Write of Way

Moving on...

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:59:48 GMT

... to a Wordpress blog, hosted here.

See you there ! :)

GMAT Yesterday

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 04:09:57 GMT

Gave GMAT Yesterday. Got an average score .. 710 (94 %ile) (Math 48, Verbal 40). That's more
than what to expect after studying for just about over a week, with a couple of random weekends thrown in. Sure, I would have loved a better score (who doesn't ? ;) ), but the present score should serve its purpose.

I Wish ...

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 20:21:32 GMT

I could be as awake as I am right now, every night !

I really should get into polyphasic sleeping ....

Now Playing ..

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 15:50:06 GMT

A nice song .. seems to be quite popular on winamp shoutcast channels :)

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 14:22:04 GMT

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to good manners and elegance.

In love, you feel the most alive when things are straight-forward, and you're told that you're loved.

You'd like to your lover to think you are optimistic and happy.

You would be forced to break up with someone who was emotional, moody, and difficult to please.

Your ideal relationship is comforting. You crave a relationship where you always feel warmth and love.

Your risk of cheating is low. Even if you're tempted, you'd try hard not to do it.

You think of marriage something you've always wanted... though you haven't really thought about it.

In this moment, you think of love as commitment. Love only works when both people are totally devoted.

What Are The Keys To Your Heart?

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:07:13 GMT

A different kind of SPAM ?

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 12:02:58 GMT

One of my friends got this mail on her gmail id. Seems to be a sincere request :)

hai i am interested in love marriage , if u feel the same and if u r vegeterian , fair ,slim and 5feet 3 incher or more give response . sorry if i have hurt u in any way happy new year bye

How did the guy get my friend's email address? Through her resume, posted on one of the job sites!

Pittu

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:40:14 GMT

Pittu is a traditional Indian game very popular in rural areas. So it was a pleasant surprise to watch some kids play it in the streets of the Indian Silicon Valley's Koramangala area.

The game (which is supposed to have been played as far back as the Harappan civilization) consists of a stack of discs (often of stone, though Terra cotta was prevalent in the ancient times) placed in the centre of a field (or street). Two teams alternatively try to aim at the stack using a ball, and topple it over. Once toppled, the team needs to rearrange the stack as before, while the other team tries to hit the person arranging the stack, using the ball. They are not supposed to run around with the ball, and are allowed to hit the stack repeatedly so that the rivals do not finish re stacking it. This goes on until either the team stacks it, or the other team hits the person trying to do so.

Complicated ? not exactly :) google did not find any good references for pittu (apart from the ones mentioning the Harappan connection), so I had to make this up verbatim :)

Update : Found this article which explains it much better ;)

When Amitabh Bachchan was discharged from hospital ..

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 11:18:54 GMT

One news channel (or were they all?) reported the time of discharge to the LAST SECOND ! And repeated this info all through the day...

Sure, the entire nation is happy that the greatest star of all times is well .. but doesn't the media have more pressing stories to move on to ?

Rules Are No Obstacles for Committed People

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 09:43:16 GMT

In the article Rules Are No Obstacles for Committed People, Steve provides nuggets from his varied life illustrating how he constantly strove to do something different - breaking all rules.

At the risk of choosing A first among equals, this is one of his best posts to date, one which provides real scenarios from his life (This is not to say that his other articles are not good - they are all worth reading and implementing).

Web Clips

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 14:00:07 GMT

Gmail now has a cool "web clips" feature. This displays RSS Feed entries (a default list which can be edited to add your own feeds) at a convenient location on the top of the Inbox/Current Label view. You can click on the feed item to open the item in a new tab/window.

Once again, a simple but useful feature from google, with a great use of browser real estate and smart use of intuitive UI principles

Extreme AXN at Work

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:51:31 GMT

A couple of weeks back, there was an article by Mr. Harshad Oak (Hope I got the name right) which was doing the rounds of the fwding circuit, thanks to some great support by the IT labourers. The article was about the working conditions in the Indian IT industry, and the lack of work/life balance.

This article provides insight into people who actually enjoy extreme working hours, hectic schedules, high stress/adrenalin levels.

The point is, be it any industry, you are on probation until you retire. Whether you want to do that extra bit beyond your 9-7/8 working time is entirely up to you. But it would be wrong to blame your company if you are part of such a work environment. Don't like it ? Go start your own company :)

Letter to Santa... :O)

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:44:07 GMT

Dear Santa...

Dear Santa,

This year I've been busy!

In May I signed my organ donor card (28 points). Last Sunday jace and I donated clothes to the needy (11 points). In August I ate my brussel sprouts (1 points). In March I helped sreeji across the street (6 points). In February I gave yodha a life-saving blood transfusion (50 points).

Overall, I've been nice (96 points). For Christmas I deserve a pony!

Sincerely,
abhinav

Proverb of the Day - remixed

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:03:44 GMT

Where there is google, there is a way

Bangalore Weather

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:24:44 GMT

[rant]

What's up with Bangalore's weather this past couple of days ? Hot in the morning, cold in the afternoon-> night .. ?

Pretty much like the Indian cricket team.. no consistency ;)

[/rant]

LJing from Windows

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:53:08 GMT

So I have to use Windows for a few days to work on some stuff, and I miss the familiarity of Ubuntu. So much so that I have reduced reading mails (a good side effect) or internal news groups.

Naturally, this also had an adverse effect on blogging and blog reading frequency. For the former, though, Semagic is a great tool for posting to LJ. It is much better than drivel, which I have been using on Linux.

Apart from allowing one to post on LJ, it also has many other options such as friend post alerts, adding users as friends, etc.

Dilbert on Agile Programming

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 18:03:14 GMT

Web based IM

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 12:01:17 GMT

This one is for all the ladies and gentlemen who cannot access an IM application (Yahoo/Google Talk/Jabber/MSN/AIM/ICQ) for whatever "technical" reason.

meebo, an AJAX based web IM, allows you to log in and use these IM protocols through a web browser.

Currently in Alpha Testing, this free web service is already functional with all basic requirements of an IM client, and the creators are actively involved in adding other features.

Today, due to some reason I was not able to connect to Yahoo via gaim or even the yahoo client. (IM access is not regulated in my organization, so the issue was something purely technical). meebo did the trick !

Disclaimer : Before using this service, please do ensure that you are not violating any policy which may be in force regarding the system/resource you use to connect.

FOSS.IN/2005 : Be There !!

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 19:06:02 GMT

FOSS.IN/2005, famous in its previous avataars as Linux Bangalore, is on this month. Probably the only Open Source Software Conference of its kind here in India, it promises to provide a great platform for spreading OS.

When : Nov 29 - Dec 02
Where : Palace Grounds, Bangalore
Schedules : Here

Register now ! Online registrations are only Rs. 500/- for all days.

I am sure this time around, FOSS.IN will be much more successful than Bangalore.IT !

An interesting speech by Subroto Bagchi

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 12:27:42 GMT

An inspiring Speech By Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting

"I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of Five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa.
It was and remains as back of Beyond as you canimagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap.
As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled.

My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and, without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.
My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system which makes me what I am today and largely defines what success means to me today.
As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government – he reiterated to us that it was not 'his jeep' but the government's jeep.
Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep -we could sit in it only when it was stationary.
That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate Managers learn the hard way, some never do.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father's office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters.
They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, 'Raju Uncle' â€" very different from many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as 'my driver'. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.
To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother's chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman's 'muffosil' edition -delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading.
But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly.
Father taught us a simple lesson. He used to say, "You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it".
That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamoured with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one.
Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons. We also did not have a house Of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply, "We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses". His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.
Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed.
At that time, my father's transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom.
She said, "I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited".
That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life, I saw electricity in Homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script.
So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself.
She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe.
In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term "Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan" and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University's water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper.
Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.
Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mother's eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, "Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair". I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date.
Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, "No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed". Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.
To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life's own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life's calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places – I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the, world.
In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flewback to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroac infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst.
One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the tending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, "Why have you not gone home yet?" Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.
There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create.
My father died the next day.
He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts -the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned.
His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant's world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him.
She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.
In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, "Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world." Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity - was telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.
Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and Godspeed. Go, kiss the world."
Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting

Polyphasic Sleep

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 03:44:08 GMT

Saw this interesting post about polyphasic sleep on stevepavlina.com. The idea of sleeping for 30 minutes every 4 hours, which in effect means a total sleep time of 3 hours, seems appealing to me (It is another matter that I am sleeping around 7 hours per day right now, and cannot get to reduce it :( ).

A couple of nice things about this schedule, once a person adapts to it, is :

More work/activities can be done during the night time, what with the calm and serene environment

Could talk to US counterparts at their day time, or attend late-in-the night conference calls without any irritations.

Combined with Pranayama/Meditation and exercise (all of which I should be doing, but am not), this would definitely give better energy levels, once the initial pains associated with this schedule has gone and the system has become a habit.

A lot of people have tried this technique and failed, mainly, it seems, due to the inability to maintain the sleep routine. Read more about it from people who have tried it, here.

Google Reader !

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:38:39 GMT

Google Reader is YABRFG (Yet Another Beta Release From Google) which completely rocks.

Found out about it from yodha , while reading his blog via, ironically, bloglines (which has been my feed reader of choice since a long time). Promptly exported everything, and moved in to Google Reader. The Import took a bit longer than expected, but the UI, as with all things google, Rocks.

A few of the nifty features introduced :

GLAF (Google Look and Feel) Compliant
A "Lens" View which unclutters the feed noise and shows the posts in a nice UI
Gmail a post to anyone
Use keyboard shortcuts for navigation.

Highly Addictive !

Converting documents to audiobooks

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 07:52:31 GMT

With podcasts and portable mp3 players increasing the popularity of audio as a medium for content other than just songs, here is a great article in the August edition of linux gazette.

To summarize, it is a HOW-TO for converting PDF/PS/HTML to mp3, all with the use of open source software and tools (ofcourse ! )

The Tools

archmage (CHM) requires also python

ps2ascii (PS and PDF) from the ghostscript-library package

Lynx

text2wave from Festival

the lame MP3 encoder

A good program

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 08:30:22 GMT

Found the following through /usr/games/fortune:

   A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a
strings of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained
throughout. There should be neither too little nor too much, neither needless
loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming
rigidity.
   A program should follow the 'Law of Least Astonishment'. What is this
law? It is simply that the program should always respond to the user in the
way that astonishes him least.
   A program, no matter how complex, should act as a single unit. The
program should be directed by the logic within rather than by outward
appearances.
   If the program fails in these requirements, it will be in a state of
disorder and confusion. The only way to correct this is to rewrite the
program.
       -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

Screw the Nano

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 06:59:27 GMT

Link via yodha

Motorola CEO takes on the nano