Tittle-Tattle

Landmarks...

2011-09-25T23:44:00.000+05:30

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine. Our office canteen has this great Biriyani counter. I told my friend that this guy has one of his outlets somewhere near RV Dental College in JP Nagar.

My friend said, you mean the one opposite to HDFC bank.

I said, no HDFC Bank should be opposite to this RV Dental College. (Actually, neither is correct, but that isn't the point of this post).

We laughed over this, but this reminded me of the way landmarks keep changing and its repercussions.

I sometimes take a bus to travel back home from my office. BMTC conductors are familiar with the way the bus stops were named earlier. But that was then, and there are several new landmarks in Bangalore now, including on the Bannerghatta road. There is this Bannerghatta road and Outer ring road junction and BMTC knows it as JD Mara junction. On the same junction, there's a Maruti showroom called Mandovi Motors. Similarly there is Jayadeva Flyover junction which was called BTM checkpost and there's this Shopper's Stop very close to that.

So I get onto this bus, take ticket for self and then there will be some new recruits boarding the bus with their workplace tags hanging around their necks. Some will say Shopper's Stop and some will say Mandovi Motors junction and I have seen the conductors staring back at them blank faced. There will be some more words exchanged but still the two parties remain at their own stratospheres. Then some learned gentleman will speak out loud - Checkpost... Checkpost... or JD Mara. That settles it and folks move ahead with their own businesses.

Kids...

2011-02-19T21:16:00.001+05:30

We recently underwent the domestic change management exercise of sending our young daughter to a play school. Although we have been thru this once (our son), but still the anxiety was no less. It is very difficult to break a young kid's heart. Hand her over to a teacher unknown to her while she is still crying... And this actually happened when she exchanged laps between me and her teacher although against her will.

In the first two weeks, it was all cries, sobs and such for -

स्कूल नहीं जाना! ( I don't want to go to school)...

Two weeks later, again cries, sobs and such for -

स्कूल जाना है! (I want to go to school!)

That was a quick transition, we thought. It was heartening to see her performing in the school annual day function as well, doing a butterfly dance -

When I left my home for the first time to join my job, I wrote a letter to my parents. The content more or less said that I am that kid-bird which has grown up and has left its nest. It was written in an attempt to assure my parents that I am fine. But soon I realized that those must have been really "strong" words for my parents. Now the same words come boomeranging on me somewhere in my mind, when I "happily" watch my kids grow and build a world of their own.

Kids...

2010-11-09T22:12:00.000+05:30

Young kids always come with some interesting observations from the way they understand the world. In their playfulness they bring out their interesting interpretation of things. My kids are no different and I used to quote my son a lot when I was regular in this blog earlier.

Now my daughter does that quite often. Like she gets really excited when our car undergoes some underpass. She starts shouting with joy the moment she realizes we are going to go thru a tunnel like underpass. My son always wants us to go atop a flyover. I try to avoid them as it could be a detour, as well as many of the Bangalore flyover land you right into a Jam point! Anyways...

Recently, when we were standing on a red signal, my daughter started singing the rhyme "London bridge is falling down", all of a sudden and with great enthu and all. And when we paid attention we noticed that she was also trying to point to something. It was this site -

Needless to say, we couldn't stop laughing...

My Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic phone

2010-07-04T16:06:00.004+05:30

I recently bought this Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone. Recently as in, a few months back! I have been exploring it a lot and with time I have come to like it a lot. This guy is a full screen touch mobile phone from Nokia with GPS, 3G and wifi capabilities. It has got dual camera, so the front camera helps in making video calls. For full specifications you can always refer to the Nokia website. I have also taken a BSNL 3G connection on this phone so I have got a fast access internet connection in my hand all the time (well, almost all the time).

This mobile phone has become very famous so much so that many of the meetings I have gone to, almost half the attendees san this phone. Its almost two-thirds the size of any of the world famous smartphones (read iPhones and Androids), but I have behaved like any of the price conscious Indian consumer and gone for this smartphone which comes for half the price.

Nokia has poured in many of the goodies with this set, when I bought it, I got a free Sennheiser headset, 100 free songs from Nokia music store (people buying the set now get unlimited free songs) and free OVI maps with GPS capabilities. One also gets access to the OVI store with loads of free apps to install. I would talk about some of those which I have installed on my set.

Snaptu - This guy is a great aggregation of some of the typical online activites I perform on a daily basis, vis-a-vis news reading (general, tech news, sports), social networking (facebook, twitter, flickr) etc. It gives one single interface to aggregate all of those and neat uncluttered UI to use them. This is the most frequently used app on my phone now. Most of my tweets now show up from Snaptu on twitter.
Fring - This is another aggregation of various online chatting tools. I had kind of stopped using them but now with Fring I am back in the chatting world again. Most of my online chats or VOIP calls now happen thru Fring on my mobile. I have got aol, msn, yahoo, gtalk and skype configured thru this. I can see all of my friends online at one single place "on my mobile". With msn, yahoo, aol folks I can do a hand-typed chat and with gtalk and skype I can have a VOIP call. Interestingly, Fring offers video calling using skype whereas skype's own Symbian S60 app for my mobile won't allow video calling. One intresting story I am almost always telling my friends is that I went to a shop to do some gift shopping. But I went alone and was confused on what to pick. So I asked my wife to come online on skype and then using Fring and 3G internet, we had a video call from the shop and I showed her various options and "we" finally picked something.
Audible - Twit got me into Audible listening and I have a membership now. This is not too old a flirtation but I have already enjoyed a great book thru this app. I was recently going for a training to one of my office which is a good 1 and half hour drive away from my place. Within 3 days I finished listening to almost 10 hours of read. So I don't mind going to far off offices now :P (just kidding).
Podcasts - The default music application comes with podcasts section also. So I have revived my interests in podcasts and have already splurged on Twit, then there's Twig and Buzz out Loud as well. These are my companion on my daily one side half an hour trip to office. Yup, I have gone a bit of green now and let the Vajra bus drivers negotiate with the crazy traffic while I listen/watch the podcasts.
Tunewiki - This is an interesting app with capabilities to fetch lyrics when a song is playing. It can read thru my library for songs, search in youtube if I want to watch the song video, connect to shoutcast and play online radio and other typical capabilities of any mobile based music player. I like but I am not an avid listener of English music (yup I call all of them English music) and with this lyrics fetch capabilities I can at least understand what Mr Adams is singing while I used to enjoy only his rock music whatever he sang. Not all the hindi songs I listen to have their lyrics with tunewiki and its a surprise if I find any. But then, I don't need their lyrics anyway.
Shazam - Another problem I had with English music was the inability to find which album that song belonged to. Heh! If you don't understand the lyrics how would you find the album. So I found Shazam, this guy literally "listens" to the music currently being played and tags them or rather finds the album to which the song belonged to. Nice, another good tool to handle that peer pressure ;)
Google Maps - Yes, I am on latitude, people know where I am if they are on my friend list. Google maps is really good in Bangalore. I have even used it usefully in Chennai.
OVI Maps - Unlike Google maps, this nokia app also helps as a speaking navigator. Uses GPS well and finds my exact location on this earth. The maps are not really as updated as Google and search capabilities are questionable. But the speaking navigator gets some brownie points. Apart from English, I have also installed Hindi and Urdu language support. Its fun to hear the Urdu speaking lady telling you - "आपकी मंजिल आ गयी है" - Meaning "You have reached your destination". Using GPS navigator is also fun when you know the one ways and how to go thru the roads with less traffic. It picks up the shortest distance path mostly, it tells me turn left and I turn right and then poor guy recalculates the route again.

There are many other nice apps that I have installed on this phone but I mostly use the above. Other mentionable apps are skype, cricinfo, communities, qik, youtube, dictionary, sudoku etc. Cricinfo is anyway seasonal app; I have used qik to upload a few videos; if you find a tweet of mine from Nokia, that means I am using the Communities app, it also connects to facebook for me. Communities also finds my location and attaches that to my tweet. But its in effect a bit.ly url to the OVI maps site taking one to my current location which doesn't look very nice, guess twitter is not able to separate that url from my tweet at show it as my location.

Another thing that has happened is that my father has stopped using the computer. With a 3G mobile connection at both ends, we can now make video calls to each other instead of the traditional skype/google video calls. His technology needs are getting fulfilled with another 3G nokia mobile.

That is it for now. This has become a long post after a very long time. And long posts get boring in these days of micro-blogging. Thanks for reading till this point of the blog.

~mks

Passive smoking...

2009-12-27T23:11:00.003+05:30

How would you handle this?

So far my 6 year old used to say I will become this, I will become that when I grow up. Today he said - "मैं बड़ा होके smoking करूँगा!" (Means: I will do smoking when I grow up!!!!)

Out goes our reply with a long listing of our entire family tree trying to make a point that no one smokes because its not good (for health)... Added with some lecture on smoking hazards...

Comes another statement - "But friend's grandpa smokes..."

Discussion closed - No, its not a good thing to do... Think about doing something else... so many better (cooler) things to do...

I am sure so many people would have thought about this for themselves when they were kids, but its always like "reinventing the wheel" when you become a parent and see your own kid going thru the same cycle; and trying to save them from what's not good and encourage them to take up what's good...

PS: Cigarette smoking is injurious for one's health... Actually not only for smoker's health but its injurious for passive smokers and the potential smokers as well...

BIAL...

2009-12-22T08:22:00.002+05:30

Today's Hindu features a house panel report on the shoddy workmanship exhibited by the builders of the Bangalore International Airport. There are two news articles in the print edition today and I tried looking at the elaborations of shoddy workmanship in those articles, but I couldn't find any. Its a 124 page report it seems, but all that the news media has picked up is following -

1. Profit making by one of the promoters by trading BIAL shares

2. The facade of the exterior of the airport not showing the culture of Karnataka or India for that matter

3. Hold Narayanamurthy, Rajiv Chandrashekhar et al responsible for such lapses

I have looked at the google news results for BIAL also, but seriously I don't find anything else in the news reports, and I am especially interested in looking at the elaborations of the poor workmanship. I would also like to the see if the house committee looked at the delay in building the approach road(s) to the airport (Why am I asking about road(s), there has to be A world class road first!). The approach road which is available now is certainly not world class so to say. There were some discussions on building a Airport Express Metro also, did the house committee look into that?

If we take the experience of a traveler starting from the time he or she gets out of his/her home and reaches the final destination, the experience is certainly not world class while he or she is in Bangalore (except for the Vajras). I hope the house committee would have looked into it, in that entirety.

Talking about BIAL only, if we had set our expectation of getting a Heathrow in our city, then BIAL has certainly not met that expectation. If I have to compare it with HAL, then BIAL is certainly bigger, wider, better managed. The cleanliness quotient is higher; the check-ins or the baggage claims are quicker. For peak hour traffic, one would get pissed off by the time it takes to clear the queues, but then even the Delhi Airport on a Sunday evening resembles a railway station (a better managed one of course) just by the sheer number of people inside the airport premises. I still find the queues moving faster in BIAL and I doubt if our VIPs would have ever experienced those queues.

Btw, this also reminds me of the delays in the commissioning of the airport where people, bureaucracy and politics played a huge role. I am sure people have forgotten those days and the issues, so they need not feature in the house committee report as well...

Shopping on the Web...

2009-10-25T10:02:00.015+05:30

Today, I was reading an article on Windows 7 on indiatimes. An ad showed up on the website indicating (Nikon) Digi Cams are available starting Rs 5800/-. Sounds interesting, so I clicked on it...

The click took me to the camera section of the seller website but the first page showed lots of Kodak and Canon cameras.

Where is that Nikon of the Ad? So I checked on the checkbox on the left to see Nikon only section and here's what I got -

Lesson Learnt (Again) -

WYSIWYG rarely works in the Adv+shopping world.
Indiatimes needs to catch up on Google Chrome.

My suggestion to Indiatimes - You may want to put a "* conditions apply" tag on those ads.

Go Green!

2009-05-30T16:30:00.004+05:30

I see many "Go Green" campaigns running around me these days, be it the ads on TV and Radio or initiatives at work. I have consciously done a few things to abide by the advices given in these campaigns -

Cut down on the number of print outs

While I was on a small time assignment in the US, I did not configure printer at all. This led me to request a friend of mine to take the printout of my return tickets for me! Recently, at work, they change the print server configuration and I have survived so far without configuring it.

Switch off the car at signals

My inner self reminds me to switch off the car at the signals but I fail to do so many times when it is hot outside and the car AC is on and all the other vehicles which are not switched off, puff out smoke clouds into my car.

Take public transport for commuting

Recently the municipal body started monsoon preparations in my locality and they have blocked and dug one side of a very busy road near our house to complete a drainage construction work which is on for over an year now. Interestingly, during the recent elections, when people raised this issue with the campaigning politicians, the politician asked them to talk about the problems of the nation (and forget about these tiny winy problems which will take their own course to disappear).

Anyways, the road block prompted me to think about taking public transport instead of driving to the office. This is a very recent initiative and I hope I manage to continue this for some time. Car pooling is another nice idea but I find it very difficult to match my work timings with those of others. I will have to learn it probably because taking public transport is not a very encouraging experience so far. We will see!

Taking stairs instead of Elevators

I do this sometime but not always. Laziness prevails mostly! But I seriously dislike those set of elevators which do not have a software to schedule them together. I have got such sets at my apartment. Most of the residents when they want to use the elevator, they will happily push the switches for both of them and wait for both to come to their floor while they are definitely going to use only one. Big time energy waste!

Hope this little post of mine encourages a few other folks to do better than me...

For now GO GREEN!

In US...

2009-02-13T12:08:00.013+05:30

This is my first visit to the US and past 6 weeks have been a nice experience. I have these many things to write about, not sure if my schedule here will allow me to write on them -

The Journey to the US
Driving in US
Snowfall
Sight Seeing

One good thing about the place where I am staying here is that I wake up every morning with this view outside the window -

It doesn't snow every morning here. And sleep with this view outside my window -

The Gateway Arch has been my prime subject in photographs so far. And I guess I would be uploading various photos of it if I manage to post all my blogs I mentioned above.

When I was starting from India, my friend told me about this and it still struck me when I landed here in the downtown of St Louis. You feel like there is some curfew imposed in the city. There are very less people on the street. All you see is cars (if at all). It can also be due to the cold weather. In this city, I guess this phenomena is especially true with the downtown because we could see decent population moving around when we went to the Malls in midtown or further away.

That's it for now.

Formula 1 Drama!

2008-11-03T01:24:00.004+05:30

Luck!

Drama!

Nail biting finish!

Climax - Anti-Climax!

Fantastic!

Unbelievable!

I have been trying to think about words which can describe today's F1-2008 finale@Interlagos. I started watching Tennis when Boris Becker's won the 1985 Wimbledon at the age of 17. I started following Formula1 keenly when I noticed blogs@my office and newspapers mentioning a young rookie doing podium finishes race after race in 2007 season. I actually became a fan of Hamilton right from the moment I saw him (a rookie!) holding Kimi all thru the race right from the beginning which Alonso won with McLaren 1-2. Prior to that my interests in Tennis or Formula1 was limited to newspaper sports columns.

Today I think I am sold to formula1. I uttered a thousand swear words to Kubica when I saw him doing those maneuvers between Vettel and Hamilton. I also for a moment believed like the Ferrari team that my favourite Racer has lost the title again till I heard Karun Chandhok shouting at the top of his voice that Timo Glock slowed down and Lewis Hamilton is fifth. The lady-luck turned her back on Hamilton last year while she has smiled on him this year. Scores are level! He has won this year's championship when it "sounded" like the whole world was against him. He can make a fresh start next season and please please please make less mistakes. But for the mistakes he would have been a champion by leaps and bounds in both 2007 and 2008 seasons, but a "no-mistakes-life" is impossible for mere mortals. Championship goes to the guy who makes least number of unforced errors.

Stories will come in pouring about those 30sec when it all happened but those 30sec were the most dramatic ones which people will remember for some time to come. If I say "long time to come" then it will undermine the fun that this game brings into the life of spectators and the players. Looking forward to the next season right away!

Fedora...

2008-10-29T20:34:00.004+05:30

I used to use Fedora till I fell for Ubuntu sometimes back. I have never been loyal to any particular Linux distro till I started using Ubuntu a year or two back. That instinct of "switching distros" was probably on a high yesterday and I thought I should check how is Fedora doing these days. I checked Fedora website, currently Fedora 9 is available. Let's download the DVD so I went for the torrent way. I noticed that some 700 seeds were available and some 250+ users were downloading Fedora 9 with me. I was amazed and I thought probably Fedora 9 was released recently. So I checked the schedule. Some more amazement for me, Fedora 9 was released on May 13 this year. And Fedora 10 is just a month away. Hmmm, I am totally out of touch and it seems Fedora is quite popular. But I cancelled the download and will wait for Fedora 10 to get released. The Ubuntu upgrade is just a day away anyway!

I am really very interested now in checking the torrent data on Fedora 10 release day!

~Mks

BIAL Visit...

2008-09-07T10:17:00.008+05:30

Last Saturday, we went to the Bangalore International Airport. I have uploaded some of the photographs from that visit at my flickr site. While we were there waiting for our guest to come, we noticed a huge group of school kids visiting the airport that day. All their teachers did is to divide them in two different groups. One group stood near the departure terminal and the second group near the arrival terminal. We were sitting close to the arrival terminal.

These kids were having fun. And they have their unique ways of having fun. Whenever some foreigner (especially white skin) was coming out of the Arrival terminal, all the kids would in chorus say a Big "Hi" to them. I am sure those guests would not have expected such huge welcome when they land India. Not sure what all their teachers showed to them that day, soon our guest arrived and we left the airport. There is one good area though to watch the happenings on the runway etc next to the departure terminal.

One can climb on top of those small sand deposits which are thrown carelessly in that area and watch the inside of the airport for free.

Rumours...

2008-08-01T19:59:00.005+05:30

During the recent Bangalore Bomb blasts last Friday, I was tracking the happenings at various places on the web. One such update caught my eyes, I was a little late in doing the print screen but still I managed to get a fading view of what I want to show here (inside red enclosure below) -

The text is - "Guys hate to break this, but info from sources well placed whom I cannot reveal : 5 more blasts to happen in Bangalore".

A very serious rumour, I gathered this at around 7pm in the evening while all the Bangalore blasts happened in the afternoon. I still remember we were getting news of two more blasts that day which didn't happen - one in Iskon temple and another somewhere near Hebbal on the new Airport road.

Major fire near my apartment...

2008-07-20T22:16:00.006+05:30

There was one major fire near my apartment on Bannerghatta road...

In the background is the Mantri Elegance apartment. It must be somewhere close to Mandovi Motors junction.

Phishing...

2008-06-15T17:53:00.008+05:30

Today, I checked the junk folder for one of my personal mail box and noticed a mail like this -

I never open any mail like this leave aside opening the links given in this kind of mails. But today I got curious and thought of just checking out exactly what these websites look like. And was I amazed -

Exactly same as how ICICI bank's website looks and these smart people are asking for your whole world there. Normally the ICICI bank's infinity website prompts for User id and password only. Check it out yourself -

Awesome work! Note the "Important Security Notice" in the original website also.

~mks

Ubuntu 8.4 LTS

2008-05-18T00:10:00.005+05:30

Today I upgraded my home PC to Ubuntu 8.4 LTS. Almost a month after it was first released. And I am pleasantly surprised to see that they have packaged it with FF3b5.

I like change and this change indeed impressed me. I have been using FF3b5 for some time but never expected it to be packaged with a stable desktop operating system. Actually before upgrading from Ubuntu 7 I was wondering which FF version they will provide in 8.4 LTS as FF3 is almost getting finalized.

I am yet to get the feel of this new version but from the first impressions I find it a bit sharper than the previous version. The desktop effects are smoother given that I was facing GUI freeze problems just before the upgrade. I see the search feature pre-configured on the top panel, somehow I fail to recall if it was there earlier. I never used it even if it was there. I will have to reconfigure Automatix as the current one says it works only with Ubuntu 7. Lets see, more updates as I use it more...

My Windows XP installation will have to seriously work on startup time to get me back there... I am anyway in Love with Ubuntu already!

My Pics in Google Image Search...

2008-04-22T23:57:00.003+05:30

Whenever I look at my flickr statistics, I notice that I have frequent visitors for my Infosys Mysore photos. I wondered why and today when I did a google search for "Infosys Mysore", I understood why.

When we do a google search on "Infosys Mysore", my photos are there on the top of the page (as of today). If you do a google image search for "Infosys Mysore", again they are on the first row. And it is not just the flickr photos, I get traffic to Tittle Tattle is due to these results.

Nice, I like it!

~mks

PS - This is my 100th blog post! Century during the IPL season.

IPL Telecoverage

2008-04-20T22:40:00.004+05:30

This IPL's television coverage is all screwed up. What a sentence to start a blog! But really, they are messing it up a lot. The host commentators are all amateur including Ajay Jadeja. May be I am so used to Harsha Bhogle. But surely, Max thinks that putting pretty faces can do it for them. They started with one face earlier (Yeah, Ms. Bedi) and now there are plenty. And they all slip and flip on their words, switch overs and match each other in asking silly questions. I wonder why I have not seen Sunil Gavaskar in the studios.

Coming back to the point, there is no sync between there various departments, including the audio and video department. Once we could see Symonds and the commentator talking but couldn't hear them and on another occasion the video showed players warming up while the audio was from the toss. And then it seemed that the host commentators heard and saw everything correctly, no apology for the mixup. The camera men frequently lose track of the ball especially in the Mumbai-Bangalore match today.

Another thing, I am not sure why MAX is using only one channel to show the matches. The schedule is so packed up, the half hour gap between two matches gets eaten up and then they eat up the post match ceremony of the first match. If these guys are going to cover the world cup matches then we sure are up to some pathetic coverage.

No Comments...

2008-03-14T18:07:00.002+05:30

10 year boy burnt alive in Delhi

70-80 strong mob molests 2 women in Mumbai

We the barbarians!

Coorg Trip

2008-02-22T09:18:00.014+05:30

We recently went for a Trip to Coorg on the Jan 26 weekend. It was an interesting trip because it happened in a very unplanned manner. We have been thinking for sometime to go out, go on a long drive, go somewhere sorts. So we thought, we will go for a day long trip on Jan 26 weekend, starting on Saturday morning and coming back on the same day. And we finalized on Hogenekkal for this day long trip.

Saturday morning came and we started for Hogenekkal, we heard that there was no good place to eat around Hogenekkal so we packed lots of food as well. When we reached the Silk Board Flyover (Bangalore), a discussion started and this idea to drive to Coorg instead was thrown in and everyone agreed. We had no stuff to change to for the overnight halt, no hotel bookings and no places decided, I had just browsed thru a traveler's guide the last night, noted a few places (in mind) in Coorg and then I forgot picking that book up in the morning haste.

By the time we decided to go to Coorg instead, we had crossed Bomannahalli, so I decided I will take the NICE road near Electronic City which will take me to Mysore Road. The NICE road is really cool and there was one "Great ELCIA Run" organized that day. 26th Jan is an ideal day to organize such events.

The NICE road is a great road to drive but the apathy of authorities has made it unusable at several stretches. The Run was organized to raise a voice against that apathy it seems. We had a first hand experience of the problem, when we tried to get back on the NICE road from the Bannerughatta Road. Politics can stop things from happening, but it cannot stop people from progressing. Somehow, there is continuous flow of trucks and cars on this extremely bad patch despite a pathetic severely potholed mud path connecting the two. Because people know that after this bad patch there is a world class road all the way till Mysore Road (at least, since I have not used the road beyond that!).

One complain to the NICE people though, there is ridiculously steep slope after the flyover over Kanakpura Road. I am not sure how difficult it was to carry forward that flyover till the other cliff, but right now you feel like climbing down a wall. But we reached the Mysore Road pretty soon and continued our journey towards Coorg, the tentative destination being Madikeri because I could recall that the book mentioned - if at all we need a hotel at run time in Coorg, Madikeri is the place. Continuing on Mysore Road, we reached Kamat Lokaruchi but it was so awfully crowded that we decided against having the breakfast there. So we continued and finally stopped at a restaurant which is behind the Cafe Coffee Day. And here we had to be content with Paper Dosa only because the restaurant guys ran out of their raw material, they did not anticipate such a rush on a weekend it seems. Interestingly, whatever we were asking that day, he was going in and then coming back saying "wover". And finally, whatever he could get, he just dumped that on us.

Anyway, we reached Srirangapatnam. The book mentioned that after Srirangapatnam, take right turn to Ranganthitthu bird sanctuary to get on a short cut to Hunsur Road. I got confused and decided against that and finally we took a right turn just outside Mysore on its outer ring road. After that due to lack of appropriate signage at various unassuming forks, we wandered around but finally managed to get on the Madikeri road. I was expecting not a very good road but this was indeed a good one, not as good as Bangalore-Mysore road but still driving was a pleasure. Again, we kept looking for signboards to Madikeri at each and every forks. The good road finally ended and we came across an extremely bad town road in Piriyapatna. It was ok again till Kushalnagar. That's where we started looking for accommodation. Kushalnagar seemed to be full and that helpful Hotel person tried to call Madikeri hotels as well and they were all full as well. We finished our home made food in Kushalnagar. Kushalnagar looked like a good locality with lots of shops etc. We proceeded to Madikeri from here on the hilly road. The road is quite wide but full of potholes.

On the way to Madikeri, we noticed a left turn to Dubare Elephant Camp where they give bath to the elephants every morning. I noted that it was something I needed to take my son to, the next morning. Another fork indicated that the Abby falls will be on the right side of the road. We finally reached Madikeri in late afternoon and decided that the first thing we need to do is to get accommodation. By the time, we had discussed a lot about home stays and the consensus was to get that somehow. Going thru the Madikeri town, we came across a tourist information center and we approached them immediately. They connected us to a family which gives out a portion of their house for home stay. We finalized that, it was in some colony on way to Club Mahindra Resorts. Looked good, they charged us Rs. 1250/- per night per room. After that it was too late to go to Abby falls because they close that by 6pm and we would miss the sunset at Raja seat had we gone there. So we went to Raja Seat immediately and I was amazed to see how it opened the Coorg Valley in front of us.

It was difficult to imagine about such a valley when we were going thru it while on way to Madikeri.

We spent some good time there, watching sunset and taking photographs. That's the only time my Camera worked and was used during the trip.

After the sunset, we went to the town market for some shopping. Then a restaurant, then good night sleep. We decided that we would wake up early next day and go to Abby falls first and then proceed to Dubare where the elephant bathing starts from 8:30am. And to our surprise, we were all up early by 5:30am next day. We checked out, but by the time we started it was close to 7:30am. When we reached the Abby falls there was no crowd and it was all open for our eyes only.

Nice place, but I liked the snake like hilly road more thru which we drove to the falls and back. Then we took the same bad road towards Kushalnagar and took a right turn to Dubare from where it was a very nice road all the way to the Elephant Camp. The queue made us wait for a while on one end of the River Kaveri while we watched Elephants given bath at the other end of the river. And by the time we reached the other end, the bath was over. Little disappointed, we went ahead to watch the Elephant feeding session. They prepare some big balls of ragi and jaggery and put it inside the Elephant's mouth. It was fun to see the kid elephants hurrying to pull some stuff out of their mother's mouth. Sunny enjoyed it a lot and I guess he enjoyed more when we let him get into the river and have some fun with water and pebbles.

From Dubare, we came back to Kushalnagar road and went to the Kaveri Nisargadhama park. Their the fun thing was the Elephant ride and a stroll in a good park with lots of animals around. That was our last outing sorts in Coorg trip. After that we had lunch in Kushalnagar and then back to Bangalore via Mysore. On return, we did stop at Kamat Lokaruchi which has lesser crowd and then I didn't take the NICE road to reach back home.

It was a fun trip, and it ended with a longing to visit that place again and enjoy it more.

And I thought...

2008-01-30T20:10:00.000+05:30

And I thought why my system is running so slow!!!

Search Travel in India - 90DI.com

2007-09-16T02:27:00.000+05:30

A few friends and ex-colleagues of mine have come up with an interesting idea about travel search. First a little background - The Indian Railways operates around 8700 passenger train trips but still these many trips are not sufficient to give you point to point connectivity to around 6,856 railway stations. So we have this practice of connecting trains.

To go from point A to B, you first go from A to C then from C to B. You can have various options depending on your fare, time and location preferences. And you may want to check about the availability on these routes, the pricing, time taken etc. To this, if you want to add the options provided by the fast growing air travel industry of India, you will have even more options to compare for.

So what my friends have done is that they have come up with a website called http://www.90di.com, which lists all the connection options from point A to point B in India. One can select modes like Train, Flight and Train+Flight and it fetches information from related websites and gives you a consolidated result which includes all the route options, duration of travel, number of hops, fare etc. One can also check the map for the listed routes.

I was very amused and amazed when I first came across this website. A really nice idea and makes life very simple for frequent long distance travelers. This website will be especially useful for those who need to travel during festival times and the direct route reservations are full on the very first day they open.

For those who have seen Yahoo!'s farechase website, they will find this one similar but with an added convenience of search in Indian Railways. Farechase caters to search in Air Travel only (when I last checked). And I am sure, search in Indian railways is a big feature because doing the same thing on the IR website takes a looong time!

~mks

Disclaimer - I don't have any financial affiliation with 90di.com! Naqvi and gang were in my previous company and we are good friends.

Route to E-City in Bangalore...

2007-09-16T01:35:00.000+05:30

This blog is for people in Bangalore, who happen to travel on Hosur Road every weekday or more to reach their offices in Electronic City. I have tried to create a tour in Google Earth of an alternate route from Wipro Office in Electronic City to Bilekahalli-Bannerughatta Road junction. The latter junction is a few hundred meters away from the Bannerughatta Road and Outer Ring Road junction. This route will be a wee bit longer than the regular BTM-Hosur road route but the time one would take on this route is always close to 30mins (in almost all weather conditions!) unlike that on regular route which varies from 20 min to 4 hours.

To check this route, you will have to install Google Earth and open the .kmz file using that. The route starts from the Wipro Office gate in Electronic City and takes you thru some villages although the road thru them is mostly wide and tarred and in very new condition and rarely used. This even avoids the NICE road whose exit to Bannerughatta road is always choked.

Please find the route file here (to be opened using Google Earth). Hope the file opens as easily as it did in my computer and the route therein was easy to follow! Once thru this route in Google Earth, you may also want to have a dekko on the same route in wikimapia.

~Mks

Long time no see...

2007-09-08T21:41:00.000+05:30

Its been a long time, lots of things to post but never posted.

Workplace changed, blogs labeled Infosys will decrease and those labeled Accenture will increase! Apparent changes in web presence - AOL becomes primary IM. MSN is also there to some extent. And came to know about this nice thing called trillian. Sleek one, useful if you use many instant messengers and you actually chat using all of them. Supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ.

My home PC recovered from a near crash situation. Its working fine right now, touch wood! Reason being, switching it off from the UPS directly instead of normal shutdown (There's a four year old in house!). Ubuntu is totally unusable now, is not booting up at all and I saw it going from bad to worse while trying to recover. Windows looks normal now after a system restore and multiple chkdsks.

Had to buy additional USB harddisk for backup. You get a 160GB Seagate hard-disk, vendor assembled in a Tech-Com casing for Rs 3328/- (tax included) in Bangalore. That's when you don't do any bargaining and are assured of a 5 years warranty. Taking backup in an unstable system is an arduous task. Took two nights for me to backup some 100GBs. For once I had to run chkdsk on new USB drive as well.

That's all for now. Hope to see my system up tomorrow!

~Mks

Call from Google search...

2007-07-24T22:26:00.001+05:30

I was trying to search for some Movers and Packers in Bangalore today when I noticed this call thing in the sponsored links. So I dialed out the first result and it actually connected me to the movers and packers listed there. Its another thing that I was trying to call at 10pm in the night and this movers and packers guy didn't want to talk and disconnected immediately. The feature as such was a pleasant surprise. I will test this out tomorrow during working hours.

~mks

Pownce, Inviteshare and Techcrunch

2007-07-23T16:29:00.000+05:30

First Joost and now pownce, thanks to Techcrunch. The joost invite I got directly from Techcrunch courtesy this post. And today I stumbled upon this news item about Techcrunch acquiring Inviteshare. So I checked up Inviteshare and immediately signed up. And placed myself in the queue for invitation for pownce. And vow! Within 10 min one Mr. Maverick sends me an invite. I am amazed. Come to think about it, inviteshare is good, one way it fetches you invites for new happening type sites and other way it tells you which are the sites which are of happening types these days!

Coming back to pownce, some of my friends who have been powncing for sometime now, must have noticed new friend request from me. Getting into pownce thru this method was interesting, now I have joost invites and pownce invites which I am going to send/share now thru this inviteshare. So if anybody is still looking for them, please sign up on inviteshare, and then I will invite you for joost and pownce :-P.

~mks

PS - And btw, I am looking for livestation invite now, the livestation team has given some blah blah on growing the user-base in controlled manner!

Joost!

2007-07-16T16:36:00.000+05:30

I have been watching Joost for some time now (Ok, few weeks!). And all I can say that its been an experience so far. The ad-free viewing experience is great (save for that Coke text-ad which I noticed yesterday evening). The other day I and my son were watching that continuous burst of cartoons when my wife came and remarked - "No Ads!".

Apart from the No-Ads thing, the choice of channels is also good. So many things to watch and explore, Joost has the potential to revive my interest in watching TV (on computer of course). And my 2Mbps connection is also managing it well, now I need one with no limits on downloads/uploads!

By the way, going by Text-Ads thing, why can't the TV channels do the same thing for themselves. Tickers are already part of the news channels these days. This way they can have ads coming on the screen all the time while the programs carry on with their stuff in the main viewing area. At least the channel which starts this experiment can boast of having more viewers in the beginning. But I know, if they go with this idea, we will finally be having text ads on the screen all the time plus the regular ads we see, coming as usual.

~mks

This is cool!

2007-07-10T10:17:00.001+05:30

When I checked for the source of traffic to my blog today it showed one link from Yahoo! OurCity. On exploring it further I was pleasantly surprised to see that Yahoo! OurCity for Mysore contains my Mysore Trip blog. Yahoo! posts the results of this Technorati Search in the Travel Blog section.

That was cool anyway!

~mks

Mysore Trip...

2007-07-07T22:53:00.000+05:30

Last Saturday we went on a trip to Mysore. We drove all the way from Bangalore and came back on the same day. We used SH-17 (Bangalore-Mysore State Highway) for our travel.

Our first stop being Sangam at Srirangapatna. A Sangam is a sanskrit word meaning confluence. At Allahabad its the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati. This sangam at Srirangapatna is different. Actually the town of Srirangapatna is an island and is enclosed by the river Kaveri. So the point where the river Kaveri meets back again is called Sangam.

The river Kaveri is sacred for the people in this part of India. And the people you see in the photograph above were actually going to perform some puja on those small islands in the river. Our next stop was the Dariya Daulat bagh. It used to be summer palace of Tipu Sultan built in year 1784.

As the description says, its made up of wood and work done on those wood is huge and amazing. Imagine something like that, wholly made up wood and still standing intact after 200+ years. And that's not just all, there are some great paintings containing lots of details. Sad that we are not allowed to take photographs of those. Anyways!

Then our next stop was Sriranganathaswamy temple from whom the town derives its name.

The uniqueness of this temple is that there is a huge idol of God Vishnu showing the God in resting position while most of the idols depict the God standing upright. From here we moved ahead to Mysore city. It started raining that made the journey even more pleasant. I must say, the weather Gods were in a very good mood that day, for we didn't have to face any kind of heat during anytime of our trip . It was either clouded or drizzling. In Mysore we first headed towards the Mysore palace.

One small note from the palace experience. We reached the wrong gate of the palace and thought that the entrance is closed. When we asked people over there they said the correct entrance is on the other side but the entry time is over and there is some 1 hr time before it opens again. And they suggested by that time we can probably cover one silk Saree shop where we can get good Mysore Silk Sarees. We believed on their "palace closure thing" but since we were not interested in buying Sarees we proceeded further ignoring their suggestion. And instead of going towards our next destination, we went to the correct gate of the palace and to our surprise the palace was open. It is actually open all day starting from some 10am in morning to 4/5pm in the evening.

The most interesting thing about Mysore palace is its special lighting done on Sunday evenings. It is done for very small duration but the palace looks really beautiful and grand in that lighting. We could obviously not cover the lighting phenomena so we proceeded towards some lunch destination. While coming out of the palace we found a gentleman playing the toy violin. I couldn't stop myself from taking his photograph. This toy violin, we used to pester our parents so much every now and then for buying. The sellers used to be so expert in playing it. And in our hands they used to get ruined within hours. This person was also an expert in playing it.

We again asked for suggestions from local vendors and everyone was pointing to a particular hotel nearby. But this time we didn't want to fall for the sponsored hotel kind of things because from our experience we have found out that these hotels sponsored by local vendors or autovallas are of very poor quality. To our surprise hotel Ramanashree turned out be better than our expectations especially when while trying to avoid it we went to a nearby restaurant which was really bad and pathetic. There is one Bheema jewelers there very close to this hotel, we initially didn't notice the jeweler part and thought that it is from Bheema's chain of restaurants we have in Bangalore and almost parked our car there. Thankfully that realization happened well in time because we had two ladies there in our car, taking them to a jewellery's shop is like you know what :-).

You must have noticed the book featured in the first photograph of this blog. The Mysore chapter in this Outlook Traveller's guide very clearly mentions all the good restaurants in Mysore and the timings of all the travel destinations. But somehow we were not reading it properly till someone pointed out during the lunch that all this information is there in the book as well. So we figured out that from the next time onwards we would be exploring the Devaraja Urs Road instead of random search for good food.

Next we proceeded towards Chamundi Hills. Before that, this is how Chamundi Hills looked like from Mysore Palace -

The weather on top of the hill was superb with misty misty atmosphere at the hill but clear sky to look down at the Mysore city.

The temple -

The Lalitha Mahal Palace from the hill -

From the Chamundi Hills we proceeded towards to Vrindavan Gardens popularly known as KRS (Krishna Raj Sagar) in Mysore and around. There again we had some nice time and more photographs -

By this time we had finished our travel quota for the day and we had to rush back to Bangalore. We traveled back on the same SH17 and the journey back home didn't even take 3 hours with intermittent rains and most of the time driving with headlights on. In all nice experience and a very long blog. :-D

~mks

My Hindi Blog...

2007-07-03T00:19:00.000+05:30

I have started a separate blog page in Hindi today. You can check my posts in Hindi at Manish Uvaach!

~mks

हिंदी ब्लॉग (Blog in Hindi)...

2007-07-02T15:54:00.000+05:30

नमस्कार,

अभिषेक को देख कर मैंने भी सोचा कि एक ब्लॉग पोस्ट हिंदी में भी करूं। यह तो काफी आसान है। गूगल नें तो ये सुविधा मार्च में ही दे दी थी पर मुझे अभी पता चला। काफी सही है ये तो!

अरे सही, इसमें तो गलती करने पर सुधार के लिए उदाहरण भी देता है, वाह! किसी भी शब्द पर लेफ़्ट क्लिक कीजिये। अगर आपको भी हिंदी में ब्लॉग करना है तो Settings में जा कर Basics में देखिए वहा पर आपको Transliteration का drop down दिखाई पड़ेगा. सही है ना! पर अगर हिन्दी व अंग्रेजी मिला करके लिखनी हो तो फिर थोड़ी समस्या है। editor थोडा slow हो जाता है। मुझे लग रह है कि editor का "Write Hindi" option click ना करके सीधे शब्द पर लेफ्ट क्लिक कीजिये उस से आसान रहेगा। और समस्या तब हो रही है जब मैं कुछ गलत टाईप कर दे रह हूँ। खैर दिमाग तो काफी लगाया है गूगल नें उसमें कोई दो राय नही है।

वैसे मुझे अब लग रह है कि मेरी हिंदी लिखने की आदत अब छूट चुकी है क्योंकि कोई भी वाक्य पहली बार में बिना अंग्रेजी के एक शब्द इस्तेमाल किए हुये पूरा ही नही हो पा रहा है।

१ - "option" को हिंदी में क्या बोलते हैं?
२ - "Blog post" को हिंदी में क्या बोलेंगे? उसी प्रकार "right click", "left click" इत्यादि इत्यादि।

ये काफी सुविधाजनक है, मानना पड़ेगा, वाह! थोड़ी हिंदी भी सही कर लेंगे अपनी, इसी बहाने ;-)

~mks

Rail Enquiry...

2007-06-20T11:53:00.000+05:30

Have you tried the Rail Enquiry using the number 139? This one is IVR and it allows you to type in the train number or speak the train name. There is an option (in Bangalore) where you can enquire for either train bound to Bangalore station or elsewhere. For elsewhere you have to speak the station name. Today when I said "Yasvantpur Jn", the IVR lady said "I **think** you said Yasvantpur".

The "I think" struck me hard. Vow! To make the software sound more interactive/human they have used the word "think", cool!

~mks

PS - I use the Train Enquiry website. Todays was an exception.

Kiddo Chat...

2007-06-14T12:05:00.000+05:30

My son has this peculiar inclination towards reading text from right to left like we do in Arabic/Farsi/Urdu. Yesterday, when his Mom asked him to spell Apple, he said "E L P P A"! If I try to read newspaper to him and start reading "The Hindu" like "T H E H I N D U", he will say "no read it like 'U D N ...'".

My grandfather was a teacher of Farsi so that could possibly be one reason. But its interesting, like they force kids to use their right hand we will make him read from left to right.

~mks

Bad day!

2007-06-10T16:51:00.000+05:30

We went to one "Hemadri Cermaics Shop" near Silk Board in Bangalore. I parked the car with enough space for parking two more cars on the left. But one lorry driver had other ideas. While we were inside checking out the bathroom accessories, he apparently while backing up his vehicle, did a huge smooch with the rear left door of my car -

He could have stopped while the lorry just touched my car but that has not to happen, the lorry's rear stuck at this point in my car and dragged the car till its front bumper hit the boundary wall some 3 ft ahead of it -

The lorry driver ran away after the incident. The shop owner who owned the lorry as well has promised to bear the cost for the dent. But lets see if they hold their promise when I tell them the cost of repair tomorrow. When I showed the damage to service center they were suggesting change of door. I am going to claim the insurance for this and hope they pay the part which will come to me. I will be loosing the no-claim bonus as well when I renew the insurance next year.

Bad day indeed for me!

~Mks

Tip

2007-05-31T13:42:00.000+05:30

A tip is a payment to certain service sector workers beyond the advertised bill or fee.

It was a sad day yesterday. One of my relatives passed away. The family decided to take him to the native place Lucknow. The air travel required the body to be embalmed and casketed. There is an agency in Bangalore which does this. So we went to this mortuary where this was to be done. The guy over there could speak in Hindi and he very clearly explained us everything. He was very forthcoming in giving all the information and he assured us that everything will be done on time.

While all this was happening, the youngest son went to a corner and was crying. We went to console him. And suddenly this guy walked over to us and asked for a tip. Apparently he was going to bring dinner and he was asking for a tip to get the same. We were shocked. We gave the money but the shock stayed and probably this is one of those events which will reside in my mind for all my life.

Later we discussed the same and we deduced that they have become agnostic to all these emotions. They cannot survive if they let those emotions overcome them. And for that matter, we tipped them again when they helped us hand over the casket to the airport cargo today morning!

~mks

Formula One!

2007-05-28T09:04:00.000+05:30

Watching formula1 is dangerously infectious, it gets into your driving immediately!

I have watched two Alonso won races (KL and Monaco) till now and he must be really thankful to Hamilton for blocking the Ferraries for him all the way till the end. Such consistency! When LH starts getting the pole position...

Monaco race track is crazy, you start from Residency road - St. Joseph School Crossing, take right at Bangalore Central, take right again on the Richmond Road at Lifestyle crossing, go straight, climb up the famous dissected flyover of Richmond/Residency road, take a U-turn on the flyover itself towards Residency road... That's Bangalore Formula1 race track for you. If you want, you go from under the flyover, that will give you the tunnel like feeling.

;-)

~mks

Meeting Sunil Gavaskar...

2007-05-25T14:21:00.001+05:30

Sunil Gavaskar came to our office campus today for some promotion. And we got a chance to hear him. Me and Veetrag went together to see him. We didn't bring our cameras and we didn't have anything appropriate to take autograph on (and not even a pen). Luckily, people arranged for some notebooks and pens in the audi and Veetrag's w700i worked as our camera.

Since Gavaskar retired some 20 years ago so the junta which turned up on time was mostly from that era when he played. But later on the hall was full with people from all ages. The Gavaskar I saw right there speaking in front of me was a little different. When I looked up at the screen behind him, the Gavaskar in that looked familiar. I am so much used to his on screen presence I must say.

Some very candid discussion on all aspects of (mostly Indian) cricket happened. He fielded all the questions very coolly and I felt good seeing and listening him. I asked a question (why no triple hundreds from Indians (only one till date)), and I wasn't too worried about the answer, I just looked eyes into eyes at him.

Some photographs -

That's me taking his autograph.

That's the autograph! :-)

~Mks

Kiddo chat...

2007-05-24T22:33:00.000+05:30

After buying the car, I gave my bike to my cousin. He visits me often, and today was one such day. When he left, my son got curious and this happened -

Son - Papa tum car kisko doge? (Whom will you give the car to?)
Me - Nahi beta, car hamaare paas rahegi. (No dear, car will be with us)
Son - Main chalaunga. (I will drive)
Me - Haan, jab tum bade ho jaoge to car chalaoge. (Yes, when you grow up, you will drive the car).
Son - Tum peeche baithoge? (You will sit on the backseat?)

:-)

~mks

Paisa - Random Musings

2007-05-22T11:10:00.000+05:30

Microsoft agrees to buy aQuantive for $6 billion, compare this with google's acquisition of Double Click for $3.1 billion. Other such acquisitions I heard of - Yahoo Inc. buying online ad exchange Right Media Inc. ($680 million), and WPP Group PLC buying ad firm 24/7 Real Media Inc ($649 million).

Baba re! kitna paisa hai advertisement mein!! (Gosh! there's so much money in advertising business).

This one is from GigaOm - Alltel, one of the smaller mobile carriers has decided to go private in a deal that values the company at $27.5 billion ($71.50 a share in cash), a 23% premium over Alltel’s closing price on December 29, 2006. The company is being acquired by two private equity players, TPG (Texas Pacific Group) and GS Capital Partners (private equity arm of Goldman Sachs).

Baba re! Mobile business mein aur jyada paisa hai (Gosh! Mobile business involves even more money).

Vinnie Mirchandani discusses salaries and billing rates of Indian Offshoring companies in his blog post titled "the fat flat world". He quotes one survey where customers think after-tax outsourcing margins should only be 5 to 12%. IIRC Infy, Wipro, CTS do in the range of 3-5 times of that.

They (customers) also seem to be saying - Baba re! Kitna paisa hai logo ke paas!

;-)

~mks

Insane Rail Fan...

2007-05-18T15:52:00.000+05:30

Can you believe somebody would lie down on the rail track to take a video of a running train? No? Confused? Watch it yourself -

~mks

Bengali/Oriya Tam Bram!

2007-05-16T10:37:00.000+05:30

I met this friend of friend of mine today. He is son of Oriya Tam Bram father and Bengali Tam Bram mother. He can understand Tamil but cannot speak. His paternal ancestors settled as Raj Purohits of some Kingdom in Orisa and maternal ones settled doing same for some Bengali Raja. He himself has married a Marathi Brahmin settled in Andhra.

Really interesting lineage!

~mks

HP's second quarter earnings...

2007-05-09T09:42:00.000+05:30

GigaOm reports that HP has to release information about its second quarter earnings one week earlier due to some internal mess-up. It was better than market expectations anyway but what caught my attention was these statements -

H-P’s announcement rolled across Business Wire’s feed at 8:45 a.m., EST

...snip...

By 8:46, the stock had shot up 2.7% to $44.92 a share. That’s not a
huge percentage gain per se, but for a stock as large as H-P’s, it
meant $3.2 billion injected into its market cap in one minute.

Lets read it as - Three point two billion per minute!! Very interesting indeed. I now understand what they mean by "eyes popped out!"

~mks

Summer Training...

2007-04-24T16:55:00.001+05:30

Is it mandatory to do 2 months summer training course during your engineering? Say after 6th sem. What is the norm like?

The demand-supply equations have changed. When these courses were designed, they had only a few seats to start with, and there were only a few industries (government run/public sector), that equilibrium is gone now.

There are so many engineering colleges out there churning out so many grads every year, how is the availability of genuine summer training opportunities? With the colleges making it compulsory and junta is coming out in such large numbers, how is it possible for everyone of them to do something useful. 2 months will be spent in no time with the trainee just getting acquainted with the norms of the industry, when will he/she produce something useful for the organization.

The companies will rarely get any returns from the such short trainings. If at all they do, they enforce stringent mechanisms to induct trainees, and add some branding benefits to it. It might be beneficial for the trainees but if that trainee is not going to join back the organization, it is a loss of productivity for the organization.

Many people look for their friends/uncles who are in key positions and can get them at least a certificate from some organizations. As I understand, in many organizations it is mandatory to entertain a certain number of trainees every year and people use it as a way to get some certificate without any effort, for the trainers its a burden as well. Philosophy wise it is good, one must spread the knowledge but when it comes to implementation, its a chaos...

Is it not all farce then?

~mks

Happy Feet Video - Desi Ishtyle

2007-04-16T13:46:00.000+05:30

This one is one of my favorite video off late on youtube. Very nicely done and can work as a very good promotion for the Happy Feet - Hindi version.

~mks

Another father-son chat...

2007-04-14T22:12:00.000+05:30

Last night it was raining in Bangalore, a little bit of thunder and lightening as well. And while this was on, me and my son were having a chat -

Son: Ye kya bol raha hai? (What is this noise?)
Me: Badal bol raha hai. (Its the clouds)
Son: Chal hum log chapat laga ke aate hain badal ko. (Lets go and slap the clouds)
Me: Vaha sky mein kaise jaoge? (How will you go up in the sky?)
Son: Superman ka towel pahan ke jayenge. (We will wear Superman's "towel"!)

:-D

~mks

Google Masterplan and Privacy...

2007-03-29T09:35:00.000+05:30

Watch this movie on google and privacy debate, recently posted on digital inspiration. DI says its best ever movie made on google.

And for the privacy debate, I think there is a race to collect as much data about individuals as possible all over the web. Some guys are doing it decently and some are not. This video talks about gmail where each of your mails are scanned (of course with your consent, apparently) but what about social networking sites (orkut et al) where people voluntarily part with personal information. Actually, in all these cases, the onus resides on us! If we believe that google (and others) will abide by its (their) privacy policy forever then its a risk which we are taking and we should be aware of that.

~mks

Kiddo Chat

2007-02-26T14:48:00.000+05:30

Yesterday Star Plus was showing Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. My son walked by, paused/watched for a while, and asked "bole to uncle kaha hain? (Where is "bole to Uncle" (Munna Bhai)?).

~Mks

India Shining...

2007-02-16T18:49:00.000+05:30

Rising India

India Poised

Do these remind you of anything?

India Shining

When is the election? ;-)

~Mks

I am a conservative and an orthodox...

2007-02-16T16:54:00.001+05:30

Because I am wondering what to understand from this statement -

"a form of intimate entertaining communication involving some very subtle and complex combinations of gesture, language, play and relaxation"

This is quoted verbatim from an ibnlive news. But then my attitude explains, how difficult life is for people from that domain, in our society.

~mks

Tata Indica ad...

2007-02-12T14:13:00.000+05:30

Remember that Tata Indica Liar ad, my son used to come running from anywhere in the house just to see this ad and he must be just one or one and half year old at that time. I was wondering if I could find it on youtube and yup, it is there, here you go -

~mks

The Techcrunch Effect...

2007-02-06T01:48:00.000+05:30

Techcrunch blogged about Go2Web20 and heres what they did to themselves because of the traffic coming to them from techcrunch.

~mks

PS - Yeah, I know, I have got too many unread feeds in my netvibes!
PPS - Looks like there is some problem with blogspot today, I can blog at blogger but cannot read posts at blogspot. And I smell fish here, because the same blogspot is available thru internet proxies!

Bandwidth Crazy!

2007-02-01T20:40:00.000+05:30

Here I go...

Finally it changed - my BSNL dataone bandwidth!

~mks

Ek Anek aur Ekta...

2007-02-01T07:18:00.000+05:30

I am part of a mailing list of parents in my office. There was a discussion on "Ek Anek aur Ekta" (One, Many and Unity) - a films division video which used to be aired on Doordarshan in the good old days of single TV channel. And its there on Youtube and Google Video. Here you go -

Today morning my son woke up in bad mood. And then I showed him this video and voila! He immediately got back his rhythm... Actually I had to drag him from the computer to finish with the daily morning chores.

~mks

BSNL Dataone - Again!

2007-01-30T23:13:00.000+05:30

While I am eagerly waiting for 1st of Feb when they remove the bandwidth cap for my connection, I got a glimpse of what my neighbor is getting @ Rs. 250/- per month -

Looks cool! Mine is still lingering around 100-300Kbps.

~Mks

Linux Asia Conference (Update)...

2007-01-29T11:32:00.001+05:30

I see that the schedule is up now. Good to see that its not really packed up - The Tech Track. No parallel talks, no attempts to fit in as many speakers/tracks as possible.

Less is good!

Best wishes

~mks

BSNL Broadband - Dataone

2007-01-26T11:57:00.000+05:30

While I was raving about BSNL's dataone broadband all around the world, BSNL was busy in its own bureaucratic innovations!

I use dataone at home and I have Home Unlimited 900 plus plan. This means I get unlimited downloads and uploads and the bandwidth is 256Kbps. When I saw this news on dataone portal I was very excited and I happily blogged about that in my intranet blog also. But then Veetrag asked me to do a bandwidth test and post the image showing 2Mbps or so bandwidth. So I did a bandwidth test and saw this -

Eating the humble pie! A retest within a few minutes was some solace -

But I am confused! Though this is still not enough (afterall they said they will be giving 2Mbps). I checked up with the helpline, and its there at the dataone website also. BSNL is not increasing the bandwidth for Home Unlimited users so why am I getting > 256Kbps b/w. For me the higher the better, but where is 2Mbps? So now, I have asked them to migrate me to Home-1000 plan where there is an assured b/w of 384Kbps which can go up to 2Mbps. Only guys paying 3300/- per month get 2Mbps b/w. What does this mean? 2Mbps is still a faraway dream. Lets see what I get next month when they change my plan.

I am sure they think that these buggers are already eating up the bandwidth with huge downloads and if they get faster connection they are going to eat up the whole world. I used to believe the same for Airtel also, the bandwidth they offer in their unlimited plans used to be much less than what they offered in limited download/upload plans. Not sure about the current status there. Also, note that BSNL was offering no unlimited plans in the beginning, they worked it out only later. It seems unlimited downloads and high bandwidth together don't make business sense for them.

I have this fundamental doubt - Why is there a download/upload limit in a broadband plan when it is supposed to be always on facility. On one hand they shout about "Video on Demand" and "Online Gaming" facilities and on the other hand they charge Rs 0.90 per MB if your download/upload crosses 1 GB in a month. 256Kbps is a pre-historic bandwidth when I compare with what others get in broadband advanced countries (check those for South Korea, US). While they can claim the broadband tarrif in India is going to be the lowest in the world, I can easily show it can be highest because of the way it has been formulated. Given an opportunity, I will download at least 500MB to 1GB per day @ 256Kbps which makes it 15-30GB in a month. In the home 3300 plan, my bill would be Rs 3300 to Rs 10000/- per month. To give you an example, I recently upgraded the Ubuntu on my home pc and fedora core 6 on my laptop and both the updates were just a little less than 1 GB each. 2 GB of my limit gone in 2 days straight. If I want to download Solaris 10 to try it out, it will be another 3-4 GB. And lets not discuss about the videos of my son which I want to share with parents in Varanasi because the bandwidth situation is Varanasi is even worse. I don't want to restrict myself with such download/upload limits.

If they want to proliferate the usage of broadband internet in India, they have to come out of these restricted pricing methods. Its not any social service I am asking them to do, we are 1 billion people in India and lets divide it by 10 to get 100 million households. Dividing it by 10 again gives 10 million households which may want to get internet at home and if they pay Rs. 250-500 per month it comes out to be Rs 30-60 Billion per year business opportunity. How's that?

Looking at statistics, I find that the target for 2007 is 9 million broadband subscribers and 20 million till 2010. One would also say broadband proliferation is dependent on PC penetration but still internet access is one of most important reasons why one would buy a PC. If my parents can seamlessly video chat with my son while sitting at the comforts of our homes they are going to tell 20 more people about the experience. OTOH, a father is going scold his son/daughter big time if the poor guy downloads 5 GB of data in a particular month because instead of Rs 250/- the bill will be Rs. 4000/- for that month. It may look like loss of revenue to BSNL if they are looking at just one connection at a time, but if it scares some 1000 dads like that, it is an opportunity lost worth 2.5 Lacs per month for n number of years.

Finally, I am still hopeful that it will not be like this for long, we will have even better days in future like what we have seen with Mobiles and Telephones in India. Sooner the better!

~Mks

PS - As you would have noticed at the top of this page, I do a lot of random mumblings! :-)

Impressed...

2007-01-26T09:43:00.000+05:30

Sun's CEO gives an interview to Scoble. Talks about a lot of things. Wordpress Founder watches it and blogs about his experience with Sun, not so good. The crib being -

The Sun platform is completely wrong for a new generation of startups

And Sun's CEO apologizes on his blog to Wordpress Founder. Cool no!!

I think it's like the difference between your requirements analysis documents and your end product. You should be able to deliver what you promise, or you should be able to chew what you wanna bite. And to some extent, I agree with this perception thing with Sun.

~mks

Linux Asia Conference 2007...

2007-01-25T15:47:00.001+05:30

Linux Asia Conference - Some observations...

1) Microsoft is one of the Sponsors - "Interoperability Partner". Now what is that and what happened to this.
2) Turbolinux is alive - I almost forgot!
3) Conference starts on 31st Jan, I am still searching for the schedule.

Best wishes

~Mks

PS - I gave a talk there in 2004.

The crowd on the dais...

2007-01-24T23:32:00.000+05:30

The presentation ceremony today for the India-West Indies cricket match was quite interesting. Some 15-20 people (dignitaries) were standing there on the dais, or probably more, including two ministers. What for? To give out some 3 awards to the man of the match. Lot of big people in Orissa!

And what is this Tripti Foods? Their CEO was also named there, last match also some similar company's CEO was there. Both seem to be related to Pepsi. Tried googling without success. My guess - local franchises of Pepsi and misuse of sponsorship rights. Hope its not true, but still the crowd on the dais is annoying, especially when there's nothing much to do.

With each of these ODI centers getting matches after a long time (3 years+)... nobody knows when the next time will come. But then how does BCCI manages maintaining such huge lights put for day-night matches when they can give a match to this venue once in every three years only. Or may be they are used for local matches like Ranji etc which I don't watch.

Anyways, people like power, people like to be seen as powerful people, people like to be seen with powerful people... Can't help it, can we? The crowd on the dais!

~mks

Solaris + Intel

2007-01-23T21:46:00.000+05:30

I have always had a great respect for the Solaris OS. And I hope this move of Sun and Intel pays well for both of them.

~mks

Flip Test...

2007-01-19T10:52:00.001+05:30

"Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper'. It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

Those are of course not my words, while reading Andrew McAfee, I came across this cool concept of flip test. And that's not the thing he wanted to discuss in that blog. He takes this discussion further to compare old generation collaboration technologies (email, chat, cellphones...) with the new generation collaboration technologies (blogs, wiki etc). Interesting read!

There is always some opposition to any new technology or disruption while many people (old economy thoughts) oppose new adoption there are always people (new economy thoughts) who advocate for change or new additions. One should be able to view things from the top, understand all the perspectives and then evaluate all the pros and cons to take a decision which is good for all. I like writers (especially fiction writers) a lot for that matter.

~mks

Spams...

2007-01-05T15:04:00.001+05:30

If you are sending me a mail and if you think that I don't know you then please write a reasonable subject in the mail. Because I get so many mails these days from so many people from around the world about so many things which are totally irrelevant to me that I just delete them without opening if they don't sound convincing from Sender's name and the subject line.

Some of the key subject lines -
1) Hi
2) free blah blah blah
3) Your mail
4) Words where "0" (zero) is used for "O" and so on...

And Senders names like
1) Instant Business CD
2) Way of life

And lets not talk about the unmentionable subjects and sender names here.

Spams have totally ruined some of my webmail accounts. Lycos is totally gone, I don't even bother to delete the mails there. My primary web mail used to be Yahoo but that has moved to gmail now, the latter having better filtering. And whenever I visit my Yahoo mail, I have to first delete all those "unreasonable subject" mails and then proceed with reasonable ones. This blog happened when I was checking my Yahoo! mail.

And there is one more category of spammers. Emails from job sites and talent hunt organizations. You need them when you plan to switch job and they need you all the time! So when I contacted them some four years back they were so obliging that they have made it a point to always inform me whenever there is some opportunity anywhere in industry. Software Developer, Testing, Architect is still bearable (keeps me informed ;-)) but I get offers for automobile profiles as well. And there went another preferred email id of mine.

I guess one should strategically choose which email ids to give where. You happen to browse various types of websites, many of them would want you to register there, 90% of them would want you to give your email id for verification etc. So one should use various ids for those variety of websites - yourname_jobsearch, yourname_magazine_subscription, yourname_timepass, yourname_dontmailmeback and so on. That should help in segregating the spams at least.

~mks

PS - I did a search on "how to hide your email id from spammers" and it gave some useful results. But that's kinda bit late.

Shivanasamudram and Somanathpur trip...

2006-12-31T09:22:00.000+05:30

Last weekend we went to Shivanasamudram falls and Somanathpur temple for a day long trip. We started with just the Shivanasamudram falls in mind. There are two ways to reach Shivanasamudram from Bangalore.

1. Take Kanakpura road, its a National Highway (NH209) and goes all the way to Dindigul from Bangalore. I think its the shortest route to Coimbatore from Bangalore but the road is not good. Till Kanakapura it was good actually but after that renovation is going on and the road is in bad shape.

2. The other way is thru Bangalore-Mysore State highway (SH17) which is in fantastic condition. You will have to go all the way to Maddur and then take a left turn towards Mallavalli. The same road joins NH209 just 17km before Shivanasamudram.

Ignorant of the NH209's condition, we went that way. It came to around 120km till the first fall. There are two falls there, Gaganachukki and Barachukki. We first went to Gaganachukki.

Being a Christmas weekend, it was very crowded there -

There is a famous dargah near the Gaganachukki falls. Looks like this from the "view-point" shown above -

After Gaganachukki, we proceeded to Barachukki. The way to it from Gaganachukki is very nice. At Barachukki, one can actually go down and enjoy some swimming, we didn't do that though -

By the time we were done with Barachukki it was only afternoon. So we checked our Karnataka Tourist Guide, the Eicher Road Atlas India and with the people at Shivanasamudram. And proceeded towards Somanathpur. On our way, we came across this scenic picture so had a few snaps there -

But the road to Somnathpur from Shivanasamudram is also under renovation and is not good. At Somanathpur there is a temple, the architecture is that of Hoyasala temples and other structures also found at Hampi. And the detailing done at Somanathpur is huge -

It was also crowded -

After this, we proceeded towards Srirangapatna, didn't go all the way there. Hit the Mysore-Bangalore SH17 before that, took a right turn and came back to Bangalore. Btw, on our way back, we took the NICE road from Mysore road to Bannerghatta road. Too good! But one comes across a shock just before the Bannerghatta road. And thats sad! Hope that gets resolved soon.

It was a nice trip, drove around 350km in a day, my first long drive. Enjoyed the SH17 also. Hope you like the photographs.

~mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 8

2006-12-30T17:17:00.000+05:30

This one is for the moon. Like sun, moon wasn't spared either. But it seems moon decided to play naughty with me. Except for one or two, in all the other snaps it will either go left or right, up or down but will refuse to remain steady. Check it out yourself -

Finally it relented -

I got another ok one with auto mode -

Thanks for bearing with me for this one. Enjoy!

~Mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 7

2006-12-30T17:00:00.000+05:30

I took a lot of sunset and sunrise photographs during the Mysore trip. We started from Bangalore at around 4pm so I tried my hand on sun set on the way. Here you go -

All of those were taken from the cab running at 110kmph. :-)

~mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 6

2006-12-30T12:43:00.000+05:30

Some miscellaneous view in and around the campus -

A lane -

Another ;-) -

Night view of a factory outside of Infy campus viewed from a food court -

That food court in Infy city -

The lawn in Infosys hostel area, this looks much better in thumb nail :-( -

Sop! Will post some more another time. Enjoy!

~mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 5

2006-12-30T12:24:00.000+05:30

The Global Education Center this time...

Far off view -

Closer now, too early in the morning, you see nobody in -

And now the night view -

Night view from a distance -

Thats it! More to follow...

~mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 4

2006-12-23T15:54:00.000+05:30

This time I will be covering the Sports and recreation related snaps from Infosys Mysore. Lets check up the swimming pool first.

Another view -

I am sure there are better ways to highlight the colours in the above photograph. Night view of the same pool -

This one is from the Basketball court -

That's about it. More later...

~Mks

Photo Blog - Infosys Mysore 3

2006-12-23T08:12:00.000+05:30

This post is going to cover the globe building.

Do you see a face in this photograph -

Now there are so many of them -

They look like sleeping in this one -

That's it for the globe building. C ya later!

~mks

Photo Blog - Infosys Mysore 2

2006-12-23T07:35:00.000+05:30

Continuing from my previous blog about photos from my Infosys Mysore trip. This blog I will cover the origami building. We also call it shapeless building. Lets start with "good morning" again -

The origami building in pre-dawn light -

One view of the building -

Another -

Another, tried to capture the full building from at least one side -

And now the night view -

So we will have another subject in the next blog. Thanks for watching.

~mks

Photo Blog Infosys Mysore - 1

2006-12-22T23:35:00.000+05:30

I went to Infosys Mysore recently for some work. This time I took my camera with me. And every morning and evening, we used to go out for long walks and took lots of photographs. Good that I was accompanied with people who know about photography and they taught me how to use modes other than automatic in my Canon S2IS. I will be posting those photographs in the days to come. Lets start with the "good morning" photographs first -

Deserted Infosys road, dawn time -

This cloud formation looked interesting. Some kind of sign language, near the origami building -

The Sun rising from behind the Origami building (note that the chimney is not part of the Infy Campus) -

The Sun rises on ECC building -

And the basket ball court -

So how were these? More to come in later posts. Thanks for watching!

~mks

Infy by night...

2006-12-14T14:09:00.001+05:30

Anita Bora posted some stunning photographs of Infosys (Electronic City Bangalore) at flickr. Check them out, they are just fundu! I am totally bowled over, though I work in this campus.

~Mks

A photo blog...

2006-12-01T18:25:00.000+05:30

I went to my native place recently. Moved around a lot of places there. Went to my Alma mater also. During the visit, I tried my S2IS a lot. So this blog is going to be a post of the photographs I clicked during the visit. You will find the same photographs at flickr also. Lets start with the photographs now -

1) Statistics department in BHU (Banaras Hindu University). We used to have our Mathematics and Statistics classes here. I studied Physics, Mathematics and Statistics in the first two years of my B.Sc.

2) Another one from Statistics Department

3) List of Profs at Physics Department, BHU. I did Physics (Hons) in the final year of my B.Sc.

4) Those from Physics dept will probably recognize this

5) From the Old Lecture Theatre in Physics

6) One of the notice boards in Physics Dept

7) Computer Center - met some teachers there as well.

8) Computer Center Labs - we used to have 80x86 computers with no harddisk, boot them using floppies and then work on the assembly programs using another floppy. -

9) Though we had good HP-9000 also in a separate lab -

10) This is my school - KV BHU, yup I spent some really good years in BHU, 12 years of schooling, another 3 for graduation and last 3 for MCA -

11) VT - Vishwanath Temple - notice the additional security measures there

This was a rather long one. Thanks for reading/watching till this point.

~Mks

IE is not supported!

2006-12-01T13:32:00.001+05:30

When you try to open this link in IE, it says - "IE is not supported - please use Firefox, Safari, Konqueror or just about anything else."

I posted this link in my previous blog about Rasmus Lerdorf and was so blissfully unaware of this feature of php talks site. Today, a friend of mine pointed this out to me.

~mks

Rasmus Lerdorf

2006-11-30T10:43:00.001+05:30

I have become a fan of Rasmus Lerdorf. He is the author of first two version of the PHP language. For the last two years, I have been attending his talks in FOSS.in and these talks have been excellent. Last year he talked about cross site scripting and this year the topic was Getting rich with PHP 5.

Please go thru these presentations. Talking about the latter presentation, if you have an idea and you need to develop a website, then to earn from it, you need visitors, and you need lots of them, and to handle say 500000 visitors you need your servers to handle 1700 req/sec. Now he takes you with a development cycle where you take a website developed in PHP from 17 req/sec to 1100 req/sec on a simple desktop like box. Interesting talk and worth read.

Enjoy!

~mks

Technorati Tags: Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP

My netvibes opml

2006-11-29T16:53:00.001+05:30

Netvibes enabled the export opml feature long back. I tried it today and now my netvibes opml is available here.

And I tried configuring performancing today with my blogger beta account. After a few hit and trials it worked. Not sure whether I was giving wrong passwd or something. And this post is from performancing. Cool!

And by the way, my recipe is here.

~Mks

Technorati Tags: netvibes, opml, performancing

Father-son chat...

2006-11-23T10:38:00.000+05:30

Excerpts from today morning post-waking up discussion with my 3 years old son -

Son - Ye apka mooch hai? (This is your moustache?)
Father - Haan (Yes)
Son - Mera mooch to nahi hai! (I don't have moustache!)
Father - Haan, main bada hoon, meri mooch hai, tum chote ho tumhari mooch nahi hai (I am old so I have moustache, you are young so you don't have moustache)
Son - Dadu chote hain? (Grandpa is young?)
Father - (Speechless!!)

:-)

~mks

PS - Need I say my dad doesn't have mooch!!

Random Thoughts...

2006-11-20T16:42:00.000+05:30

Feel Good -

I feel that the number of people who "despise corruption and try to stay as far as possible from it", is increasing or has increased in my generation and onwards (the generation of 70s and the younger ones). Getting a government job with "upar ki aamdani" (extra unaccounted income) used to be a sought after position in the past. Nowadays, getting a job in private sector (they are high earning also, if you compare them with old economy jobs) is more common. These private sectors include IT, Pharma, Banking, Retail, Telecom, Automobile etc. If the trend remains so, we can be hopeful of eradicating corruption in the next 100 years or so. No I am not sarcastic, corruption is a problem which has got into our blood. And expecting it clean up in next 100 years is very optimistic. It will certainly take a few more better generations to go away.

I know some brilliant people who opted for government job but now they are struggling to justify their decision because they find their classmates doing better in terms of money apart from staying away from corruption. (The second part of my statement is my own inference and is not based on any discussion with those people). A PO in a government bank working somewhere in Rajasthan is thinking about joining a private sector bank somewhere in Delhi or Jaipur. An IAS in West Bengal is now working in an IT company in US. Another IES switched to IT. These used to be such high profile jobs when the closest I could see a computer was in Rail Reservation center (Oh no! that's just a dumb terminal). Each of those people can/could resort to the "natural" money making ways of those organization but chose not to. You may also find some of these silver linings in Mark Tully's book "India in Slow Motion". Those in book chose not to leave the system, rather fight with it.

I don't know if its only me who thinks like this or if all the people at some stage in their life would have thought like this. Is this a common feeling and this happens with everybody at some stage of their life no matter what generation they belong to? Or I am feeling like this because I am sitting in some comfort zone far from the realities of life? Or is it like there has been some good people and many bad people (or vice versa) and it will remain like that for generations to come. Let me also proclaim that I am using a relative term "has increased" which also means there have been finite number of honest people earlier also.

Feel "not so good" -

On the other hand, I still know many people who are preparing hard and spending years to get into these government jobs. All of them are aware of the "natural" money making ways of these organizations and some of them openly acknowledge that. The corruption in the government organizations has been discussed all over the places. We just don't know what's going on there when we see them from outside.

Going into the cause of corruption will only make this discussion lengthy, but still the basic cause is "greed" and that is something fundamental to the human nature, nobody can change that!

~mks

Splashed!

2006-11-08T18:18:00.000+05:30

We had an interesting experience of rain and water logging recently. We went to meet a relative in Malleshwaram (Bangalore). On our way back, I took the Sheshadripuram-Majestic route to come to BTM. It was raining heavily all the time. In Sheshadripuram, there is a rail over-bridge and there was good amount of water logging under it. And just when I was crossing it, one BMTC bus also crossed it from the opposite direction and splashed huge amount of water on us. The car was literally poured upon by that dirty, muddy rain water. For a few seconds, we saw only opaque water on the wind screens all around the car. Certainly an amazing experience!

A fellow blogger pointed out, the experience could have been more amazing, had I left the window(s) open!

~mks

Movies...

2006-11-08T18:06:00.000+05:30

Movies that I watched recently -

Khosla Ka Ghosla - Very nice movie. Decent length - a short one but complete. Entertaining, and very typical middle class depiction. And it is especially made for janta from and around Delhi. Not that those who are not from those places will not enjoy it. My memorable sequence from the movie being - Father telling proudly that I will buy the land and my engineer son will build the house and then the son clarifying I am not a "house building" engineer, I am a computer engineer. This son is also aspiring to go to US of A, another son is an aspiring real estate agent. Boman Irani got a role similar to that of LRMB and makes you laugh. All that happens in this melee is very entertaining. In all, I liked the movie very much.

DON - I liked the movie, the style, the storyline, the twists, the scope for a sequel and so on. The movie grew on me after I left the theatre. Leaves the viewer thinking, wondering and smiling. I have even thought a name for the next in sequel - DON II - Roma's revenge or in hindi - DON Dwitiya - Roma ka Badla. Howz that!!

~mks

RT...

2006-11-08T17:55:00.000+05:30

I came back from long vacation recently. Itinerary being -

Bangalore --> Delhi --> Varanasi --> Lucknow --> Unchahar --> Lucknow --> Delhi --> Bangalore.

Except for one train journey (Lucknow - Delhi), all the travels by train and plane were on time, "RT" as they write on the Rail inquiry boards. And I really feel good about this overall RT experience.

The train delay was interesting. We were coming from Lucknow to Delhi by this Kaifiyat Express (Super fast). It runs from Azamgarh (Kaifi Azami's birth place and now famous for Abu Salem) to Delhi. It was an hour late at Lucknow and we boarded the train at 12:00am in the morning. When I woke up later in the morning, we were heading towards Aligarh and we were around 2 and a half hour late already. Aligarh is around 2 hrs from Delhi at full speed.

At Aligarh, the train stopped, and after sometime we started wondering why, and then were sure that this train is now going to pass Rajdhanis heading towards Delhi. But first came a goods train and it irritated us a lot. What the heck, a super fast train is stopped to pass goods train, what have we come to. After the goods train, the Rajdhani procession started. We kept counting, first Howrah Rajdhani, then Bhubhaneshwar, then Guwahati, then Ranchi and the last Sealdah Rajdhani. We were standing there for full 2 hours. Finally we reached Delhi some 5 and a half hours late. I saluted the patience of Indian commuters (including yours truly). And realized that it was a good idea to pass the goods train first while stopping us at Aligarh (a decent station), otherwise they would have stopped our train at some remote station for two hours and some commuters would sure have lost their patience.

~mks

PS - While writing this blog, I came across this nice website maintained by Indian Railway Fans called IRFCA or Indian Railway fan club. They have got one huge photo gallery containing lots of photos and videos of Indian Railways in action. I consider myself a fan of Railways, and am wondering why didn't I come acorss this earlier.

Ads and kids...

2006-10-03T14:03:00.000+05:30

My son (2 months to 3 years now) is growing up -

Last night he said "Mummy, dimag ki batti jalaani hai kya?" (Do you want to light up your "head" light?). It took her some time to understand that he picked it up from the Mentos ad.

~Mks

Infosys-Microsoft blog site...

2006-09-26T07:57:00.000+05:30

I am really impressed by the Infosys-Microsoft blog site. They have started with content, really. This is purely an Infosys initiative btw, Infy techies are blogging about anything and everything technical. Cool one!

And the tone is informal, first thing that is needed for blog sites (according to me at least). No philosophy discussions (read flat world, offshoring etc.) here, thats required probably for brand building among the budget allocation community in the big organizations.

On the other hand, I find the soa blogs rather high level. I need to grow up it seems!

~Mks

Random thoughts - Kingfisher earphones, pens...

2006-09-26T07:56:00.000+05:30

Every second earphone that I see around, is a Kingfisher earphone. The one you get when you fly with Kingfisher Airlines in India. Nice branding, right? Jet Airways guys give out different gifts to kids every time you travel with them. No branding for them that way!

I have even seen people carrying Kingfisher ball pens. You can easily guess that this person has flown the airline very recently. Why, because contrary to earphones, the shelf (your pocket) life of ball pens is very short. Ask the facility guy in our company who issues ball pens to us, or his boss for a bigger picture. The law of conservation of pens always fails. Where do all these pens go? Seriously.

Btw, you can recognize the Kingfisher earphones by their color, the bright red one ("The Kingfisher Airline's red color" - can't recall still - remember the color of the dresses of their air hostesses, now I am sure!). Longer shelf life of earphones can be explained that way - "to keep the memories afresh". Did I need to say that! :-D

~mks

Podcasting...

2006-09-25T13:28:00.000+05:30

I hear (from here) that Apple is sending attorneys behind those who use the word "podcast" as it is Apple's something (trademark or whatever!). Will that affect companies like those who plan to put podcasts on their websites for brand building?

Read more about Apple and podcasting issue here.

Anyone who knows about the owner of the word "blog"!

~mks

Web 2.0 winners and losers...

2006-09-25T11:37:00.000+05:30

Readers make your own judgment!

This one compiles a list of web 2.0 winners/losers and the other one gives out a list of web 2.0 losers. Some of the names come in both, like

1. Odeo - Winner in first, loser in second,

2. Squidoo - Loser in both.

The latter list also includes Flock, Netscape, Microsoft, Technorati and SixApart. I think they are going a little overboard with their enthusiasm. Flock seems relevant anyway ;-).

~mks

Flock...

2006-09-14T01:28:00.000+05:30

Now this is an interesting one from valleywag. Flock CEO and founder resigns and plans to start another company. The stuff is still in 0.x stage. And it seems they have a funding of $3.2 million.

How do we take it? A casualty in the browser war or there will be something more than what meets the eye? Lets see...

I have used it and liked it; simple, meets the requirements and works.

~mks

Sun Microsystems...

2006-09-08T14:25:00.000+05:30

This valleywag entry intrigued me to do a Google blog search on Sun Microsystems sale. The search took me to this somewhat old discussion on "Is Sun priming itself for sale?". The discussion is good but there is one point in it which made me post this blog -

The buyer could be one of the new players: some undefinably large and yet unknown company from China or India.

Among others (IBM, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Apple), one of the readers is expecting a company from India or China, yet "unknown" to outside world take over Sun Microsystems. Interesting! People have these views about India. China I understand, it could be Lenovo but which is this "undefinably" large and yet "unknown" company in India.

~Mks

"Same Name" problem

2006-08-28T17:58:00.000+05:30

I have this big problem of "same name" since my college days. In my MCA there were 5 Manish' (different surnames) in my class. Now in office, there are five guys with the name "Manish Srivastava". And we tend to receive each other mails every now and then. In fact, if I get a call from somebody asking for "Manish Srivastava" I first confirm which one he is looking for. I belong to the Linux group and there is another one who is in "rival technology" group and many a times the first question people ask is "how many people are there working on "rival technology"?".

Now this "rival technology" guy is a senior here so I get enquiries and all for him. Sometimes congratulatory mails also. Another guy joined as a fresher, now when he joined, I got all those age old forwards boomranged back to my mail box. "Duniya gol hai" (The world is round!) indeed. With freshers, its not just the fwd mails, there are "good morning" mails, "happy 1st year @ work" mails, PJs and if there are girls in their mailing lists, you can add a few more categories e.g. "cute kittens/babies/puppies/verse" etc.

The height happened recently - what we sometimes do is, to take backup we send the documents to ourselves, now this another "Manish Srivastava" (the fourth one) sends a ppt to himself, and imagine, it reached me!

~mks

Shock of the day...

2006-08-23T08:38:00.000+05:30

CNN IBN news

Five members of a family were trapped in an overflowing river for eight hours in Rajsthan, India. They were swept away, one by one, while an entire town and the government machinery watched.

This is shocking, was there no way to save them, airlift using helicopter or something? Considering that it took eight hours for all of them to die (swept away). And considering that we could mobilize the whole nation to save prince.

~mks

Free and Open Source licensing...

2006-08-18T11:41:00.000+05:30

I found a good discussion on Open Source licensing. It is a Sun white paper, so talks about Sun's open source licensing policies and all, but the author has managed to convey the message very clearly. He has categorized the FOSS licenses into three and clearly listed the pros and cons of each of them, and how, where and why Sun has used the licenses from each category.

A good read indeed.

~Mks

Java / Open Source

2006-08-16T09:11:00.000+05:30

Went to /. after a long time today, rss aggregation has changed the way you browse. The site has changed its look and feel and for better.

And the news/update is that Sun has moved a step further in making Java open source. The first lot (JavaC and Hotspot VM) will happen in October this year.

Read more at vnunet and Sun's java community website Open Sourcing the JDK.

~mks

Buzz of the day...

2006-08-14T09:59:00.000+05:30

Windows live writer - on GigaOm , on TechCrunch and where not. Download it from here.

As per Windows Live Writer blog it is -

A desktop application that makes it easier (we will see!) to compose compelling (we will see!!) blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.

~mks

PS - Works only on Microsoft Windows :-P

Infosys Blogs...

2006-08-11T13:26:00.000+05:30

Infosys has got an official blog now. Check it out.

~mks

Cooliris observation...

2006-08-08T11:51:00.000+05:30

I use Cooliris addon with firefox and I had this interesting observation. The mantra of Cooliris is "Why Click", so interesting things can happen if you click while you are using Cooliris.

Like I had one google search result in a browser window and then with Cooliris I was reading a pdf doc. Now while browsing thru the pdf file inside the cooliris (on the browser window) I had to click to move thru the pages and one or two clicks landed on the search results which were word docs or other pdf (in the background browser window behind cooliris). So this guy (Firefox) showed me a download window asking for "Save as" and I was wondering from where and how this is happening. And then I realized, cooliris he he he!!!

~mks

PS - Cooliris also comes for IE and Safari (Mac).
PPS - Did I sound confusing? You are not using Cooliris!

Firefox and IE...

2006-07-28T12:10:00.000+05:30

There was this discussion (flame war) going on Firefox and IE and Firefox Myths at our internal blogsite. This made me ponder on why I moved away from IE. Below is an extract from my comment there -

******************************
I was trying to recollect what all those things were which led me away from IE way back -

1) Pop problems - boom boom boom, click one link and get four more windows as free gifts. There was no sign of any effort in pop up blocking in IE for a long time, one is free to feel good about it now when they finally woke up.

2) Multiple windows opened when you wanted to open many links in google results, cluttering your task bar - tabbed browsing (no signs of tabbed browsing were there in IE till last year I guess and when they introduced it with MSN toolbar, it was very heavy and totally unusable, I was laughing when I saw how innocently they have talked about it in that "Firefox myth" page). Tabbed browsing has been a breeze in both Opera and Firefox for a long time.

3) Addons - Those mouse gestures, Foxy tunes, mail notifiers, downloaders, rss readers and so on, they make life so easy with browsers, I heard that IE will also allow people to create add ons for the browsers. If we wanted to do those things with only IE on board, we will have to install so many new ".NET clr" based applications cluttering our task bars and system tray. Remember those freewares.

This list will be endless. In brief IE was simply not meeting the requirements so was discarded. Opera and Firefox did just that. Firefox was much lighter than Opera in the beginning plus it introduced us to the extensions world.

And that Firefox Myth is simply useless, I mean, what the heck,

Firefox and Mozilla may or may not be same,

Firefox may or may not be for profit,

Recommended requirements looked Ok to me, what was worse in that,

Firefox is definitely faster than IEs and Mozilla (my personal experience, every bike manufacturer claims 100 kmpl under test conditions),

Bugs, security holes and patches, no software is without that, I am sure I can find such things for IE also, selective sampling can always lead you to desired results,

IE has definitely close to 90% market share or a little less (though the %age of users coming on my blog site and using firefox is higher, selective sampling you see!),

With Firefox I feel I am more in control of the things compared to IE where by default they disable there own ActiveX controls and then request/guide you to allow running ActiveX control while you are surfing a M$ website. Ironic isn't it!

If you want to know a little bit more, read this.

~mks

Top-level domains

2006-07-25T16:08:00.000+05:30

How many domain names (codes) you have come across? Let me list down a few -

1) dot com
2) dot org
3) dot net (not the MS one)
4) dot info
5) dot "country code" - us for USA, in for India, de for Germany, uk for UK and so on
6) dot int (my latest observation - check this one http://www.itu.int)
7) dot co dot "country code" - http://www.bsnl.co.in
8) dot gov dot "country code"
9) dot gov

More information about top-level domains is here, country code top-level domain is here and generic top-level domain is here. Actually, the last two list down all of them and I have not seen many of them.

~mks

Web 2.0 - Continued...

2006-07-20T10:15:00.000+05:30

I came across this interesting discussion on 11 Suggestions For Not Being a Dot-Bomb 2.0. This is certainly a good read including the comments, and don't forget to take this great quiz on Web 2.0. And if possible post your score as well. Mine was 25.

Good day!

~mks

Mid-management crisis in IT Companies...

2006-07-13T15:26:00.000+05:30

Recently I had a discussion with a colleague who finished his B.Tech. during the dot com bust days. Those days, he already had a job offer thru campus placement. Then his joining was delayed by about a year. In fact, the letter informing him about the delay was dated 9/11. There are many such guys who finished graduation in year 2001 but could join the industry only in 2002.

The discussion was on what has happened due to this delay during 2000-2002. Due to that delay, people with experience between 4-6 years are scarce in the industry because its not just a matter of one year during 2000-2002, the whole demand and supply process got disturbed during those years. People going elsewhere, opting for other courses, lesser numbers opting for computer sciences in the later years, industry taking its own time to recover etc. These numbers may have been small but still would have impacted for sure. And if suppose, a thousand were supposed to join one company, these would have in turn managed another 10 thousand now.

So what we can deduce from all this is the much talked about mid-management crisis in IT industry can be attributed to that down spike during 2000-2002. Well, to some extent at least.

What say?

~mks

Firefox and your old extensions...

2006-07-12T11:30:00.000+05:30

Found this from digg. If you are using Firefox 2.0 beta 1 and your extensions of Firefox 1.5 are not working. Try this addon as they call them now. It is working for me, though I had to see a few Firefox core dumps (on windows) and switch between 2.0b1 and 1.5 to disable a few extensions. Its finally working.

Enjoy!

~mks