W0lf Howl

2009-02-23T12:29:00.003+05:30

mere-paas-oscar-hai dept.

Rehman chose to snub Big B very smartly, using the "Mere paas maa hai" line in his acceptance speech.
Killing them softly, indeed!!!
For the record, I liked Slumdog Millionaire.
People who disagree are invited to debate it out on chat with me, mano a mano.
One of us will leave the conversation having changed their mind.

2009-02-14T05:01:00.002+05:30

how-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.

Amar Singh falls ~~off~~ into a podium during a rally

2009-02-07T12:20:00.002+05:30

सोपी-दिनचर्या dept.

उठणे, आवरणे
युनिफॉर्म घालणे
चालत/सायकलनी/रिक्षानी/बसनी
शाळेत जाणे

असेंब्लीत ताटकळणे
हजेरी देणे
सरकार-प्रमाणित, पौष्टीक शिक्षण
ग्रहण करणे

टवाळकी करणे
घरी येणे, जेवणे
आईच्या ट्युशनवाल्यांशी खिदळत
होमवर्क करणे

खेळायला जाणे
भांडणे, भडकणे ई.ई.
दिवसातल्या रन्स/विकेट्स मोजून
नमूद करणे

हातपाय धुणे
शुभंकरोती म्हण्णे
जेवताना ९ ची सिरीयल, कुणाचे
न ऐकता बघणे

झोपणे.

2009-01-31T08:13:00.006+05:30

satyam-naash dept.

Its been a while since the Satyam fiasco came to light. For anyone who knows what Indian IT companies typically do, and how they operate, something like this was only inevitable.

What was amusing to me, when the story broke, was watching the sense of outrage amongst business news anchors. They must have felt very foolish, considering they had spent the last few years hobnobbing with luminaries like Ramalinga Raju, discussing Quarterly results and doing pieces on the great Indian Services miracle.

Still, no one in the press seems to be asking the tough questions about this industry. For starters, where is the value in it? Should we go overboard praising an industry just because it has high margins? Are high margins indicative of anything substantive being produced by these companies? Is their business model fundamentally sustainable? What are their long-term plans, considering the inevitable downward slide in the 30-50% profit margins, when salaries rise, and there is more global competition? Finally, before comparing them with Silicon Valley companies, are they producing anything of inherent value, or are they just pushing novices to do menial, labor-intensive work at rock-bottom prices? What strategic assets are they creating for themselves and for the financial security of the country as a whole?

IMHO, the Indian Software industry is just a novel manifestation of age-old feudalism. We Indians are very good at feudalism, it seems to have been wired into our genes. Swanky air-conditioned offices may look better than rice and wheat fields, but they are not all that different. And believe you me, the swankiness exists to impress customers and financial analysts, and air-conditioners operate for the benefit of the computers, not for the people. The day computer chassis' ship with a refrigeration unit, expect an en masse replacement of A/Cs by ceiling fans. Since heat dissipation in CPUs (especially with smaller form-factors and multicore etc etc) is not going to be solved anytime soon, this is unlikely to happen though.

I don't want to rubbish the contributions of these (for legal reasons, unnamed :-)) companies. They created an entire industry from scratch where none existed. But I do believe they are not as 'high-tech' as the business press so naively believes them to be. And they need to considerably invest in *real* (as opposed to fake) R&D to sustain themselves. Otherwise, they might just get wiped out overnight.

2009-01-31T06:34:00.006+05:30

think-big dept.

I am currently listening to an audiobook lecture series by David Christian, a history professor at SDSU. Christian, when he was previously teaching at Macquarie University in Australia, pioneered a course called "Big History". Normally, history courses exclusively navigate the familiar terrain of the past that is embedded in human experience, perpetuated in myth, or transmitted through oral and written records. David Christian's vision is a little larger than that. In Big History, he covers the history of the universe -- starting from the Big Bang, and leading up to the rise of human civilization.
Its a fascinating course -- we may have read about cosmology and physics/chemistry or even anthropology and human history in bits and pieces before, but listening to it unfold like a sequential story is a very different experience.
Highly recommended, and available here.

2008-12-15T06:35:00.002+05:30

bitter-truths dept.

Arundhati Roy has written a very thought-provoking article in the Guardian newspaper about the Mumbai attacks and the general state of affairs in India.
Because it made me feel very uncomfortable and unnaturally defensive as I read it, I guess her analysis is probably very
close to the truth.

2008-12-13T12:42:00.003+05:30

future-readings dept.

This book seems to be related to my post on the emergent role of social networks in mass mobilization. Adding to read queue.

2008-12-10T23:34:00.002+05:30

lost-in-translation dept.

Sometimes, people can be a tad overenthusiastic about globalization.

2008-12-10T08:20:00.003+05:30

corruption-is-a-global-phenomenon dept.

I used to think only our Netas were shamelessly corrupt. I stand corrected. At least they're smart enough not to get caught.

2008-12-07T00:20:00.002+05:30

towards-gaia dept.

This story talks more about how the Obama campaign leveraged the so called 'new media' in their quest for the White House.

We're likely to see some of this in the forthcoming assembly and general elections in India. Probably not as part of a conscious effort by any political party, but more spontaneously.

2008-12-05T10:41:00.011+05:30

missing-links dept.

The post-Mumbai popular outburst has provided an interesting insight to me. For too long, the actors (stateful, not stateless ;-)) in Indian democracy have been completely unaccountable pretty much for five years of their elected terms. This has rendered a good state in theory, practically dysfunctional. For any truly functional democracy there has to be a closed loop where the common man gets to hold everyone in power accountable.

There were two crucial elements missing in Indian democracy to close the loop, and now I see those two elements gradually taking their rightful place, and plugging this gap.

The first, with the electronic media, has happened over the last decade, and continues to go from strength to strength. However, someone needs to keep a check on the media too.

The next, with social networks and cellphones, is giving unprecedented community mobilization and expressive power to common people. The next decade belongs to the emergence of this particular piece of the puzzle. For it keeps all of the other pieces in check, and is more or less self-regulated. You can see it throw up temporary structures as responses to particular situations, even though for the most part, it is structure-less. Politicians the world over, with the singular exception of a certain compulsive-Blackberry-using President-elect, are really clueless about this phenomenon.

The result is this amazingly organic system that's really self-evolving, and is mutually accountable. Its not mandated by the Indian constitution, no one set out to create it -- it has just appeared out of thin air. A politician who can keep this formless beast happy can go a long way in life :-).

Perhaps a few years from now, when enough has been written about this phenomenon, the technology has matured and become truly ubiquitous, and the politicians begin to grok it, the 'last piece of the puzzle' will finally get its due, and some official constitutional recognition.

2008-12-03T11:08:00.003+05:30

known-unknowns dept.

The following story is probably very important indeed, but I am still undecided...

Quantum Test Found for Mathematical Undecidability.

2008-11-30T10:37:00.006+05:30

oye-lucky-lucky-oye dept.

Not everyone can take on Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott, and then outdo them.
Its unfortunate that an outstanding movie with great performances has to release at this time :(.
I hope everybody goes out and sees this one.

2008-11-30T04:50:00.007+05:30

its-the-end-of-the-world dept.

On September 11, 2001, I was on a flight to San Francisco, sleeping soundly somewhere over the Pacific when the twin towers were attacked. I was originally scheduled to fly on the 9th, but I was down with the flu, and my departure was delayed by a couple of days. Three-fourths of the way from Singapore, the flight was redirected to Vancouver. After landing, the plane sat on the tarmac for five hours before being carefully unloaded. (We were given no information about what had happened until about two hours after we had landed). I then spent two days in Canada, glued to my television set at the Hyatt Regency, where Singapore Airlines so graciously put us up -- a displaced, disjointed lot.

The world changed then, and the world is about to change again. The attacks on Mumbai, in that sense, are exactly the same and seek to send the same message to the world. It would be a mistake to think this is an attack on India. I wouldn't relegate it to such a narrow context. Fundamentally this is an attack by a closed, nihilistic society on an open and progressive one. Ostensibly, the message being sent is, "No matter how superior you think you are, we can bring you to your knees."

Any old-world ideology can be twisted into this template, and made to work in this way. In this case, and this time in the world, Islam is being used in this way. The mental trick being used here is to really zero in on the most intolerant parts of scripture, and use that as an intellectual override for irrational acts. Every old-world religion has enough material in its body of scripture to be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. After all, they were only created by human beings.

The desired effect of the attack is more subtle, it really seeks to transform the victim (a vibrant, open society) into a mirror of the perpetrator (a prejudiced, closed one).

So when we put it in that context, this is really a sequel to 9-11, and the London Underground bombings and needs to be put in proper perspective.

The scale in terms of physical impact may not be as extensive as 9-11, but its equally powerful in terms of its media impact, and hold on the popular imagination. Also, India has been attacked only because it is the most accessible open society that can be subject to such an attack. New York and London have significantly raised the bar for any attack of this kind, and so Mumbai was the best soft target.

The challenge here is to preserve openness and freedom, without becoming an image of the attacker. The more we seek to defend ourselves, the more closeted we become as a society. So, IMHO, offence seems to be the best form of defence in this case. The hardest part is finding what form the offensive strategy should take, without causing the world to come to an end :-). This last bit because the target of the offensive strategy is a failed state with nuclear weapons. Who really runs this state? Who would be the target of retaliation?

I do hope such an offensive strategy exists, and is found in time by those whose job it is to think more deeply about such things.

2008-10-26T04:26:00.014+05:30

the-tiger's-tale dept.

This reviewer has, as a rule, refrained from evaluating self-help books, having suffered from a chronic aversion to self-improvement since childhood. However, this year, he feels compelled to make an exception, considering that the honorable jury members of the Man Booker Prize committee have themselves given their nod of approval to this genre of literature. A genre -- one has to say -- that is popular and omnipresent, yet hitherto unfairly ignored by the critics.

The book under examination is The White Tiger : A Novel, written by Mr.Aravind Adiga, erstwhile South Asian correspondent for Time Magazine. Mr. Adiga has written a simple, clear book in a very lucid prose that details quite explicitly for the very first time, a well-defined set of steps by which one may move up the socio-economic hierarchy. Moreover, it builds on a fine Indian tradition of letter writing (please see: Letters From a Father to His Daughter by Mr. J.M.Nehru) -- a rhetorical style that successfully employs correspondence as a means towards advertising one's opinions and ideas.

The book borrows one of its central theses from that other great writer of self-help books, Mr. Mario Puzo (The Godfather, The Sicilian), who so famously quoted Honoré De Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime". In his book, Mr. Adiga has followed an interesting two-step approach to flesh out problems and solutions relating to the pressing topic of social mobility.

In the first phase, he shows us the psychological makeup and trauma of a repressed individual. Here, we see the social conventions and psy-ops that are used by those up the hierarchy to keep those down below in check. This discussion, although targeted towards the layman and hence presented in a jargon-free and to-the-point style, may nevertheless rival any scholarly tome on this subject.

The second phase however, is what sets this particular book apart from others in its category. For in this phase, Mr.Adiga lays out clearly, the steps one may follow to correct one's position in the hierarchy if one so desires. He describes quite vividly the psychological preparation required for undertaking the necessary action. But importantly, he very clearly defines the steps required, once the necessary psychological preparation is in place. It is the reviewer's opinion that it is this factor which will significantly endear this book to the reading public, and inshah-allah catapult this book to the status of a classic in its genre.

In conclusion, The White Tiger is another classic in the genre of self-help literature, to rival other mainstays of the field, such as How to Win Friends and Influence People, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Getting Things Done and The Godfather. The reviewer expects this book to remain long in circulation considering that the masses would find the concepts and methods discussed therein useful and practical in their daily lives.

2008-07-27T10:18:00.001+05:30

the-niagara-river dept.

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

-- Kay Ryan

2008-02-29T04:03:00.003+05:30

from-lamports-bakery dept.

Leslie Lamport is due to speak at Hopkins in the weekly seminar series. Needless to say, I'm excited and looking forward to hearing one of the great sages of Computer Science speak.

Here is a Bio that was circulated by the CS Department, probably self-authored :-)

Dr. Lamport is best known as the author of LaTeX, a document
formatting system for people who write formulas instead of drawing
pictures. This naturally led him to join Microsoft, a company with
little interest in such people. He is also known for writing

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a
computer you didn't even know existed can render your
own computer unusable."

which established him as an expert on distributed systems. Among his
other contributions is the TLA+ specification language--a Quixotic
attempt to overcome engineers' fear of and computer scientists'
antipathy towards mathematics.

The fact that I am currently taking a Distributed Systems course right now, can only be decribed as poetic.

2007-11-25T11:47:00.001+05:30

paisa-vasool dept.

Om Shanti Om is very nicely done, funny movie. Its about as nice as a cherubic little friend who makes your acquaintance, or a nicely satisfying backrub after a tiring day at the office.

So there. I don't have anything even mildly sarcastic to say about it.

When I was little I had a cassette tape of Naseeb, and my favorite song which I repeated ad nauseam, was John, Jaani, Janardan. OSO is the kind of movie that little kids today will grow up with, they will know the dialogues and the songs and 30 years from now, pot-bellied and balding, as they gather round for a few drinks and some pakoras, some of them might even trade a few laughs by reminiscing about it for old times sake.

2007-11-04T02:45:00.001+05:30

fall-2007 dept.

असा गाफिल होऊन चालू नकोस
हे बघ, फक्त रंग बदलतायेत
माहितीये झाडांचे कसे पारे उडालेत
वाटतं पार कायापालट झालाय

असलं हे नेहमीचंच बरं-का
चांगलं हिरवं भरलं रान असतांना
रुसून सन्‍यासाची करायची सोंगं
मिरवायचे जरा भगवे-तांबडे कपडे

मग बर्फांचे फवारे लागले
थंडीनी चांगली जरब आणली
की येईल जरा डोकं ठिकाणावर
हळूच चढेल पुन्हा खराखुरा रंग

अरे सोंगं कधी टिकत नाहीत
मी कधीच फसलो नाही, सांगतो
तू ही जास्तं भाव देऊ नकोस
त्याचं हे असं नेहमीचंच आहे...

2007-10-26T00:04:00.000+05:30

rielly-open-problems dept.

Rik Van Riel, linux kernel developer, posted a call to arms a few years ago for CS researchers to
consider focusing anew on systems research. Rob Pike wrote a paper in 2000, basically chiding the research community saying that Systems Software Research is Irrelevant -- the title sounds misleading: you would think Pike claims systems research as a field was dead; what he actually writes in the paper is that most researchers are into performance analyses (that too, using flawed methods) rather than building new kinds of systems, and so recent research is mediocre and irrelevant :-).

(Before all you grad students start throwing your Systems dissertations at me, this is what Rob Pike -- member of UNIX team at Bell Labs, programming style guru, father of Inferno and Plan9 -- claims, not me :-)).

I recently read a paper (CAR) about, of all things, Cache replacement algorithms. I came across the above links while researching ARC, the cache replacement algorithm for databases that CAR is based on (CAR is a clock-based implementation of ARC that's more suitable for OS page cache replacement). ARC is a pretty effective scan-resistant algorithm (it performs well even for bursts of sequential accesses that totally screw up LRU), and very simple conceptually (which makes it all the more brilliant). Turns out a lot of commodity open-source OS kernels (Linux/OpenSolaris) and Databases (PostgreSQL) considered and then abandoned ARC implementations because of patent issues with IBM. Too bad :-(.

If, what Rob Pike and Rik Van Riel are saying is true, I have a hypothesis for why this may be happening. Systems Research saw its greatest achievements bank in the '70s and '80s. This was when commodity hardware was not available, and software was at a pretty raw stage -- if you needed a compiler, there was no gcc, you had to write your own -- this is when most researchers grappled with building abstractions and systems -- because they had no choice -- there were no abstractions to work with.

Now that we have reasonably stable abstractions (they may not be the best, but they exist :-)) like UNIX, files and mouse-driven windowing systems, researchers have moved on to other areas. Systems problems are an annoyance at best, and not a high-priority. If systems problems were a bug in a bug-tracking system, they were triaged as "P5, S5" a long time ago.

Perhaps with increasing disk and memory size, hybrid drives, network speeds rapidly outpacing abysmal storage speeds etc. etc., we might see these bugs clawing their way back onto the priority heap. Until then, I leave you with the humorous, yet sublime words of Rob Pike:

...I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

2007-10-17T13:06:00.000+05:30

poetic-routing dept.

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never see
A graph more lovely than a tree
A tree whose crucial property
Is loop-free connectivity
A tree which must be sure to span
So packets can reach every LAN
First the Root must be selected
By ID it is elected
Least cost paths from Root are traced
In the tree these paths are placed
A mesh is made by folks like me
Then bridges find a spanning tree

-- Radia Perlman.

Extract from her paper on the Spanning Tree Protocol.

2007-10-16T07:52:00.000+05:30

red-faced dept.

The Communists have done it again -- screwed up a good deal for India and scotched a chance for its nuclear rehabilitation.
Although the decision to defer the general elections for a deal that will eventually be pushed through is a good one by the Congress government.
They probably could have avoided all this by putting the agreement up for debate in Parliament though.

2007-10-15T08:28:00.000+05:30

homeo-apathy dept.

Homeopathy is quite popular in India. It is quite common for practicing homeopaths to have long queues of waiting patients outside their doors, and have established clinics. There are many Homeopathic Colleges throughout the country, which presumably churn out thousands of Homeopathic doctors and pharmacists each year.

I have been taken to Homeopaths (mostly for recurring sinusitis, which seems to be a popular reason to go to a Homeopath :-)). I have always asked -- What exactly is Homeopathy? And well, if you ask that question, no one really has an answer. Its quite astounding really -- well-educated people, even technologists will not be able to tell you the scientific basis of Homeopathy. Most will tell you its based on administering inorganic compounds in small amounts -- which is not true at all.

The sad truth, unfortunately, is that its a bogus science -- much like reiki, astrology, intelligent design and other fanciful theories. Most Indians will be shocked to learn this, I bet. Especially the thousands of freshly-minted Homeopaths themselves, who are poised to make their living using principles that do not stand the test of scientific method.

Ars Technica published an excellent article some time ago about the pseudo-science behind Homeopathy. Recommended reading.

But seriously, this article scares me -- I know quite a few practicing Homeopathic Doctors -- I will not look at them in the same way again. Over the years, the scientific method as a system for exploring the world has worked for me so well, I really cannot deal with any profession that lacks a sound scientific base or rational explanation.

2007-10-10T22:56:00.000+05:30

innovative-sql-injection-attack dept.

2007-09-29T09:11:00.000+05:30

indians-still-do-it-cheapest dept.

Recent figures published in the Economist shows India still is the most attractive outsourcing destination. Not surprisingly, it does well on all counts -- cost, skills and business environment.

2007-09-27T19:57:00.000+05:30

rupee-shining dept.

The Indian rupee has quietly made its way into the 39s against the Dollar. I anticipated at the beginning of the year that it would get into and perhaps cross the 38s. That still remains to be seen. The rise of the Indian economy and the massive inflows of foreign investment into India make this inevitable. The implications for the software industry in India are interesting.

Cheap Labor?

Right now most of the industry located back home is based entirely on the labor cost differential and the Rupee-Dollar ratio. Indian programmers and software technologists are paid much, much less than their American counterparts *and* Indian software company executives :-) even accounting for purchasing power parity. Both these differentials were so high until recently (as recently as 2 years ago, the Rupee was still orbiting in the 47+ per dollar range), that companies had no motivation to change their business model, which was essentially a form of labor arbitrage. Companies made money in one of two ways:
1.) Hiring programmers in India and paying them a low salary, and earning more dollars per hour on their behalf from their customers.
2.) Hiring programmers, getting them H1Bs, and paying them a low salary in the US :-), and etc., etc., etc.

Cheap is not Cheap Anymore

However, two things are rapidly changing this scenario and threaten to change the industry as we know it. The first one is of course, the rise of the rupee. The second is the gradual entry of software multinationals into India. This is putting pressure on salary packages and increasing the attrition rate in Indian companies. There have always been engineers who looked down upon the 'Labor Arbitrage' way of doing business. The difference now is, these people don't have to work for these companies in India if they have the right skills. There are just too many better choices. Maybe these choices are available only to the top 5-10% of engineers right now, but over time, I can see it lead to a cascading series of attrition.

Its getting easier and easier for multi-national companies to set up base in India, and most are doing so. They are gradually cutting out the middle men and managing their own set ups, leveraging their existing Indian employees to manage their India operations. The days of the "Offshore Development Center" managed by an outsourcing company are definitely numbered.

This does not bode well for indigenous companies. They will now have to look at product development as a *real* and focussed business model. In most companies today, there is usually some "in-house product development", which is a euphemism for keeping people busy during lean times, and for maintaining some staff redundancy. The up-side is that the growth of the Indian economy means that soon, India in itself will be an attractive software market, and the companies that have products targeted for this market will reap rich dividends.

Some Crystal-Ball Gazing

The worst case scenario would be this nascent market for software products and services being gobbled up whole by muti-national software companies, who have the financial muscle to overwhelm Indian companies. This is a pie that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP could neatly divide among themselves.

We could draw a parallel to what happened to the Indian car industry after liberalization. The biggest names -- Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles -- all but disappeared. Some plucky companies that innovated and adapted to new market conditions (Tata, Bajaj, M&M) survived and even thrived in the era of globalization.

Its all going to be interesting to watch. Just make sure *you* aren't working for a 'Premier Automobiles' of the software industry, when the time comes :-).

2007-09-11T08:17:00.000+05:30

one-man's-food dept.

Begin Rant.

I confess. My favorite hobby when I have nothing better to do is to desultorily surf random articles on Wikipedia.

But there is something deeply unsatisfying about wikipedia to me these days. It is the flat nature of the material, the lack of dimensionality. Dimensionality which is ubiquitous, so pervasive in real life. If I ask three students at my university about which courses to take, I get three different responses, all sometimes orthogonal, all equally rich and useful at the same time. One gets the feeling this is how information really is -- a dynamic, shifty, multi-colored and shape-shifting animal.

Wikipedia does not model information about the real world accurately enough, I feel, because the underlying assumption is that we all see the world in the same way. That's not true at all, the human model of the world is also highly modulated by experience -- subjective, in plain English.

Wikipedia has no room for subjectivity, in fact it marks it to be a bad thing. That's simply ridiculous because that means it consciously chooses to leave out a lot of useful information that could add more dimensionality about the data.

This is true of all information repositories -- they leave no room for annotations by people, showing the subjective dimension of that information.

I would like documents to evolve in the future to encapsulate subjectivity somehow, retain it, possess the ability to have annotations and notes, and the ability to still present a navigable interface to the reader.

In that sense sites like slashdot provide a much richer information view with comments on articles etc. But there's no site that allows a wiki-like model to the recording of subjective information.

End Rant.

2007-07-22T16:23:00.000+05:30

from-the-cartography dept.

A Japanese website has come up with a trend map for Web2.0. Its modeled on, of all things, the Tokyo Metro System map. The various lines in the map are best described as content themes (insider blogs/political blogs/music sites) or specific technologies (search/social networking/p2p sharing). The 'stations' on the lines are the websites themselves. They've rated each website with the generation of technology used to build it (1.0/2.0/2.5? :-)) and the future prospects (sunny, cloudy, stormy?).

2007-07-21T09:17:00.000+05:30

oms-the-man dept.

Thanks to Om Malik for the pownce invite.

I have 4 pownce invites for anyone else who's interested.

2007-07-18T09:44:00.000+05:30

safely-anonymous dept.

A site that could do without some publicity -- The Hype Machine.

2007-07-16T09:05:00.000+05:30

web-three-point-oh dept.

Here's a potentially high-profile site that claims to use Adobe AIR extensively: Pownce seems suspiciously like a web-based IM system. Does the world need another Instant Messenger, you might ask? So did I, but perhaps the delivery and usage model is novel, so I have queued up for an account.

Pownce, incidentally, was started by Kevin Rose (current age: 30 years), founder of digg, Internet tech celebrity podcaster and entrepreneur.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is an interesting piece of technology that should go head-to-head against Micro$oft's recently announced Silverlight technology. These 'integrated runtime' APIs are really the generation-next of AJAX, one step above the Google Web Toolkit and (not too sure about this) Google Gears. Essentially, they provide a language independent API for generating animation and other rich content objects that was the previous domain of Flash.

It seems that, in the coming years, all applications, in one form or the other, will be built as "webapps". That is, they could be either desktop or browser based, but they will have a significant Internet-based component. Naturally, webapp developers should be increasingly drawn towards these technologies that provide easier development models and hide the nittygritties of asynchronous application design for the Internet.

Both offerings differ a little in approach though. The AIR philosophy seems to be to let developers use existing web technology like Flash etc. to build browser-independent desktop web applications that can also provide offline storage capability. Silverlight, on the other hand, leverages .NET runtime technology to allow developers to build browser plugins that are more integrated with the host OS and that provide richer offline functionality.

2007-06-28T23:30:00.000+05:30

sigh... dept.

11 Reasons Not to Buy an iPhone.

Sigh, the heart needs its consolations, sometimes.

2007-06-22T08:14:00.000+05:30

and-the-future-is dept.

2007-06-20T14:16:00.000+05:30

something-to-think-about dept.

"But you go to a great school, not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness."

- William Johnson Cory (1861)

Hmmm...

2007-06-19T10:20:00.000+05:30

good-artists-borrow-great-artists-steal dept.

Hmmm...both Microsoft and Apple coming out with multi-touch technology in the same year???

The natural question, given the past history of these companies is: Whom did they steal this technology from? ;-)

Here's one possible answer:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65
http://www.perceptivepixel.com/
http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/

These companies are really the "Anu Malik"s of the technology world :-).

2007-06-18T20:49:00.000+05:30

this-week-on-the-web dept.

The Web 2.0 Social Networking revolution continues. Some new sites this week:

Roy Added me to this nice site, where I've been writing some (real) book reviews:

Goodreads - Write and view book reviews, share book lists.

I'd been reading about this site for some time, finally checked it out:

Twitter - A mini blog to put in all the little things you did during the day. This could be very addictive. And a privacy risk. But I think the notion of privacy and private v/s public content is just going through a complete paradigm shift.

Twitter's no relation to the TWiT podcast, but here are other links that I heard about on TWiT:

Tumblr - Similar to twitter, but you can also "tumbleblog" links to images and videos. I can now get a digital trail of where Leo Laporte has been on the web. Scary :-).

Audible.com - Audio books online. One free audio book download.

StumbleUpon - Pretty interesting site. Claims to "learn what you like and make better recommendations".

2007-06-14T22:16:00.000+05:30

another-poor-indian-grad-student dept.

After putting down people with graduate study plans for years, I am preparing to join their ranks. I am glad I never really lost my way irretrievably in the maze of temptations that jobs can be. There is nothing more empowering that education. A job can provide this, but I had felt a bit stagnant, lost, mentorless for a few years now. I think a new environment is the only cure for this malaise, and no better place than a decent US graduate school.

I am putting these thoughts down as a personal amusement, really, to see how much I agree/disagree with them a few years down the line.

2007-06-10T08:55:00.000+05:30

roots dept.

The human migration from Africa, illustrated:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

2006-12-19T20:05:00.000+05:30

from-the-firing-line dept.

In the Line of Fire is the sort of book that’s worth your money. For a book written by a President/Dictator still in power, its contents are truly unprecedented. For they may be inaccurate or colored to suit the author, but they do create a window into Pakistan and the mind of its leader, the irrepressible General Pervez Musharraf.

The book makes one thing crystal clear. Musharraf, when he was a baby, accidently fell into a cauldron of testosterone. If he didn’t, he sure wishes he had, and any statement, repeated oft enough, becomes true. So the book is an interesting documentation of the thinking process of an out-and-out alpha male.

It also serves a grim reminder, that it very easily could have been written by someone else. Musharraf has already survived two assassination attempts.

His description of the coup against Nawaz Sharif (or in his own words, the the counter coup) reads like something out of Forsyth or Ludlum (no, its not that bad actually). And here we see Musharraf preening his feathers and parading his plumage in all its smartness. When he describes how the coup was led by officers in command of various battalions around Pakistan, all appointed personally by him, from a pool of obseqious juniors and relatives, and all of this when he was incommunicado, in mid-air between Sri-Lanka and Pakistan, I couldn’t help visualizing a smirking Musharraf twirling his moustache and declaring triumphantly, “So who’s got the biggest one, eh?”

2006-11-19T20:05:00.000+05:30

maximum-prejudice dept.

The book Maximum City by Suketu Mehta is a classic example of how amplified stereotypes and a healthy dose of prurience can sell like hot cakes. Suketu Mehta does a good job of caricaturing himself in the opening few pages. He is a non-resident Gujarati, returning to Mumbai to write a bestseller. He is surrounded by wealthy traders, who live in a ghetto-like apartment complex. For his subject matter, he targets either the grotesque, or the glamorous (sometimes, both at the same time). Right from the outset, his clear motive is to find the most senational, scandalous material and write a cheap paperback that’ll sell millions.

But here’s what really riled me up (apart form the fact that he’s a milllionare): Marathi to him, in his own words, is a language that sounds like beating a tin drum. Traditionally, this would get outfits like the Shiv-Sena and the Sambhaji Brigade to go on the rampage, attacking brokerage houses and over-turning Dhoklas and Gujarati Thalis. However, after I read about the Sena’s new approach, I decided to resort to a coherent, logical counter-argument to disprove Mr.Suketu’s** parochial notions about Maharashtrians and Marathi.

**(I thought of calling him Mr.Mehta, but that would just be a lot of noise to Google’s indexing engine. Besides, I didn’t want to confuse you into thinking this was an article on some stock-market scam. Also, I felt that ‘Mr.Suketu’ really brings out that sinister, diabolical, villainish aspect of him that I really want to highlight here)

The basis of my argument is this thesis: the sound of any language is best represented by its poetry. Here, at the poet’s disposal, lies the entire vocabulary of the language, and all the permutations within its complete syntactic, semantic and phonetic space. Clearly, conclusions we draw by reading some representative poems aloud would be based on a far more scientific base, than relying on the wholly unsubstantiated claims that Mr. Suketu makes .

So, here are a few lines from some Popular Modern*** Marathi poems. If you can read devanagri, just recite these lines aloud a few times, and don’t leave out the poets’ names either:

***(Popular Modern Marathi literature is anything published after 1857. Anything published after 1947 is Post-Modern. Beyond 1987, Marathi writing is rumored to exist but is possibly so avant-garde that it has not been published for the greater common good. The ‘Modern’ tag has to be applied selectively, though. For instance, any Marathi literature after 1857 that is actually read by Maharashtrians is just Popular Literature).

खादाड असे माझी भूक
चतकोराने मला न सूख
कूपांतील मी नच मंडूक
- कृष्णाजी केशव दामले (केशवसुत)

ऐल तटावर पैल तटावर हिरवाळी घेउन
निळासावळा झरा वाहतो बेटाबेटांतुन.
- त्र्यंबक बापूजी ठोंबरे (बालकवी)

पिपात मेले ओल्या उंदीर
माना पडल्या मुरगळल्याविण
- बाळ सिताराम मर्ढेकर

अंगणात गमले मजला, संपले बालपण माझे
खिडकीवर धुरकट तेंव्हा, कंदील एकटा होता
- माणिक गोडघाटे (ग्रेस)

झुक्-झुक्-झुक्-झुक् आगीन-गाडी, धुरांच्या रेषा हवेत काढी
पळती झाडे पाहुया, मामाच्या गावाला जाऊया…
- Unknown

Clearly, this sound is hardly anything as underwhelming as a tin drum. For me, its more evocative of the rolling thunder, an avalanche, Shivaji’s horsemen riding out of the Sahayadris or perhaps a fast local pulling out of Boribunder station. These judgments are subjective, of course, but surely no one will agree with Mr.Suketu’s wholly unsubstantiated claims.

This is another instance of outsiders getting the better of Maharashtrians, taking advantage of their generous and tolerant nature. Clearly the Marathi community has to up the ante a bit, and make its voice heard. Only then will other Indians take notice, and go: “Its a plane! Its a storm! Its a train! Naah, its just those Marathis talking…”

2006-11-19T09:30:00.000+05:30

we-have-moved dept.

Not that you would care, but this blog has taken up new residence at:

http://l1w0lf.wordpress.com

Reason being mostly, Google's obdurate reluctance to add tag-based indexing to blogspot, and the general malaise that seems to afflict the blog search button at the top of the page. If I can't search what I have written myself, I can hardly expect the millions who hang on to my every word to do better.

2006-07-23T10:00:00.000+05:30

karla dept.

Climb up on a hill, through winding narrow stone stairs
Feel the mingling of the sweat and the swearing
Under the breath, and the silence of a million thoughts
Overlaid by the thousand unsparing voices

Ashamed to add your own, out of place.

Fear the smell, foreign and unknown even in daylight
And the strange lingering expanse that preys on itself
You can hear the clamor and feel the gaudy lines
Stretching finitely before your eyes in ecstatic motion

That is not your destination.

Your destination is a hole in the wall behind it all.
Deserted by those who carved their souls into
heartless rock, Treaded by the curious soles of
those who feel lost, and yet find their way

Here, within these stone walls.

2006-05-10T00:01:00.000+05:30

could've-been-verse dept.

This is a great poem I came across long ago while watching the Mel-Gibson-directed movie The Man Without A Face. The poem was written by a nineteen-year-old American Pilot named John Gillespie Magee, Jr. during World War II, only a few months before he died in a plane crash.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

2006-05-07T16:31:00.000+05:30

.tded-nevaeh-ot-yawriats

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all

2006-05-01T22:33:00.000+05:30

old-stories dept.

I had read this really thrilling short story in school which I had been desperately seeking. I had forgotten the name of the author, and everything else but the name of one of the main characters -- Rainsford.

Finally located it today. The story is The Most Dangerous Game by American writer Richard Connell.

2006-05-01T13:34:00.000+05:30

dubya-and-his-double dept.

George W.Bush at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

2006-04-24T23:58:00.000+05:30

quota-unquota dept.

Reservations may be on the cards for the private sector and IIT/IIMs. Leave aside the inevitable emotional outcry, I'm trying to understand the implications from a sociological point of view.

This may be a bad idea for small or fledgling companies. Most companies start out as ventures between friends, or families, many of them from the same community. It may be a good survival strategy during this nascency to depend on people you know and trust.

For larger companies, it may not make much of a difference. Most companies rely on the top 10% (just a figure with no empirical backing -- an intuitive guess) of the employees to do most of the decision making, and the rest mostly follow their lead. In such a case, apart from changing the demographics of the bottom 90%, reservations would really have no effect on the quality of output of the company.

Similarly for the IIT/IIMs, the difference will be in the racial/caste composition of the bottom 70-80% of graduates, and won't matter in the larger scheme of things.

So if you are high-caste, and of average ability, you have to make way for someone from a lower caste who is somewhere around the same level as you. Considering the fact that high-castes in India have been enjoying a monopoly on higher learning for centuries, you would expect their progeny to be more enterprising in keeping that lead by working harder.

2006-04-18T00:00:00.000+05:30

elegy-for-a-mogul dept.

This is the most interesting song I've heard for quite some time now -- Boom Like That from the recent album Shangri-La by Mark Knopfler. As usual, the music is smooth, and the guitar rocks. But its the wry, whimsical lyrics that really grabbed me. I couldn't figure them out at first - they seemed to be some sort of stream-of-consciousness juxtaposition of words at first. But the word 'Kroc' rang a bell, and I finally got it, thanks to a little help from this page in wikipedia, and this interview on NPR.

Boom Like That
-- Mark Knopfler

I'm going to San Bernardino ring-a-ding-ding
Milkshake mix is thus my thing now
These guys bought a heap of my stuff
And I gotta see a good thing shooting up now
Folks line up all down the street
Now I am seeing this girl devour her meat now
And then I get it Wham as clear as day
My pulse begins to hammer then I hear a voice say

These boys have got this down ought to be one of these in every town
These boys have got the touch It's clean as a whistle and it don't cost much
Wham bam don't wait long, shake fries plenty of gum
How about that friendly name, heck, every little thing gotta stay the same
Or my name is not Kroc, that's Kroc with a K
A crocodile is not spelt that way now
It's Dog eat dog, rat eat rat
Kroc style - Boom like that

You gentlemen are to expand
You're gonna need a helping hand now
So gentlemen well what about me?
We'll make a little business history now
Well we'll build it up and I'll buy him out
The man they made me grind it out now
They open up a new place flippin meat
So I do too, right across the street

I got the main I need town, sell em' in the end and it all shuts down
Sometimes you gotta be an S.O.B. you wanna make a dream reality
Competition sent em south, they're gonna drown or we're hosing em' out
Do not pass go go straight to hell
I smell a lotta meat .....da smell

Or my name is not Kroc that's Kroc with a K
A crocodile is not spelt that way now
Ohh it's Dog eat Dog, Rat eat Rat
Dog eat Dog, Rat eat Rat now
Ohh it's Dog eat Dog, Rat eat Rat
Kroc style - Boom like that

2006-04-17T16:33:00.000+05:30

this-summer dept.

Funny Impressions.

2006-04-16T23:03:00.000+05:30

don-camillo dept.

When I was in school, we were handed a reading list of classics to first read and then write a book report on. But one of the most enjoyable books I read was one that my friend Gaurav Trivedi had picked -- Italian satirist Giovannino Guareschi's The Little World of Don Camillo.

It seems that someone called Vajrang Parvate has posted this book online -- with legal permission from Guareschi's children -- the current copyright holders. Guareschi was also a famed cartoonist, and its great to see his artwork available here too.

Looks like the links to the HTML versions of the stories don't work, but you can download a PDF of the book here. Other books in the Don Camillo series are also available on the site. I haven't read any of them, and haven't checked out the online versions either. These can be found here.

2006-04-16T15:04:00.000+05:30

boot-camp dept.

A lot of the A-list techno-bloggers in the blogosphere are speculating furiously over Apple's release of Boot Camp, a program that allows Intel-based Mac owners to dual boot OS X with other OSs. Robert X.Cringely has been the most imaginative, coming up with ever more fanciful ideas about the business logic behind Boot Camp.

Guess he doesn't have anything more interesting to write about.

Apple has a much more marginal market share than windows, as far as the personal computer market is concerned, and is never ever likely to prove a serious threat to the Windows/Intel juggernaut. Today their business is more about selling music, than about personal computers. My reasoning behind their releasing boot camp is much more mundane -- it is just an acceptance of market reality from Apple.

People have always run Windows applications on the Mac using VirtualPC. This is just a move to retain the market, and create another incentive to people who otherwise might shun apple hardware for compatibility reasons. So many people out there only buy Wintel machines because they *have to* use Windows software at work. So many games exist only for windows. Boot Camp will allow Apple to make inroads into that market, where people would buy Macs as high-performance PCs that run all the great mac applications out there *and* can run windows side-by-side.

The apple website recently linked to this story where XP benchmark results were compared for Apple hardware (Macbook Pro and the iMac -- wish they'd also covered the new iMac mini core duo) versus other high-end PC vendor machines. Apple either lead or was behind very marginally on most benchmark results.

2006-04-02T15:59:00.000+05:30

evolutionary-mishaps dept.

Four million years ago, at the dawn of the age of the age that would belong to him, man mastered the art of tool-making.

With his tools, he tamed the world around him and created a food-surplus economy.

With the leisure that prosperity brings, he fought wars, persecuted, plotted and redeemed himself in equal measure.

Then to enliven this desperate struggle that is his life, he invented movies.

The thought that four million years of evolution led to Maalamaal weekly being made, can truly be depression-inducing, but I'm sure mankind has meandered before through evolutionary deadends.

However, a reviewing of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey can be a surprisingly effective cure.

Especially when supplemented by an elucidation of the subtext in that film.

2006-03-28T22:44:00.000+05:30

yet-another-review dept.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind is another Charlie Kaufman product. The same bizarre imagination that produced Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.

I have always been awestruck by this guy's wizardry with the art of plot-development (or should I say dismemberment?). Which reminds me of the time I bought a VCD of Being John Malkovich. I had a couple of (ahem) friends then, who had the temerity to borrow it and then to say that the movie was perverted to my face, loooking me over as if I were some decadent pervert myself.

Well, they were right, because I was blown away by both movies Kaufman wrote after that.

2006-03-19T00:18:00.000+05:30

crash dept.

I saw Crash last week. Not having seen many movies this year, I cannot compare it with the other contenders that competed with it for the Oscars.

The acting was great, and so was the tautness and structure of the movie. It was a bit intense and draining to sit through, but in a good way, because it engages and disturbs constantly.

The movie is very analytical and does not take a stand, which is a good thing -- I believe it really shows it like it is for many people, not just in LA, but any metropolis in the world that has communities and sub-communities living in their own miniature ghettos.

2006-03-17T00:32:00.000+05:30

गावठी कविता dept.

मन वढाय वढाय
उभ्या पीकातलं ढोर
किती हाकला हाकला
फिरी येतं पिकांवर

मन मोकाट मोकाट
त्याले ठायी ठायी वाटा
जशा वार्यानं चालल्या
पानावर्हल्यारे लाटा

मन लहरी लहरी
त्याले हाती धरे कोन?
उंडारलं उंडारलं
जसं वारा वाहादन

मन जह्यरी जह्यरी
याचं न्यारं रे तंतर
आरे, इचू, साप बरा
त्याले उतारे मंतर!

मन पाखरू पाखरू
त्याची काय सांगू मात?
आता व्हतं भुईवर
गेलं गेलं आभायात

मन चप्पय चप्पय
त्याले नही जरा धीर
तठे व्हयीसनी ईज
आलं आलं धर्तीवर

मन एवढं एवढं
जसा खाकसचा दाना
मन केवढं केवढं?
आभायात बी मायेना

देवा, कसं देलं मन
आसं नही दुनियात!
आसा कसा रे तू योगी
काय तुझी करामत!

देवा, आसं कसं मन?
आसं कसं रे घडलं
कुठे जागेपनी तूले
असं सपनं पडलं!

-- बहिणाबाई चौधरी

2006-03-13T00:43:00.000+05:30

incredible dept.

This happened today.

It really did.

Unbelievable.

2006-03-11T21:56:00.000+05:30

buddha-mil-gaya dept.

Somehow, this day and this year, reminds me of that exquisitely lyrical book I read once: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

The part which affected me most (and the part which I think makes any reader of a certain disposition identify with the main character) was when Siddhartha encounters the Buddha, preaching to his followers. After the sermon, Siddhartha goes up to him and congratulates him on the wonderful symmetry and beauty of his philosophy, and the benefits it might potentially bring to any that adheres to it. But, he points out, it does not teach me how I myself might become the Buddha. The Buddha smiles, and agrees, and his answer is pretty much an apologetic, "Sorry son, but you have to find your own way in life".

The rest of the book and the part that precedes this point is suddenly all rendered superfluous. What follows, has to follow, and what has already transpired was inevitable. I wonder, why no one just told me that before I read the book.

In the book, Siddhartha explores renunciation, religion, philosophy, indulgence, ambition, and disillusionment. Eventually he settles on routine, plying a boat on a river and trying to keep his emotional state as ephemeral as the river water. He might as well have tried crack cocaine, but the technology of the day does not provide that convenience to him.

Somehow, in the course of my seeking, I would like to end up making smarter choices than Siddhartha made.

2006-03-04T18:48:00.000+05:30

meter-down dept.

Taxi no. 9-2-11 is an interesting little hot-rod of the Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson vehicle Changing Lanes. Its well-made, the performances are good all-round. But...the climax. the climax jars. It was a bit like taking a Porsche to get the groceries.

I mean there is nothing feasibly, ethically, morally or legally inconsistent in doing so, but a Porsche parked in a supermarket parking lot just violates the beauty and symmetry of nature, don't you think?

2006-02-25T17:45:00.000+05:30

tales-from-the-crypt dept.

Ambhi was really bored. It was his second day at work.

A meeting in the morning had petered out into nonsensical yawnings, and slashdot didn't have anything interesting either. There was no email. Oh, yeah, there was one from someone called Hanson Obuya, who was apparently, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Godwanaland.

Obuya had an interesting offer. Only, it wasn't so interesting.

Ambhi had wondered aloud what the per capita income and GDP of Godwanaland was, and had googled for it.

He was startled to learn that the economy was not all that hot in the Mesozoic Era.

Meticulously, he stared at the screen. Then with his left hand, brushed somebody's wafer crumbs from his desk and considered his next move.

Might as well start a blog, he thought.
Or I could fetch another biscuit.
The coffee-vending machine?
Thats a tough one.
Lets do this blog thingy.

He headed over to http://www.blogger.com, and registered.

He called it "Space Debris"***.

Subtitled it, "A Random, Virtual EVA into the nothingness of reality.".

His handle: "CaptainStarbucks".

Journal Entry 1, Stardate 22-02-2006 0930hrs

The computer failed yesterday. All systems are on manual control. I just ejected the hibernating crew.

I am all alone.

Journal Entry 2, Stardate 22-02-2006 1130hrs

I am still alone.

Journal Entry 3, Stardate 22-02-2006 1230hrs

My space suit is deflating. The cabin pressure is suspect.
I think an alien life-form is onboard this ship.

Journal Entry 3, Stardate 22-02-2006 1245hrs

False alarm for #1. It was my incontinence.
#2 still under investigation.

Journal Entry 4, Stardate 22-02-2006 1300hrs

Alien sighted. To do: Rendezvous with alien at 1400hrs, post-lunch.

Journal Entry 5, Stardate 22-02-2006 1500hrs

Rendezvous with Alien completed. Mission success depends on us getting along well.
Alien has long hands and huddles conspiratorially, talks in a low voice in an empty room.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing.
Who cares?

Journal Entry 6, Stardate 22-02-2006 1545hrs

An Alien Away Team has docked with the ship. Alien has friends.
They all look the same. Their language sounds like bird-warbling.
They don't talk much, except two who are really noisy.
When I say anything, they look at each other and then do some hushed warbling.

Journal Entry 7, Stardate 22-02-2006 1800hrs

Aliens have retreated to their mother ship.
Although we gesture, I do not yet comprehend their intentions.
I have christened their planet Gondwana.
This makes them, Gondwanians. Perhaps Gondwaners might be better.
The ship has been programmed with coordinates for the next few hours.
Time for some rest.

Sign out.

*** Before settling on Space Debris, Ambhi also considered the following blog titles:
My 2 Cents, Inconsequential Warblings, Random Ruminations, Flotsam and Jetsam, Wandering Warbler, Alien Interloper.

2006-02-15T00:13:00.000+05:30

coming-soon dept.

Shining, starring Jack Nicholson.
Brokeback to the Future, with Michael J.Fox and Christopher Lloyd.

2006-02-13T22:07:00.000+05:30

you've-got-mail dept.

What a lame title, but anyway, here goes...

Email clients are hitting their limits of scalability.

Now, I get almost a couple hundred small emails everyday, and keeping track of them is a nightmare.

Email traffic characteristics have fundamentally changed since I started working. Now they are almost instant messages, in form, mode of address, size and content. Most people seem to treat them as instant messages with more metadata tags and end-to-end archival built into the fabric.

I recently listened to the CEO of the company I work for mentioning that e-mail is a store and forward protocol, like physical mail, and that is the way he handles his email : read it once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the evening, and don't look at it in between.

However, with disk, memory, processor and network bandwidth being what they are today, email is more like an instantaneous delivery system. And senders invariably expect recipients to respond instantaneously with at least an acknowledgement.

All of which basically makes my poor email client unable to cope. Now I have MacOS Tiger, so with Spotlight, my life is that much easier, but it only highlights how critical Desktop Search will be as an application in the next few years.

The trouble with mail clients is that they are still stuck in the 2-d, tabular, database world, when they really need to be data mining applications. Filters and Saved Searches are just stored procedures, in the end, and a highly watered down from at that. What I really need is a multi-dimensional, heuristic tool for analysing my mail, and presenting it to me so that I don't miss anything critical.

I don't actually mind seeing a bit of spam here and there, as long as I don't drop critical emails.

I think it would be a great idea to build a next generation communication tool that does this, combining e-mail, instant messaging and voice. Gmail is ofcourse, the best bet, and Google is surely on the right track by integrating Gtalk with it, but I have privacy concerns with Gmail.

Actually, frankly, Google is beginning to scare me. It is beginning to resemble too closely, the funny little guy you introduce to your friends, who quickly usurps centrestage, and makes your world suddenly unpredictable, and somewhat dependent on his whim. You wonder, "Have I created a saint or a sociopath?".

Hmmm...

2006-02-02T23:01:00.000+05:30

nein-nein-nein dept.

I have observed that the best employees, i.e. individual contributors, are those who always say "No.". By always negating everything, they put the onus on their managers to come up with irrefutable logic and nail down the specifications for tasks, so that they would not get no for an answer.

Unfortunately, such people are also not the best people to get along with.

However if you're looking to start a product company, hire only these naysayers as programmers. Optimisitc kids with stars in their eyes will overcommit themselves and be the bane of your scheduling endeavors.

2006-01-31T00:55:00.000+05:30

two-movies dept.

I was visibly moved by Rang De Basanti. So much so that my wife had to restrain me from going out and doing something reallly stupid. When I calmed down after a dose of good old middle-class morality washed down with some excellent wine at the Swiss Cheese Garden, I finally saw through the sham, and now am back to writing code during the day, and kissing my powerbook goodnight every night.

C.S.Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. He was chums with JRR Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of The Rings. Both have been made into movies. I mean the books, of course. Actually, C.S.Lewis was also made into a movie once.

Narnia is unique, in its own way.

There are weird-looking creatures. There is a prophecy. The good guys have a mentor who dies and then is magically resurrected. A horn is sounded. There is a character who's very prim and proper and carries a quiver full of arrows. There is a battle at the end. There is a blonde guy reluctantly brandishing a shiny sword on a horse leading the good guys into said battle even though they are desperately outnumbered.

Only, he does not give a speech before doing this.

I really missed the speech.

2006-01-09T19:28:00.000+05:30

सगळीकडे-मराठीच-मराठी dept.

विंदा करंदीकरांना ज्ञानपीठ पुरस्कार काल जाहीर झाला. हे एक बरेच झाले. सरकार-दरबारी मराठी माणूस आपला शिरकाव करू शकत नाही हा सिद्धांत अखेर खोटा ठरला. ज्ञानपीठ पुरस्कार हा देखिल आमच्या कंपनीच्या Employee of the Quarter Award सारखा rotationने दिला जातो हे ऐकून बरे वाटले.

शाळेत असतांना एकदा विंदांच्या कवितेवर once-more व पहिले बक्षीस मिळवले होते. त्या वेळेस अजाणतेपणामुळे त्यांचा उल्लेख 'कवयित्री विंदा' असा केल्याबद्दल, उशिरा का होईना, मी इथे दिलगिरी व्यक्त करू ईच्छीतो. विंदा ऋषीतुल्य वगैरे आहेत असे आज पेपरमधे आल्यामुळे ही एक गफलत ते माफ करतीलच अशी माझी मनापासून खात्री आहे.

माफ केले नाहीच, तर आम्ही त्यांचेच शब्द त्यांच्यावरच उलटवू:

घेता

देणार्याने देत जावे;
घेणार्याने घेत जावे.

हिरव्यापिवळ्या माळावरून
हिरवीपिवळी शाल घ्यावी,
सह्याद्रीच्या कड्याकडून
छातीसाठी ढाल घ्यावी.

वेड्यापिशा ढगाकडून
वेडेपिसे आकार घ्यावे;
रक्तामधल्या प्रश्नांसाठी
प्रुथ्वीकडून होकार घ्यावे.

उसळलेल्या दर्याकडून
पिसाळलेली आयाळ घ्यावी;
भरलेल्याश्या भीमेकडून
तुकोबाची माळ घ्यावी

देणार्याने देत जावे;
घेणार्याने घेत जावे;
घेता घेता एक दिवस
देणार्याचे हात घ्यावे !

2006-01-08T18:30:00.000+05:30

भाव(खाऊ)सरगम dept.

काल थोडासा ताप होता. तरी tickets काढले होते म्हणून ह्रदयनाथ मंगेशकरांच्या कार्यक्रमाला गेलो. या आधी दोनदा बघून झाला होता, पण पुण्यात नव्हे. एकदा बँकॅाक मधे, आणि एकदा नासिकला. बँकॅाकला वडीलांनी 'ती गेली तेंव्हा' ची फर्माईश केली होती. पंडीतजींनी ती स्वीकारली, पण "या कवितेचा अर्थ बाकीच्या लोकांना कळेल का?", असा टोमणा वर मारलाच.

वास्तवीक अशा खऊटपणाला काहीच कारण नव्हते. कदाचित आपण पुण्यात आहोत असे पळभर त्यांना वाटले असेल.

ही कविता माणिक गोडघाटे ऊर्फ कवी 'ग्रेस' यांची आहे. त्यांच्या कवितेवर अनेक लोक दुर्बोधतेचा आरोप करतात. वास्तवीक हा आरोप चुकीचा आहे. खरं म्हणजे, कष्ट केले तर त्यांच्या काही कवितांना अर्थ असावा असे भासते. ईतकेच काय, त्यात काही-काहींचा तर संदर्भांसकट अर्थ देखिल लागतो. त्यातलीच ही 'ती गेली तेंव्हा'. बाकीच्या कविता अगदीच NP-complete आहेत. प्रस्तुत कवितेचा अर्थ सांगणार्यास Millenium Prize देखिल सहज मिळू शकेल.

उखाणा

शुभ्र अस्थींच्या धुक्यांत
खोल दिठींतली वेणा
निळ्या आकाश-रेषेंत
जळे भगवी वासना.

पुढे मिटला काळोख --
झाली देऊळ पापणी;
आतां हळूच टाकीन
मऊ सशाचा उखाणा.

तरी, मैफल चांगलीच रंगली. ताप विसरलो. सकाळी २ वा. घरी परततांना हुडहुडी भरून ताप परत आला. आजचा दिवस झोपून आहे.

2005-11-29T23:40:00.000+05:30

konquer-your-desktop dept.

KDE 3.5 is finally out. I've been using Beta 2 for some time now, and I can heartily recommend it. In addition to being serious eye-candy, this is probably the first significantly usable, yet powerful windowing system for Linux.

KDE has always been extremely configurable, and this version does not disappoint. Significant chznges include applets that you can drop onto the taskbar, transparency support that would really rock if X would let it, the Kopete IM client that finallly manages to kick the aweful GAIM in the arse, and a bunch of cool navigation tools in Konqueror, which i prefer over firefox.

I really hope more people use KDE, and bury that text-console simulator for VGA, more popularly known as GNOME.

2005-11-25T13:40:00.000+05:30

there-is-no-sachin? dept.

An essay on NPR by someone called Penn Jillette, who justifies his belief that there is no God.

An argument that is very coherently and eloquently put forth.

2005-11-21T18:14:00.000+05:30

when-harry-met-voldemort dept.

I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire over the weekend.

I liked many things about this movie.

But most of all, I liked the imaginative, and highly original plot twist at the end.

*** WARNING: SPOILER ***

The evil villain Voldemort (a noseless Ralph Fiennes), not having much of a corporeal existence until now, proves he is a character of some substance after all.

This is followed by a climactic wand-duel between Potter and his nemesis in a graveyard, where Harry loses his balance at a cliff edge, and hangs on precariously, gripping onto a tenuous fistful of English lawn.

Voldemort, gloating over his fallen prey, grins and says:

"Dumbledore never told you who your real parents were, Harry".

Harry winces.

"He told me you betrayed and killed my parents."

"No. I am your father, Lu ... errr ... Harry."

"NN..NNN...Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo"

"Search your feelings, Harry, you know this to be true. Join me, and together, we shall rule the galaxy."

"The galaxy eh? You sure about that?"

"... errr ... I mean ... errr ... well, at least a rather substantial part of Islington."

2005-10-31T08:13:00.000+05:30

all-hail-st.sachin dept.

This article, written almost two years ago, but reposted by Cricinfo, speaks about Sachin in almost hushed, ecclesiastical tones. Apparently, according to the author, who slobbers, fawns and drools over Tendulkar as if he were a greater God among lesser ones, Tendulkar is the one true force of certainty in a despairing sea of chaos. The batsman's batsman, the cricketer's cricketer, the professional's professional...

I couldn't agree more.

2005-10-28T00:23:00.000+05:30

get-me-to-the-church-on-time dept.

I saw an interesting discussion on live-in relationships on ETV Marathi a couple of days ago. The dicussion was hosted by journalist Nikhil Wagle, and the panel included three very eloquent women whose names, I'm afraid, I do not know/remember.

Since I'm essentially an armchair-anarchist, I pretty much don't care about these stupid issues, unless they affect me in some way.

However, since I'm getting married soon, the question that really interested me was this : What is the marriage process exactly? I mean how would you define a 'marriage'? For that matter, how would you exactly define a 'live-in relationship'? Where does a relationship stop being a marriage and become a live-in relationship?

OK, the traditionalists in the audience must be puzzled. How are live-in relationships the same thing as marriage? And so must the modernists, who want to throw the whole "vivaha-sanstha" out the window.

To me, the difference is a little fuzzy between the two. Why?

I ran a mental checklist of the characteristics of the two, and it all distilled down to this, if we abstract out the details of ritual, cast creed, religion, location, age and other unimportant things (such as sex and feelings ;-)).

Marriage is essentially a three-way contract. Two parties -- the bride and groom, enter into the contract, with a third party as witness, arbiter, judge and sentencer in case of contractual violations (most often, in India, the thord party is most likely to also be the mastermind behind the whole deal in the first place).

With live-in relationships. the first two parties dispense with the third party -- the enforcing authority. So its purely a two-way contract between man and woman.

With this bare-bones definition, the pros and cons of each are easily open to analysis.

In the case of marriage, if the third party enforcer is too strong, bad marriages can stifle the partners. For live-in relationships, since both partners forfeit the protection offered by society/law, the weaker of the two partners is vulnerable to being exploited by the stronger.

But I suspect that most of these people who appear on talk shows and defend or advocate live-in relationships are actually living in a marriage, although they don't know it :-). In their case, social approval is often tacit, and their peer community (people they hung out with in college, their school friends, family) will take on the 'enforcer' role without anybody being the wiser :-).

This gives rise to Anshuman's law of procedural equivalence :-). In short, this law states that all things being equal, a relationship shall be deemed as a wedding as long as it can be proven that a three-way contract exists and is subscribed to by the concerned parties, either explicitly, or tacitly.

2005-10-26T22:05:00.000+05:30

ontological dept.

Contrary to popular opinion in the modern world, God does exist, and revealed himself and his true glory on the 25th of October, 2005 A.D. at the Vidarbha Cricket Association Cricket Stadium, Nagpur.

His coming was broadcast on national television, so there!

2005-10-19T23:42:00.000+05:30

digging-in-the-nose dept.

For all those like me, suffering from allergies, sneezing fits, and blocked nasal passages, there is a possible ray of hope.

2005-10-18T22:57:00.000+05:30

shameless-plug-and-google-bomb dept.

I'm trying to write a programmer's guide to object oriented perl. Object Oriented Perl looks very similar to
C++, but only superficially. The underlying mechanisms are very different -- in fact they very much resemble an afterthought. I am still grappling with it, but I plan to write out a learn-as-you-go report that people may find useful.

You can read W0lf's Guide to Object Oriented Perl for C/C++ Programmers, here.

2005-10-18T10:23:00.000+05:30

boot-me-up dept.

All those years I wasted waiting for my machine to boot up...

2005-10-10T22:37:00.000+05:30

the-blogs-of-war dept.

Blogs are a wonderful thing. The fact that every human being with Internet access and time on their hands can broadcast their thoughts is a trully disruptive and enchanting idea.

Now if only we did not have people who sound better only when they shut up.

But it ain't a perfect world.

There are some blogs I read that are so unashamedly mediocre, that they cross the threshold into sublime humor.

I hope, dear reader, that this blog does not serve the same purpose for you.

If it does, well, I intended it to be so all along :-).

But seriously, there is a blog out there called Vantage Point which I read often. I mean its in my Safari RSS Feed list. What happened to this guy is truly frightening.

Any medium is great at first when there is a barrier to entry to access and use it. It just gets harder to mine all the good stuff as it is created and published in real-time. With today's cutting edge technology -- essentially Pagerank, content can only be found when it has already enjoyed a certain degree of social acceptance, or unless it is so distinguishable from the crazy mass of words that is the Internet that it lights up like a Christmas Tree.

With this technological barrier still in place, the blog as a source of innovative writing is finished.

Unless the content location technology is upgraded soon, there is every likelihood of the loud, stupid voices in the world drowning out the sane, rational ones.

So for its next avatar, I would like the blog to be complemented with an intelligent search engine. Something which checks for tell-tale signs of insight -- dunno what those could be...good grammar? Allusions and references? Originality (Even Shakespeare wasn't original)?

Or should we just teach a Bayesian filter the works of all the great authors in all languages, and then use that to rank content?

Hmmm...

2005-09-28T21:33:00.000+05:30

a-real-book-review dept.

I am currently reading the book The Best Software Writing I (ed. Joel Spolsky). The editor is of course, a high profile blogger and code-philosopher. The book is organized around the same topics that the editor deals with in his blogs i.e. software processes, defining product quality, some hiring heuristics, lifestyle issues for coders and a bit of business sense thrown in for good measure. And of course the outsourcees. Grrrr...The outsourcees...Those evil-smelling, foul-talking, gibberish-spelling spineless serfs from the nameless land. I was thinking of Chaplin's "Der Juden" rant as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator. If you haven't seen it, its the greatest impression ever. Actually, those are the kind of subjective statements you are likely to find in this book.

But its eminently readable, and some of it even makes sense.

However be warned: it is written from the coders' perspective. Which means that the world-view this book reflects belongs to people who spend 90% of their working time (which may be 90% of their actual waking time :-)) hunched over their monitors furiously assaulting their keyboards - and the remaining 10% being assaulted by the QA and marketing teams in meetings about bug fixes and product specifications. So expect a whiny-ass tone and lines like "A good manager should...blah, blah, blah...".

There are no conclusive answers to some of the social questions raised, only vague solutions like "hire developers, not programmers". Hmmm...and why and how do people make the transition between these two extremes? There are vague indicators, but again, most of the solutions proffered by the book take the form: "you either do or you don't". Not a very scientific approach, if you ask me.

2005-09-10T05:55:00.000+05:30

a-new-kind-of-ring-tone dept.
Hmmm...a man invents a whole new paradigm of science.

All to what end?

Downloadable ring tones.

2005-09-09T13:31:00.000+05:30

do-the-evolution dept.

My grandfather, who also claimed to be a writer of some sort, always talked about a book called Janus: A Summing Up, by polyglot, philosopher and novelist Arthur Koestler. It was a theory that he expounded on every alternate day at the dining table, until all of us had it memorized -- well almost. It is a miracle how much information the human mind can retain even without the ability to comprehend it :-).

Janus is a two-headed Roman God, and from what I remember of the book, it had some dire predictions for humanity. It sure began on a sombre note -- with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- about how after that day, humanity exited the age where human beings had to face destruction as individuals, and entered one where humanity itself faced destruction as a species.

The scare-mongering just got worse from there. The two-headed allusion was of course, directed at a duality of the human mind -- the 'philosopher' and the 'hunter'. Presumably, the philosopher makes and lives by rules and aesthetics. The hunter, on the other hand, relies on instinct, and is a much more unpleasant sort of animal.

The ultimate question then, was -- which of these two dualities is the dominant one. And if one factors in evolution, are we moving from being dominant hunters to dominant philosophers? And if so, is that a good thing?

And then , where does humanity itself fit into this interplay between the two? Are we heading towards becoming a more refined, intellectual, gentle race of supermen. Or are we just kidding ourselves, and sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

My grandfather, of course, could play around with this if he wanted to. For those familiar with his work, the play 'सूर्याची पिल्ले' contains an inside joke on the doomsday prophecies of Koestler.

I personally find either extreme distasteful of course-- more so the dominant philosopher types -- ever been with some one that made logical arguments founded purely on deduction i.e. other people's theories, without any substantial experience with the human condition in its myriad forms? You know them -- they live by certain books, and idols, and substitute practical experience for a lot of 'ism's they can throw about in casual conversation :-)?

God! I mean even Sherlock Holmes relied on induction now and then. (See : his experiments with opium)

Of course, for a naive adolescent, ideas like these can really get you to wilt in despair.

Which is why, its a relief to know that the human mind is on the move after all!.

2005-09-09T09:34:00.000+05:30

release-me dept.

There has been a long silence on these pages, and for good reason too.

For the past three weeks I was sucked into a team that was ceaselessly working towards releasing a product.

I have done bits and pieces of products before, but this was the first time that I got a ringside seat (actually, you could say that I was in the ring most of the time -- and without the benefit of a second) to the entire process of making a product shippable.

Now that the beta release is happenning, I can take a breather, look back and analyse the past few weeks that blazed through my life like Hurricane Katrina.

First of all, I consider myself to be a reasonably dyed-in-the-wool geek. Getting through this milestone was very important to me personally, and my ego dragged me through days and nights of nervous fidgeting, frantic coding, trivial but frustrating political games, and finally, the joy of seeing a multi-organism jerk suddenly into life, and establish a steady, but reassuring pattern of its own existence.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I signed up for many years ago in my undergraduate years.

This makes the circle complete -- or rather, makes it turn in on itself, starting that inevitable self-feeding spiral that any creative person aspires to ride, for as long as the surf is up, and the heart clamors for more.

2005-08-29T06:38:00.000+05:30

blast-from-the-past dept.

Another bit in my continued re-romancing of the Java programming language. This makes me feel like a starry-eyed nineteen-year-old again.

2005-08-29T00:54:00.000+05:30

ajax-watch dept.

As part of my weekly watch on the world of AJAX, came across this article that is a much more technical, non-evangelist, and lucid exposition of the innards of AJAX applications.

2005-08-29T00:43:00.000+05:30

ashes-2-ashes dept.

Hands down, the best test series ever.

2005-08-27T06:06:00.000+05:30

redundant-information dept.

Didn't need an academic to tell me this.

2005-08-22T05:26:00.000+05:30

धनुष्य-बाण dept.

बाप गेला घाम गाळूनी
जगाचं पडलं बाभळ-रान
हरेक गुंगला आपुल्या नादी
मग त्याचे का ना विरेल भान?

भणंग शिकारी सुगंध शोधे
रान पालथे करूनी, आज
तरी ते सावज मात देतसे
सवंगतेच्या अंधारात.

गळेल घाम अन् निशा अंथरेल
संथ मंतरेल दृष्टीपथात
तरी तो कालचा डाव न रोकेल
उचलेलच कोणी धनुष्य-बाण.

2005-08-20T22:36:00.000+05:30

alone-in-office-on-a-bleedin'-saturday dept.

It is deathly silent here
Silent as a lonely grave
Quiet as the still, watchful waters
That stealthily but surely tread

Black, grey, stoic, surrounding walls?
Guards beneath a deceptive veil
The cold, unceasing metallic hum --
No warm footfall -- whispers "all is well"

It is deathly silent here
No voice to break the music dead
No living laughing working now:
A cold, penetrating, eternal haze

2005-08-20T17:23:00.000+05:30

jargon dept.

AJAX or Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The application coding technique that products like Gmail use, where the application is written in browser-independent Javascript, and communicates with a server back-end using XML/SOAP based transports.

The essay by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path that coined the term. Seems fairly recent, only beginning of this year.

2005-08-12T12:46:00.000+05:30

तो-मी-नव्हेच dept.

मराठीत आणि इंग्रजीत लिहीण्यात अर्थातच, फरक असतो. हा फरक वरवरचा जरी वाटत असला तरी तो कुठे तरी खोलवर, मनाच्या अंतरिक प्रक्रीयेत दडलेला असतो. पण या दोन भाषांचे संतुलन बर्याच लोकांत एका बाजूस कलंडल्यासारखे वाटते. अर्थात यात कुणाचा दोष किंव्हा बरे-वाईट असे काहीच नाही. एखाद्या भाषेत आपले प्रभुत्व वा भाषेची आपल्यावर पकड असणे हे बर्याच प्रमाणात आपल्या सामाजिक व आर्थिक परिस्थितीवर अवलंबून असते. शेकडा नव्व्याण्णव लोकं त्यांच्या वाटेस आलेल्या परिस्थितीला बळी पडून स्वतःच्या नजरेस पडलेल्या दृष्टीक्षेपालाच सत्य समजतात. अशांतून भाषेवरून भेदभाव वगैरे प्रकार निर्माण होतात.

पण २-३ भाषा येण्यासारखे सुख जगात नसावे. प्रत्येक भाषेत विचार करण्याची प्रक्रिया निराळी. हर शब्दांत निरनिराळे संदर्भ दडलेले. प्रत्येक भाषा ही एका विशिष्ट संस्कृती, राहणीमान व विचारधारेची छोटेखानी मूर्तीच नव्हे का?

मी आता मराठीत लिहीत आहे, तर इंग्रजीत लिहीणारा 'मी' कुणी भिन्न प्राणीच असावा असे वाटते. तरी 'त्या'ची ही जागा मी थोड्यावेळापुर्ती का होईना, हडप केली आहे.

च्यायला...एवढं लिहूनच बोटं दुखायला लागली राव. लई झालं...

2005-08-10T15:22:00.000+05:30

hit-search-to-download dept.

If you have the energy and the bandwidth, you can try this.

2005-08-08T15:00:00.000+05:30

OLS dept.

Jonathan Corbet of lwn.net has put up an interesting presentation describing the roadmap for the 2.6 linux kernel.

Interesting reading is the change in the current development/release engineering process being followed by the core developer team.

2005-08-08T14:10:00.000+05:30

mergers-and-acquisitions dept.

Cisco planning to buy out Nokia?

2005-08-05T10:05:00.000+05:30

page-rank-really-works dept.

Failure, according to Google.

Thanks to Pushyamitra, for this astute observation.

2005-08-05T01:10:00.000+05:30

perversions dept.

Well, I'm not ever, ever going to have a Subway sandwich again!!!. Brrr....pthuuuiiii....gargle, gargle, gargle...pthuuuiiii...

And here's something from the same evil brain -- The Complete Jailhouse Diaries i.e. a survival guide for first-timers in the slammer.

2005-07-28T16:56:00.001+05:30

i'd-rather-be-a-watcher-than-a-watchee dept.

This conclusively proves that there is money to be made from September 11th in more ways than one.

2005-07-26T17:20:00.000+05:30

software-pricing dept.

An article with a great bit of lateral thinking. Essentially, it deals with the problem of decomposing product prices (software product prices, specifically) to find acceptable prices for 'service options' bundled with the product.

Again, the iMac + Applecare spin is what made it interesting for me...(I'm not buying Applecare)...and the really interesting mapping techniques the author uses to model behaviour for patterns that haven't been studied well (like comparing tech world product price fluctuations to stock market indices).

I hope I understand this article :-).

2005-07-22T19:26:00.000+05:30

पिरतीची कीरत dept.

पिरतीची कीरत समद्याहुनी लई न्यारी ।।

ही पिरत जडली रामाला, शीतेसाटी यडा परभू जाला ।
मग पुसं झाडापाखराला, कुनी दावा पिरत माझी प्यारी ।।

हीनं जनीला यडं क्येलं, हीनं नाम्याला घायळ क्येलं ।
हीनं तुक्याचं मन भारलं, सार्या सृष्टीत रमले नर-नारी ।।

अशी झळंबी कितीका बिजली, कितीकांची जीवजोत इजली ।
पर जीचावर मती हिची रिझली, त्यानं साधिल्या मुक्ती चारी ।।

पिरतीची कीरत समद्याहुनी लई न्यारी ।।

- कवी गिरीश.

2005-07-21T15:27:00.000+05:30

one-armed-banker??? dept.

What will those Japanese think of next?

2005-07-20T16:18:00.000+05:30

apple-on-a-roll dept.

A good game to play in the Bay Area these days is "count the iPods". Wherever there are pedestrians, count on atleast a few with those distinctive white wires sticking out of their shirts. The 'halo effect' of the iPod is now starting to reflect on Macintosh sales too, if this report is to be believed.

Apple is now the no.4 seller of personal computers in the US this quarter. (The ones ahead: Dell, HP and Gateway)

Their market share is now 4.5 percent, with a 33 percent rise in Mac shipments.

2005-07-19T19:54:00.000+05:30

damn-lies dept.

2005-07-19T18:28:00.000+05:30

newkiller-power dept.

Is this goodbye to three-hour blackouts?

2005-07-19T16:35:00.000+05:30

i-want-my-iptv dept.

Damn. I need a bigger remote.