coming-soon dept.

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

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...

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.

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.

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 !

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

boot-me-up dept.

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

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...

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.

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

All to what end?

Downloadable ring tones.

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!.

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.