Tittle-Tattle

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

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

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

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 ...

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 - 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 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 Ranj...

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

"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...

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...