nd words are all I have...

I've moved

2008-05-08T11:55:00.001+05:30

OK, this should in most likely case be the last post on my blogspot account. I have shifted to my own domain where I will continue to blog with the same name.

You can follow me here.

Regression

2008-04-29T17:24:00.001+05:30

OK the migration did not work out as I expected it to. Even after paying for the hosting space, the service I got was terrible. The phone helplines were supposedly meant to be musicDJ with IVR and cPanel was pathetically slow. Online Help always showed as unavailable and after almost 10 conversations the problem was not resolved. And the most ironical part - the name of the service provider was 247-host.com, claiming to be available 24x7 service providers. I think they had a different definition of what 24x7 means. They almost tested my patience by repeatedly responding with useless information about how to solve the problem. I gave up after two days and asked for the closure of account and refund for the payment made. Haven't still received the money back in my CC a/c. Will wait till this gets sorted out and then go for another hosting service. Till then this is the refuge for the blog.

From Taking Pride to Being Paranoid

2008-03-18T12:58:00.003+05:30

From '10 Things I Hate About You'

You can be underwhelmed , you can be overwhelmed , but can you only be whelmed - ?
I think you can - In Europe.

The movie got me in to some serious trouble yesterday and I recalled this conversation from the flick. Not to mention - This was not a copyrighted version and was lying on my corporate machine (I in turn copied it from somewhere on the LAN). I did took pride in having it on my machine but all that was washed off by the formal warning.

Anyways , I've removed all copyright content now and anything now which remains is all licensed, openSource, GNU and FreeWare stuff.

65 Posts, last published on Aug 23, 2007

2008-01-23T19:03:00.000+05:30

Surprisingly enough I noticed the date only after I took up my lazy step to write after such a long time. So it's been exactly 5 months. Not a day less or more. Too perfect to be a coincidence.

Anyways complaining about not being able to extract out time or having a writer's block is what I wouldn't resort to this time. No point in actually cribbing about even. What's the big deal after all :P.

And the traffic ?....nah..like I care.

However a lot has indeed changed since then. I have started to get a feel of the micro-blogging business (not that am regular even there..). I have also started to devour and look into the social-networking/social-media buzz more closely because of the innumerable links and resources I receive daily, thanks to both twitter and RSS feeds and of course their authors.

I have started to think more seriously about the SOA revolution and where does it lead to in the future from the point of view of business application software. It still remains to see whether it's a buzz, hype or a bubble.

And finally , after more than 3 yrs I moved a step higher in my organization hierarchy after the much awaited roll out of promotion cycles. That happened although a month back. Still to realize that nothing much has actually changed because of it.

With no resolution or promises of being regular i'd rather let it be like this with sprinkles of updates as and when they accrue to a size worth posting here. It's true that taking first step is half the job done, only that in my case I believe it's definitely more than half ( maybe full :D).

Search --> Discover --> ??

2007-08-23T21:31:00.001+05:30

Search --> Discover --> ??

0.0) Since the time of its inception, web has moved leaps and bounds. It's genesis has created nerve-wracking problems and also wonderful creative solutions. Nothing apart from human evolution could compare to this so intriguing development (both good and bad) of the web. The difficulties which cast doubt on the evolution of an entity are iconoclastic problems which always push the entity to either mutate, compromise, or find a solution to end that problem. Growth of the internet has remained no exception and has led to some very amazing and intelligent answers during the course of its development.

1.0) First it was the problem of searching information/resources on the net. Google and other search-engines have solved it well and in a more than efficient way. One could search possibly everything that is there on the web by keying in pertinent keywords and reach out to potentially exhaustive list of resources relevant to that keyword(s). A peculiarly inconclusive and futile search for the letter 'a' on google would return somewhere around 8 billion resources. Of course an incalculable percentage of it is basically redundant because it's one of the most ubiquitous and canonical search arguments that can be passed to any search engine. The reason to quote that example here is to give an idea of the thoroughness of the searches that are performed over the net. As an indirect consequence of this, people have found ways to derive fun and challenges out of such systems for example by trying to figure out a combination of two meaningful keywords which would yield a single result. However, their discoveries only last for second after being published as the new GoogleWhack !!

2.0) With an almost incessant influx of data and ever increasing amount of information being put online, came the problem of discovering the information. StumbleUpon(SU) and the likes(del.icio.us, digg etc etc) provided a tool to do that. This was a paradigm shift from the way search engines work in the sense that unlike the dedicated crawling spiders/bots which generate the content for search engines systems, here the users themselves were the source of the discovered content. Any content deemed fit by a particular user would get automatically added to the stumbleupon's repository with proper topics/tags/subjects/contexts and would thereafter serve as the results of discovery by another user for those particular tags/subjects/contexts. Web-surfers could possibly keep stumbling around a particular set of their pre-defined subjects on the net and in the process rate the particular resources based on there relevancy. Thus, in essence it is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy for the systems such as SU to generate their content and also maintain the quality and reliability of that content in an almost perpetual process of information retrieval.

2.1) However, there is also a fundamental similarity in terms of the user interaction between these two kinds of utilities, services, information retrieval systems or whatever you wish to call them. And that is the user in either of these two cases has to explicitly reach out for the information whether intentionally or unintentionally. While in case of search the user intentionally seeks the information, in the other case he or she unintentionally discovers the information based on what others have qualified as the relevant resource for a particular subject. We can therefore in the language of business process classify these activities as outbound or on-demand from a user's perspective because the user has to actually 'reach-out' for the information. On-demand is a term more often used in the context of enterprise services, wherein a particular service or functionality is made available to the customers on as-and-when-required basis and it clearly represents the manner in which search and discovery work on the net.

2.2) Also an interesting common trait for these two kind of information retrieval systems is that they both are reactive in nature from their user's point of view. The process of accessing information from these system is more of a reactive(on a need-to-know basis) nature rather than pro-active(on an ought-to-know basis)

3.0) The question therefore is : What next? Well, any more obviousness would be killing and hence the next thing that demands focus is the need for inbound information availability. Not that anything of that sort does not exist, but there is a greatly felt need for an inbound Information Radiation System(IRS). Feeds, alerts, subscriptions to newsletters, spams(yes spams and junks) are all examples of these inbound information radiation systems, because the information automatically flows to the user without him or her having to do anything necessarily and continuously. This idea is not at all new in its original form because TV advertising, newsprint and radio are all quintessential legacies of these inbound information radiating systems, which we use till the very day. The way perhaps these systems became inbound had more to do with the limitations of technologies rather than the way they evolved as in one cannot imagine the invention of an interactive television in the first place.

3.1) An ideal inbound IRS should qualify by having the following characteristics.

a.) It should be a two-way communication system between the user and the radiator (radiation and acknowledgment).
b.) It should be symmetric, i.e. the roles of user and radiator should be interchangeable.
c.) It should be adaptive, i.e. to say the system should adapt itself to the radiate information which has utility for its recipient.
d.) It should be pro-active in nature and not reactive such as the search and discovery systems are.
e.) It should be non-invasive in the sense that the information should be acknowledged by it's users and should not in any way be treated as unwelcome.
f.) It should be non-binding, .i.e. the expectation of any returns from the members of this system should be ideally zero. (way to be 'leechers' !!)
g.) It should be non-redundant in a liberal sense. i.e. to say a particular information should not be repetitively radiated for a very long time.

3.2) Before going forward there are some classic example of systems which act as both inbound and outbound - Telephones and Snail/E-mails. Telephones are however not well-defined and ideal inbound IRS (according to the definition above) as these tend to violate the e.) charter of being non-invasive ( I would not believe someone thinking otherwise).

3.3) The basic motivating factor behind any such inbound system is probabilistic filtering of the relevant information over the web over a period of time. An almost infinitely vast expanse of knowledge base exists on the net ( both verifiable and true vs unverifiable and false) in the form of wikis and it's derivatives. However reaching out for the information that is of any utility or interest still remains a far cry for any given user. The probability of finding out a relevant piece of information on a reactive basis is continually decreasing in a system where information comes from a multitude of sources. No wonder people talk about information overloading, which is nothing but an indication of the inability and the associated stress in finding useful and appreciative information.

3.4) Coming back to the examples of inbound IRS, the problem perse is that first these examples are not pro-active in nature which is an essential characteristic requirement for an ideal inbound IRS. Pro-active systems are ones which do not require any or require very limited input from its users in order to radiate the information. For e.g. The user has to always first either search/discover a feed URL and then eventually subscribe to it. Similarly a user creates an alert for the events for which he/she wants to get notified. And the other examples also follow a similar pattern. Spams/junks however behave in an ambiguous way in that although they are more closer to the inbound IRS (because a user never explicitly does anything in order to receive them) than other counterparts but because by definition they are something unwanted and not obliged by their receivers they do not qualify as an ideal inbound IRS.

4.0) Instigation: Why should such a system work. Or become popular. Or more critically, is something like that even required. Two answers to support the argument that indeed there is a place for an inbound-IRS to exist - First it broadens the horizons and usability aspects of the information on the web. In a democratic setup of internet anything which is not acceptable would eventually wear off and be replaced by either something more efficient or revert to its original and enduring previous system. Hence the only litmus test for the feasibility of such a system is to first bring it into existence.

Besides an inbound IRS is in no way mutually exclusive to the existing outbound information retrieval systems or even close to become a perceptive threat. In fact both kinds of system would in time create a symbiotic ecology of their own which would not only benefit the consumers, but also bring more tangibility to the concept of Information Superhighway which we hear about in day to day talk. To grant the feasibility of anything like that would certainly add value to the way we treat information (sometime ruthlessly and casually), and help change our outlook for our own good.

-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Vital Stats for this article. (acknowledgment Google Docs)

Flesch Reading Ease: ^[?]	52.65
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: ^[?]	10.00
Automated Readability Index: ^[?]	9.00

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Rich Grad, Poor Grad

2007-08-13T22:25:00.000+05:30

Francesco: Milano è tanto meglio di Napoli. Milano è la citta la più bella di tutti… nel mondo…

Giuseppe: He say "Milan is better than Napoli".

Instructor: Oh, he shouldn't be saying that — we haven't done comparatives yet.

(From Monty Python and The Holy Grail..)

Well, neither have I (and yes, I dare admit, I saw the whole movie !). But when I stumbled upon a link by name similar to the pre-conjunctive part of this post's title, something popped up immediately in my head... - the post-conjunctive part of the title. I must confront that my proclivity towards the titles of an article by far exceeds that towards its content and hence it's more often my failed search for titles rather than my incompetency which eludes me to write a new post. This proclivity is in part abetted by my penchant for quotations/quotes/aphorisms/proverbs and the likes.

Of course, to get opinionated about any article just by the heading or the subject would be like proposing that 'beauty is not skin deep' and hence if the interest of a reader starts shaking just after the first few lines the post is certainly not its worth.

Now what about 'Rich Grad, Poor Grad'. Of course nothing. You know it's just a skewed form of plagiarism if you've read 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' which talks in practical terms about what not to do in order to be rich and what poors do to become what they are. Obviously the book talks about usefulness of money handling and cash flow concepts, of being penny wise and pound wiser, and above all of being a smart investor on a very carefully defined comparative platform. All in all it's a book with a single track money orientation and materialistic outlook.

However far from the moolah-land, the definition I am trying to proclaim here of being rich or poor is how smartly one invests his/her assets (time, intelligence, aptitude and judgement powers) to increase the knowledge base. Being a mere graduate today is normal-middle class stuff which does not distinguish you from other bricks in the wall of averages. It leaves you poor at the end of the day. It tags you as a poor grad who just like a pitied poor on street, was somehow unable to do something different or rise above the levels or normalcy.

I think if at all this world continues to move ahead, it is not because most of the people behave normally, but because everyone behaves differently and uniquely. And if you lag in that race of abnormality and doing something off track you are no better than a literally poor man who has never looked beyond the horizons of normality. And that's where the comparatives appear : Rich Grad is one who in simple words either has a upper hand in the level of education or is credited with producing something unique and different on the basis of her knowledge capital. A poor grad is someone similar to a running rat in a race who even though wins sometimes, but still remains a rat, content and calm with whatever comes on the way and does not strive towards excellence or improvisation in whatever knowledge base she has.

Wordpress vs Blogger.

2007-08-06T15:38:00.000+05:30

Having fiddled a lot with blogspot(domain blogger.com) , getting a taste of open source blog hosting and publishing platform Wordpress(WP) was a mix of sour and sweet for me.

As always the open source thingies are supposedly more intelligent, behave in a sane manner and embrace that air of 'this is no crap' around them when compared to their counterparts and WP is no exception to that fact. WP is not only a blog host but also a standalone platform which can be installed on any host for personal domains. I haven't switched to installing the platform s/w for my domain, but instead hosting my new tech blog on the free host itself.

WP stands as one of the most preferred blogging platform amongst migrating bloggers , because it provides the flexibility and extensibility to its users through plugins.
That is one of the advantages the user community enjoys by being the part of the developing community.

However, there are also some drawbacks of being an OS community project, because there's a plethora of information available from infinite sources and every TD&H like me would post something about the project that within minutes you find yourself drowned in that information deluge about "how to do.." questions. Second, for beginner's it is at times difficult to grasp what all, the technology has to offer and what is best suited for their purpose.

The lack of standardization leading to security vulnerabilities is another big problem as with any open source community project. Although, it seems the things are not as tangibly bad with WP but it took me some time to figure out that certain things unlike the blogger platform are not possible on the standard free WP.com host. Maybe there are ways to do them, which will have to be unearthed and that will take some more time.

Whatever it be I think I still need to dig in more into the trivialities of the platform and see if I can continue to use it on as-is-basis.

Not to be continued

2007-07-27T15:44:00.000+05:30

Every time I pledge to write a second in-part series of a post, I end up not writing for exceptionally long time. I've seen this happening twice, so from now on most probably the unit of work will be defined as a single exhaustive and comprehensive post without any "to be continued" tag lines ;) .

Now something which struck me today was this post from Copyblogger, which pushed me back to my writing.

Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don’t want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don’t.
Write every day.
Keep writing.

I should also acknowledge that this is partly an abstract inspiration from ' A post a day ' ;)

Where's the cabbage -I ?

2007-04-30T19:22:00.000+05:30

This question has had too many answers with varying degrees of contention, satisfaction and perhaps their truth content. However if we are to take a non-analytic view the answer is sheer blatant and all exposed and pervading in front of our eyes.

Just like the circulating molten core of earth which enlivens it, the life on earth in more than what we can afford to believe is surviving predominantly on these two money-churners : advertising and arbitrage.

Where advertising on one hand has the effect of concentrating the money from that vast pool of populace into few hands, or more discretely it is the supply of cash from many to the demand of few, arbitrage on the other is exploited by few who leverage the difference of money values across different markets and thereby sustain the tautness of the demand and supply curve. To put it in other way it's the flow of cash from the supply of few to the demand of many. Maybe these two things don't sound too instrumental in the first glance, but just give a thought -that if half of the world's money is in one or the other way scanned under the mechanisms of these two money-churners, one cannot but shed any skepticism about them. (the other half probably sleeps as a secured money in the pits..)

The power these two things hold individually is too humongous to be grasped unless we get the real hard numbers to put across, but then statistics is something which surpasses dammed lies and hence it's only a matter of self-realization and self-enlightenment.

Through advertisements, whether they entice or create a revulsion in masses for a certain product, one process that always gets initiated is the flow of money. From a pressure-margin business of selling a Re1 sachet of hair oil on television to a completely soft advertisement of social-networking on web to the star-studded apparel commercial asking you to spend more than 1000% of the production cost for a shirt or whatever, the wheel of money game start spinning, streaming trifle amounts through millions of pockets eventually landing in to the hands of few. It's this convergence which is followed up again by a divergence of the cash flow which keeps the moolah rolling. The divergence comes in the form of investments in financial instruments, infrastructure building, generation of new businesses and employment essentially disbursing out the cash packets back to the masses. Surely the influx and out-flux are not the same and that accounts for the rising no of billionaires in the world and acute disparity in the money possessions.

Arbitrage if we go by dictionary definition shows up as a see-saw in the money-park wherein the key players try to cash-on the imbalance in the values of almost anything, yes literally anything - from interest rates to currency to commodities to stocks and what not. Arbitrage is again an immensely pressure margin business which relies on the multiplicative power of the volumes. The torrential sums when multiplied by a fraction of the cent produce millions of dollars as pure profits in a single day and in the process reconcile the difference in the underlying entity. However, just like a see-saw in action the equilibrium is never achieved in totality or eternity in the world of arbitrage(s)

ps: cabbage is the informal term for money

hopefully i'll not ditch the second part of this article [;)]..

Issued in the blogger's interest.

2007-04-24T19:52:00.000+05:30

In a follow-up to my last post (technically speaking the penultimate post, coz' i had to slew the last one) on the titles of the article which somehow couldn't manage to see the living day-light, here's a cross-link to the recipe of making eye-catcher headlines for your posts. And here are some heroic mistakes which you should only be doing if you are contending for the last on the best blog competition ;)

When 'Titles' became the 'Post'

2007-03-23T17:44:00.000+05:30

Although the list is not exhaustive, but this is all what I have attempting to convert into a meaningful post for quite some time now. But as evident the titles itself became the subject matter of this post. Can't help falling in to a pitfall ... :P

1.) Algorithm of Jokes.
2.) Business, e-Business, what next.?
3.) Good Night and Good Luck. ( This I know is plagiarisation..)
4.) The Pun is not intended.
5.) The inverse of Wachaowski bros. 'Matrix'.
6.) Around the world - 7 times in a second.
7.) A Goal is just a kick away.
8.) Index....I need the Index of life.
9.) Make meaning - Right a wrong.
10.) Broadcasting live from nowhere! :D
11.) New Word Salad ... Now fortified with euphemisms ;)
12.) The 64 thousand 256 $ question.
13.) Will Utopian world have stock markets?
14.) Omnipotent Dementia.
14.) My cellphone just smirked.
15.) God's Fantasies.
16.) Another Nickel in the Machine.
17.) Rejoicing the pink slip.
18.) When Murphy's law fail.
19.) Obviously it's not to be read.
20.) In Rome.......Fine you know what to do. ;)
21.) When 'Titles' became the 'Post'

Thankfully , at least the last one did actually materialized.. !!

Ab'z'olutely Random...!! (What do you think ? -->)

2007-03-13T21:35:00.000+05:30

ACK : P-ink (pink is the short form of 'pick up link') from a forwarded post on my wing group.

Cross-domain Access using AJAX-II

2007-02-13T14:27:00.000+05:30

Intended Audience : Small/novice/experimental web-developers looking for free access to cross-domain web-services/data using AJAX.

Target Replication : Experimental/Test/Individual [Non-production]

Reader's Technical Level : Beginner's in web-development with minimal and basic introductory knowledge of AJAX.

Technical Relevance/Benefit : Cross-domain access using AJAX technology has remained a big hindrance for small-time and novice web-developers who want to freely access third-party web-services/data using AJAX on their 'domains'(such as " www.mydomain.com"). This is because most of the free as well as paid web-hosts do not allow setting up proxy server scripts on their shared web-servers for 'domains' in particular, to maintain the quality of service.However certain web-hosts allow setting up proxy scripts only on 'sub-domains'(such as "www.myname.freewebsitespace.net") for their own advertisement benefits.

Although many solutions for cross-domain AJAX requests are already in place,they cater to a very limited set of users. This article demonstrates a simple workaround method to circumvent this restriction on cross-domain AJAX requests for a highly common and widely acknowledged problem.

Problem Statement : Given a 'domain'(http://www.mydomain.com) set up on the shared web-host which does not allow setting up a proxy script(say a PHP proxy script). How can the 'domain' developer overcome this restriction of accessing cross-domain services/data using AJAX.?

Solution : This solution is not completely innovative in the sense that it actually combines two separate cross-domain solutions for AJAX, to provide a highly versatile and zero-cost solution for small-time web-application developers for their experimental/test or individual requirements.

Step 1: First register a 'sub-domain' on a web-host which allows setting up PHP proxy scripts for 'sub-domain' (such as " www.myname.freewebsitespace.net").

Step 2: Since this technique uses the Flash based AJAX solution which uses 'FlashXMLHttpRequest()' instead of the usual 'XMLHttpRequest()' function we need to place a 'crossdomain.xml' file on our 'sub-domain'. This allows us to bypass the 'Same origin policy' and send requests to any required cross-domain.

Step3: Upload a file with name 'crossdomain.xml' having the following entry <allow-access-from domain=" mydomain.com"/> in the root of your 'sub-domain' http://myname.freewebsitespace.net). This will grant permission to http://www.mydomain.com to send Flash based AJAX requests to the 'sub-domain' .Check that the file is accessible by opening the URL - http://myname.freewebsitespace.net/crossdomain.xml .

Step 4: Set up a PHP proxy server on the 'sub-domain'. php proxy scripts are freely available on net. Let's assume the proxy script is 'prx.php' and it takes the parameter 'prx_url' to fetch that particular web-service/data.

Step 5: Upload the following files (a javascript and a flash .swf file) in order to instantiate the Flash based AJAX request objects on your 'domain'.
i) 'FlashHelper.js'
ii)'Flash4AJAX.swf'

Step 5: Now Send AJAX requests from your 'domain' in this manner:

var URL = 'http://myname.freewebsitespace.net/prx.php?prx_url=<any cross-domain service url>';
var fxhr = new FlashXMLHttpRequest();
fxhr.open(GET, url);

'Content-Type' should be set in the requestHeader to match the kind of data returned by cross-domain request.

The diagram below depicts the above steps pictorially and in more comprehensible manner. Click the image to view full size.

This technique is highly similar to the one - 'Use a Web Proxy for Cross-Domain XMLHttpRequest Calls' described here. However since most developers cannot setup up a proxy server on their web-host (especially when the service is free) the current workaround proves quite helpful and lets the start-up developers access the cross-domain facility at almost no cost.

The technique however has few demerits to own:

a) For first this technique requires that the browsers be flash enabled and allow instantiation of Flash based AJAX request objects. However the omnipotent nature of Flash in reality tones down the criticality of this issue.

b) Since the 'sub-domain' web-host service (except for some) usually provides a limited monthly bandwidth, web-developers cannot put this technique to use on the production scale or commercial use, where their bandwidth limit exhausts in a short interval of time rendering their web-application dead.

The resources,demonstration and the example site using the technique can be accessed from : http://jabber.org.in/JAO/JabApp.html

Cross-Domain Access using AJAX - I

2007-01-31T16:12:00.000+05:30

In a fit to catch up with the growing interests in the Web2.0 and the much hyped and talked about - Ubiquitous AJAX, the novice developers have constantly been teased and beleaguered by the browser restrictions and security considerations. With applications such as Google Maps, Gmail, Google Document and many more still in its labs, Google the forerunner of the technology has undoubtedly bucked up javascript from its till now 'underdog' status to a completely new and prospective one. However still, the most interesting and useful aspect of the AJAX which is - Cross-domain access - remains a hot and overtly discussed concern on almost all AJAX forums. Though there are many workarounds in place to circumvent the browser restrictions [See Same Origin Policy ], what I discovered to my dismay was that, none of them actually proves helpful to the beginners and people who live with the 'Open-Source' ideology. Some one willing to experiment and trying to taste the splendid technological advantages of AJAX is simply left with no options at all. The workarounds just doesn't sound appealing to a wider audience.

The second part of this post [will publish in a day or two] would discuss this "AJAX - Cross-Domain Access" conundrum with a different perspective and detail a zero-cost solution for beginner's and novice developers. Till then...

~tech it along !

Ain't there better things to do ?

2007-01-18T19:07:00.000+05:30

I think there aren't. At least for those who don't have anything to do in the first instance. I believe the priorities of Citizen 2006 have shuffled lately. From moral to ethical and now racial policing. How far would we like to go in our campaign to raise voices against each and every thing - big or small, significant or trifle, worthy or unworthy of a cause. Aren't we over-enthusiastic about the whole saga. Aren't we wasting our time and energy, when there are better and more important things to be done. Can we afford to live in the light of such hollow controversies and overshadow the plights and problems which need more attention?

I am not being versus here or undermining the intensity of this melodramatic despair of whosoever it was. Definitely, we ought to condemn whatever happened and especially take it on a serious note when it's related to a citizen of our nation , but come on this can't become a national issue in a country like India. I just don't give a damn if the whole issue is so much of worth in Britain to be raised in the House of Commons , but certainly I oppose anything of that sort happening in India. In a nation of over a billion population, can we yield to waste our precious time in talking and debating with vested interests over a matter which shouldn't even be there in the list of actions.

But see the irony we're more than happy and content in burning effigies of 'XYZ', putting up petitions, devouring prime time on national networks, going ga-ga over the whole issue which I feel is not at all a 'Issue' if looked from a different perspective. Three reasons for that -

First, Uncountable no. of such incidents happen all over the world in a minute here and a second there. And in a game cum reality show where one can least expect for such things to NOT happen, the whole issue has only enthralled everyone with more than its share of controversial pie. So are we going to tackle all such issues with the same intensity and hype just as we are fighting this one. Definitely not. Then why this one??

Second, Just because this whole thing involves a 'beautiful' celebrity with a large fan following, the issue has gathered so much of uncalled momentum and fanaticism. Why don't we bother to raise our voices when the same thing happens to almost every individual of Indian diaspora living in Europe and UK sometime or the other?? No, because we just don't find them worthy of our interest.

And lastly because whether this can-of-worms was intentionally or unintentionally opened by airing the scenes which perhaps could have been easily done away with , the motive is clear cut - toast a controversy and raise money. And undoubtedly the scheme has hit upon us, we are working to make money for them day-in and day-out, by discussing , talking , writing and doing what not to show that yes - We don't have anything better than this to do.

G.U.R.U - the _________ ??

2007-01-16T01:38:00.000+05:30

Now how many movies leave you in a contemplating mode, long after - 'The End' ?? Not many of course and certainly when it comes to the 'produce' of our own bollywood, most of them would only leave you flashed, deja vued, confused, mesmerized and maybe sometimes 'reimbursed' of the ticket amount.

However 'Guru', unsurprisingly belonged to that all together different class of cinema - 'Different' !!
Yes it was different, unique, separated and it wasn't worth its money, because somethings are just as priceless as that feeling of content you get with a glass of water after a spicy meal.
'Guru' could have been just another run-of-the-mill, but for many reasons you find that inspite of some uncalled for songs, technical flaws, and boring scenes, the movie came out perfect from a holistic viewpoint. A much needed (sm ppl would certainly beg to differ here) come back for the on-screen couple Aish-Abhi was all that was needed to ice the cake of their engagement ceremony.

Going all praise for 'guru' is not the agenda of the post if at all I'm sounding such, but the fact remains that after RDB perhaps the only movie which clicked me smwhere was this, which going by the ratio of movies I have watched after RDB would turn out to be 1/80. I believe being subjective about movies is just another birth right and when that right pushes you to raise you voice for a cause such as - 'Guru', you can only find a mass action following behind you.

I was amazed how democratically the same notion ringed everyone's mind while coming out of the theater that the title 'guru' could have aptly been suffixed with such quite evitable phrases like Guru - The Master, guru - the entrepreneur, guru - the visionary, guru - the confidence within...but then it would only have made it resounding and hackneyed and was definitely an intelligent move, unless the crew forgot to put one.

Go watch it for a break from the monotone of watching the likes of - KANK...et al !!

Complexity vs Efficiency

2007-01-12T18:24:00.000+05:30

Ever wondered how much of our effort goes in general to increase the complexity of the system we are working in. People working day-in and day-out to achieve more and more efficiency in their work by increasing complexity of the same. It's amazing that we have reached a point in line of advancement where our notion of development in terms of building efficient models of working system is paralleled with the rise in their complexity and density. Take a self-test - Is your work adding to the complexity of the system to derive efficiency? And no wonder your answer would most probably be in affirmation.

Definitely it's possible and that's why it's happening and that's why the world is moving. The strong covariance between complexity and efficiency, moving the wheel of our so-called development is a clear-cut 'Yes' in everybody's mind. Intelligent routers - at the cost of high intricacies, better and more feature rich softwares - with more lines of code, futuristic cars - with self-controls and the list is perhaps endless for me to mention, but the question remains how long will this schema of progress continue to prove it's worth for our ever growing demands from the respective systems. Isn't there a limit to the complexity we can achieve in a system. Come D-day and we might as well realize that we have crossed the rubicon and there's no way to turn around. That the complexity has reached a stage beyond comprehension. That there are systems, but we don't have the clue to understand them. Our ingenuities forcibly stuck because there's no place to implement our ideas. And slowly and gradually our own creations will surpass us and our ability to maintain them, eventually leading our racing vehicles of development into a pitfall. The only consolation I speculate, for someone could be a step towards reducing the entropy of the whole universe by building complex and intricate systems. But certainly that doesn't help much in the much bigger picture of infinite universe and the longer run towards eternity.

I know it all sounds far-fetched and outlandish. May be !, but we never know. We have effectively progressed in the past few decades ( am talking of scientific progress) more than what our predecessors had in all the time before.

So can we move to an all together different track, and start our quest for increasing efficiency by means of simplifying the system? That clearly is a tough call, coz had it been easier we wouldn't have walked the other way round in the first place. Producing efficient systems which are simple is tough and increasing efficiency by simplification would be like dying. And that's why we would never get to see the next release of Windows backward compatible with the existing hardware as against its requirement of gigs of RAM and multiple processors. I guess somewhere during our evolution we have perhaps ingrained the idea of value-addition in terms of complicating things. The idea however has served well and continues to. We have had the most complex of theorems applied to the most complex of systems in order to achieve fractions of indispensable efficiency figures. But then that is how we have reached this very point where I can take a critical view point towards this hand-in-hand relationship between complexity and efficiency. And if not for this we wouldn't bother to look beyond the horizon and ask this question - Can we simplify things to achieve the desired levels of efficiency. Can we build systems which are simple and less intimidating, and yet can be perfect replacement of their counterparts?

Satan's of the Ring

2007-01-05T15:55:00.000+05:30

And just before i could even type out the words that were raging themselves out of my finger tips, I was passed on this link . And nothing of what I would have written matched the way the article suffices to incarnate the monstrosity of this demented servant & master couple.

Reviewing the hiatus

2006-12-19T19:17:00.000+05:30

Incomplete posts , unrelenting thoughts, borrowed phrases, crazy titles, and finally this. After a much longer typical hiatus though !
At least am not running away this time. Not eschewing what is destined. I tried not to be cliched this time but then that's why they call it cliched ;), because you end up sounding terminally verbose without your own knowledge, and gloating it like a piece of modern art.

Last few weekends, were not so obliquely different when it came to candidly pass them doing nothing just like Calvin would have loved to. However, with some futile violations of doing something in bits and pieces can be completely ignored. Like - reading Dan Brown's - Angel & Demons, and watching completely avoidable serials and movies.

Whatever it be I have decided to start up certain things on a war footing. Yes war footing. The first in the list - to build if not everything then only the UI of my web page on the domain I bought last summer for some very mystic reasons ( I fear not to tell them). And it's more cumbersome than writing this blog. With plethora of new web technologies available at your disposal the phrase - 'More is less' in fact actualized for me. Am still confused what to use - GWT (Google Web tookkit), YUI (Yahoo User Interface), Adobe's FlexBuilder, Ruby on Rails or perhaps something more obscure. Not that I have mastered all of them, but yes I have chalked out the options.
What remains is to find someone who can maybe help me in arguing/coding/discussing how to go about putting the thing in place.

Next in the pipeline is to gobble up the Dan Brown's novel series. For the first time I can recall, in my life I have read any novel as voraciously as this one. And I cannot be more eager to catch up with the rest of them. There's something about him, his writing , or perhaps with the subject itself which can leave you craving for more and with so much to contemplate. Simple and realistic fiction which can be addictive. I hope to get some time to finish up the series without any self-made inhibitions.

The last one is most probably the most crucial one - How to get 'there' from 'here'? That's a bit of abstraction though. Am just waiting for something to turn up. Never ever have relied on probabilities but this time, looks like I have to. No other option. Somethings have to be learned in a harder way.

Currently listening -~~~ "aa khushi se khud kushi kar le" ;) ~~~

Investment it is after all.

2006-11-27T19:10:00.000+05:30

Shakespeare's eternal quote would befit all the time to come -
"All the world's a stage and all the men and women are but actors",
but the quote would perhaps take upon a strikingly different form in different eras- such as this, which I feel befits the capitalized and globalized world we live in today -
"All the world's a stock market and all the men and women are but brokers."

Investment is all what we do everyday. Isn't it?

At the end of the fag day, what we might look back and see is our investment in all manners, big and small to earn what we need to live. To live is to invest - not only money but time, effort, brain, goodwill, talent and beliefs. But then why should I be calling it an out and out 'investment' and not merely a normal way to live or carrying out our responsibilities disguised as jobs, hobbies, obligations etc etc. After all that is how we have been living ever since the day we know. Yes. But then somewhere down the line as our brains evolved , our dispositions switched towards making investments and see whatever we do not as the natural way of living but as a priced future option. Something I have both repented and enjoyed - often.

Our tendency has grounded to visualize and measure out everything ( and i mean everything) in terms of its potential to give back the desired outcome. We study hard to earn good marks then jobs and then salary. We work hard to climb up the ladder of our corporate hierarchy. We spend time reading to improve our language skills. We socialize and make friends to broader our network of acquaintances. And the only thing I can compare all this to - Our investment in stocks to make more money out of it.

Everything suddenly looks so motivated and intentional. Nothing remains natural and without a reason.

Nothing wrong till now. After all we need motivations and goals to move forward and reach out higher.

It's just that our learning have become a by-product of what we study.(Do a reality check on how many thing we voluntarily learn everyday without any future motivation or looking at its potential use).
Our proficiency and accomplishments have become a side-product of our struggle to be the root of the corporate hierarchy.(Figure out how much of your work is oriented in completing the targets set in the last appraisal cycle.)
Our feelings of content and surprise while reading have become ephemeral against our quest to be more skilled in language and to increase the book count.(The last book you felt close to you heart and which was finished seamlessly. Remember??)
Our best friends and confidants are just a result of the random probability of colliding with someone being worthy of from our friends list.(Check your orkut list and find out how many ppl you really have talked to in the last one year).

Nothing wrong even now. After all its just a shift of priority and that's a subjective human right everyone has in a democracy.

Maybe this transformation, is the characteristic of our times. Maybe there's nothing wrong in this shift. Maybe I am wrong.

I am not the understand the English :(.

2006-11-22T11:39:00.000+05:30

Egzactly....!!

To someone like me whose inhibitions towards bollywood movies are more or less governed by the opportunity to watch them, what I have written above would definitely make (non)sense and unveil the context. For others there is this post. To begin with, this is yet again the same time of the year when India witnesses an educational turmoil in form of an examination which perhaps would be and remain an imagination for the rest of the world. I Imagine a satellite picture of more than two hundred thousand peoples giving a test at various corners of the country . Yes am talking about the CAT which was back last weekend and just like the festival of Diwali it left the smoke and thundering sounds as its aftermath. The only difference between the two - the proportion of those encashing happiness and those left somewhat burned and blistered. And the bomb which ripped apart everyone was the legacy of our 200 years of freedom struggle - The English language. or more technically the 'verbal' section in the jargon of MBA blues.

I have had an interesting rapport with 'English' ever since the first day of my school. That of unnerving each other. I wasn't built to learn it. If there is something of which I have remained paranoiac all through my life, the answer would come out in a jiffy - English. Somehow I have never been able to make it up to the required levels of English. I hated English as a child. I hated learning the words which looked alien to my mind. I hated making a separate notebook for grammar all through my school days. I somehow remained disjoint from the whole class when it came to English. My second lowest marks would be in English subject (the lowest being in the social science - I luv to hate this subject till this very day ). My library book would travel along in my bag to home, remain untouched for the whole week and then back again to library on the day of the return. The only time I managed to lead in English for a quarter of year, I was almost about to flunk in one or the other subjects. In short English never became my cup of tea.

And in turn English would put me in the background of activities. Devoid me of any deserving limelight. Give me a taste of my incompetency and make me hate it more and more. Nevertheless in recent past ( i.e. the last two years) I have to my surprise been attracted towards English. I have pulled up my self to appreciate the beauty and potency of this language. I have learned to how to take a stand like a connoisseur when it comes to English in all its various forms ( except for the poetry which I still feel is something highly subjective and the subtlety of which can be understood by its writer, and sometime even he/she cannot). The rivalry however still continues to this day. :((

I have invested quantum of time contemplating why is it that English plays a vital role in all my setbacks, and then like a spark of nirvana it occurred to me that perhaps I am here to redefine (???? OK...refine) the standards of English, and be known more as a legendary figure of English language rather than of any programming language. But that may take all together a new incarnation to accomplish. And untill then perhaps the powers that be - would make me struggle again for this new independence I seek from the paranoia of not being an 'anglo-indian'.

Quote me not !........never..........ever

2006-11-14T00:37:00.000+05:30

I like reading quotes. I have been particularly interested in them for quite some time now. I have read the worst and the best of them. I have also believed in the fact that no matter how exhaustive I become in my reading of the quotes, there would still be some under the graves, which are better than the 'best' and worse than the 'worst'. Not unless I hit upon this one today. which perhaps I think is the worst and the biggest loser quote of all times.

"All success begins with spreading your W.I.N.G.S - believing in your Worth, trusting your Insight, Nurturing yourself, having a Goal, and devising a personal Strategy. nd then, even impossible dreams become real."

To a normal eye - this outshines as one of those inspirational quotes which can push people to die for their success. For me this is nothing more than- BULL****. A made up crap. Something written for the sake of writing. Something you can honestly forget the moment your swing your eye balls. Something which can work only for those who don't really want to work. Miles away from the reality and into the futile core world of hyper-philosophical or gyan-darshan. Who's a** can benefit out of such verbose and useless quotes, glamored and enamored like those fugacious Chinese products, which are good for nothing other than creating a mass infatuation.

Call me names for putting it all like this, but I just can't help despising this one. For there are reasons which are quite in parallel to why I hate those stinking K-serials on the idiot box. For first, it looks like something straight out of an evil mind. Someone wanting to confuse people and alluring them with yet another stupid excuse for not working their ways out towards success.

Some people would contemplate after reading - Aaah..am most probably not trying to believe in myself (come on even bush would have believed in himself for all what he has done so far) or I better nurture myself (with what and how only god knows !!), and do I have a goal as yet, I think I better search out(read as waste time) for yet another one....and what not.

So grossly hollow that you can't get a quark of wisdom in them after closely analyzing them and that is why I hate these category of unquotable quotes, meant to be deleted for ever from everywhere - net, books and most importantly from our minds..!

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Little 'Bloggers'

2006-10-31T16:30:00.000+05:30

I am sure Nobody would not have heard/read/listened this -

"While Capitalism is screwing the Working Class, Government is sound asleep, the People are being completely ignored and the Future is full of Shit."

Though it's part of something more trickier and more johhnier ;) , than what it looks here, it says it all and if not read it down.

I know it's one of those things someone puts on the blog, when he/she is suffering wildly from writer's block. Not that am a writer, but yeah sometimes I feel like one,but quite unlike the the ones who feel complete and ingenuous in their writing, tracing every filth they get on board of various tabloids across the net just in order to make yellow journalism more yellower.

Yes am pointing my finger......ok..my fist, on all those bloggers who are complacent in being the next blatantly screaming 'read-me-please---for-god-sake' portal owner, through their blogs. They will regularly post the wild and wackiest of news picked up from the plethora of pathetic news sites and google out fact and figures to somehow make the whole news look like the event of the century. I have seen a sudden surge in the no. of bloggers posting news items picked up seemingly from the last result page of google search, and contrive a mind candy for their regulars, like yet another potboiler story of a soap, as if those sucking K-serials were already not causing enough pain, of every kind.

The question being does that serve purpose? Does that not violate the original idea and concept of blogging?

Well yes and no.
No, because this is the age of remixes and remakes. So these bloggers are no less than their show-biz counterparts in deriving their 'inspiration' from what is happening in the world today. I think blogging has indeed picked up a new show-biz culture paralleled by enormous fan following and the desperateness of the readers waiting for their super-writers to release a new post. Huh !! as if they had choices. ( I think the proverb should be changed to - 'Readers are not choosers')

And Yes because we know it all, the blogging was just a modern approach of maintaining personal diaries only differing in their access to the public as against a method of generating revenues (thanks to google's non-sense adsense), archiving remakes of sensational news, or of showcasing discoveries of obscure facts which essentially only goes to tell the readers about the writing abilities of the associated authors and nothing else.

Ok I know, if that starter on the top of the page still looks alien to this whole post and has been consistently troubling, let me give an explanation. (Just and extempore attempt ... [;)])

"While the bloggers are screwing the idea and concept of blogging, the blogspot is sound asleep, the reader's choices are being completely ignored and the future of blogs is full of shit."

Sounds convincing ? isn't it ... :D

ready for a beating....anyone??

2006-10-12T17:52:00.000+05:30

The last post will continue in the next post ;)......Procrastination redefined...:P. OK it's just that I don't feel like writing, I feel like avenging someone for something...and that someone can be anyone...;). This is perhaps due in the wake of incidents such as these :

The 9/11 being repeated in not it's whole entirety but on a much lesser scale only goes to show that Osama has now his competitors within the US. He's offloaded of the burdens of downsizing the high skyscraper in the states. Pun intended -Of Course !!, and I wholeheartedly extend my condolences for those who died in this mishap. Longing to see this world as a safe place to live in...

The more bolder and more armed media of India, capsizes the Orkut community - I hate India. Now can someone explain if it's not paranoia but something else that makes our media in general to run amok and be instigated by a handful members of a community of eternal Indian haters i.e. Pakistanis - Ggod, bless them, their country and our media.

And the Star-struck pune-ites were no less fanatic in chasing Angelina Jolie's all-black tinted glass Innova, than poor farmers of drought-struck areas chasing relief helicopters for food packets. The result : a chaser getting knocked down by the cab containing jolie-pitt, the couple being pulled in a for a case in court and new channels coudn't have asked for more. But who's to be blamed really? The so called 'roads' of pune, the driver of the cab, the chaser or more interestingly jolie herself. And what does this showcase : desperateness, indecency, frustration, or simply our innate instinct of getting wild.?
Can't help feeling for those two poor souls... :(

as always praying .............\_/

Lost in Transportation... - I

2006-10-05T14:02:00.000+05:30

How many different modes of public transport have you used in a single day? 2, maybe 3, or a max of four. But my trip last weekend to Goa via Bombay ( yep, i still prefer 'Bombay' over 'mumbai'..in some contexts ) was more than a myriad of transport switches. The whole thing went something like this...I biked from my office back to the flat, picked up an auto from there to airport, boarded the flight off to bombay, caught a 'mumbai' local train to churchgate, took a yellow-black taxi to go to my friend's office, and finally got up on a bus off to Goa. Huh..!! so much for a day isn't it. Though the list is not exhaustive, but it still covers almost all of the feasible conveyances which anyone would take during a trip, only that it was a bit uncommon in a time span of a single day journey.

The rides look simple when i say, "i picked, boarded, got up etc etc on different modes"...but each of them has its own story behind the the groovy scenes...so I would start with my bike..
The most important thing i feel for a biker is to ensure that he doesn't run out of fuel and be stranded in an place without a pump ;). It turned out as I was returning from a place in the outer of the city that the bike had run out of fuel...I was already under the impression that the bike was running on reserve fuel, so those jerks from my bike's fuel starved engine gave a 'jor ka jhatka' to me, and only when I pulled out my hand for the reserve knob I happily realised that I was wrong and there was enough reserve to take me back home.

Searching for the auto next, to hop to airport was torturous. I was amazed as I came out of the flat with a 8Kg bag on my shoulders, at the scorching sunny daylight at 2 in the afternoon. The whole morning it was lightly clouded with no anticipated signs of a ray of sun for the whole day. But as luck would have it, the conspiracy was mid-way, and the drivers of the very few autos which were there, refused to earn in lieu of the relishing siesta they were having. Eventually had to walkdown almost half-a-kilometer to catch one of the empty moving autos. :((

At the airport, I was there well before the departure time of my flight. With a single bag as cabin luggage you can be more than comfortable in hanging around at the airport without bothering to keep an eye on your heavy luggage pieces. Certainly being there well before time, saved me from the serpentine queue for the boarding pass and I proceeded for the security check-in. There a CISF security in-charge put me on hold at the check point for I don't know why, becaue I dont think I was looking so pathetic to be put on hold for an informal interrogation. The in-charge asked me where did i work, how much did i earn and all sort of impertinent questions. Having answered them with a broad smile on my face he asked me to move on. As I moved to pick up my bag, the bag scanner pointed out a small bottle of scent I had packed in my bag which eventually I had to throw away in the dustbin kept there. And thus came the end of one of my longest kept bottles of perfume and of course one of the most cherished ones. :((

I took my bag and rushed to the wating lounge. After a boring half-hour wait, the boarding was announced. Seeing the length of the line, I decided to hold on and wait till the line gets shorter. You can do this except for an Air Deccan Flight which is a free seater, and wherein people would not mind even running on the taxi-way to get their coveted seats. Any how, seeing the last few passengers in the line I moved and waited in line for my turn for the last security check. When I reached at the check point, the guard pointed out the missing security check stamp on the tag attached to my baggage. This probably happened as I collected my bag unaware of the missing stamp, because of the perfume bottle. I kept cussing myself for making a fool of myself, as I moved to get that stamp on the tag.

The journey continued in the part - II