Tittle-Tattle

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

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

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

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!!

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 b...

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 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 fo...

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 towa...

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

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

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 af...

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

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

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

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

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 "...

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

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

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

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