to ask lord for the food, so on the same lines is it fair to ask for a Ferrari?, Why do we groan/murmur while we pray and why is it that we are not aware(happens at subconscious level) of what we murmur about? why do we close our eyes but not other senses like ears and nose while praying? Whats the significance of posture in a prayer? etc..etc and an attempt to find answers is also on...

Probably my plea for a Ferrari and the Abraka dabra Boss tu hoja disappear magic wand might or might not come through, no regrets either ways, but if the prayers lead me to that critical introspection thus empowering me to appreciate Life better than I do now.. I will ask for no more..I will consider my prayers answered.

(Photo source)

2008-01-04T08:07:00.000+05:00

(akshar naach rahe hain :) )

One of the advantages of reading TOI is that you will get to read and participate in these utterly useless opinion polls which try collate hard numbers on burning issues and get the feel of pulse of the nation. Recently one such "burning" issue got my attention;

Which Khan is the super duper badshaa of Bollywood? Sha..sha..sharukh Khan or Amir Khan?

Along with this opinion poll they had a half page review of their latest movies OSO(for the reel illiterate, its Kewl way of saying Om Shanti Om) and Taare Zameen par.

As such I am a great sucker for movies but had resisted watching SK movies as I have had real big time trouble coping with the neurological problems after watching couple of his previous movies, but when "enna rascala mind it" became part of lore and when people started to quote me as a example to explain the meaning of "anachronism" after I expressed my ignorance about the happening lingo..I knew..updating myself with the new lingo was necessary, not just necessary but it became a matter of survival...so I caved in and watched the movie. Not all was bad..I loved one song and that one scene when Deepika turns and gives that one look..ah!! my paisa wasool. About the rest of the movie, I will exercise my right of "reserve from making comments"(hail democracy) and not speak about it.

Anyways this post is not about OSO, but the other movie Taare Zameen Par , which I happen to see yesterday and am glad I did.

The emotional agony of not meeting parental expectations, which a nine year old suffering from Dyslexia goes through has been picturized really well. Darsheel Safary as Ishaan is simply brilliant and Aamir Khan as Nikumbh Sir, Director and Producer is equally brilliant. A very different story line than usual with sparks of Amole Gupte's brilliant creativity (idea of Ishaan's flip book was truly awesome and adds that extra punch) aptly intersperse with songs having some really neat lyrics by Prasoon Joshi coupled with good music by Shankar Ehsaan makes it a worthwhile movie to watch.

But what I liked the most about the movie was not only does it scores really high on entertainment quotient but also sends out a message about a problem thats so prevalent yet so inconspicuous and neglected, it throws at you a few very relevant questions;

- There is a scene that involves Ishaan family and Aamir Khan. Aamir Khan says Ishaan is good at painting for which Ishaan dad says "Kya Faidaa" (whats the use). The notion that there is no career prospects beyond a doctor/engineer is not that rare even today.

- Ishaan gets punished for not doing well in Maths but all of them fail to notice the confident brush strokes and the vivid colors which he can pack into a white drawing sheet. So the question arises if our education system is geared up to identify these differently gifted students?

- For at least 2-3 years Ishaan's parents/teachers saw the same patterns like reversals of letters/words/numbers, finding it difficult to read or construct long words/sentences, inability to follow multiple instruction(go to chapter 13, page 12, line 12) and tendency to mis judge important characteristics like speed, direction etc of spatial objects(finding it difficult to hold a moving ball), a special sort of failure to recognition words resulting in a poor reading ability and also extreme difficulty in spelling but could not or were not ready to attribute it to a neurological syndrome(dyslexia). So the question of how to recognize and categorize such traits?

- When Aamir Kahn speaks of Ishaan's symptoms, his dad asks "are you saying my child is a retard"... So the question of how can we eliminate the taboo associated with neurological disorders so that people can admit about the problem and seek help?

- Ishaan could not do few things with the same ease as most of his contemporaries did in spite of the fact that their IQ might have been at par or Ishaan better off than most of them and Ishaan had no control what-so-ever on this, even he did not know that what he was doing was wrong. A practical fallout of this was discrimination both at home(dad says his elder brother is so good and Ishaan a "duffer" and Idiot) and outside for no fault of Ishaan.

- If noticed all the "tests" that decide if Ishaan can progress to next class was a "written" exam. Now the core of Ishaan's disability was extreme difficulty dealing with spoken and written language. So the results of the "exams" were actually under-estimating Inshaan's capability. So the question is how to deal with such contradictions? Aamir suggests oral test for Ishaan until he develops his writing skills. So do our schools have provisions for such alternate testing?

- In the movie, its shocking to see Ishaan dad's indifference towards the problems of his son even after he is made aware of it...This basically hints at another problem..when ever we talk of Brain related disorders, we most of the times assume that its not curable. Probably Ishaan's dad had the same notion and that resulted in the "hopelessness" we get to see. So the question is what kind of education is required to spread awareness that not all brain related disorders are incurable.

and probably many more such question, the answers to which can probably lead us to more Einsteins, Da-Vincis ,Abhishek Bachchans or just more Ishaans. Just the possibility of finding one of these makes the effort worth it....what say??

Mungaru Male

2007-08-11T09:01:00.000+05:00

One thing that struck me and left me awestruck as I watched "Mungaru Male" recently was the quality of the lyrics, the absolutely stunning locations and some really good music. I had to pinch myself to make sure I am watching a Kannada movie. Its been really a long periods of drought for the Kannada film industry after which its seen the "Mungaru Male" and man I am so excited about it...

So What made Mungaru male so popular?? A mindless story line and plots(strictly my opinion) has been rescued by brilliant lyrics by Yograj Bhat and Jayanth Kaykani, amazing music by Mano Murthy and stunning beauty of Malenad region/ Jog falls. One has to appreciate the direction of Yograj Bhat, who made the decision to shoot the movie in our own state instead of hunting for locations abroad and man!! what a job he has done. In Shri Kuvempu's "Malenadina Chitragalu", which is a compilation of stories, he writes the following about Malenad in a poem called "Malenadige Ba"

ಮಲೆನಾಡಮ್ಮನ ಮಡಿಲಿನಲಿ
ಕರಿ ಮುಗಿಲೊಡಲಿನಲಿ
ಮನೆಮಾಡಿರುವೆನು ಸಿಡಿಲಿನಲಿ
ಮಿ೦ಚಿನ ಕಡಲಿನಲಿ
ಬನಗಳ ಬೀಡು
ಚೆಲ್ವಿನ ನಾಡು
ಮೋಹನ ಭೀಷಣ ಮಲೆನಾಡು

ನೇಸರು ಮೂಡುವ ಪ೦ಪಿಹುದು
ಮುಳುಗುವ ಸೊ೦ಪಿಹುದು
ತಿ೦ಗಳ ಬೆಳಕಿನ ಕಾ೦ತಿಯಿದೆ
ಇರುಳಿನ ಶಾ೦ತಿಯಿದೆ
ಕೋಗಿಲೆಯಿಲ್ಲಿ
ಲಾವುಗೆಯಿಲ್ಲಿ
ಗಿಳಿಗಳ ನುಣ್ಣರವಿಹುದಿಲ್ಲಿ!

ಮರೆಯುತ ಹರಿಯುವ ತೂರಯಿಹುದು
ತು೦ಬಿದ ಕೆರೆಯಿಹುದು
ಹಾಡುತಲೇರಲು ಬೆಟ್ಟವಿದೆ,
ಬಣ್ಣಿಸ ಘಟ್ಟವಿದೆ
ಬಿಸಿಲಿದೆ, ತ೦ಪಿದೆ
ಹೂಗಳ ಕ೦ಪಿದೆ
ಹಸುರಿನ, ಹಣ್ಣುಗಳಿ೦ಪಿನೆದೆ.....

reading this simple yet absolutely beautiful poem, you wonder what is not there in our own Malenad and this is what the movie has done the best, portray the natural beauty of our state and the scene shot at Jog falls, Holy cow!! that's probably the best promotion for Jog falls I have ever seen. If our tourism department had spent even a tenth of the effort to promoted our state as they have done in the movie, we would have had lot more influx of tourist than what we currently have.

Another feature that was a highlight in the movie was the lyrics...after really long time have we seen some genuinely beautiful lyrics written. Love those lyrics in Anisuthide, Araluthiru and the title song Mungara Maleye rocks.. add to these brilliant lyrics the voices of Sonu Nigam, Shreya Goshal and sweet sounding music by Mano Murthy, what you get to see is sheer magic.

All in all a great movie after really long time...I hope this brings out the awareness that its not fancy locations, bikini clad heroines or heroes with six pack abs beating up the rest of the world which people expect in a movie, but any thing with a decent storyline, songs that make sense and some decent music should fill up theaters.

Quantum Retrocausality

2007-06-17T12:45:00.000+05:00

Remember this classic strip from Calvin and Hobbes where past Calvin writes a letter to future Calvin and Hobbes comments

"Too bad you cant write back"

Now if what John Cramer says he can do is correct then Calvin for sure has reason to smile. According to The Register , John Cramer has claimed that he can send information back in time through a process called quantum retrocausality. Now if you ask about "Quantum retrocausality", the engineering-degree-a-long-time-ago desk at The Register opines that all they really know about quantum is that it's pretty wild stuff and I tend to agree. So Dubara mat poochna :)

Rajnikant and art of brand management

2007-06-17T08:29:00.000+05:00

Caparisoned elephants carrying the movie print to the theater, paal abhishekham to the hero, tickets sold at a wopping cost of Rs.1500 , houseful screening of movie at 4am, that basically sums up the frenzy in our country around the Super star Rajnikant's new movie Sivaji, which was released yesterday.

No, I have not see the movie yet nor is this post a movie review. I had seen Rajnikant's Chandramuki at a theater in Madurai and one thing that has remained the same then and now is the huge fan following that Rajnikant and his movies have. I can never forget that electric atmosphere inside the theater when I had gone to watch Chandramuki, the aarthi's, the whistles, the confettis all added to the on screen magic woven by the superstar, making it a un-forgettable experience. So looking at all this one tends to wonder;

1) How is that Rajnikant is able to churn suck blockbusters with such amazing consistency

2) The audience for his movies range from auto drivers, government employees to Software engineers, executives and top movie stars, so what is it that makes it possible for Rajnikant to not only satisfy the tastes of such a wide range of audience but also thrall them enough so that they come back for more again and again.

3) Movie Baba was considered a flop in spite of cashing in more than 30 crores at the box office, but the next two movies were super hit. What is it that Rajnikant and team do to stage such a come back after a flop movie.

Recently the bad boys from Boston, Aerosmith, visited Bangalore. If you read their history on wiki you will see that..

1) In spite of starting in late 1960, even today they consistently produce Gold/Platinum records and even today all their shows boast of sell out crowds.

2) They have this amazing ability to connect to "new generation" with their music(I don't want to miss a thing and Jaded won the Teen choice award).

3) Aerosmith made a awesome comeback after they broke up in late 1970's

If you look closely these characteristics, ability to consistently produce quality content in their respective fields, adapt to changing tastes/culture or bounce back from failures are strikingly similar in both cases. But then it should not come as a surprise after all both are super stars in their own way and both have mastered the art of Brand management.

Sivaji is a ideal case study for Kannada film industry, which had a successful movie against its name after a really long time in Mungaru Male. This movie in spite of having a decent story, brilliant cinematography, amazing songs and decent performance by Ganesh and Sanjana was not able to create even 1/10th the "noise", Sivaji has created. We for sure have lots to learn from our neighbors.

Riding solo to the top of the world - A Tale of incredible journey

2007-02-12T18:03:00.000+05:00

A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.
- Isabelle Eberhardt

Name : Riding solo to the top of the world
Director : Gaurav Jani
Producer : Dirt Track Productions
Music : Ved Nair

This isnt a review, as I would be doing a gross injustice if I were to call this one..no words can completely describe Gaurav Jani,loner(His 350cc Enfield) and their 5000KM odyssey, a incredible journey of a lone biker who had set out to conquer the flats of Changthang plateau in Ladakh, but how, after two months with resplendent nature and the champa community, its not the Changthang plateau which he conquered but himself..

This chronicle starts with Delhi and leads you through a virtual tour of wilderness of one of the most remote places in India. What follows is a splendid tale of Champa community in the back drop of some stunning scenery, a confluence that will leave you spell bound. What makes it even more special is the fact that the whole thing is a one man show..Gaurav not only rode alone through the 5000KM journey but also directed, scripted, narrated and filmed the entire adventure all by himself.

Starting from Delhi, Gaurav takes the scenic route of Delhi- Manali to reach Manali then to Leh. Changthang is a plateau between the Karakoram and the Himalayan range. From Leh he travels to northen most tip of Changthang called Datta and from there along the Pangong Tso lake to Chusul. From Chusul to Rongo and then to Hanle to Chumur which is the southern most tip of Changthang and from Chumur back to Delhi to complete the journey.

Apart from the incredible beauty of above mentioned places that you get to see, Gaurav has also filmed the Hemis Festival which happens once is 12 years, Hanle prayer festival and the Chumur monastry(which has a mummified Lama and severed hands of a women who using her charm was responsible for death of 7 Lamas) all of which form a amazing footage which you dont get to see very often.

In short, its an really wonderful documentary. Its not just about Gaurav or his bike or about his incredible journey, its about the splendid beauty of Nature, its people and their lifestyle, their culture and spirituality. Its about the heaven on earth called Changthang. A must watch for all who love travel.

PS :
If god were to grant me a wish all I would ask is Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner.

Futuristic White board..

2007-02-09T10:00:00.000+05:00

I have seen electronic white boards, but this one from MIT(supposedly) is way too cool..Check it out

its amazing how a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking can help transforming a simple concept of white boards into a really powerful, interactive medium.

Speech/Voice recognition and BI

2007-02-07T09:03:00.000+05:00

We know of the integrated speech recognition in Vista, where in you can issue voice commands to get some basic tasks done. I recently came across another interesting application of speech(voice) recognition implemented at Midomi.

They have this feature where in you can sing or hum the song or rhythm of the song and their software will decipher it and make a search for users who have uploaded the same song. It also shows you the snippet of the song by original singer and you can go ahead and buy the complete song. You can see the video of how it works here.

Though the results vary depending on the tonal quality of the singer and the application isn't perfect yet(I couldn't get it to find the song I was looking for :(, but then my musical talent is as celebrated as that of Cacofonix by Gauls), but its really a interesting concept and it can be applied to provide easy interface to end users....say for example we have a BI reporting application, instead of user selecting the columns and then submitting the request, he can just issue a voice command like "Get me top 10 customers by sales" or "Show me countries where sales greater than that in India" and the application translates these to appropriate SQL and gets the results..Wonder if anyone is doing some research in this direction.

Ash-Abhi hysteria continues...

2007-02-04T15:43:00.000+05:00

IBNLive reports that Aishwarya rai on her spiritual sojourn at Benaras, Bangalore and Ayodhya with her in-laws, married a peepal tree at Benaras, a banana tree at a Bangalore temple and a god's idol in Ayodhya inorder to appease the gods and to rectify the "Dosha" thats because of presence of Mars in the 2, 4, 7, 8, and 12 houses of Ash's Kundali..

Since "will they? wont they?" questions regarding Aishwarya and Abhishek has been answered, the whole nation and understandably is now deeply concerned about the impending Ash-Abhi marriage...The question on top of everyones mind is not about disgusting human rights violation track record of Army in North east or why we are not a wee bit concerned when this "untouchability" concept takes such ugly turn almost every day, but we are riveted to know if Mangalik traits of Aishwarya jeopardize the "made-in-heaven" marital bond between Ash-Abhi.

Such is the hysteria in this country about what Ash-Abhi do that we have a site to suggest what color undergarments should Abhi were on the day of his last bachelors party(which also happens to be his 31 birthday) and we also have people like Shruti Singh who apparently has filed a PIL(public interest litigation) saying the above act of Rai is a direct violation of Article 17(what ever in the world it is) and promotes "untouchability" and violation of fundamental human rights...

If I remember correctly, this isn't the first time we have read about weired "marriages" ...we had cases of women marrying a snake, a girl marring a dog or a women being married at gun point, but I don't remember our top notch human right activist and Saviour of suppressed and repressed classes Shruti Singh doing anything, so you wonder why now?

anyways, I seriously hope Aishwarya chants "Om gan ganpate namah" regularly...With great difficulty has India come to terms with Tulsi and Mihir seperation in KKSBKBT and it cannot take another.

Sachin aala re aala..zara world cup sambhaal Australia...

2007-02-01T13:31:00.000+05:00

Talent is what you possess; genius is what possesses you goes the saying and any one who watched our master blaster's innings yesterday cannot agree more with it..watching those sexy strokes that dispatched the balls to boundaries and beyond turned back the clock of memories to days when the whole nation of billion people would come to stand still when the little master used to step on to the 22 yards. Wonder struck I asked is this the same Sachin, Hoi, ka nahi.To Sachin(yes, of course thats Sachin) came the reply.

Not long ago, people(including me to some extent) had written off the little champion saying that the old Sachin is dead and we will never again see that person who single handedly turned the Australian might to rubbles. String of injuries because of which he had to miss 11 Tests and 96 ODIs and the recent personal score card that read more like a string of binary digits rather than a cricketing score did nothing more than add fuel to this fire..

But the God of cricket had other plans for Wednesday, another avatar to take and another leela to enact and boy wasn't it a bliss to watch him. He yet again demonstrated why he is regarded as "unbowlable batsmen of this era". Such were the fireworks that like Lara, all I could do is just stand and admire. With Prince and wizard in the same team you wouldnt expect anything less.

Please welcome ....Jade "tormentor" Goody..clap clap clap

2007-01-26T21:11:00.000+05:00

Chaosrules links to this Hindu article, which reports of an open letter by department of tourism inviting Jade Goody to India. Oh lovely!, I for sure whole heartedly appreciate this move by our Indian Tourism Office.

News is that the tourism office recently had sponsored a all India survey and found a very distressing trend in India, inside sources say that the highly confidential survey report paints a grim picture for India for coming decade and warns that if proactive steps are not taken then India would face a severe shortage of people who can come up with "Racist" slur like calling SC/ST's "candidates of poor calibre" or discriminating people based on skin colour.

Grim, indeed is the situation. So as steps to mitigate this issue, Indian Tourism Office has embarked on 'EEE' mission, which in layman terms is "Education, Experience and Exposure". The tourism office, is said, will leave no stone unturned to make sure we don't face any shortage. So as a first step in this regard, it has decided to rope-in services of a foreign consultant, who can bring in wealth of experience.

After the recent Big-Brother incident the tourism office has found the right candidate in Jade Goody. Her skills in making stinging comments find no parallels. Also her recent experience working with a Indian has been a great value addition. She has shown beyond doubt that she has done her research and has a very deep understanding of Indian psyche or how else can someone know that all Indians stay in slums(of course in monkeyland), cannot speak English and all their names end in "Poppadom". How illogical can we Indians be.

As the demand for the above skills is really high these days, the tourism office has moved in quickly. Wasting no time they have written a open letter requesting Jade Goody to visit India and share her expertise with all of us. The open letter reads;

Dear Jade Goody,

Once your current commitments are over, may we invite you to experience the healing nature of India. ... As a beauty therapist, you may be especially interested in visiting one of the many spas where you can cleanse your stresses away, enjoy yoga in the land that invented it and experience Ayurvedic healing, which promotes positive health and natural beauty. ... We look forward to welcoming you soon,

yours sincerely,
India Tourism Office.

For every Indian's good luck, she has expressed her desire to come to India along with channel 4 crew. If you are wondering why channel 4 crew, some reason it out by saying, as her career is in neck-deep of shit, she and Channel 4 are planing to stage a PR stunt in order to salvage what ever they can.

But who cares, Have we ever invited Richard Gere, heck no, he speaks and does good things. Tradition has been that we only invite people like Benny Hinn and torch people like Aadhikanta Daliya and Graham Stains and the tradition still continues..... Welcome to India Jade.

Baawla hua re, Bajji Baawla hua re....

2007-01-21T00:50:00.000+05:00

Hindu reports that Harbhajan Singh was having a special session with a bio-mechanical expert during a practice session at Nagpur. Holy cow! A BIO-MECHANICAL EXPERT! to me it sounds like a person who is transported from year 2020 to present time. I am truly impressed. On one hand I am impressed at the level of sophistication that we get to see in our cricket team these days.But on the other hand it was feeling of bitter disappointment..just one expert! Looking at our teams performance in South Africa I believe there is certainly scope for more experts. I say the A Grade contract that Bajji has got should include the service of these experts as a part of compensation deal...

Rajma...that too home cooked Rajma and if you throw in some rice..hoi hoi hoi. Now Rajma and Chawal being favorite of our Bajji also, a Nutritional Biochemistry expert along with Structural Molecular Biology expert and Enzymology expert are a must. They will analyze how bajji's body will break down the rajma chawal he had eaten previous day and they will also be responsible for making sure that Bajji has all required supplements that can digest rajma and chawal in case his body enzymes fall short.

Biomaterials expert who would suggest the best shoe material so as to minimize the risk of slipping when he accidentally steps on a rotten orange which will be aimed at him by a spectator if he gets clobbered for six either by Lara or Jayasuriya or both

Computer aided Modeling and Simulations expert who can do a predictive analysis of most likely places where Bajji's ball is going to go when clobbered by West Indies or Sri Lankan batsman. This report is going to be shared with Captain Dravid and coach Greg so that they know the places where they cannot place Bajji for fielding. Last news is that Dravid and Greg are taking this matter very seriously. They are skipping their practice sessions and spending more and more time with these experts working out all possible scenarios where Bajji can be subjected to "Nagpur-rotten-orange" attack. Behavior Profiling experts and group behavior experts will also be called in to mitigate this risk.

Decision-Making-techniques experts will educate Bajji on various coin tossing and dice tossing techniques by which Bajji can decide what ball to bowl next. Experts believe if these techniques are brought into practice by Bajji it will at least bring in some logic to otherwise clueless blowing he does these days.

Deficiencies-in-Nonverbal-Language experts will help Bajji with non-verbal cues that he needs to demonstrate so as to cheat the captain into thinking that he is still confident of picking up that crucial wicket and needs to get full quota of overs.

SO inspite of all this expert guidance, running commentary will still say

Harbhajan Singh to Lara, SIX, this time Harbhajan bowls a delivery a bit wider and a bit slow,Lara who had decided to go for the sweep,but when sees the juicey ball, the elevation and the distance duly obliges by pulling it away over the ropes

....so much for BIO-MECHANICAL EXPERT.

Why do they hate me? woooaaaaa ..sob.. sob..

2007-01-19T01:05:00.000+05:00

Last couple of days have been different. When I enter the office these days, I no longer hear questions like which brand of liquor will Salman endorse in his new Devdas avatar after Ash marriage or was the visit to Varanasi temple by the big B familily a cleansing ritual for Ash after the liplock scene with Hritik in Doom 2, but these days its..what are the odds of Danielle Lloyd(of Big brother fame) calling our bollywood tinsel town "babe" Shilpa Shetty(now of big brother fame) a pig?

Its amazing how there is such a emotional upsurge in our country when a bollywood actress is involved..firstly with 24*7(almost) live coverage of Aishwarya's engagement saga. Such was the coverage that it took a personal request from big B himself to convince the camera crew to at least blur parts of footage which was shot while Abhishek was taking a leak in between the engagement and I was personally unhappy and felt let-down by the government because a national holiday was not declared on account of such a important occasion and now the whole Indian media Juggernaut is all guns against Big Brother. How dare some moron calls our babe a dog? Our babe and dog!! Maa Kasam! Woh milgaya tho, Main ~~uska koon peejaunga~~ uska koon test karake peejaunga(there goes another enlightened citizen, thanks to "Know AIDS, No AIDS campaign on Doordarshan)...

So what is this Big Brother show?

Its pretty simple contest, you hand pick a bunch of half wits, generally less than 15, lock them up in a house that has nothing that belongs to the era after Adam&Eve(no pen, pencil, mobile, music players etc..), for say couple of fortnights and film every move they make so that the rest of half-wits who were not fortunate enough to qualify can derive voyeuristic pleasure watching the film. If any participant is unable to deliver that punch(something similar to e-orgasm or i-orgasm depending on who is reading) to the viewers then he is voted out of the competition and the one left out at last wins loads of cash.

Is it sleazy? I mean is there racism and content that needs to be watched only after all at home are asleep?

you are kidding right? Who knows such things, only Sharmila Tagor(i.e. if its beamed in India). But from what I heard, the show packs in a healthy dose of sex, nudity and "borderline" pornography. Today we can add racism to this enviable list.

So why did our bollywood babe take part in spite of the reputation of the show?

With our babe's career almost over in Bollywood, she was looking for alternate way to earn her livelihood and 3 crores plus 25000 pounds, hey common you understand right, its hard to resist such things and for our babe it was good enough to shove the previous reputation aside. But I wont say that..nope its not in our culture to say such things. So here is the "Andar ki baath" as to why she accepted to participate.
there exist a organization called "Vishnu Sena" which has the whole and sole responsibility of saving and propagating Indian culture. After a high level meeting the saviors of Indian culture realized that there is very less representation from India in Briton. So they decided to send our babe to participate in this high visibility show as a representative of the Indian/Asian community. But our babe refused on the grounds of self-respect and dignity. So left with no choice Vishnu sena kidnapped babe's great great grand father and demanded that she need to take the 3 crore and participate in the contest. Rest as we all know is history.

When sick things were told against our country Why didn't our babe say anything?

Shilpa feels that she represents the Indian/Asian community and doesn't want to let them or herself down by retaliating...wow let me read that again. Look at it and we crib that our value system is breaking down. Again as we are Indians and the whole values thing that's inculcated in me is holding me back from saying; "represents the Indian/Asian community", bull shit. She does not represent me or my country, she went there to better her cash flow position.

What are the positives to come out from whole of this episode?

- As they say there is no better publicity than bad publicity..so Probably the biggest outcome of all this is our babe is going to win...Yepeeeeeeee.

- J*** T**** is a dolt with brains no bigger than the size of a pea. You hold and shake him, the sound thats produced when his brain strikes the inner wall of the skull can put even the Big Ben to shame. I personally feel Indian government need to gift him a atlas free of cost and teach him that babe is from India and India is not the same as "Paki"

- Really love the easiness with which you can vote some one out..I guess it would be a fine addition to our constitution..send a sms and give a laath to our non performing ministers

Look at this case, you have people burning effigies of housemates, PMO office and Ministry of External affairs voicing their concerns, Online petition being signed, Ofcom receiving highest number of complaints(not even Saddam's last video could achieve this fete), this issue being discussed in British parliament. But I wonder why the same billion voices which are crying for justice and equality for our babe get stubbed the moment we talk about the in numerable cases of discrimination based on cast, creed, language, sex, colour and what not that happen in our own backyard?

Data, Data, everywhere,.....

2007-01-17T15:09:00.000+05:00

(source)

"Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink."

All are familiar with those popular lines from the 1797 The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, fast forward to present time and if it were to be re-written by a business manager today it would be like...

"Data, Data, everywhere,
Not a byte that's worth."

Accenture's recent survey of US and UK based large companies seems to confirm this. The results are there for all of us to see and they unequivocally point at one thing...we are not in control of the data we generate and you might also hear business managers saying IT is not doing enough to "add value" to the business .

If you look at it, the problem is this, we have huge amount of data and we need to make sense of it. Now what makes it so very interesting is the magnitude of huge...consider this;

* Comscore captures 50 attributes for every click the user does anywhere on its 1.5 million member network, that translates to 8 TB a year.

* Walmart adds almost one billion rows daily to its already bulging 500 odd TB sales and inventory data.

* European have linked 16 telescopes and its said each generate one gigabit of data per second.

* Nielsen Media Research found that 80-100 TB of data is added annually and guess by whom, a community of 12000 households!!

Now we don't have much say in amount of data that generated, the only way we can do better in that survey next time around would be to reduce the redundancy. Quite a few methods have been proposed..

* SOA - One of the top 5 bets for 2007 according to Accenture CTO. Concept is simple, if I have my Sales and Marketing application why don't they talk to each other and share the customer data instead of each maintaining there own? That is what SOA enables, access to resources without having to know the platform/implementation details.

* Better protocols - When a packet is sent over TCP, it does lot of checks with regards to the packet and that makes it slow to transfer huge amount of data, so probably a protocol that can deliver the packet with less overhead could help.

* Duplicating data is no longer a viable solution. Transaction tables to ODS, ODS to stage, stage to DW may not be a good idea going forward. Concept like EII could be a alternative.

* SAN and NAS could act as a central repositories thus reducing duplication.

* 40% in the survey said other parts of company are not "willing" to share data. If I read this correctly, it means that the data thats generated in other departments are stored in local media and hence not accessible to others. Its more to do with policies. We need IT policies and setup that encourage sharing. They should make it as easy to save the report I generate on a centralized repository as it is to save it in my local hard disk.

* We need good search algorithms. I understand the pain to look for a document on our intranet, it simply sucks. If I needed to create a document, I prefer to create a new one instead of searching for a template on the intranet and reusing it. Thank lord we are now allowing Google to crawl our intranet.

Now say the IT team gets to implement all or more of the above and we score better in the survey next time around, now the business managers will probably say;
well we are getting good data now, but you see, the IT department in competitor's company has also implement all or more of what we have done and their managers are also able to generate same kind of "intelligence" out of data as we do, so IT investments we made are not contributing towards making that differentiation. IT is not "adding value".

And thus IT starts fresh again in this perpetual cycle, looking for that new technology which will help the business make that elusive "differentiation".

Wishing you all a very happy Sankranti/Pongal

2007-01-15T07:46:00.000+05:00

ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ತರಲಿ ತರಲಿ ಸುಖ, ಸಂತೋಷದ ಸುಗ್ಗಿ ತರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ದಿನವೂ ಧನ, ಸಂಪತ್ಟಿನ ಮಳೆ ಇರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ, ಬಾಳಲ್ಲಿ ಸಕ್ಕರೆ ಅಚ್ಚು, ಪಾಯಸದ ಸಿಹಿ ತರಲಿ
ಬರಲಿ ಬರಲಿ ಹೊಸ ವರುಷ

ಈ ಹೊಸ ವರ್ಷದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರತಿ ದಿನವೂ ಸುಖ, ಸಂತೋಷ ತುಂಬಿದ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಸಂಬ್ರಮವಾಗಿರಲಿ ಎಂದು ಹಾರೈಸುತ್ತೇವೆ. ಎಳ್ಳೂ ಮತ್ತು ಬೆಲ್ಲ ತಿಂದು, ಒಳ್ಳೇ ಮಾತು ಆಡು.

ಮತ್ತೆ ಯಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಸಂಕ್ರಾಂತಿ ಹಬ್ಬದ ಹಾರ್ಧಿಕ ಸುಭಾಶಯಗಳು.

New year and a new post...

2007-01-13T10:33:00.000+05:00

wow....its been really long time. Last time I posted Saddam was still breathing...now, he is just another chapter in annals of history. Bush must have toasted after delivering his "Id gift to the Iraqi people". But I am sure who ever watched the loathsome video of all the action that happened in Khadimiya, will have one dangling question....Is this how real men behave?

I am by no means a sympathizer of Saddam, for what he did in Halabja and Al-Anfal, if it were to me I would resurrect him and throw him to gallows again and he deserves it all. Saddam, cruelty personified, who was responsible for debasement of life in Iraq like no one else, but rest of us are no saints with halo on top. So I believe he should have had a more dignified end. Anyways he is gone and its a closed matter now..

Its a new year again and as usual with the start of new year comes the time to make resolutions and as the tradition has been, the only thing that ever changes in the "resolution list" is the year column. So I successfully rolled the year column of the list to 2007. Voila!! list for 2007 ready.

So what's going to change(hopefully) this year...

1) Planned to put my finance back in place(man I am bad at managing money)
2) By end of this year, I should be in a position to play Tamacun. I simply love the way they play.
3) Lots of travel.
4) Lots of reading planned for this year, especially Kannada literature, which is so rich and beautiful.
and yep blog regularly..

Hopefully I change more than the year column same time next year ...

Internal Blogs

2006-10-30T00:27:00.000+05:00

Recently got to know that my previous employer is now making it compulsory for employees to contribute to the company's internal blogs. I believe its probably a great decision..ask why? here are few good things blogs can do

-> I really believe blogs are really a great way to keep in touch with people with similar passion/interests across the organization.

-> When you see videos like that of Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft(as part of "Behind the Code" series hosted by Barbara Fox on there channel 9), you get to know the kind of influence, people and company can have on others. So Blogs when used properly are great tools to influence others.

->They are great tools which can act as voice of employees. Great ideas or people pissed off with company strategy/policy blogs can speak on behalf of employees

->You are a Oracle guru, then blogs can be great tools for sharing that knowledge with others. They can help in Knowledge management and brainstorming.

->Blogging is probably one of the best way to ask help

->Blogs can be great tools for project management. Here is a good article on the same subject

-> Blogs are better than E-Mail when it comes to initiating discussions on decisions that need to be taken. Say your manager has come up with a new operating model for the team, Initially putting this up on a blog makes more sense than communicating it through email because
- Blogs are more "engaging" while emails tend to just "transmit
- Anyone can comment(even anonymously) and its there for all to see and respond.
- Blog posts can be tagged to appropriate context, which makes it much more easy to archive or search.

These being just a few instances where internal blogs can contribute in positive way, there are many more Avenues of Opportunity that blogs can open, so in light of this, its really a welcome decision.

Update:

Check this Scoble post. Interesting point, he makes.

Deepavali Wishes

2006-10-22T08:42:00.000+05:00

May this festival of light add more fun, peace, sparkle, fortune and success to your lives.
Wishing you all a Happy, Joyous and safe Deepavali .

(image source)

Ray Ozzie on Open architecture and interoperability

2006-10-22T08:12:00.000+05:00

Recently Business standard had published a E-Mail interview with Ray Ozzie, the chief architect of Microsoft, who was on a "learning trip" to India. You can find the article here.

I always believed that Ray Ozzie was one of the best thing to happen to Microsoft. He is one person who understands the importance of products that encourage collaboration and networking rather than the ones which are "PC centric"(like most of Microsoft products). So with him at helm of things at Microsoft, at least one can hope and expect the much needed change in attitude. Since the time he has taken over the position of chief architect, you get to hear things which you generally do not associate with Microsoft. You get to hear more of "Open architecture" and more of "interoperability" these days. In his own words

I'm spending a significant amount of time ensuring that our products' architectures are open, interoperable and secure by design.

Also the emphasis is clear when he says..

We're embracing this change at Microsoft, shifting toward a 'services mindset' across the company. In the past year, we've launched some 20 new Windows Live services, including a very significant update to Live.com and our Windows Live Search service

sounds too good to be true isn't it? But the ground reality is still a stark contrast. Even while chief architect speaks of open architecture and interoperability, you can see Microsoft continue to wield its monopolistic iron grip to press "closed code and standard" to its users and throttle competition. You do not know what to make of this statement from Ozzie

when any company's products become successful and pervasive enough that other companies' operations depend upon them, open interoperability becomes paramount

when you know that Microsoft in there latest operating system Vista
- Is strangling third party application developers(read Symantec/McAfee) by not releasing the APIs for OS.
- Killing the hardware market by introducing ridiculous security policies(OS License is invalidated after a single upgrade)

The only way you can make sense out of Ozzie's statement and the ground reality is to redefine "Open architecture" and "interoperability" in case of Microsoft.

I was delighted to see Ray indicating shift towards 'services mindset'. If somebody were to ask me who is one of our most dreaded competitor, I would say its not the Junipers, the Huaweis' or the alcatels, but its Microsoft. They have a very healthy balance sheet, cash reserves and monopoly that they can use to severely retard the progress of people adopting "IP centric" approach(say google spreadsheets instead of excel)for their day-to-day computing needs. Ideally Steve Balmer would want all the apps that user will ever need to be provided on a Windows based PC, but such a trend would not go down well with us, as we get paid only if a IP packet moves over the network i.e. when people collaborate and share over the network. So, in light of this, Ozzie's statement sounds quite exciting.

IBM Server ad..

2006-10-08T23:19:00.000+05:00

This is a good one from IBM ..

de-stress at Wild valley farm

2006-10-04T15:46:00.000+05:00

Only through first hand experience can you really appreciate the benign effect of a concoction of clear sky, un-polluted air, a visual extravaganza of colors that’s created when a kaleidoscope of green shades merge with the vibgyor colors of the sunshine, a cappella by swaying green vegetation closing with a melodious cadenza of a distant bird chirping, breeze, cool and fast hissing a orchestra around you before whooshing away.

We happen to have a healthy dose of this concoction over the last week end, around 200KMs away from Bangalore at a place called Wild valley farm a.k.a. Daniel Farm. Left to negotiate and cope with perpetual chaos of Bangalore traffic, pollution and ubiquitous network of gadgets, day in and day out, I experienced a new definition for solitude in this wild valley, solitude from nerve-wracking symphony of horns amidst regular traffic jams. solitude from the "tech smog". solitude from blaring television. I loved every second of it.

After two last minute drop-outs, five of us, Shankar aka Shanky, Satish, Chimpoo aka Chetan :), Yogesh and myself started at around 7am on Sunday. We traveled along the Mysore road, passed Ramnagar and stopped by at MTR Shivalli for a sumptuous breakfast. I must admit, Khara Bath was really awesome. After breakfast we started for Shimsa falls.

Shivansamudra falls, it’s truly a magnificent sight to see river Shimsha, a tributary of the Cauvery, split up and make twin jumps as Gaganachukki and Bharachukki. After watching the falls to eye's content, had a photo session with the group, ate amla served with mixture of red chilli powder and salt and then started for Danny's farm.

We traveled the same route specified on the website, Shivanasamudra falls, Kollegal, lokanhalli, Odeyarpalya and then cross over to Tamil Nadu and then through Germalam to our final destination.

Daniel farm, its a lush green forest covered area spanning around 100 acres. It gets its name from Mr.Daniel who owns this farm. You really get the feel of the magnitude of 100 acres of wilderness, when you hear to Daniel saying that in close to 25 years of his stay there he has not been able to "visit" all the parts of land he owns. He has now converted close to 12 acres of that land for cultivation of vegetables, spices, maize and coffee. A small piece of flat grass covered land hosts our camps. He has setup few tents overlooking a flat land, in the middle of which there is a provision for camp fire. There is a neat kitchen/dining room around 50 meters from tents where they serve breakfast/lunch and dinner. Toilets are well maintained. There is a room for playing carom. Nets have been setup to play badminton and Volley ball.

So after five hours of nearly back-breaking journey, where Shanky behind the steering wheel was trying his best to maximize the time our car tyres are in contact with anything resembling tar on the road, otherwise most of the time it was gravel, stones, potholes or mud we were traveling on. After reaching the farm, a glass of chilled lemonade was really a welcome idea. We gulped it all. We were shown our tents and we relaxed for some time after which it was lunch time. We had a sumptuous meal. Food was great. Then we relaxed for some more time before embarking upon a 2.5 hrs trek through the forest.

The "batch" that had trekked the same route in the morning was lucky enough to be chased by a wild elephant. Shucks!! We had no such good luck. We had to be content with watching buffaloes and Oxen from neighboring town grazing. We then took a stroll of the town and happen to visit a old monument that looked like a temple...only later did Ramu, our guide, tell us that it was not a temple but grave of Gowda(head) of the town. Also he remarked that the Gowda's son looked exactly similar to me..my happiness knew no bounds. I started to dream about all those old Hindi movies where the hero was son of Surpanch who owns zillions of acres of irrigated land and was flirting around with all those gorgeous gaon ki gori(s). But this time there was a small twist, the hero who does all these macho stuff was me. As all other good things in life, my dreams did not last long. Tiredness took over and put a full stop to my dreams. I was transported back from tinsel town to stark reality. We continue to walk for some more time and reached our camp site.

Soon Night started to fall. For the first time I saw a color that matched the theoretical definition of black(its really difficult to see pitch darkness in Blore these days). Slowly moon emerged. lying on bed of green grass with a blanket of twinkling stars basking in soft white light of 3/4th moon floating above, slightly cold wind whistling around you, trust me you wont ask for heaven. Soon we had campfire burning bright. Relishing the warmth from burning wood, we chatted for long time. Later had really tasty dinner and slept. Slept like a log.

Next morning we got up early and played Volleyball, Badminton and enjoyed running around a Frisbee. Later got refreshed with a cold water bath, had breakfast, settled all our bills and started towards Bangalore. On the way to Bangalore we visited the Dhondenling Tibetan settelment in Oderyarpalya. We visited the Dzogchen Monastery. The richness of colors and design on the monastery wall paintings or the artistic richness that you get to see in the carpets hung to the monastery walls will simply amaze you. I wanted to visit his Holiness the Dalai Lama's palace and the carpet weaving center, but due to lack of time we could not make it. Probably next time.

We reached Bangalore safe and sound in the evening. All in all it was a long weekend spent well. Looking forward for more adventure and many more discoveries.

Steve wanna meet Mr. President

2006-09-25T15:29:00.000+05:00

Now I always knew that a strong co-relation exists between showing "gorked out" symptoms(read it as temporary mental impairment) and lots of Oracle and PL/SQL programming. Steve Feuerstein is all set to become "statistics" and is out to prove that. All of a sudden, one fine day, probably one of THE BEST Oracle programmer wakes up and decides to meet the President, to take his measure as a man and human being. yikes!!!(I told you about the co-relation). It does not stop there. He is also blogging about it. You can catch all the meet-the-president adventure of Steve here.

The title of the blog says "I encourage others to follow my path and request such a meeting!". For a sec, it sounded like a awesome idea..me and Kalam....Damn! that's when I decided to prepone my vacation. Looks like I need rest.

A more sensible blog from the master can be found here.

PS -
No offence meant to Steve, but I really dont get it..the meeting stuff.

Google Tech talks..

2006-09-06T15:43:00.000+05:00

Probably some of the best technology talks happen at Google and the best part is they are available for all of us to see..I came across one such called "Leveraging India As India Stands Up" by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IITM.. real cool stuff. I think this is a must watch.

Weirdest cosmology theories

2006-08-12T01:58:00.000+05:00

Newscientistspace recently has compiled a list of top ten weirdest cosmology theories. you can find it here. I love the "In the Matrix" theory..

Maybe our universe isn't real. Yale Philosopher Nick Bostrum has claimed that we are probably living inside a computer simulation. Assuming it ever becomes possible to simulate consciousness, then presumably future civilisations would try it, probably many times over. Most perceived universes would be simulated ones - so chances are we are in one of them. In that case, perhaps all those cosmological oddities such as dark matter and dark energy are simply patches, stuck on to cover up early inconsistencies in our simulation.

brought back memories of Keanu Reeves, Fishburne and Anne Moss in Wachowski triller trilogy, The Matrix. Probably one of the greatest movie concepts ever.

Lord Shiva's flying arms and legs and the swaying of his torso produce - indeed, they are - the continuous creation-destruction of the universe

I really wonder why there is no mention of our "Cosmic dance theory" of creation/distruction of Universe/life..

Teach yourself Photoshop in (2)1 days - Adnan Hajj

2006-08-08T23:06:00.000+05:00

Today TOI had this photo by Adnan Hajj of Reuters, which was found to be doctored. Do check this really interesting discussion on one of the forums about this photo

(Pic Via TOI)

TED - Touch-driven interface to computers

2006-08-08T16:39:00.000+05:00

Recently I had the "good" fortune of teaching my dad how to use a PC. I am sure, people with similar experience would agree that its really a pain to make them feel comfortable with the mouse..Which button to click to select? Which button to click for menu? Which button to click for opening/dragging/moving? questions galore..at one point it becomes so frustrating that you will trade anything for Douglas Engelbart.

So I was able to relate to the research of Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences who has implemented this new "interface-free" touch-driven interface which makes the interation with computer much more interactive, lively and fun. He spoke at TED conference about this new interface. You can watch the video here.After watching the video, I had to agree, what he did with that new screen of his is simply amazing..You can find another kind of GUI interface called "Dontclick" here..

Staying with TED talks..this is the first time they have released the video/podcast of the conference to public..The talks are so popular that the tickets are sold out a year in advance..Do check out the talk by Larry Brilliant, Sir Ken Robinson, David Pogue and Julia Sweeney here...really nice.

GNR version of Lord of Rings

2006-08-05T15:01:00.000+05:00

Take me down to the land of Mordor
Where Sauron is the king
And is hungry for the Ring
Take me to hell (Oh, won't you please take me to hell)

Just an hobbit livin' in the Shire
I'm a hard case that's tough to beat
I'm your ring bearer
So buy me mushrooms to eat
I'll carry the ring to Orodruin
and dip it in crack till it meets its doom

Obscurity to fame
Or so they say
we hobbits gotta Keep pushin' every day
for when the Ring meets its doom
fortune and fame is all we'll know
until that You know it's, it's all a gamble
just a game of us nine against the Evil

Take me down to the land of Mordor
Where Sauron is the king
And is hungry for the Ring
Take me to hell

you can find some more Alternative author's version of Lord of the Rings here.

(Link via Flastaff)

Business week - Top 100 brands for year 2006

2006-08-04T02:01:00.000+05:00

Business week has recently compiled the list of top 100 brands for year 2006 and Cisco has made it in to the top 20 league. We are in 18th position in the overall listing and we stand 5th among the IT companies behind Microsoft, IBM, Intel and HP.

18th position huh!! Though its pretty good position, But I believe we can be in top 15 or may be top 10. Also when we talk of 18th, 15th or 10th position, we are talking of two things... Familiarity and Favorability. Familiarity is how well people know about your brand and Favorability reflects how willing people are to come back for the same brand once they have known of it.

Now the obvious question to ask would be why is Cisco in 18th place and not among top 15 or top 10 brands? One reason I can think of is because we score poorly on the Familiarity front i.e. people do not "know" Cisco that well, ask them what Cisco does and you will find almost all of them tagging us as a Computer networking a.k.a. "plumbing" company. What they have failed to see or what we have failed to project is that along with plumbing we are into Internet services and software, rubbing shoulders with Google ebay etc. We are in to Computer Hardware(HP, Dell), Computer Software(microsoft), Computer peripherals, communication equipment and services(Lucent, motorola). Our products just don't cater to Enterprise segments(SONA, Unified communication) alone, but we serve the Commercial segment, The service provider segment(settop boxes from Scientific Atlanta) and the consumer segment(Linksys). Going by the no-so-latest figures, its said that there are atleast 40 million Cisco devices in the consumer segment. So though we do lot of things, we have not created the sense of "familiarity", thus resulting in not so optimal rank.

So why do I think Cisco would move within top 15 and then within top 10? Its the same reason as to why you see brands like Google and Ebay showing awesome growth in their brand values..46% and 18% respectively..Take Ebay...they don't sell products but what they sell is "ecosystems", platforms over which others can build there own applications and make money. Cisco, I believe would move up the brand ladder because they are working towards positioning Cisco not as supplier of switches or routers but as a company that supplies "Intelligent Network platforms" over which others can build there own applications and provide services.

So until pandemic like SAARS/Ebola breaks out or Al-Quida strikes heart of New York or London or the price of crude oil skyrockets to $100 a barrel and thus sending the world into another round of recession, things look bright for Cisco and yeah Cisco shares ;)

Zip a file using PL/SQL

2006-08-01T16:45:00.000+05:00

Today was quite interesting day at office. As part of the current project I am working on, today, I had a very strange request from our client. It goes like this;

we have a table, which has a BLOB column that contains a XML file(CONTAINS!!..ok.. Contains/points to a XML file). Now the requirement is, using PL/SQL I need to zip this XML file and then insert the zipped file into another table(BLOB column), after doing so I need to send this zipped XML file to a list of people by e-mail.

At the first glance it seems impossible ..but when you break it up, we have the following three tasks to be done;

1) Zip the XML file
2) Insert the zipped file to another BLOB
3) Attach the BLOB to mail and send it.

Second and third tasks atleast look doable, I was thinking of writing a trigger which will fire after insert and will attach the file and send a mail. The mail part, I am sure I will hijack a mail package from metalink :)

Now the difficult part...Zip a file using PL/SQL!! I am not sure how to do this..I looked for some Oracle package that can do this, but couldn't find one, not sure if one exist. So alternate solution could be to take care of the file compression using java and call those java functions in PL/SQL. SIMBLE isn't it?

yeah, never have I written a single line of Java code, never have called a Java function in PL/SQL and with just 15 days deadline to do it and make it work..Life can't get any better :)

Top 20 programming languages

2006-07-26T16:09:00.000+05:00

ABC, Boo, Oberon, Occam, Scala, Yorick, Shakespeare, Chef ....I thought these were some wierd words straight out of some techno/psycho babble, but was taken by surprised to know that these are programming languages.

Anyways continuing...Got to know this site called Tiobe, which intrestingly, ranks the programming languages based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors..Rankings are given out on a monthly basis. Here are the rankings for month of July..

Position July 2006	Position July 2005	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings July 2006	Delta July 2005	Status
1	2		Java	21.853%	+2.19%	A
2	1		C	17.829%	-2.02%	A
3	6		(Visual) Basic	10.689%	+4.62%	A
4	4		PHP	10.350%	+1.18%	A
5	3		C++	9.779%	-1.28%	A
6	5		Perl	5.626%	-2.20%	A
7	7		C#	3.401%	+0.26%	A
8	8		Python	3.017%	+0.49%	A
9	9		JavaScript	2.108%	+0.33%	A
10	10		Delphi	2.037%	+0.30%	A
11	12		SAS	1.746%	+0.54%	A
12	13		PL/SQL	0.956%	-0.09%	A
13	35	22 *	Visual FoxPro	0.868%	+0.60%	A
14	18		Ada	0.548%	-0.20%	B
15	15		Lisp/Scheme	0.515%	-0.46%	B
16	21		Pascal	0.511%	-0.04%	B
17	30	13 *	Ruby	0.506%	+0.20%	B
18	33	15 *	ActionScript	0.484%	+0.20%	B
19	16		VB.NET	0.477%	-0.48%	B
20	11	9 *	COBOL	0.464%	-0.93%	B

Some intresting things I noticed are;

1) I don't work with any of the top 10 languages :(

2) Perl is rated below PHP.

3) Perl rating has slipped by one rank as compared to same month in year 2005.

4) Check Ruby-on-Rails...30 to 17!!!

So Perl, once mother of scripting languages, losing out?? I am no expert, so can't comment. But many have already started to sing elegy for Perl.. you can catch up with intresting article on this topic here , also check out the various links in the article. It would be sad if that happens.

PEW Bloggers survey

2006-07-24T10:00:00.000+05:00

Recently there was a survery by PEW on blogging and bloggers and quite intresting results have emerged out of it..I found the following the most intresting.

77% of bloggers have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos online, compared with 26% of all internet users.

77% bloggers creating and sharing content!!!..if you are wondering what's so special about this piece of statistics. Check the Bradley Horowitz's "content production pyramid".

and when we relate this pyramid to the facts like, in Wikipedia "10% people create 80% of content", we really understand the importance of creators and synthesizers for the wealth they create through there content. The survey statistics hint at the fact that bloggers are not just scribbling things on the web, but by blogging there experiences they are indirectly taking up the role of creators, synthesizers and creating content which can be consumed by rest of the community.

The pyramid also speaks of creators and synthesizers being consumers themselves and the survey says;

72% of bloggers look online for news or information about politics; by contrast, just 58% of all internet users do so.

other intresting facts include, most of the bloggers love to share content and receive feedback..

87% of bloggers allow comments on their blog and 41% of bloggers say they have a blogroll or friends list on their blog.

fore more interesting facts, you can read the compete report on the survey here

Calvin and Hobbes

2006-07-21T15:49:00.000+05:00

funny thing happened today, we were discussing about Calvin & Hobbes comic strips and one of them commented saying

You see all the Calvin & Hobbes strips are written in upper case

For a min, I did not realize what he said....then it dawned upon me...Holy crap!! TRUE. I have read most of the strips, but I never ever "noticed" that all the words are in upper case. Gosh!! I must be suffering third stage of Short attention span syndrome :P

Nikon - 10.2 Megapixel DSLR

2006-07-21T13:06:00.000+05:00

Nikon have come up with a new 10.2 Meg pixel DSLR which they are planning to release in the market in about 19 days from today. So to create buzz around this new camera, Nikon's advertising team has come up with, yes another teaser ad. You can watch the ad on there homepage

Now this is a typical teaser ad..We have set of flash screens and each screen screaming virtues of the camera like More power, more control, more versatile, more excitement and by the time you reach the last screen a incomplete image of the new camera evolves in the background and the last screen simply says

"integrating quality and affordability to meet the demands of passionate photo enthusiasts"

So we can expect some more interesting details of camera to be revealed as days go by.

Now why did Nikon go for a teaser ad for its latest offering and not a big bang ad campaign involving celebrities? As far as I can think it could be because of;

1) Advertising budget constraint
2) The new offering has nothing new which will earn back the big advertising spend.

though I don't think its budget constraint...We will never know the true reason.

This is not the first time I have seen a teaser ad. We had few good one like Microsoft doing it for there origami ultra-mobile PC, Purvankara with there "magic of Venice" campaign, few ok one like the sahara group doing it for there Amby valley project and few poor one like Kajol doing it for Marie, but if you ask me, the most effective ad I have seen is the Digen Verma teaser which literally pumped life back into Frooti. I still wonder what happened to that guy.

I personally don't think Nikon ad will have the same effect as the "Digen Verma", but what ever happens I will look forward for these 19 days to pass and hopefully at the end of it I will still wear the expression of "aha" and not "ah shucks".

Steve Balmer advertising for Windows 1.0

2006-07-19T15:09:00.000+05:00

When I saw the "developer developer" stuff from Steve Balmer long back, I wondered what in the world possessed him so as to make him go berserk and run around on the stage like a hen fed to guillotine. But last week, when I saw a video of Balmer advertising for Windows 1.0, I realized that its not a acquired skill but his genetic makeup itself is as such.

Enjoy the video..

more madness..

Some more of it..

SKOAR Gaming Expo 2006

2006-07-10T15:51:00.000+05:00

Thanks to Yogesh and his cousin, who is part of editorial team of Skoar, I happen to be at the Skoar Gaming expo 2006 this week end.

This was a Dream come true :) . I had never played on a Sony PSP. cool..

Eye-Toy on a Sony Playstation. I wonder how this is different from Nintendo's Wii.

HP Stall

Multi-player Lan setup of Quake 4, brings back memories of engineering college.

Laptop zone- they were playing RoadRash on all laptops, not sure what laptop capability they were planning to demonstrate by playing RoadRash

Windows Media center stall

Intel's stall showing off there latest Dual core preocessor.

What the hell are they doing at a computer game expo?

Kid's plan to demolish school

2006-07-07T14:21:00.000+05:00

Kids hate school, especially if they are given homework on Friday. Check what this kid is out to do to her school and teachers. Really funny.

powered by ODEO

Art of Layoff

2006-07-07T12:05:00.000+05:00

One more classic Guy Kawasaki post, "The Art of the Layoff". Lot of "Food for thought" for managers, who unfortunatly are the "chosen one" for distributing the dreaded pink slips. I liked his ideas of

1) Cut deep and cut once
Makes lot of sense, the problem with "trickling" down pick slips now and then is that you will not only get rid of non-performers, but also the good performers will leave because of sense of insecurity.

2) Share the pain
In a lay off, its not always the non-performers who are thrown to the guillotine, but may good performers are shown the door too. So during downtime, its good to do your bit to cut costs so that the chances of good employees being retained increase.

3) Provide support
Very true. Layoff can wreck a person, he will be in flux regarding his social and financial security. So I guess a bit of help from others in what ever way they could, would certainly aid to tide over the difficult times.

pretty good stuff, as usual.

July Bug fest

2006-07-07T10:34:00.000+05:00

Recently I came across this blog which rants about browser bugs, tricks and hacks called Browser fun. The best part of the blog is that right now they are celebrating this month of July as "Month of Browser Bugs(MoBB)". As part of the celebration, they have decided to release one new bug present in MS Internet Explorer on every single day of july month.

I am not a techi guy when it comes to Browser technology, so was wondering..won't the "bad" guys use these exploits to there advantage..I guess blog authors have taken care of it when they say;

The hacks we publish are carefully chosen to demonstrate a concept without disclosing a direct path to remote code execution.

So 31 bugs in 31 days..pretty cool,now will MoBB change to YoBB? now when they can find 31, they can as well find 150 odd more for the rest of the days left in this year and am sure no one would be surprised if that happens.

Oracle and Asktom

2006-07-05T16:26:00.000+05:00

Today one of colleague, who has just started with Oracle programming asked for resources on web, where he can get help incase he is struck. I suggested
AskTom.oracle.com. He questioned as to why it was a good site. He was convinced, when I sent this in my reply.


Tom you are doing a great job... Excellent
My personal thanks to you, I got help several times from these pages.

But why you are not taking new question?

Regards,
Syed



Followup:

i take new questions.

ask_tom@ASKUS> select trunc(timestamp), count(*)
 2  from WWC_ASK_SUBMITTED_QUESTIONS$
 3  where timestamp >= sysdate-20
 4  group by trunc(timestamp)
 5  order by 1;

TRUNC(TIM   COUNT(*)
--------- ----------
07-JUL-04          8
09-JUL-04         18
17-JUL-04          9
18-JUL-04          2
19-JUL-04         12
24-JUL-04          9
26-JUL-04          9

7 rows selected.

he wrote a query to answer "why you are not taking new question". Thats why its such a pleasure to browse this(his) site.
1) He is precise and gets to the point directly.
2) He gives proof for every claim he makes.
3) He provides very elegant solutions to most problems related to Oracle RDBMS.
4) He comes up with amazing analogies to help break down the complexities of some concepts/issues and make it easy for everyone to understand.

All I can say is go through the site and you will know why he is one of the very best when it comes to Oracle RDBMS.

Lance Armstrong and his journey back to life

2006-07-03T15:39:00.000+05:00

Author: Lance Armstrong

Year: 2001

Publisher: Berkley Trade

Rating :

Make every obstacle an opportunity

If you are looking for some inspirational stuff to read over a week end, look no

I have read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you dont fly up the hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up the hill and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.

further than this book. Its brimming with courage, never-say-die attitude of one man who was diagnosed with triple cancer and was given 4% chance of survival and how he he took on sure death by its horns, fought against and lived to tell the story.

Its a awe-inspiring story of how when you go for the kill with all you have, every obstacle on your way becomes a opportunity. Its a story of how a person who had no hope himself, later became hope for others. Its a story of man who never gave up and showed that adversity is a entry door to better and beautiful life. Its

Cancer did not have to be a death sentence. It could be a route to a second life, an inner life, a better life.

story of a man who conquered Illness and hardships, which were all set to consume him and emerged triumph.

I asked myself why my victory has such a profound effect on people. Maybe its because illness is universal-we've all been sick, no one is immune-and so my winning the tour was a symbolic act, proof that you can not only survive after cancer, but thrive after it. Maybe, I am hope

Lance Armstrong’s life had everything, Happiness, Sadness, Tragedy, Victory, defeat and to put these kaleidoscope of intricately woven emotions in words, this book has done it extremely well. As you follow the book you will "feel" the pain when he suffers and you will feel the joy when he triumphs. Another aspect of the book that I like is the punch statements; you will find lot of them. Also there are lots of incidences that you will enjoy reading.

To conclude, this is a amazing book. Truly stuff of legends. Get one and read it, it’s worth it.

Update:
Routes and map of Tour de France are available here.

Documentary - The Lost Temples Of India

2006-06-30T16:08:00.000+05:00

Thanks to Varnam and LazyGeek, Got to see this wonderful documenatary about some of greatest temples of India, mainly the Tanjore temple,Temples of Hampi, Sri Rangam and the temples of Khajuraho. "The Lost Temples Of India" will take you back in time and try to reason out as to, how they bulit these really amazing, complex temples? How they managed, what now looks like a logistic nightmare involved in building these temples? Also the documentary puts forward a intresting viewpoint as to why most of foreign travellers when they come to India ignore the south Indian temples.

Good one, though its a bit long. Watch it.

When hell descends to earth..

2006-06-29T11:51:00.000+05:00

I am sure all of us remember the Endosulfane controversy few years back. Today one of my colleague sent this link. Its a malayalam documentary on the mayhem pesticides have created in Kasargod district, Kerala.

I happen to see this, first thing in the morning, as soon as I stepped in to my office...man it sent shivers down my spine. I would not wish such a life even for my worst enemy.

Watch this documentary of real, innocent people who are damned and are living a cursed life.

(Video from Sarany)

I wonder what is the state of affairs in this town now? I really hope the government/NGO's has pictched in to help alleviate some pain and agony of these people.

Farecast - Good example for Datamining

2006-06-28T16:08:00.000+05:00

Last month I along with friends went to Tirumala. As part of the travel plan I took the responsibility to book tickets for the trip. A dolt which I am of first grade, I blindly went to the nearest travel agent and booked the tickets. I paid 800 bucks per person. So when we boarded the bus and were having a casual chat with "neighbours", we were in for a big shock, we had paid at least 150 to 200 bucks more per person. Congratulations. Ok guys now a interesting question;

Q) How to draw cartoon of Prashant?

A)
yeah, I was the bakra. But that gave way to a interesting thought. Is there a way to find the cheapest priced ticket on any given day? Soon we were on the bus, had fun and completely forgot about that idea. But it kindled back to life today when I read about Farecast. They have found a data mining solution to the exact problem I had faced.

Farecast helps you decide if you should buy air ticket now or wait for some more time, so that you get the best deal. They have patented a Data mining algorithm which mines data of close to 50 billion price observations and fits in a predictive model. This model is then used to give suggestions to end used whether they have to buy the ticket or not. The user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. The indicators that hits the user to buy or not to buy the ticket are easy to recognise.

This is really cool stuff. This is perhaps the best example of data mining I have ever come across, probably because after the Tirumala trip I can relate myself with it .

You can know more as to how it works from this page. Also the founder of this start up, Oren Etzioni, formerly Creator of MetaCrawler(I think) has co-authored a white paper of sort called "To Buy or Not to Buy : Mining Airfare Data to minimize Ticket Purchase Price". Really cool stuff. You can get hold of it here. If you want to know more about the startup, you can find it here.

Philanthropy: fun to say, cool to do

2006-06-27T11:04:00.000+05:00

Apart from the ballot box, philanthropy presents the one opportunity the individual has to express his meaningful choice over the direction in which our society will progress.
- George G. Kirstein

Warren Buffett, the investment wizard, made his choice clear when he committed 85% of his staggering $44 Billion(value as of today) personal fortune towards philanthropy. A major pie of it will go to Bill and Melinda's Gate's foundation and rest will be distributed to other philanthropy foundations.

In a world where greed and avarice has become the cornerstone of social structure, here we have a person who simply signed a cheque with nine digit figure towards philanthropy and he does not regret it. That's seriously laudable.

Philanthropy as it is defined is being involved with basic innovations that transform society, not simply maintaining the status quo or filling basic social needs that were formerly the province of the public sector. Now who better can bring about this "basic innovation" other than Bill Gates, the software czar, who at the helm of affairs at Microsoft revolutionized computer industry. He has also decided to "hang up his boots" from his day today activities at Microsoft and get in to philanthropy full time. It can't get any better. So

Bill's brain + Melinda’s compassion + Buffett's Dollars = Work that will put the best of governments to shame.

Terrific team and enough resources in hand, I am sure Gates foundation will redefine "social responsibility"

You can catch up with news of Buffett's record breaking, single largest monitory donation in the history here and here. Also catch up with a interview with the wizard himself here. Also with pride can say that we are not far away when it comes to philanthropy, this beautiful post speaks of how Tata's are redefining "Corporate social responsibility".

Philanthropy, fun to say, cool to do. So go ahead and do your bit in making this beautiful planet a better place for all.

Winter Corp Survey - Oracle rules in VLDB space

2006-06-26T14:20:00.000+05:00

Got this from one of my friend...its relatively old, but quite interesting. Winter Crop through "Winter Crop Top ten program" studies and identifies world's largest operating databases. They have compiled the results for year 2005 in this document. Based on the finding for the year 2005 they haves released this white paper.

Some key highlights from the white paper;

1) The largest DW implementation on SQL Server is 5 times smaller when compared to one implemented on Oracle database.

2) The famous open source database MySQL does not figure in any of the categories, So does PostgreSQL, MaxDB or Ingres

3) DW have breached the 100TB mark.

4) Internet companies Yahoo and Amazon consistently figure in top 5 in almost all categories like database size, data volumes, Rows handled etc.

5) The average size of a DW is expected to increase tremendously in year 2007-08 with close to 12TB in 2005 to around 50TB in 2008. Also the average SQL queries per hour that will be fired against the database is set to leap from average 0.75 million queries per hour to more than 1.5 million queries per hour.

6) oracle has its database for almost all the popular enterprise OS.

Couple of things, I felt were a bit odd when it comes to this survey..
1) Its all Oracle
2) No trace of MySQL..

Second one is really surprising. Friendster and other companies have successfully implemented terabyte databases using MySQL and still it does not figure in the list, wonder why.

Lunch at Golconda Chimney

2006-06-23T11:24:00.000+05:00

This week my manager was in Bangalore and to celebrate this occasion(yeah..we hardly get to see him in person and when we do get lucky, like we did this week, we celebrate) we had been to this restaurant called Golconda Chimney for our team lunch and though I would share my two cents about the restaurant.

Name - Golconda Chimney

Address - 42/2 Airport Road, Whitefield, Bangalore East

Telephone # 91-80-28475532 / 6532

Offering - Multi-cuisine(North Indian, Chinese, Hydrabadi)

Rating :

Food -

We started by sipping mock tails...lots of choice is available when it comes to mock tails..We ordered Pina-colada(yep the one with out Rum :) ) and I went with a fruit punch. They served it pretty fast and in a neat "Hurricane glass". I had better Fruit punch in other places, but this was not bad, it had some punch in it.

As we sipped through our mocktails, starters arrived. We had ordered Veg platters. It was not very good and it also lacked variety in types of items served. Along with starters few guys ordered Veg Coriander soup. Again wasn't very good.

The main course was the normal North Indian dishes. It included Dal, couple of Paneer dishes, Roti's and Paratas. Rice item was Zeera rice. Again the taste was decent and nothing great.

Few guys had non-veg and got to know from them that the food was not all that great.

All-in-all an average experience when it come to food.

Ambiance -

Ambiance is decent. You have lot of open space and could be a problem if planning to have your dinner here. There is abundance of fresh air especially if you are sitting in the first floor, which made lunch more enjoyable. They have a decent garden with aesthetically manicured grass and plants. The furniture inside the restaurant is disappointing. Chairs look pretty old and are not very comfortable to sit. Music was mostly Hindi film songs and it was not very audible if you are having your lunch on the first floor.

Cost -

Golconda Chimney does not burn into your wallet. The cost is quite resonable. Our gang of 16 eating veg and non-veg costed us around 5K.

Customer Service -

Service was good and was very fast, though they some times tend to mix up the orders.

Concluding note -

Decent restaurant,but don't expect too much out of it. If you work in and around Outer ring road, you really don't have much choice either.

Flickr to open API's

2006-06-19T15:26:00.000+05:00

Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Flickr said

Re API keys for direct competitors: this is something that we've never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn't matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric's position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that "fair's fair' and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we'll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

How is that for fairplay.... It simply shows how confident Stewart is about Flickr and he is not alone :) .....Flickr rocks.

Dilbert collaborates using Cisco MeetingPlace

2006-06-16T11:44:00.000+05:00

Cisco has always believed that the network is much more that a cluster of computers talking to each other through tangled mess of cables, for it, it serves as a platform for life's experience...In this regard..recently they pulled a great PR stunt. Get Scott Adams of Dilbert fame to endorse this awesome "rich-media conferencing" solution from Cisco called Cisco MeetingPlace.

Say if you are able to seamlessly integrate voice, video and web conference capabilities using your existing IP network infrastructure then what you get is Cisco MeetingPlace. It will make remote meetings as natural and effective as a face-to-face meeting thus giving tremendous boost in terms of productivity gains and lowering cost.MeetingPlace is not a new product. It has been in Cisco's IP communication system portfolio for quite some time now.

So in this latest initiative called "Corner Cafe: Dilbert Comes to Your Desktop", approximately 90 Cisco customers and partners brainstorm with Scott Adams and watch as he developed their ideas and instant feedback into a Dilbert cartoon strip. You can watch the video of this happening here. Cool stuff right!

Poseidon

2006-06-12T15:29:00.000+05:00

I am a great sucker for adventure and action movies. Be it Frodo & Sam approaching Mount Doom to destroy the ring in Lord of the Ring or Luke taking Jedi training from none other than Yoda in The Empire Strikes or Neo's war against the virtual world in the Matrix or Arnold going berserk with his gun in Terminator.. The thought of guns firing, bombs exploding, planes crashing and ships sinking, have always excited me. man...the Adrenalin rush they bring in woooow ...

So when I heard that in "Poseidon", a ship sinks in the cold north Atlantic water and that too in first ten Min's of the movie..I said..man how cool is that..I got to watch this movie. So I did watch the movie last Saturday and the ship did sink in the first ten Min's and so did the movie. What followed was something so "Titanic" (read it as really boring). One loser bunch stays back in so called airlock chamber, which later cracks and all drown and the other bunch of people climb up , few die on the way and the restZZZZzzzzzzzzz. The End.
You really don't see the emotions, you don't see that "shock" on the face when they see a wave hundred of meters high or the "horror" when they see dead bodies floating around. They walk around like they are in a mela and yeah they do seem to get some superhuman strength to do some extremely-difficult-for-common-man feats, when they are completely under water. I wonder how? Isn't North Atlantic water suppose to be really cold?

Anyway, all is not bad....you get to see some really good special effects, that's really cool and its typical Hollywood..but had the special effects been supported by some "substance", the movie would have done really well.

So go watch it once, if you haven't. And yes, Don't forget a jumbo pack of popcorn and a big bottle of soft drink, else you will not know what to do in between :)

Finds from a future archeological dig :)

2006-06-08T10:42:00.000+05:00

Found this really amusing...Thanks to Gaurav Saxena who sent this one by mail.

Apple shuts down office in India

2006-06-07T16:12:00.000+05:00

I was reading this article in ET, which talked about the chickening-out act of Apple from India. Now why IBM and most other IT majors were able to see software talent at lot cheaper cost in India and not Apple is something worth finding out....But what I see in Apple's case is a new trend that's starting to catchup in India..Fire employees at will.

According to TOI, these were some of the statements from employees who were sacked;

On May 15, Apple officials addressed us and were highly appreciative of the workforce and the task it would execute in India. I wonder why they never said anything even then

- Employee who was sacked from Apple's software division in India.

It started off with building dreams. We were not given any warning. They just told us the operations would now head back to the US

- Employee who was sacked from Apple's software division in India.

"I wonder why they never said anything even then"
and
"They just told us the operations would now head back to the US"

hmm..I said to myself,this never used to happen in India, this is not USA! So are the golden days when you can retire in a job with out worrying about being fired coming to an end? Are the days when even if the company had to fire people(when its not performace related) they used to give them some time or even help then get a new job, over? Is Apple's case premonition for trend that we will be seen, lot more often?

Well...in my opinion, the answer is YES, the golden days when the only thing you had to worry about was getting into the company, if not over are seeing the dusk. But does that justify what Apple did? Ask me and I would say no. I am not buying into there argument of engineers here being "pricey". That's probably the most ridiculous argument. Is Apple management so short-sighted that they entered a market with out analysing the cost it would incur to hire people to run the unit or was the estimation so bad that the cost overshot the projected values by such an extent in just two months of operations that they had fire everyone and shut down the unit? Their logic really does not make sense to me..

Layoffs are bad, both for the company morale and its image, especially if its not ingrained in its policy framework. I agree that Apple has set foot at the wrong time when the software market in India is at its peak and acquiring a full time, good engineer at this point can burn deep in the wallet(its height of foolishness), but I will be surprised if Apple did not realise that before it set up its office, If Apple was not sure if revenue stream generated from its India operation could sustain these cost...it should have probably gone for other models like partnership instead of hiring full time employees or else HR could have done lot of things better, they could have signed a "differential labor contract" with employees, where its made clear to the employee that there is risk of layoff in case there revenues don't pickup or they could have gone for no layoff policy with possible pay cut if things don't improve. So by making layoff part of the company culture they could have made things lot less painful. Its not reported that Apple did any of these. That's really sad.

anyway many of the 30 sacked employees have joined there former employers, that's good, hopefully rest of them should do as good, MARKET IS HOT :)

Duke Nukem - Third person shooter that rocks

2006-05-31T00:07:00.000+05:00

Yesterday after office, I happen to "dust" my comp's Hard disk...it had been long time and close to 100GB of "dust" had accumulated..while doing so, I found a zipped folder and the name was "Duke Nukem". Holy crap! I had full version of "Duke" installable and I never knew about it.

I have played quite few games(its reduced drastically since a year or year and a half), Max Payne, Half Life, Colin McRalley, NFS, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein etc which are technically more advanced and have better graphics, but still "Duke' doesn't fail to enchant me. Be the gravel tone of Duke when he says "I hate pigs" or the way you go bang bang against the pigs and rescue this sizzling hot digital babe from "Glopp Bombs", the charm of this "third person shooter" still captivates.

So sending a un-maskable interupt to all the jobs I was doing and planning to do, went ahead with installation of this game. Click, click and finish. Game installed successfully. Let the FUN TIME begin..POW, Biff, Bang, Bang, Bang..one thing is clear..Duke Nukem still ROCKS :)

My best part of the game? I was not able to play much, but from whatever I have played, the best part should be rescuing this hot babe ;) ..

so here we go...

After the first successful rescue operation....cool..TWO MORE "NUKES"!! :) ..

"I love you ~~Prashant~~ Duke, You are my hero"(Shucks! reel life :( . When will this happen in real life)

woooo...BABY, thats some pose

All in all, a great third person shooter... go for it..It may not scale up to the level of Half Life's or the Commando's, but it will sure leave you yearning for more.

Reservation for OBC - Cartoons.

2006-05-29T07:22:00.000+05:00

When reservation for OBC was announced, It faced stiff opposition from people. Emotions ran high, people protested vehemently against it. While the medicos and engineers took to the streets to protest, there was another kind of propaganda happening against the reservation and it was in the form of electronic mail. So here are few of cartoons and pictures that were widely circulated...do leave a comment if you have seen more.

McDonald's ad

2006-05-27T14:25:00.000+05:00

Just opened, near Kimaya Kothrud.I'm lovin' it.

Credits: Leo Burnett, New Delhi; Copywriter: Rondeep Gogoi, Art: Sumonto Ghosh, Illustrator: Sumonto Ghosh

This is a real gross one ...I am not sure what they were trying to portray, but it sucks big time. I really don't get the point....do such a gross "paintwork" on such a sweet little child to sell their clown!!, instead they could have published the photo of the art director who came up with this idea, I am sure he/she will make a better and natural clown. If the art director thinks he/she is the reincarnation of David Ogilvy, and whatever he/she has done is epitome of artistic creativity, I would say, sorry buddy, this is one little creepy,sad and sick thing you have done.

(Source of the pic Adsoftheworld)

SQL Developer - Six features which I think are really cool

2006-05-25T17:02:00.000+05:00

For a backend database developer, the GUI tool used for database development makes the difference if development experience is good or frustrating.

I have been using Toad, PL/SQL developer for some time now. So when Oracle released production version of SQL Developer, I thought let me dirty my hands with it. Even though I haven’t explored the whole gamut of options that it provides, here are the few things that I felt are good in the tool;

1) Its Free.
One thing I dread professionally and pray it never happens is, the organization I work for, decides to stop using Toad. After working on it for couple of year now, I have become so much dependent on GUI that if I was asked to write a create table query in SQL* Plus, I take shelter of Google to lookup for syntax. So Oracle's declaration that this tool will be available free of cost is a welcome statement.

2) Reporting infrastructure
SQL developer has pre-built reports, close to 70 of them, which can report on various important event/statistics of database objects.

3) Snippets, Reports and Right click context menus which can be fully customized.
Its not uncommon for database developers to have their own repository (excel, Word) of snippet collection for a quick reference when memory lapse occurs. Now not only SQL Developer has integrated this "snippet concept" in to the tool, but also has given the user the ability to add his own snippets to the list by writing few lines of XML code.
Same with the reports, you can extend the existing reports or go ahead and create, save and share your own reports. Also contents of right click context menu can be customized depending on what you want to see. Cool right!

4) Extension and plug-in.
I believe this is the best part of the whole tool. Why? Look at Firefox, one of the biggest reason why IE was not able to beat it browser market was because Firefox was always one step ahead of IE, thanks to plug-ins.
So SQL Developer can archive same success because you can write extensions and plug-ins to extend the functionality of the tool as per your requirement. Awesome.
Already two of the plug-ins are under development and you can check them out here and here.

5) Drag the object into the SQL worksheet and it will write the select statement.
As a developer, the query which is written most often is the "Select" statement on a table or a view or a materialized view. Now SQL developer anoints that grief by providing a feature where in if you drag and drop a object into the work sheet, the tool will write the select statement by itself.

6) Multiple platform support.
One problem I always faced was, I had to switch to SQL* plus when working on UNIX. Now SQL Developer is supported on various platforms, so even when you are on Linux, UNIX or Mac, SQL developer works for you.

Software piracy decreases. Is it good news?

2006-05-25T07:20:00.000+05:00

Economic Times has this article on the recent figures of Software piracy in India and elsewhere. Figures look very encouraging indeed. Software piracy rate stands at 72% in India, a drop in 2% over the previous year though the monetary losses due to piracy stand at $566 m, higher than what seen in the previous year.

So less of piracy implies more of software jobs, more taxes and good economic growth, I guess Software industry is all set to uncork and pop open the champagne as the piracy rates show south bound trend.

But isn’t this just one side of the argument...I would ask;
1) Would India be a software powerhouse as it is today, if piracy had been curtailed to half the level it is today?
2) Would it not affect the economy of the country adversely, if piracy in general is reduced to zero?

High piracy rates in India have done one thing...it have given every budding software engineer access to rich development tools at a very early stage, probably when they are studying or early part of there career. One reason for flourishing software industry in India is the availability of people with good software engineering foundation. Will it not be a fair argument to say that piracy has aided in laying this foundation.
Saying goes as "there are more pirated Windows OS on desktops than genuine free Linux". Now availability of a pirated Windows OS at dirt cheap price has made it that much more easier for people to connect to different people, exchange ideas, explore/learn/master new technologies and best practices, which in a way has contributed to the software industry to flourish.

Saying about China goes as "If we can make it Chinese can fake it". Piracy in China is known to be at legendary proportions (when compared to India). Piracy here is not restricted to software or music cd's, DVD’s etc. but it extends to products as well....Now what has this done to China....it has made cheap goods available to local population, as its pirated, the cost of goods are less and thus have kept the inflation of the country low, which in turn has helped the economy. It has helped generate employment for local population. Going by unofficial figures, 1/3rd of Chinese GDP is driven by these counterfeit products.

So does that imply, we need to support piracy? Well no, rampant piracy is also a bad idea. Research says;
- the more the piracy the more crippling effect it has on your local software industry.
- The more the piracy, the greater will be the loss to the exchequer in terms of tax revenue loss.
- The more the piracy, it makes genuine software that much more costly and thus this extra burden percolates to other areas which use these software thus making the end products that much more costly.
- For every 10% increase in average worldwide piracy rate, close to 1 million jobs could be lost and it could cost close to $400 billion.

So piracy is kind of necessary evil. Too much of it, you sink and too less of it also will hurt.

The flying circus of Physics

2006-05-24T23:11:00.000+05:00

Author: Jearl Walker

Year: 1977(First Edition)

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Rating :

If you think Physics in not fun, you will reconsider that statement after reading this book. Once in a while you fumble upon a book which you instantly grab your attention. I had a similar experience with this book.

In the book, Jearl Walker enunciates a day-to-day situation and then at the end of it will tease you with a brillant question and then will challange you to explain the physics behind it.

Here are a few good one from the book....

say you are writing on a black board with a piece of chalk and then suddenly you hear a sqealing sound. Now what produces that sound and does it matter how you hold the chalk?

Does the timining of adding sugar or milk or cream effect the time tea takes to cooldown and what is the effect of adding a plastic or steel sppon to it?

and the best according to me....

If all Chinese(soon Indians will also qualify for this elite club) were to jump simutaneously from a height of 6ft, it can send shock waves strong enough to destroy part of USA by causing earthquakes. So if China has to develop this "geopolitical" wepon, what should be the frequency of the jump and does is matter if all the Chinese have to have stiff knees while jumping?

So if you are even wee bit intrested in Physics, then this book is a must read. I would say buy it, its worth it.

Monday morning blues on Dalal street

2006-05-23T10:05:00.000+05:00

kisi ka chutta, kisi ki daulat,
kisi ka sari zindagi ki kamayi
yahaan pe zindagi ki har khushi,
Bonds ya Infy ka share,
hey Sensex down, down......
hey sensex down, down......

with it, Mai be down, down....

Quota quotes

2006-05-22T16:25:00.000+05:00

Yesterday I happen to see "Devil's advocate" on CNN-IBN, where Karan Thapar grilled HRD minister Arjun Singh. If you have missed the program, you can catch up with the text format of the interview here and video here.

As the interview progressed it was clear that the honorable minister is one person who has absolutely no clue what so ever as to what he is doing. Our minister does not know;

1) How reservation would help OBC's gain greater access to higher education.
2) What percentage of the population (i.e. percentage of OBC in overall population) would benefit from the reservation?
3) If reservation do happen, our minister is yet to "pick up a chit" to decide the figure for the percentage of reservation.
4) What would be the method to compensate Non-OBC candidates?

Now check this out.. honorable minister says;

-The case for reservation will be decided by the parliament.
-The percentage of the reservation to be given to OBC will be decided by the parliament.
-How to compensate non-obc, non-sc/st casts for the loss of seats due to reservation will be decided by the parliament.
-Also the solutions to address the issues that come as sequel of extending the reservations to OBC's will be decided by the parliament.
-Now if there is consensus on increasing the seats, then whether the increase will happen in one shot or it will happen over time will be decided by the parliament.
-If increasing of seats does not come through then the other methods of compensation will also be decided by the parliament.

I ask, if every aspect of this burning issue is decided by the Parliament, what will our honorable minister do? Now your guess will be as good as mine.

Update :
Medicos of Ahmedabad medical colleges staged mock operation on Arjun Singh - The idea was to study his brain !!

But they found it missing :)

Bangalore University and the "Syndicate" Rekha

2006-05-21T08:43:00.000+05:00

Saying goes as "History always repeats". Around 5000-6000 BC, Lakshmana in Mahabharat drew the famous "Lakshman" rekha to ward off any evil from hurting Sita(Read it as to prevent Ravana from "brutally attacking" women(sita)).Today Lakshman has reincarnated as our "Syndicate" and decided to re-draw the same kind of line, though christened diffently, lets call it the "syndicate rekha".

So what prompted this heavyweight decision? Well there was a sad incident of few lumpish, cerebrally-challenged, disgraceful jerks, who decided to show there non-existent virility by attacking few women in English department of Bangalore university. So as a "proactive" measure, our top brains at the syndicate, to prevent further such grievous attacks have made this collective decision of segregating students based on sex.

Now though I don't support the decision, what I won't do in this post is bawl about it, you will find umpteen number of blog that are better than me in doing it. When I read about this decision couple of days back..I could see the stage of clear helplessness the University is in. On one hand it is fighting a loosing battle to rectify its battered image and on other hand its plagued with problems like dwindling number of students, corruption and to add to the woes, now this incident...so this decision comes as a desperate measure to save already battered image of the university from taking further beating.

I am not sure, how segregating the students based on sex in the class room really be a panacea for the issue. I would be eager to hear the justification from the syndicate. I believe the root of the problem is that there is no proper "working" redressal system at the university for ladies, at least I did not hear of one when I was studying. It’s hard to believe that few thugs attacked women all of sudden, there must have been earlier incidents of incitation, probably like whistling or slight. Had the redressal system been good the issues would have been "nipped at the bud" and thus preventing it to reach this stage. Also I guess our primary and secondary education system should try a bit harder to instill in men, values like respect towards women :)… that would solve most of the issues.

Also for heaven sake, I wish top brass of the Bangalore university stops calling it self "Syndicate"...man the word brings back memories of Sicilian Mafia and Marlon Brando(what a actor!!) as Don Vito Corleone(what a role!!). As a parting imponderable...any idea why don’t they call themselves as "Association" or "consortium" or heck any thing other than "Syndicate"?

Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life

2006-05-20T16:02:00.001+05:00

Book Review* - Imponderables: The Solution to the Mysteries of Everyday Life

Author: David Feldman

Year: 2004

Publisher: HarperCollins

Rating :

This was pending for long time and the mohurat to read this came today because I did not get tickets to any good movie in PVR and parents refused to go out anywhere. So stranded at home, I randomly picked this book from the huge backlog of to-be-read books.

now how many time have you passed by doors that have the sign "ALL MAJOR CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED", but have you any time pondered if there exists a "NON-MAJOR" or "MINOR" credit card? Personally I had never done it. But David Feldman has done exactly that in this book, ask some really common questions plagueing us in our daily lives and he does not stop there, he goes further and finds not-so-common answers to these, so called, little mystries of modern life.

The book tries to answer some very intresting questions like Why is the right-hand side of a book always odd-numbered? or Why do people look up when thinking? or Why is film measured in millimeters rather than inches? or Why is the NBA shot clock 24 seconds? and some real good ones like Why do Corn Flakes and Sugar Frosted Flakes have the same number of calories per serving? or Why don’t we ever see baby pigeons? or Why do women open their mouths when applying mascara?

Though you will not be satisfied by the answers to all of the imponderables, but will be a good read over a weekend when you lazing at home and have nothing to do.

*All opinions about the book are mine

Cisco rendezvous with Dilbert

2006-05-19T10:37:00.000+05:00

Code madness

2006-05-18T16:41:00.000+05:00

I happen to flip through couple of papers online while I was in office and what do I see, I see Da Vinci Code everywhere. I see it here, here, here, here and here. Damn what’s wrong with us..

Hindu's are angry with screening of Water, Fire. Hindu community is agitated over the fact that, in the Movie Fire, characters in lesbian relationship have the names Sita and Radha. Muslim community is not happy with a Muslim girl marrying a Hindu boy in Bombay. The din that was created on filming of Hey Ram and now Christian community is gung ho on banning the Da Vinci Code because it portrays Magdalene as wife of Jesus....

Common guys, what in the world is wrong with us. Can't some amount of fiction sink down our throat? Now I am seriously wondering is the Movie medium so effective that all communities are ready to do anything to stop something that does not comply to there belief, being shown in the movie? I am really curious to know. I am curious to know, are our beliefs so weak that if something contrasting is shown or told to us, we all will simply agree to it and start following it, if not, why all this madness?

Blog Design change..

2006-05-15T07:34:00.000+05:00

I guess the trek seem to have more side effects than I had expected. After I came back on Sunday night, I am not sure why but I suddenly had this urge to change the design/look and feel of my blog. CRAZY. yeah..I guess after long treks its common for neural imbalance to set in. The idea was to achieve the following;

1) To remove the "about the blog" section from the side bar
2) To add word of the day and thought of the day somewhere in the blog.

and the confessions could not have been far

1) I have NEVER EVER done any serious HTML programming before in my life.
2) My expertise in HTML does not go beyond the fact that I know HTML is an acronym for "Hyper Text Markup Language".

So with out thinking about the consequences, me like a brainless twat went ahead and changed the template code. Not that it turned out be a disaster, actually the blog looks more pleasant than I had expected it will turn out to be. So far so good.

Removing the "about the blog" section was quite easy, just flush couple of lines from the template code and its done.
Now the I was not sure how to go about adding word of the day and thought of the day. The first question was where to place these? My side bar has too many things already, so adding these to the side bar would make things worse...I had to scroll for eons to get to my word of the day, not a good experience. So the only place probably it would be good enough would be below the blog title. So went ahead added code to create a table of two columns below the blog title, added the java scripts to create the column content. Changed the border and background colours, so that its camouflaged, changed the font size and hit the preview button....voila...we had the word and though below the blog title. On my mozilla things looked great...

But when I tried it in IE 6.0 things were not quite the same..

I am not sure why this is happening. Considering my expertise in HTML, I guess it will take time for me to figure it out. I may not have achieved what I set out for, but this has kindled couple of questions in me..

1) What is the general process that web application developers follow so that they make there site compatible with myriad number of browsers available.
2) Is it common that 2 different browsers interpret the same code in two different ways? If so arent there any standards for browsers?

Any HTML aces who know the answers?

Weekend adventure - Trek to Brahmagiri

2006-05-12T06:40:00.000+05:00

I am off to Brahmagiri for a trek, over the weekend, so will not be blogging for the next two days.

Brahmagiri -
1607 m, approx. 270 kms from Bangalore, located in south Kodagu. There is a sacred spot called Irupu the start point to the Brahmagiri range of hills. River Lakshmana-tirtha flows nearby. Legend says that Rama and Lakshmana, warrior Gods, passed this way while searching for Rama's concert, Sita. Rama asked Lakshmana to fetch some drinking water for him. Lakshmana shot an arrow into the Brahmagiri hills and brought into being river Lakshmanatirtha, the sanctuary shares with Wynad wildlife sanctuary on its south and Nagarhole national park on its west. This sanctuary is famous for tigers, elephants and India gaur.

Plan is to hike to the Brahmagiri peak and then go to Irupu falls and be in Bangalore either on Sunday or monday. This sounds to be great fun. Will post details once I am back. So all you guys have a scintillating and a crazy week end.

Gmail - How good is the spam filter?

2006-05-11T14:19:00.000+05:00

I have been using my Gmail account for close to 2 years now and for the first time today, I happen to have a "false positive" in my Gmail account. A legitimate mail from my trekking acquaintance was tagged as "Spam" and shoved into "Spam" folder.

I am quite impressed by Google's spam filter tool. For more than 700 days I have been using Gmail, it has done its job to perfection of filtering mails which contain profound How-to guides to expand or shrink size of private parts of body, highly educative information like how to get cheap credit or how to get software without paying for it, day today general knowledge oriented info like the latest price of Viagra, Valium, Cialis etc. man it sounds as though life would seriously be dull without these.

now this incident triggered a thought as to how other spam filters perform as against Gmail. Luckily Danny Sullivan of Daggle has done all the hard work and have compared the spam fighting capability of 3 spam filter services Yahoo, Gmail and Spamcop and compiled this report.

The report looks interesting..Yahoo with 5% false match percentage..hmm..thats not very good when compared to Google's impressive 0% and spamcop's 0.2%. Also the number of spam messages caught by Gmail and spamcop is lot more than that of Yahoo. Probably one metric that I believe would be nice to have in the report would be "number of mails which were spam but were not tagged as spam by the spam filter". Can we get that metric from the data given? I guess no. If someone can..I admit now itself, I am bad when it comes to logic and math :)

As a parting thought, if I write, say Viagra - $10 in Mspaint and save it as image and then add this image to body of the mail, is the spam filter technologically advanced enough to read the image and tag it as spam? Something similar to what Riya does with photos. Probably will try when I will have lots of time to kill.

Google - where does it want to go tomorrow?

2006-05-10T16:53:00.000+05:00

chaosrules, in his blog, speaks of the new ketchup cooked up by Google, Sketch up, which happens to be a new 3D modeling tool acquired from @Last Software. Following the link to tool, my first reaction was, you must be kidding. Google and another mainstream desktop software application...wow.

So my immediate question was...what in the world has a 3D modeling tool got anything to do with Google and why the heck did it buy it...I did not see the connection until I read this..

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you've built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.

Now things made sense..lot of sense..think of it..if each user made model of his street or block and puts it on Google Earth, what a resource it would turn out to be for Google and this for just the investment on the tool. I say its a smart move.

Sketch up is the latest toy which Google has bought. On Digg, one user had the following to say..

At this rate they’ll be buying McDonalds next year

This broadly sums up the acquisition overdrive we are currently seeing at Google. Add to this recent rumours of Google WiFi service, Google "Dark-Fiber" network based broad band service, Google OS based on Ubuntu, Google office (Writely + openoffice), Google GDrive and now a free 3D tool! I am not sure what to make out of all this.This one really got me into thinking, what exactly is Google's strategy and where exactly is Google headed?

one explanation could be, Google strategy is three-fold. One aimed towards browser side of market, second the Desktop side and the third aimed at mobile devices. Google, I guess,has plans(or already developed) to develop tools for all 3 sides of the market and then slowly provide a seamless integration between Web,desktop and Mobile tools.

For example take text documents...Google has recently announced partnership with Sun to "promote and enhance" OpenOffice.org, If you read between lines, It clearly says, don't be surprised if you see Google releasing desktop side office tools to create/edit/share text docs similar to MS Office suite. Also Google recently acquired Writely, which, shall we say coincidentally happens to be a web service to create/edit/share text documents including MS Word documents.
So aren't we seeing the wall between the desktop and web browser being breached? I guess this trend will not be restricted to just text documents, but will be spread to all types of files you create, be it music, images etc..
So the bigger picture will be something similar to this, Google will provide Desktop tools to create/edit files and then you can edit these on the web with another set of tools and then place them in a universally shared drive to be accessed from anywhere under the sun.
The next stage of progression would be to develop tools for your mobile devices, which will give us the ability to access the files (present either on the web, your PC or on the universally shared disk drive), share these files, edit these files and save them back, all this done on your mobile device. With Google's acquisition of Reqwireless, Inc, Zipdash, Dodgeball and Android, it wont be long before these mobile tools will start to pop up.

So I think creating synergy between desktop, web and mobile tools will be mantra for Google going forward, probably build "Google Live" on lines of Microsoft Live, probably at a grander scale. what do you say?

Update:
I missed out on Google Health in the "recent rumours" paragraph :)

Pakistan - An albatross around India's neck?

2006-05-08T06:15:00.000+05:00

Fund for peace has announced the Failed States Index (FSI) for the year 2006.

Based on "tens of thousands of articles" from different sources gathered over several months and reviewed by experts, every nation for which data is available, is scored on following 12 criteria

* I 1 - Mounting Demographic Pressures
* I 2 - Massive Movement of Refugees and IDPs
* I 3 - Legacy of Vengeance - Seeking Group Grievance
* I 4 - Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
* I 5 - Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines
* I 6 - Sharp and/or Severe Economic Decline
* I 7 - Criminalization or Delegitimization of the State
* I 8 - Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
* I 9 - Widespread Violation of Human Rights
* I 10 - Security Apparatus as "State within a State"
* I 11 - Rise of Factionalized Elites
* I 12 - Intervention of Other States or External Actors

based on how they fair across the 12 indicators, nations secure a rank and a list of all nations ranked as above is "Failed States Index". Failing to act appropriately to contain/mitigate common political, social or economical issues will show up as high scores against there corresponding indicators, which in turn will push the nation up in the rank list.

A quick glance at the list and we will see that India as a country has done well, catapulting itself from 76th position in 2005 to 93 in 2006. Thanks to the consistent economic reforms which has resulted in economic growth, abated human rights violation, democratic processes etc. So far so good. The only worrisome fact is the performance of our neighbours. All except China fall under "Failed states" category. Even more worrisome is the fact that Pakistan's rank has deteriorated severely, It has moved from being 34 in 2005 to 9 in 2006.

So you ask why do we have to worry for Pakistan performance? Well, Its in our own interest to have a economically and politically stable neighbour. Look what happened when a feud broke between eastern and western regions of Pakistan when Awami League Party was elected in early seventies. Thousands of Pakistani refugees poured into India. This is not a isolated case,Urdu speaking Biharis in Bangladesh during the post-independence time..because of turmoil in the country a feeling of insecurity and discrimination arouse among them because of which close to a lakh of them moved across the International border to seek refuge in various states of India. So indirectly India bleeds when its neighbours strangle themselves.

Also economically weak Pakistan will be a breeding haven for Kashmir separatist groups. It more likely for person who is jobless, living in abysmally poor conditions to pick up arms than a successfully employed youth. So economically strong Pakistan is more likely to lessen the tension across our borders than a weak Pakistan.

Pakistan imports close to $12 billion worth goods and India's contributions is meager few million. So a huge opportunity to pep up the trade is present, which can only be harnessed by India only if we solve issues between us and Pakistan continues to do well economically.

Everyone is aware of Pakistan's precarious role in drug trafficking industry and a economically weak Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. This could be severely detrimental to India's health in long run.

So though India has a long way to go before it is anyway close to Norway(Rank 146) or Sweden (Rank 145), I guess we need to take inspiration from the good performance we have put up and strive for better. Also surrounded by "failed states" is certainly cause of concern and something we need to keep a tab on.

Thermodynamics and what it teaches us about life

2006-05-07T14:02:00.000+05:00

TOI reports that another grad student at the reputed IIT Kanpur has taken his life for not doing well in his courses..

IITK officials say;

the student might have taken the extreme step as he was severely depressed after coming to know that he had failed in two courses advanced thermodynamics and advanced fluid-mechanics

I say what the f**k ...I ask why such a dastardly attitude towards life and take your life, for what! for failing in couple of f**king courses. This makes me feel sick. This evokes more of feel of disgust than pity for him.

I guess we as a society have to take the blame. We have reduced education to a mere process of rote and vomit with a aim to get 100 marks and anything less being intolerable and good enough reason to send you to dungeon. In this process we have squeezed out all the fun out of it, we are merely learning skills to survive, when we actually were suppose to have learnt skills to LIVE.

Our (anti)hero was studying advanced thermodynamics...I seriously don't know what was he taught or what he understood in thermodynamics...look at the basic laws of Thermodynamics, do they just speak about heat,temperature,entropy...I say no, they speak lot more than those abstract concepts..for example

the first law..

The increase in the energy of a closed system is equal to the amount of energy added to the system by heating, minus the amount lost in the form of work done by the system on its surroundings.

does this law just speak of energy and matter conservation...no, to me it tells more..it says, buddy it never happens that you get something by doing nothing because matter and energy need to be conserved. So if the "results" are not as per your expectation, it only implies the "inputs" lacked the vigour and quality, this is something that can be rectified anytime provided you are alive.

The second law..

The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.

It simply says, given that you are at a energy state and go through a process,then you cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder or entropy always increases. So when applied it to life it simply says that "failing" is just another "state" in a process and if you take the right inputs after failing and continue in the process there is no way anyone can return to the same state(fail again) again.

Third law...

As a system approaches absolute zero of temperature all processes cease and the entropy of the system approaches a minimum value or zero for the case of a perfect crystalline substance.

In short it says, the disorderliness is impossible to escape as it is possible to so only when you can reach zero temperature and it is impossible to reach absolute zero in finite number of steps. So the way of life is to have highs and lows(disorderliness) and fun is to live through them like all ir-reversible processes and not chicken out.

so for Shailesh Sharma, why did laws of thermodynamics remain mere sen tenses connecting abstract concepts? why did Shailesh Sharma, who was one among the elite cadre of budding engineers, fail to see the bigger picture of life? Who was responsible for tying the bridle with flaps to his head and preventing him from seeing the bigger picture? Was it the education system or was it the grading system or was it us, the society?.....questions galore..I have answers to none...But one thing I would say is what ever he did is one sick thing..

Ipod - New audio navigation

2006-05-07T09:58:00.000+05:00

If you think speaking over the phone while you are driving your 4-wheeler or 2-wheeler is good enough recipe for disaster wanting to happen....you haven't tried changing a song on your ipod...with one hand on steering wheel, the other on ipod scrolling wheel, one eye on the road and the other on the ipod screen, you believe you are good at doing this balancing act, but not long when..POW..CRASH..CRUNCH..you have rammed into someone.

So to mitigate this to certain extent, Apple has a new patent for a process of voice tagging each song, genre, artist etc on your ipod. So the next time you are hunting for your favorite song while driving, as you scroll through the menus,ipod will announce the options on the menu you are currently on, so that you will always have both the eyes on the road.

Simple and ingenious isn't it?

Google Homepage - New UI standard?

2006-05-06T20:21:00.000+05:00

The other day I was listing to podcast of discussion between Tony Conard, Toni Schneider and Mike. Tony Conard is the CEO of Sphere, which a new blog search engine and Toni Schneider is its advisor. Mike was the anchorperson. At one time, the discussion went into the UI design of Sphere homepage and this is what Tony Conard and Toni Schneider had to say;

Tony Conard and Toni Schneider-
early on we had a number and that was 28 and that was the no of words happen to be on Google Homepage(on that day) and our goal was to make sure we are 27 or less(on homepage of Sphere)

if you go to google it is very clear you have to put something in the white box and if you don't put something in the white box that site doesn't do a lot for you and we want to create a environment in which people came and it was very simple wordings indicating to them what it is we need them to do and we need them to put in a word there and then we can help them to find really great stuff along there interest

Mike -
how many words do you have on your home page

Tony Conard and Toni Schneider-
you know I counted the other day I think we are up to 35
hey I have good news..Google was up to 41

Good lord..I am all aware that Google interface is extremely elegant, but was not aware that Google homepage design is elevated to such a cult status that people have started to compare the number of words on there home page to that of Google's to decide if its good enough. Well Andy Rutledge does not seem to share the same enthusiasm about the Google homepage and he for sure has a comment or two to make.

Sphere - New blog search engine

2006-05-06T18:20:00.000+05:00

Happen to check out Sphere today. It looks really cool.

"Sphere it!" ...this is really cool.. Also the first thing that stikes is the simplicity of the UI. It is lot less cluttered than the Technorati and Feedster

I can restrict the blogs based on time..

Search results grouped into three categories...I can also see the profile of the blogger appearing in the search results.

Graphical UI for setting up custom date range to filter the search results..

I can order the results by relavency or time.

Search results include rich metadata about the blog including the average number of posts, length of post and average links to the post. These would certaintly help me to make a rough guess if the post is authentic

In "related media" section I get to see other types of media(photos, books, podcasts ad news) matching my search criteria

Start your own wordpress or typepad blog without leaving the search page..

All in all, it looks real neat and the search results come out real quick. One thing that need to be checked is the relevancy of the results as compared to Technorati. Theoretically it is said that Sphere's ranking alogorithm is superior to that of Technorati's as the former uses lot of other factors other than just the number of people linking to the blog, to decide the popularity of the blog and to weed out spam blogs. Also news is that, like Technorati, Sphere also does not crawl and index myspace blogs :( .

So Sphere looks good with lot of new features. Now how much of a competition is it to Technorati is to be seen.

high oil prices +no USA intervention = IT slowdown

2006-05-04T15:20:00.000+05:00

Iranian deputy oil minister Hadi-Mohammad Nejad-Hosseinian recently foreboded that the price for a barrel of oil may hit $100. Now why honourable minister chose Delhi to transfigure himself to become Nostradamus is secondary thing, but the bigger question is, if minister's premonitions were to come true then are we again likely looking down on another round of slowdown in 2007-2008, like the one we have seen in 1990-91?

If we happen to look back in time,we can see three time frames 1973-74, 1979-80 and 1990-91 when the economies of many countries plummeted severely and one thing common during these chunks of time was the sky piercing price of crude oil as we have today, so is the history repeating again and if so whats the impact of it on IT sector in Bangalore?

Well...difficult to say if history will repeat. TOI had a good article on rising oil prices and how USA would make the difference between slowdown and no-slowdown. It said, if USA flexes it muscle power and use its influence to convince the "friendly"(read it as non Iran) OPEC countries to increase there daily quota of oil production things will get better. Also it said, things will be better if USA could quickly make amends to the things it badly screwed up in Iraq and get Oil flowing from Iraq.

Now how will all of this affect IT sector? it does and it does indirectly, the moment your crude increases, the cost of basic materials cement, Iron, Copper etc. shoot up..once they go up, they drag the prices of other commodity along with them, now as a country cannot print more money just like that, the number of commodities that can be bought per rupee decreases, in hi-fi terms we say "Inflation" has set in. So because of Inflation, demand plummets and as demand decreases and raw material prices increases, the inventory with a company increases and operating cost increase, margins and profits take southbound direction. With less cash in hand, companies don't have money to invest in new initiatives like Information Technology, with less investment in IT, less jobs get created and many existing jobs get "pink-slipped". Yeah continuing high crude prices would be like boarding pass for IT sector to time travel back to 2001(though 2001 slowdown was for different reason).

Looks grim right! but I believe chances of this happening are less. Before it gets to this stage, USA would intervene. why you ask? I guess 2 reasons...1) For its own good..US economy is slowing down and the Gov would do every thing to make sure the prevailing oil prices do not become a death noose for them. 2) Elections are nearing(2008) and Republican want themselves to be elected again, so I am sure republicans will leave no stone unturned to make sure that people don't use the high fuel prices as a pretext to vote them out.

what ever...I seriously hope Hadi-Mohammad Nejad-Hosseinian is wrong and he is just trying to scare off US. Hope India continues to grow at 8% (Golly!! 8%) ....ok 7% - 7.5% and all people have good jobs, healthy lifestyle and let peace prevail everywhere. Amen.

walk-the-thought : Learnings from Interviews I attended

2006-05-03T01:00:00.000+05:00

My recent job hunt has culminated with a good offer from a MNC here in Bangalore. I am satisfied with the offer as the nature of the job aligns with the my career plan(yeah I do have one) and provides me a decent package.

Now that things have settled down..I guess it was time to review the way things turned out during the various interviews I happen to attend..This was the exact aim of taking a walk around mini-forest(a huge park near my place) today...contemplate on the the way I faced my interviews and major blunders which I committed. Surprisingly there were lots of them..so here we go with a few key learning I had ..

1) Prepare for the interview, don't assume you know things.

I learnt this in my very first interview. This was with a Indian services company. They were looking for skills in Oracle technologies. I was so over confident about myself that I went without preparation. Results were on expected lines, I was shown the door in probably less than 15 mins and the interview was a total disaster. So the moral is be prepared or be ready to get "I am a dolt" tattooed on your face and become a out-of-the-box, ready to use object-of-fun for the interview panel.

2) No "I am the lord of universe, I know all" attitude

Again learnt this in my first interview, being confident in a interview discussion is one thing, but many times we stretch the meaning of "confident" to a totally new level..

Interviewer - how do you rate your skills in Oracle on scale of 10

Candidate - 11 out of 10

Interviewer - my lord, tell me how do I make a table read only?

Candidate - ah! well! ...I guess don't execute any DMLs

Interviewer - Nice meeting you, Our HR will get back to you.

Set realistic expectation about your skills. Lot of times person sitting opposite is smarter and knows things better than you.

3) Personal Appearance

Personally I have never been rejected because of appearance. I make sure I am in formals when I go for interviews. But I remember a incident which happened when I was taking up a interview with one of the MNC in Bangalore. While we were waiting for our turn, a person walks in, his trousers were so loose that we were afraid it would fall off any moment, he was wearing long over size T shirt and had long hair. Later we got to know that our hippie was aspiring business analyst. The focal for the interview process looked at him and then simply asked him to leave. Things did not even get to the stage, where he was asked for his resume. So personal appearance does matter.

4) Ask questions

I always feel that one of the most crucial part of the interview is when the interviewer asks "do you have any questions for me". Few good, relevant questions at this time will exponentially increase your chances of a positive result. If you are mum at this stage, many a times even though the interview has gone well, you can as well bid farewell to your job. So given a chance ask few good questions regarding your role, growth, opportunities to explore new technologies etc.. it really makes a good impression.

5) Get the reasons for leaving previous organisation right

This is one more crucial thing that can be a difference between making or breaking the interview. NEVER EVER CRITICISE YOUR PREVIOUS EMPLOYER. Period. NEVER EVER QUOTE REMUNERATION TO BE A REASON TO QUIT.Period. Get the reasons right even if you have to make them up.

6) Express yourself clearly

I have experienced this myself. If you can state things in a simple manner you have won half the interview. I happen to give a interview with another Indian product manufacturing company. I was given a simple task to write a procedure to generate Fibonacci sequence and what did I do, I scribbled the right solution all over the work sheet in a haphazard way. So even though the solution was right I was not able to put it a simple systematic manner and hence I did not make it to the next round.

7) Never over emphasis on remuneration package

Even though both tacitly acknowledge that remuneration is one of the main reason, never over emphasise on money, it builds a bad impression.

8) Get the Body Language right

This happened to me when I Was having a interview with a IT firm in Bangalore. During interview I was extremely nervous and was not looking at the interviewer when speaking. I guess he observed me for a min and then asked me to relax and take it easy. So your body language speaks more than what you do through your mouth. While in a interview, sit comfortably, don't cross legs, don't slouch, no leg movements, no leaning on the desk, look at the interviewer when speaking to him, no huge hand movements etc..

9) Don't be late to the interview

Its good idea to be there at the venue at least 10 mins before the scheduled time. In case if you are going to be late, its usually good idea to call up the concern person and inform him the reason and give a estimated time as to when you will be there.

Visit to Tirumala

2006-04-30T21:24:00.000+05:00

||Sriyahkkanthaya kalyana nidhaye nidhayerthinam
Sri venkata nivasaya Srinivasaya Mangalam||

(Salutations to You, Srinivasa. You reside in Thiruvenkata, all prosperity, auspiciousness, reside in You. Your darsana is a festivity and you grant desires)

Visited Tirumala, abode of lord Balaji, Kalahasti and lots of temples in Tirupati this weekend(Thu-Sat). Will post the details in a later post, to tired to write now.

(thanks to Ganesh for the image and this site for sloka)

Update:

~~Yesterday~~ On May 1, I along with a college friend went on a 400KM drive, we started off from Bangalore then to Sangama and other parts of Srirangapatanam, then we touched mysore and then took a deviation towards Shivansamudra and went to Shimsha falls and then back to Bangalore. All this in one day...... wow what a driving experience. Will write more on this action packed day someother time.

my blog Vs. Popular blog

2006-04-26T13:53:00.000+05:00

Guy Kawasaki has this interesting post on how to evangelize a blog. He gives 10 points that will help separate your blog from the heap and help your blog to get noticed..in short marketing of your blog. So here we go, let me see how much does my blog comply with the marketing mantra;

- Think “book” not “diary.”
Shucks! I get a non compliance for the very first point. Not that my blog is a "diary", its actually neither a book not diary.So what it is? well will post once I figure it out. I generally rant on what comes to my mind first when I log into blogspot, anyways shall move on.

- Answer the little man
hmm..."It's tough to market crap" says it all.

- Collect email addresses
10,000 email announcements of the blog!! gosh that's 10,000 emails more than what I have sent :). Ok point taken.

- Collect links for blog rolling
yeah this I have done and have to say there are some kick-ass blogs on my roll. These guys are awesome.

- Scoop stuff
Bottom line: if you want lots of people to link to you, read voraciously and find cool stuff first I guess I need to do more of reading, I am nowhere close to being "voracious" reader

- Supplement other bloggers with a followup entries
this is a good point

- Acknowledge and respond to commenter
N/A :)

- Make it easy to join up
This makes lot of sense

so this blog fairs miserably in the Guy Kawasaki's characteristics-of-popular-blog test and I guess its time for amends, yeah its time for HPWGWB(how prashant will get to write better)

Neural Interface - Next generation UI

2006-04-26T05:52:00.000+05:00

Slashdot has run a article on two start-up companies that are developing a Neural interface to games. In layman terms, it will make possible to control a video game using your thoughts and not some physical device like keyboard or a joystick.

I say this is really cool stuff. With this technology, think of possibilities, running a pilot-less reconnaissance aircraft in a enemy territory sitting in safety of your command center. A medical surgery being performed by someone thousands of miles away for the patient by controlling the robotic arm by thought over the internet and the list continues.... Cool huh?

Miss you guys :(

2006-04-25T14:45:00.000+05:00

I am not sure why, but today I am missing all my friends from my previous work place. Hey guys missing you all so much and I feel like a vehicle whose fuel gauge shows like this

Damn, I am good at creating similes huh?

How big a nerd are you?

2006-04-21T07:04:00.000+05:00

When you are jobless and have access to internet day-in and day-out, this is what you do, take up a Nerd test

Riya rocks..

2006-04-14T07:58:00.000+05:00

Its not very uncommon that at the very first interaction with a application, you are instantly in love with it and immediately know that this is something that you have been looking for. I had the same experience with Riya.

Riya is a photo search engine unlike any other in the image search domain today. While your normal serach engines search for the text and show the images associated with the text, Riya actually looks into the photo and search for people and text inside photo. imagine this, you have few thousands of digital images of your recent vacation to Hawaii and now you are looking for that one "Kodak moment", where in you and your girlfriend have been snapped in front of a hoarding which said "Welcome to Hawaii". While your normal image search engines would be a dud, Riya actually looks in to all your images and will hunt down the image that has the text "Welcome to Hawaii". Awesome isn't it! Search is not limited to text in the image, I can search for people. Say I want all photographs with my sister in it. Riya make this search possible.

You ask how does it work..well it does based on principle of contextual recognition. Its a geek term for concept of recognising a object based on the clues from the context in which the object is present. Say I upload a photo to Riya and tutor Riya saying that the face in the photograph is Prashant, now say I upload one more photo of mine taken couple of mins later where in I have my face tilted sideways. Now Riya is intelligent enough to read "contextual" clues like time stamp of the photo, colour of my shirt, skin, hair etc and automatically tag(read it as recognise) the person in the second photo as Prashant.

Now you may ask, given a photo the success rate of Riya correctly tagging a person in the photo depends on what clues does Riya look for and what is the weight it associates for each of these clues..yep that's absolutely right and to get this combination right, close to 10 PhD(your read the number correctly) geeks, who are said to be pioneers in the field of facial recognition are working with Riya. As per Munjal Shah, CEO and founder of Riya, If you give Riya 100 photos and sufficient training then Riya can tag the person correctly in close to 70 photos. That's really awesome.

The applications of this kind of image search technology is mind boggling. Imagine a mechanical component designer drawing a rough sketch of a component and submitting it to Riya like search engine which will crawl all through the engineering drawing repository and gets the component design, thus saving redesign hours. Thinks of the applications in the field of medicine and other allied fields. I would just say the possibilities are limitless.

All in all Riya is a great concept. I am eagerly looking forward to see some fantastic applications from this team. If you have not registered at Riya, all I will say is you are missing something good.

Xooglers - Bye Bye Ron

2006-04-11T09:16:00.000+05:00

One of the most refreshing blog in blogosphere was that of Xooglers. Bunch of Ex-Google employees writing rants about there experience in Google.

One of the feature that kept this blog separated from the heap was there eloquent style of expression and their clever and witty references.If you get to work with some of the best technology brains/evangelists that too in a environment where working on great ideas and technology is a hobby(read it as google), then you will have lot to rant about and world is always ready to hear that out, this rant is what Xooglers is all about.

From now Xoogler bunch(Ron, Greg, Doug) will be short by one(Ron). Ron has made the tough decision of not contributing to this blog any more(Thanks to few dolts on the net), what ever the reason,its sad to see Ron go. I have really enjoyed most of his posts. The bubbliness and energy he puts in to explain something as trivial as technology is amazing.

So Ron all the very best. You will surely be missed on the Xooglers, hope to keep in touch through your personal blog.

Port25 - Opensource software lab@Microsoft

2006-04-09T22:50:00.000+05:00

This came a surprise to me when I read about it...really a big surprise. I was not aware of this. Microsoft and Opensource lab!! sounds like a perfect example of a oxymoron huh? but this is true, not only Microsoft has an impressive setup to study the interoperability of MS products with opensource they have also started to publish lot of stuff they do. One can catch them here.

By what they have announced, its quite impressive. Throw in close to 300 servers running any and every Linux and Unix distro you can imagine and some really smart people under one roof then nobody is surprised if they come up with kick-ass solution to few issues that exist in running open source programs on Windows environment. That's what they have set out do, provide interoperability between Microsoft products and Open source products, benchmark Microsoft products against their corresponding Open source counterparts.

I think this is a laudable effort, if this lab is able to suggest ways to iron out kinks that exist between MS and Opensource, it will be a win-win situation to the customer, who will have a broader choice and can focus more on the business issue rather than worrying about technology integration. Also the benchmarking of Microsoft products against Opensource will be one step further to better MS products.

So I will be all ears and all eyes and will keep tab on what these guys will come up with next.

Contradictions - way of life

2006-04-09T15:46:00.000+05:00

Recently one of the biggest consultancy firms based out in Bangalore posted an ad asking for "Expert" PL/SQL developers to join them.

So during course of preparation for technical round of interview, I realised that I dont have a PL/SQL book, brilliant. So had to rush to the nearest book stall to find a book that will do a miracle of transforming a "PL/SQL retard" (that's me) to an Expert(that's what I need to be) overnight. After careful assessment of various author's subject matter expertise(hahahaha), there delivery style, I picked the book "Teach Yourself PL/SQL in 21 days"(hmm...I can see my negative cash flow position(sugar coated and sophisticated word for financially broke) contributing largely to this decision..ok I admit this was the cheapest book available on the shelf) to partner me in my quest.

After I come back home, while I was surfing the net. I got to read the gist of the research paper "Expert Performance - Its Structure and Acquisition" by K. Anders Ericsson and Neil Charness. It says

It takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas

I respond to ad which is looking for Experts, I purchase the book Learn PL/SQL in 21 days and then happen to read about research that prophesies that it needs 10 years to develop expertise.

Well all I could think of at that point in time was, such is life, life is full of contradictions.

Bangalore weds into Metroblogging Network

2006-04-07T07:02:00.000+05:00

After Mumbai and Chennai, Bangalore will be the 45th city to join the Metroblogging network and this is what Sean Bonner,one of the founder of Metroblogging network has to say and I quote;

Bangalore is home to over 6 million people, one of the largest media markets in India, and as of today, is also home to the 45th Metroblogging city. It's our third Indian blog, joining Chennai and Mumbai both which launched earlier this year. Bangalore is often called the Silicon Valley of India and we're excited to add them to our family of global blogs.

hey this is really cool stuff...considering the fact that Metroblogging has been voted as one of the "best on the web" by Forbes and its also one among the other kick ass sites listed in the Technorati's "Popular blogs" list.

So spread the word, let the world awaken to the rich potpourri of colourful social habits, rich cultural heritage, astounding spiritual discoveries and mind boggling varieties of lip smacking cuisine of this little, wonderful land called BANGALORE. Happy metro blogging.

Job hunt - Continued..

2006-04-06T13:19:00.000+05:00

Its been 12 days since I retired(read it as quit the job) and I am loving every moment I am spending at home.. no SQL, PL/SQL coding...no performance tuning issues, just me, family, my comp and my books...life rocks :)

I have been polishing/rubbing/shining a antique brass lamp at my place hoping that a genie would appear and I would ask ~~him~~ him/her(effect of Care for girl child ad) to freeze this moment till the end of time. So the brass lamp is shining , mom is delighted, dad -"Doing household work builds character"(Pitru-upadesa(fathers sermons), Chapter 4, verse 7) and gives a pat on my back. Mom is happy, dad is happy and Everyone else is happy,but where is the freaking genie? ah! may be I was expecting too much.

Swallowing the red pill, I came in grips with the grim reality, 2 weeks and no job in hand, this was scary and did not have a ounce of resemblance with the fairy tale world I was living in. So it was time for action, serious action. After my resume was done I had to list down all the things that I should look for in my new job. So drew a Pareto chart(ah! how sophisticated) and picked the top 3, So here we go with the first draft;

1) It should have lots of on site travel opportunities : One thing I cribbed the most in my previous organisation was regarding on site travel opportunities. Being a MNC in India, it was a cost center and PM pinched ever penny possible out of the project plan. This implied travel opportunities were virtually non-existent. My dream in life is to see the world before assuming the Q Position(for the ignorant - its dying with tongue hanging out)

2) It should offer decent pay package : well common I need not comment on this

3) It should offer me some challenging work : How many times it happens that you know exactly what line of code you are going to modify Wednesday of next week at 11:33 am or you suddenly realise that it was in office where you made the highest score in "the fly swatting" flash game. Generally life becomes predictable, I hope the environment at my next job is such that no two days are the same.

It was soon very clear that life is not so easy that it will serve on a silver platter, jobs with all three qualities ..so probably my next step would be to prepare the "compromise list".So here we go again..

1) ~~Lots of travel - bad pay - no challenging work~~
2) ~~Not much travel - good pay - no challenging work~~
3) ~~Not much travel - bad pay - challenging work~~
4) Lots of travel - Good pay - no challenging work
5) Lots of travel - bad pay - challenging work
6) Not much travel - Good pay - challenging work
7) Lots of travel - Good pay - challenging work
8) ~~Not much travel - bad pay - no challenging work~~

Prashant, epitome for optimism, but what if there is no job at all. Shut up willya. Touchwood :)

Ok let me prioritise these ;

1) Lots of travel - Good pay - challenging work
2) Lots of travel - Good pay - no challenging work
3) Not much travel - Good pay - challenging work
4) Lots of travel - bad pay - challenging work

here are the companies which are hiring people with the skills I have;

Dell, Infosys, Wipro, TCS, ITC Solutions, Cisco, Evident Software, PTC, Covansys, I-Flex, Capgimini etc.

Now that the list is ready, next step would be to classify all the companies which are hiring the skills I have into above mentioned categories.

After doing it( hey wait a sec, what do you mean by after doing it? where is the list. hmm well categorization process as you know involves pain staking research and I don't not wish to reveal it free of cost. Holy crap!!! na...was just kidding..I am just too afraid that people who believe that there company is in the wrong category can hire supari killers and try exterminating me. Oh! you have already hired one. Gosh! what a superfluous expenditure, trust me its not worth it)

So once decision regarding the companies which you are going to target is made its easy from now on..Just apply and pray :)

Update:

I had an interview with Evident Software recenty. This is kind of startup in Blore. Have lots of intresting stuff to say. Will do so in the next post.

Purana Jeans - awakening to the concept of good health

2006-04-05T16:14:00.000+05:00

Research at Princeton says and I quote

they(overweight and obese) have about two-thirds and one-half the odds of dating as healthy weight boys,respectively.

Putting it in layman terms, If there is only one hot chick available for a date and if you are suffering from either "Beached whale syndrome"(someone who is unable to do much for himself except lie there with flailing arms and legs) or "Dunlop Syndrome" (belly button lapped over the waistband) or "Michelin's Disorder"(multiple spare tyres), research prophesies dismal probability numbers of you winning that date. So if you wish not to suffer from Acute Prozac Deficiency(a.k.a. depression), its better to assume that she does not exist.

grim stats are those huh!! Until you have bulging biceps, slitted rectus abdominis muscle pack world can be unrelenting and unforgiving when it comes to getting a date :(

But as the saying goes every dark cloud has a silver lining, I had mine. I by an ounce of sheer luck, happen to try my old jeans pant and good news is IT FITS. One of the happiest moments in my life. If I had taken a snap of myself at that moment I am sure it would be the Kodak Picture of the day for the next one year :)

so the 2KM ~~walk~~ brisk walk, 7 days a week(almost) has started to show results. Probably a progression to this would be to start jogging and then swimming and then.....

Hopefully the Purana Jeans episode will rouse the fitness freak in me and drive the point that Health is something worth spending time on and yes hope I achieve the thing that triggered all these events i.e. win a date. Amen.