Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Deep Impact

I was neck deep in some impact analysis here. Hence the forced break from blogging. There were hundreds of programs to be checked to see if there would be any changes required in them in only a week's time. But me and another senior guy here have broken the back of the analysis (and ours too). Hopefully life and blogging will return to normalcy now.

Not having been a believer of Ass-trology, this piece here has made me stifle laughter. These guys will not stop at anything to gain some publicity. Whether his prediction comes right or not (there is afterall a 50-50 chance mathematically, since Sachin's career will either end or will not end this year), the asstrologer will surely have a few high profile clients. One of the funnier bits reported in the article was:

"I used to predict a lot on the outcome of cricket matches but after some of the predictions went wrong, mainly because of match fixing, I now refuse to predict on cricket matches," said Chowdhry, who correctly predicted India's 2-1 win in the Test series in Pakistan last year.
Wonder how Chowdhry mian, the gifted asstrolger as he is, failed to predict and nab the fixers. Matchfixing surely has a deeper impact than thought of initially!

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Revenge of the Sikh

Looking at the hullabaloo the movie 'Jo Bole So Nihal' has generated on either side, the producer would be well advised to change the name of the movie to something which could take advantage of the success of the final 'Star Wars' saga.

The publicity campaign would be thus:

Sardar Wars: Episode II - Revenge of the Sikh
No if, No but - only Phat
Blasting soon at a theatre near you!

ps - I did not intend it as an insult to anyone's relegious sentiments, but if any Surd is hurt, please don't blast my blog.

Friday, May 20, 2005

The making of champions

The race for India's new coach had all the elements of a potboiler. There were people announcing their candidature, people pulling out and people dropping in at the very last minutes. Even the day of the interview was full of drama. Time delays, exceeding time limitations, braking down of laptops, break for some of the interviewers to meet the PM, leaked questions, everything. Our dear Jimmy Amarnath came to the interview with an Indian flag on his clothes and used the word "Bharat" multiple times in his presentation. I suppose he was trying to show that his USP is being an Indian and his only claim to the job was that he is an Indian. Then there was Desmond Haynes who dropped in at the last moment to be interviewed before Tom Moody who was touted as being the Indian players' choice.

At last Greg Chappel is all set to take over as the coach of the Indian team. It shouldn't come as a surprise because he was the frontrunner for the job. Some people believe that being from India is the most important quality required of the coach. I disagree with such people. Jimmy and Sandy may have been great cricketers and great coaches, I wouldn't comment on that, but in my opinion, none of the other applicants had the credentials that would match Chappel's.

What our team is lacking is the right attitude and proper planning. It is upto Greg Chappel now to instill a new spirit in the team and make world beaters out of them.

Finally, we have proved that we truely are not afraid to outsource some critial jobs in our country to outsiders.

Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Replicating Robots

A research team of Cornwell University has come up a new robot which replicates itself: a robot that reproduces. The robot preforms no other task except replicating itself. These robots are made up of a series of modular cubes called "molecubes" each containing the program of replication. One can read the entire article here. The site also contains a video of the replication process which can be downloaded.

Now before you get any ideas to the kind of reproduction (and the video), let me tell you that the process is entirely asexual. The robot entirely depends upon the supply of additional modules from the experimenters. The robot just adds the extra modules to itself one after the other and somewhere down the line spilts into two equal sized robots. Good enough for a start, the experiment demonstrates that mechanical self-reproduction is possible. Researchers are of the opinion that such robots can be used for work in space or in hazarous environments.
[Link via email from Nikhil]

Monday, May 16, 2005

Beware of scammers!!

What I am going to type down below is a really story of how a friend of mine was duped. So read this to the end and be careful of such people I will describe now.

Some days ago while I was having lunch in my office cafeteria, I got a call on my cell. The caller said that he was my college senior and he was in Mumbai. His pocket had been picked and he had no money to return to Bangalore. He just had his ICICI debit card from his old salary account and wanted me to help him. He said that he had got my number from the college alumni website. Since he was in Mumbai, I gave him the phone number of a couple of my friends from college there and asked him to call them. I told him that they may be able to locate some of his batchmates from TCS there who would help him.

When I came down to my desk after lunch, I had a vague feeling that something was wrong. I checked out our alumni listing and found no name which he had given me. I then asked one of my friends in Bangalore if he knew any of our alumnus by that name. When he refused, I was certain that this guy was some kind of a "head hunter" who was looking for contacts in Mumbai. So I called one of my friends whose number I had given and told him the details. He said that if he got a call, he would see. But I made a mistake. I did not inform the second guy whose phone number I had given. That guy got a call from Mr. Senior who pleaded for help. Now this guy is real soft at heart, though he pretends to be otherwise, and transferred a thousand bucks into the account the caller provided. The caller in turn gave his e-mail id and phone number to my friend. Both of them turned out to be fake! My friend has been duped of a thousand bucks.

It seems to me that this is some new kind of a scam with a novel modus operandi. I'd suggest all people reading this to be very careful and not be taken in by such unscrupulous people calling. Spread the word and help preventing other people from being cheated.

Friday, May 13, 2005

Paraskevidekatriaphobia

Paraskevidekatriaphobia, ah, the fear of Friday the 13th. Check out the link to the Wikipedia site - it contains the origins, effects and lists its occurances for the next 15 yrs. Even "How stuff works" has a section called How Friday the 13th works. In my 24 year old life, even I have had a bad experience on Friday the 13th. Around 10 or so years ago, on this very day there was a burglary at my house when none of us was home. Considering that I have had innumerable bad experiences throughout my life, the density of bad experiences on Friday the 13th is pretty low. Hence I can conclude that I have very less to fear of this day. And besides fridays are cool at the workplace because one can feel the weekend arriving.

Anyways, the biggest horror for me this Friday the 13th has been that DDLJ completes 500 weeks in the Minerva Theatre. Seems like the movie has inspired some real life love stories too! Yashraj films is planning to release the movie in muliplexes all over the country to celebrate the occasion. I often wonder how people can watch the same movie again and again. It's a different case if the movie is say Andaz Apna Apna, as Gaurav points out. But DDLJ - no comments. As I have said before, democracy it is, and everyone is entitled to their own choice.

Update: Looks like my blog has crossed the 1000th hit mark today. Not a bad Friday the 13th at all!!

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Diseased world

It seems that the world is hit by a plethora of diseases. A lot of people have been struck by Polio in Yemen which was thought to be free of polio. Meanwhile Meningitis is wrecking havoc in north India.

At the same time people continue to die of another disease, one which has probably been the cause of most deaths in the human civilisation - human violence. Kashmir and Iraq and Afghanistan all seem to be in the grip of violence. If it is bombs in Baghdad and Srinagar, in Jalalabad it's the rioters who rule the roost.

As I scan through Google news, the best news I can see is Yahoo unveiling music service. If this is the state of world affairs, the less the said, the better it would be.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

NRIs and other stuff

I got an interesting link from one of my colleagues called the Confessions of an NRI. What it revealved was a part of NRI life which I never even thought would be true.

Another interesting thing happened today. I saw an article about Security holes in the Firefox browser and turnrd off my javascripts. When a started to write this post, the blogger page behave indifferently and all the advanced edit features were disabled. It took me a couple of minutes to realise the cause.

I am fed up of writting such crappy posts just for the sake of writing. But the work I have nowadays seldom leaves me time to do anything else. Today I had to go through a list to programs and fill up an excel sheet about the impact due to some changes. There is another PL here who has been insistent in taking my services for God knows what for half a day. He has been asking my PM and another guy in my team whom I am working with, to let me do his work. May be he needs some help in researching something from the web and preparing a presentation. Looks like my research skills and aesthetics has a few fans here. But he has been told that my services can't be lent for sometime! And even as my current work is not over, my boss has told me that we will look at some migration stuff tomorrow. God help me in the coming days.

Monday, May 09, 2005

Uncle-o-phobia

There is a new phobia I have developed. That of being called "Uncle". Well, I don't know whether I have reached an age at which I deserve to be called an "Uncle" by the kids. May be the fact that I work to earn my living makes kids call me "Uncle", because a couple of years back I was used to be called "bhaiya" (brother).

Whatever the reason I don't look, much less feel, like "Uncle". God how does it sound - "Uncle". It was only yesterday that my landlady's grand daughter (she has come down for the summer vacations) called out "Uncle" behind my back. I was oblivious to the fact that she was calling me! What do I expect her to call me when I myself call her grandmom as "Aunty"!!

Much more difficult are my encounters with my married colleagues. I often forget how to address their wives and have caught myself at times calling them "Aunty" much to their repugnance. Christ, I still feel like a kid at heart.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Blind work

I have been very busy since I returned from home in "analysing" some programs and data at my workplace. I actually have absolutely no idea what I have been doing. One of my senior teammates has resigned and this guy wants me to take over his work. So I have been getting gyaan (Knowledge Transfer) from him and also working with him on a production ticket he has got. There was some problem with the application with one of the users six months ago and they were not able to replicate the problem ever since. But they hit paydirt last friday. And we have been going through tons of data (protection logs, i.e., before and after images of the database files) just to look for some connection. Today during lunch I told the other guy that there was something in the data I did not understand and asked him to look at it. And in the afternoon one thing led to the other and we now believe that we may have put our finger on the type of process causing the error. We will have to talk to the user on Monday to see if we are right.
But the point is that through this exercise, I have learnt to project any data within sight with a lot of gas about with I have no idea with a lot of certainty. I know that no one reading this would understand a single word. Thats exactly the problem I had been facing!

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Big Blue to cut jobs

It seems that IBM is set to meet its earnings targets through cost cutting rather than revenue growth. They have announced that they are going to cut upto 4 % of their work force amounting to over 10000 jobs. The elephant is shedding some weight. May be the dancing has taken its toll.

Contrast this with the scenario in the Indian IT sector. All the major software firms have upped their intake. Even the global firms based in India have upped their ante as far as recruitment in India is concerned. Its a different thing though that a large number of people recruited by the Indian firms dont have much work to do and they warm the bench. No one knows till when the love story will continue. I shudder to think of the day when the bubble will burst in India. Something of the sort that happened around 2000-2001. But now the sun is shining. And as long as it does, let me make some hay!

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Power shortage

Due to the acute shortage of power in the state, there have been frequent power cuts all over the state of Maharashtra for the last 2-3 months. These power cuts were further increased last week to 4 hrs a day in Pune. Now the power failures have taken a political turn with Shiv Sainiks bashing up the MSEB officials in Pune. Condemnations has been pouring in from all quarters.

Though I don't agree with the means adopted by Shiv Sena (I too believe that violence is the last resort of only the incompetent), I feel that it was the state government which is to blame to the current crisis. When they knew that the state is not producing as much electricity as it needs and its coffers don't have enough money to buy power from elsewhere, what was the sense in providing free power to the farmers? I came across a nice article, which says why free power is not free. The writer puts in persuasive arguments to prove that free power to farmers harms us in more ways than one.

But the more startling fact is that with this decision of the ruling government to provide free electricity to the farmers, they have started to move towards a society which puts need above ability. If you are needy, the government will provide for you at the cost of who is able. What justification is there for the power cuts in Vidharba region which produces almost 60% of the power in the state? That some farmers in the state need electricity and cannot afford it? What justification is there for power cuts in the industrial regions of other cities? That some farmers in the state cannot afford power and the industries can afford an alternative source at their own expense? The power hungry politicians, just to get a few more votes in the election, are doing more harm to the society in the longer run by providing free power to the 'needy'.

If need be the basis of allocation, I need to study in IIM Ahmedabad. Mr. Chief Minister are you listening?

Monday, May 02, 2005

I m back

Refreshed and recharged. Those wouldd be the two words, if anyone asked me how I feel after a 10 day break. I couldn't blog in the last week or so. I tried to go to a cafe and browse in my home town, but the connection bandwidth was so low that I decided not to browse again during my stay. Hence was cut off from the tech world. The best part about being at my place is that the small town it is, the air is still pure and the late evening/night walks I used to have were very invigorating. The first thing that struck me when I set my foot in Pune late yesterday night was the pollution here. I had adjusted to it, but when I returned after a break, it was too much. Even at 12 o' clock in the night, there was smoke in the air and my eyes burned on my way back home in an auto. My system has already readjusted to the pollution levels and I feel again at home.

As I write this piece, I got a very sad news. One of the guys who was working here in Pune with me had been transferred to Bhubaneswar sometime back. He passed away on Saturday of cerebral malaria. He was diagonsed with having malaria, so his parents took him to his home town in Berhampur where there is a medical college. When he went there for a checkup, the doctors were on strike. He was planning to go to Vizag for treatment when one of the local doctors advised against it. When he lost consciousness on Saturday, his family decided to take him to Vizag immediately. He passed away on the way. I don't want to comment on the medical facilities in the country. Incidents such as this speak for themselves: an educated man such as him living in a state capital passes away in such a way. Entire medical college on strike! And we call ourselves a developing country.