Game shows: People attitude

These days private TV channels are flooded with umpty number of game shows covering people in all age categories right from kids to couples. Out of these some are quite interesting like BBC's MasterMind and Star Sports Quiz. Even DD's BSNL Sports quiz is worth watching. Sun TVs "Thiruvalar Thirumathi" is for married couples and is one whole crap game show.

I am alarmed at the outwardness of the people participating in such game shows. They reveal lot of their personal things to the whole world for the take-aways they get in the shows. I hope not those holiday packages comes with no-strings attached. We the viewers never get any clue whether the people who were given the holiday packages really went for such ones.

How to connect cellphone using IrDA port

This post is based on the experience of transferring content between your cellphone and laptop using IrDA port.

Is this the latest standard?
Using IrDA port to transfer content between your cellphone and laptop is really old way. The latest way to communicate is to use bluetooth.

Then why?
But at some juncture IrDA comes in really handy. Say when your laptop doesn't have a built-in bluetooth adapter and you doesn't have an external one too. And more you are lazy to use the wired approach of connecting using USB cable.

How to?
Laptop: Dell Latitude D600
OS: Win XP
Cellphone: Sony Ericsson K700i


Firstly the Dell D600 had built-in IrDA adapter. One needs to enable them.

1. Go to BIOS setup. (Press F2 when the laptop boots up to enter the BIOS setup)
2. Press Alt+P to go the various pages in the setup program
3. Find the IrDA section in the Commuincation Ports page (I guess so)
4. If it is disabled, then enable and set to a particular COM port. I used COM2 as COM1 is used in my laptop.
5. Save and Exit the setup and boot the laptop.

Enable IrDA in your phone and place in the line-of-sight with IrDA port

Win XP had default drivers and it was able to recognize the device. From then on, it is a single click to transfer data from laptop to the cellphone and vice versa.

Recent tamil movies and my ratings

All of a sudden tamil movie buff kicked in to me and I happened to see four movies in a span of two weekends. I have given "my" fair ratings for these movies.

1. Unnale Unnale - Promising (Happened to see part of the movie and it looks pretty promising)
2. Mayakkannadi - Cheran movie, realistic approach. Average
3. Naan Avan Illai - Below average. Hopeless screenplay
4. Parattai Engira Azhagu Sundaram - Pathetic (only one word)

Online Vulnerabilities

The other day when I was having a conversation with a friend using orkut scrapbook, suddenly I realized how much personal information is left open to the world wide web. Scrapbooks are not private, anyone can read others scrapbook. If one could correlate they could get all vital information about a person.

Other way if one uses mail, there is much more confidentiality involved. Mailboxes are private. Hence the rule to delete scrapbook entries once I reply. By the way then why is there a scrapbook and what is its purpose?

AntiCorruption

When you get obsessed with rampant corruption, you really want to break free and take punitive steps against those who demand it. But being a meek person, you will never have courage and time to do so.

Now there is a non-profit NGO who helps in this. It seems that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Visit 5th Pillar

'0' Rupee note is the brain child of this org to root out the corruption.

It is raining in bangalore

Over the weekend it rained cats and dogs in bangalore. Though the pre-monsoon shower is a good one, the heavy downpour caused much misery to low-lying areas. On the Bannerghatta Road, clogged storm water drains overflowed on the road and flats with basement car parks were inundated.

News on TOI
News on Hindu

Cooking Recipe

Came across this excellent site hosting Priya Madhan's gourmet recipes. The ingredients for most of the recipes are the standard spices that are available in any home and not that you get only in a five-star hotel chef's kitchen. Last week I tried out Chettinad Pepper Chicken and turned out good.

Photos from Road trip to Erode

Some where in between Salem and Dharmapuri, where I had a small pit-stop

Thoppur Dam


The toll-gate near krishnagiri


Sunset near Hosur


Some more photos on the Flick (Tag : Road trip to Erode)

Against KPN

Gops has posted his horrifying experience with KPN travels and their sheer disgrace towards the customers.

I have already posted about my horrifying experience. There was one more, sometime back which I skipped unintentionally. I had booked tickets to Salem from Bangalore in 11:00 pm Thiruchengode bus. I was particular about this bus, since it reached Salem at the time I wanted to land there.

After reaching KPN office at Bommanahalli and waiting more than the slated time, the staff announced that the bus has arrived mentioning its registration number. When I reached the designated bus, I was told by the cleaner that bus is not heading for Thirchengode. A little later one of staff told me that the original bus has broken down and there is no alternate bus. Since I had booked only till Salem, they will put in some bus which goes via Salem. Imagine this situation in middle of the night with dependents by your side.

After waiting for a while in the pavements, I was given two seats in another VOLVO bus. All my plans got disrupted and managed to reach Salem with this horrifying incident running back on my mind all the time.

Hope Gops would succeed in teaching a lesson to KPN through customer redressal forum.

Road trip to Erode

During the long weekend, I did a road trip from Bangalore-Erode-Thiruchengode-Bangalore traveling in the gorgeous 4-lane NH-7. While the NH-7 is till Salem, I had to travel in NH-47 from there.

NH-7 is part of the North-South corridor and NH-47 is part of the Golden Quadrilateral project.
Map of the Highways in India shows the extent of coverage by these highways.

In both the highways, the work is in progress to make it 4-lane completely. The 4-lane is from Bangalore till Thoppur and then from Thumpipadi to Salem. These projects are implemented by NHAI.

A glimpse of how the highway looks (picture courtesy NHAI)

Upgrade

Had a few free cycles and thought of upgrading my blog layout. With blogger2, tools are provided to edit the template. The past option of editing the template manually is gone. Now you have widgets that you can add to your template.





Also upgraded the statcounter script, so that now I catch the referral links and visitor activities.

How to connect you laptop video output to a TV

"Necessity is the mother of invention" - by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato

No, I didn't invent anything over here. While in the process of setting up a home entertainment system, I preferred not to buy anything in haste. In India, the home entertainment portfolio is under major revamp now. LCD's and Plasma's are entering the home entertainment market in a big way. The prices of the TV's and home theater systems are crashing down.

In the meantime, to enable me watch my favorite movies, I was in need of a stop-gap solution. I thought of using my laptop as a DVD player and connecting its video-o/p to the TV. The following are the steps to connect Dell Latitude D600 laptop to Sony 29" CRT TV.

What you need?
1. Dell S-Video to Composite TV out adapter. (You get this adapter normally with the laptop)

2. Composite video cable (You can purchase one from your local electronics store)

How to connect?
1. Connect the S-Video to Composite TV out adapter in your laptop S-video output.
2. Connect one end of you composite video cable to the S-Video to Composite TV out adapter
3. Connect the other end of your composite video cable to your TV video input
4. Switch the TV to appropriate Video mode
5. Boot your laptop
6. Go to Control Panel > Display > Setting tab (Win XP OS)
7. Right click 2nd display and attach it.
8. Set the resolution and color properties. (Generally the TV supports 800x600 resolution. Sony 29" TV supported 1280x780 resolution with 32 bit Color)
9. You will see the extended desktop.
The TV screen behaves like a extended monitor. Drag the applications you want to run into the TV screen.

This way you can run movies from your laptop on to your TV screen. In order to get your audio output into your TV, you need to take the audio out from the headphone-jack in your laptop to your TV audio input.

P.S: It is imperative that you get a properly insulated composite video capable. Otherwise when you connect the power chord to your laptop, you shall get electrical noises in your video signal

Links:
Dell Documentation
HP India site documentation
S-Video site

Titan Gold Plus - Erode

A mention about the Titan Gold Plus store in Erode. The store had a made a brisk business last year to earn a revenue of Rs 25 crore.

Crowd Pattern

While watching the "Closures for Java" presentation, I observed the following crowd pattern...

At the time when the presentation began...



At the time when the presentation ended...

Closures in Java

Watch the talk given by Neal Gafter from Google

How to download video from Google Video

By now, most of us would have watched videos online using Google Video sharing site. Google doesn't allow you to download the video file. And when you download, it gets you the gvp (google video player) file. In order to get the video file, you need to do a small hack. Edit the gvp file and you will see the URL. Use this URL to download the avi file.

Beware that google had encoded the video file in such a way that only its player will be able to play the avi file.

This titbit will be of great use when you want to watch the videos off-line.

Pace of development

Gops made a post on the pace of infrastructure development happening in coimbatore which follows the similar bangalore phenomenon. Another example of bangalore phenomenon.

BESCOM decided to upgrade the electrical lines near my place. The plan is switch from overhead lines to underground. They started working on this project about 3 months back. Until now, they have partially dug the road and left it open. No signs of work. Heard from the daytime security that they work only once in a month on this project :-(

Planetarium and Musical Fountain

Out of the few places to visit in bangalore, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium is one. As per their website, you got to see some replicas, science park, exhibition and a tele-show in the dome screen.

On the first look, the whole campus is dilapidated. There is no entry free for the science park. There are some simple experiments demonstrating the basics physics facts and only a few of them work. The experiment showing sound waves traveling in a parabolic path is simply amazing.

For the tele-show the entry fee is Rs25 and it runs full house during weekends. The night sky shown in the dome screen is breath-taking.

Musical Fountain is located just opposite to the planetarium and the show starts in the evening by 7:00 pm. In order to club these two together, take the 4:30 show in planetarium and get to the musical fountain show at 7:00 pm.

Aquaguard == monopoly

Another incident of sheer monopoly.

Aquaguard is an undisputed leader in the world of water purifiers in India. They practice unethical marketing strategies to sell their products to the households. They sell their products in door-door marketing fashion. So their marketing agents just tell all possible lies on earth to convince you to buy their product. On the day, when your first annual maintenance contract ends, you have to face the brutal facts about their product.


I bought a Aquaguard Reviva (Reverse Osmosis) based purifier about a year back. At that time I was told that the membrane has to be changed only when it wears out and its average life-time is about 8000-12000 lts of water. I did a simple math and for two persons the potable water consumption per day is about 10 lts and the membrane should last for about 2.5 years.

When the first year was over, the service engineer came and told us that we had to change the membrane and it wont last more than a year. The cost of the membrane is about 2500Rs and with the maintenance expense comes to about Rs3600 per year (which works out to be more expensive than if you buy mineral water from some vendor).

You are left in lurch as you wont get any spares outside in the market and you had to be dependent on their service for the life. Secondly they are free to charge any amount for the service and mostly will not heed to complaints (one could see lot of people complaining about their shoddy service network in the net) .



The height is that I have bought one more purifier from them as I am left with none in the market that could satisfy the requirements. They win and we loose the case always!

Track BMTC VOLVO Buses using SMS

One of few things that have improved in bangalore over the past year is BMTC. BMTC started deploying VOLVO buses in its city service fleet and it was an instant hit. No more you need to haggle with autowala's. You get a plush ride in clean A/C VOLVO buses with minimal cost (compared to autos). The buses are of state-of-the-art kind equipped with entertainment system, GPS enabled and information system.




Lately, BMTC introduced SMS tracking of these buses. The service is called "Yelli Iddira". You can track the position of a particular bus by sending an SMS. It is really a boon as we need not wait endlessly in bus stops for the bus to arrive. With ever mounting traffic, you can track the buses real time.

Photo courtesy: BMTC site.

Picture Collage

A couple of collages that I created with the macro shots that I took. Turns out nice! Used Picasa to create the collages.

International Women's Day

This is what I wrote about women's day in 2005. All that I have written applies the same with some additions. In addition to my mom, now I have one more women, my wife, to stand by me in all my endeavors and consistently push me over the extremes and endure confidence in me in all those hard times.

This post is a petty dedication for the two souls for their insurmountable effort and contribution towards betterment.

The chronology behind the women's day.

Doubly Zipped

When you compress a folder/files, doubly zipping reduces the size further compared to the single zip. Why is it so? Why can't single zip does the same compression? If we keep-on zipping, will the size keep on reducing further?

Yet to find answers for all these? Any pointers?

Blog stats

I have been running statcounter on this blog from mid-2005. The following are the stats



Impressive hits for personal blog?

Search Ranking

This blogs ranks 4th in the google page rank.



With yahoo and MSN, I do not see it in the search results.

SUN TV Network Monopoly

On the news today, once more incident of monopolistic attitude displayed by SUN TV Network. They are not sharing their feed with the rival Tata-Sky DTH.

Earlier incidents
Google blog search results page from SambharMafia

Home Loan : Calculating the Balance Sheet yourself

Off late I have been involved in home loans a lot. Just I wanted to understand the mystery behind the calculation of EMI, the prepayment and the balance computation. Since my home loan is with the Corporation Bank, and it being a PSU, I cannot expect the account statement to be shown online. By the way do any of you see such a facility with any private banks?

I took home loan of type fixed interest rate and monthly resting option. The following steps should help you calculate the monthly balance of your home loan

Step 1: Calculate EMI. I used the formula given by Ranjit.
Step 2: For the first month the balance can be calculated as
Balance Principal = Principal + (ROI * Principal) - EMI
Step 3: The balance principal becomes the principal for the next month. Repeat Step 2

Note: If you have done prepayment on a particular month, deduct the amount from the balance principal to get the actual balance.

I wrote a small java program to do the calculation for me. This can be extended for daily resting option and also for the floating rate of interest.

P.S: Apart from such minor nuances, I felt the relationship with the bank much better. There has been no hidden charges and the default options in the home loans are better tweaked to benefit the customers. I felt that with private banks unless the customer is alert, they ought shell out more.

Quote of the Day

"If you pay peanuts, you only get monkeys."

courtesy: A rediff.com reader
This reminds me of the TimesJob ad.

Photo Post

Some of the best photos covering the activities of over last 3 months

Munnar: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/munnar/

Cherai: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/cherai/

Cochin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/cochin/

Bannerghatta National Park: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rajakumar/tags/bannerghattanationalpark/

Back in action

It looks like that my blog has been dormant for more than a month. It is brand New year and time to wake up and take a plunge into action. There are a couple of posts that are waiting in my mind. Yet to spend time to get it posted. I was caught into thick of actions and as always actions lead to experiences and experiences fetches you the learnings.

It is ubiquitous that TOI is most sought out news daily in Bangalore. Perhaps the crave for gossips hasn't died down yet. If I take a morning walk down my apartment, I see TOI at all the door step except a very few different one. And out of those few I am one.

Bogus message on HDFC online

Once more I had to take a dig at HDFC Online. Today when I logged in, the personalized message at the top of the window, captured my attention.

"Dear RAJA KUMAR T, We have a special message for you. Please Click here for details."

Though I ignored it in the beginning, somehow the curiosity took over me. See for yourself what message did HDFC came up with on clicking the link. Big Bogus!

Non-standards in adapters

With the advent of good non-dry batteries almost all the electronic gadgets come with in-built batteries that need to be charged and used. It is much common these days to see three to four different adapters hanging out of the electical sockets in any house.

Why can't there be any standards enforced on the adapters? Most of the gadgets requires 9v/12v DC input. And at any point of time, no one is going to use more than two. If one single type of adapter could be used for multiple gadgets, it really eases the pain a lot.

Kidnap and ransom - will the trend continue?

Off late I am not catching up completely with the news in TV and print media. Somehow the Anant kidnap case slipped through and caught my attention. I am quiet surprised that the hefty ransom being paid to the kidnappers to seek the safe rescue of the child has been broken out to public. In other such kidnap cases the amount of ransom being paid were never disclosed in public.

I do not question the way adopted to rescue the child. But this should not pave way for anymore future kidnappings. Hope this trend wont continue and the kidnappers would be brought to justice.

Break from inertia

It has been rather a long vacation. Once you go to hibernate mode, I feel it is difficult to ramp it back to normalcy. To break this inertia is this post. Today I became a year younger (over optimistic). Lot of wishes from the loved and dear ones made the day perfect for me.

Blue screen of death

Not sure from where this blue screen of death concept came? The other day when I was watching TV and suddenly when the cable went off, TV started showing blue screen. Originally with the older television sets, we use to get grainy screens. In the new television sets, the grainy screen is replaced by the blue screen of death.

Originaly BSOD is very familiar with Windows OS crash. Where did it came from? Why there is a blue screen instead of red or green?

Chikungunya and the false reports

There is no need for me, right at this moment, to explain what Chikungunya disease is about and its impacts. For people residing in India, particulary in south, they would have known all the bare facts by now. Unlike kerala gov, tamilnadu gov is playing down the spread of this disease. I could state so because I knew around 12 people who had suffered/are suffering from this disease. Within my close knit of people, if such high number of poeple are contacted by the viral spread, one could imagine how many people would have been affected across the state.

But still the ruling gov claims that there is no wide spread chikungunya. A big lie! And they use the media effectively to downplay all the private statistics. People have lost hope long ago on the government hospitals and expect for people in below poverty line, nobody goes to gov hospitals for treatment. The statistics that you get from the gov hospitals are greatly skewed. On effectively hadling the situation, the gov could have done a lot to bring down the spread. Nothing has been done till date. And this barbaric politicians are behind the local body elections slated for next week completely ignoring the health of the people.

Will people teach them a lesson this time?

Observations from a small public function

I had been to a small public function at my mom's school. The public function is all about NSS (National Service Scheme) camp and its closing day. The guests included a few political leaders (councilors belonging to local administrative bodies of the government) and academics (Principal of Carmel Matric School and HM of the government elementary school from where the NSS camp was run)

There are quiet a few observations that I could make.

1. There is a system to motivate students to do service. The system also helps in exposing students to public affairs, management and collaboration
2. Never ever the politicians keep up time! The function was due to begin at 5:30 in the evening and the so-called busy politicians turned up only at 6:30. To the worse one came just when the function was half over
3. The context of speech tendered by politicians and academics have significant difference. One could feel the sense of peace in the speech of academics and fit of rage in politicians (since they have got tuned by attacking the opponents at all the places)

Citibank ATM

Have you ever used Citibank ATMs? Did you notice that the ATM screen after dispatching the money, shows up your account balance to everybody standing in the queue. No looking over the shoulders is required here.

The ATM screen is placed in such an angle that it is clearly visible to all the people standing behind in the queue (even though the queue is about 5 to 6 ft away). Either the screen could be mounted at a lower angle such that it is visible to only the user or else the viewing angle of the LCD panel could be reduced.

As a workaround, the only option left is to hide the screen from others!

Sillunu Oru Kaadhal - review

First time I am writing a review for a Tamil movie. Watched "Sillunu Oru Kaadhal" movie.

The screenplay was very obvious (nothing new or different). I mean the anticipation of what is going to happen in the next frame is quiet obvious. The hero has an usual flashback and there are no surprises. The second half of the movie was quiet boring, a good test for your patience if you could stick to your seat till the climax. The climax was bit different but again predictable. Music is by ARR and I could hardly understand the lyrics. I could just make out only a few tamil words in the songs. It is pity that the good lyrics are thrown to waste. At a few places I feel that flow has been disrupted. For the sake of having comedy Vadivel was shown in a few scenes and disappears forever after that.

Finally my rating would be below average movie!

Review from IndiaGlitz. Their review is quiet positive and I hope that is because IndiaGlitz has sponsored for the movie.

Bitter experience with PVR online movie ticketing system

I was trying to book online movie tickets in PVR cinemas. It is one heck of a pathetic web application that could have ever been built. Firstly, the availability is never updated properly. While trying to book the ticket, the app showed that the seats are available and even gave me the seat numbers. After entering the credit card details and going through the payment screen, it died down. The app never refreshed to show the status of the payment. On refreshing the page, it showed the same seat allocation and the payment screen. Going through it second time also ended in vain. After restarting in fresh browser window, I found that the seats are full instantaneously. There has been no error or update stating that the credit card hasn't been charged.

This made me feel that online train ticket booking is much better app. IRCTC should get a pat on their back!

Need of thin chat clients

My usage level of chat is very sparse. I would prefer picking up the phone and talking rather than chatting. For conveying unimportant things I prefer chat over phone. I have never realized the usage of thin chat clients until my office network blocked the usage of thick chat clients due to a virus outbreak. Chat option in Gmail and Meebo came in really handy at certain points.

Send Email at Residence/Office

The above option at one of the HDFC NetBanking forms made me to think for a while. How can one classify email as residence/office?

Ways to wriggle money from customers

In this materialistic world, almost every other service vendor tries to wriggle the hard earned money from the customers. Airtel and Citibank is no excuse to this.

With Airtel when you get a new connection, they automatically enable Hello Tunes (though you request them not to enable) since it is free for the first month. The customer is never told that it is "only" free for the first month and from the next they will be charged for this petty service. Secondly they never intimate the customer that such a service has been enabled without their approval. Lot of such options are taken for granted.

Secondly, Citibank is very famous and notorious with such promotions. They will send you a life-time free gold credit card without your request on applying for a savings account. Apart from this they will enable Ready credit and all other such options automatically and keep charging heavy penalties and dues if you happen to violate their laws/policies. With a dismissal quality of service they pester you continuously with promotional offers. Nothing useful could be got from them.

I just came across an illogical incident with Citibank. I requested a bank statement and they promised to deliver it through courier only to my residential address. Since this being an account statement I had to sign and collect. With no body at my residence during office hours, the statement will be sent back to Citibank which they will duly thrash for security reasons. And the worst part is yet to come, for such a service I have to pay them charges.

Time to dump rediff

I use to frequent Rediff portal to have a quick glance on the day news and other interesting gossips. Time has come to dump rediff as they have turned on their nagging ad page for each news link you click. CNet use to have this feature but it is very random and doesnt appear for each news link. Hope rediff will learn and rectify sooner.

Blogging vacation

It has been quiet a long time I turned my attention towards blogging. There is no dearth of topics to post, but it has been a deluge so far. I am occupied with personal and professional duties to a large extent. Hoping to return to mainstream soon!

Nice basic articles on EMI

For those who fail to understand the complexities of EMI, the Get Ahead section of rediff reveals the basics of EMI. The whole article is made into three parts and worth a read!

1. Understanding EMI
2. How EMIs are calculated
3. Are you comfortable with your EMI?

How to calculate EMI using Excel functions

Via Rediff

I was never aware that the EMI calculation is a standard across the world and MS Excel features a function to do it easily.
Go through this rediff page.

Flickr leech

Flickr Leech
Excellent utility that gets photos from flickr and displays it as thumbnails. It creates an excellent collage.

Experience with freshers interview

Recently I came across two incidents related to interview of fresh college grads. Both are different scenarios in different places.

1. I interviewed a couple of fresh college grads. When it came to choosing one of them, it was pretty awful. I felt guilty of not able to choose all of them. When all of them are of same calibre, it becomes pretty difficult to choose.

2. In another incident, when you have decided prior hand that you are not going to choose a candidate by screening the resume, it doesn't make sense to call and interview the candidate for namesake. If you happen to do so, then it would be better not to ask some BS questions and reject the candidate. It really spoils the reputation of the organization that you represent. The better way to handle such scenario (in my perspective) is to conduct decent interview, ask relevant questions and let the candidate know the result at the end.

How do you want your boss to be?

For long time, I have been trying to find a convincing answer to this. When I watched Robbert Scoble's exit interview in Channel 9, this question did popup over there too. In his terms, the best boss should not intercept him and should clear way for him to proceed. Again quoting him, "the best boss should be an ice-breaker".

Airtel sucks

Adding to the already existing woes, Airtel website sucks pretty badly. They use heavy graphics and it is damn slow. I just tried to get their postpaid tariff plans and could not get to it from the morning.

AIIMS Director dismissed

Though it is an expected news, it is quiet appalling to know the dirty politics played by PMK. The "egoistic" Union health minister Anbumani has avenged by dismissing Dr Venugopal, director of AIIMS, as he took a soft stand on the reservation issue. Read the story in The Week to know how much Dr Venugopal is respected in the institute. These politicians are taking our countries premier institutes for a ride.

Bandipur Mudhumalai Trip

Over the past weekend, we (myself, gops, nag and gowri) did a road trip to Coimbatore via Mysore, Bandipur, Mudhumalai and Ooty.
Read the complete story in the travel blog.
Flickr photo tag.

Time for charity

If you are following the international news, there has been a sudden splurge in the charity contributions from the celebrities.
Bill Gates was followed by Warren Buffet. Now Jackie Chan joins the chain.

I am wondering will there be any mentionable charity contributions to NGOs from desi celebrities! As per tradition, the family wealth is inherited by the heirs and there is very little left over for the charity!

TeleMarketing at its peak

Until recently my desk phone at my workplace had only internal extension and could not be reached directly from outside. The call to my desk phone had to be routed through the front desk office or through the EPABX system. The moment DID (Direct Inward Dialling) got activated, the telemarketing calls has started coming in.
HSBC was the first one to sniff. Most of my officemates had got a call from HSBC for their free lifetime gold credit card offering.

How did HSBC get these numbers? Might be the service provider could have leaked. Otherwise nobody could sniff the number right on activation.

Too much sports to follow

If you are an avid sports buff, there are too many sports to follow these days. Coincidentally all of these events are happening at the same time of the year.

Football : FIFA World Cup
Racing: F1
Cricket: India - WI Test series
Tennis: Wimbledon
Hockey: Azlan Shah tournament

Our cable operator had just two slots for the sports channels and he use to swap sports channels in those two slots based on the coverages. These days he has increased the slots to three providing ESPN, StarSports and TEN Sports simultaneously.

Hooking through dial-up

After so much getting used to broadband, I got hooked to net from my native home through dial-up. Being slow is awfull. I had to see and wait for the progress bar to complete which normally doesn't show up while on broadband connection. Luckily the connection was solid and never dropped off until now!

Dirty politics and bangalore

DeveGowda is always blamed for his dirty politics and his hand in bringing down bangalore to a crumbling state. Rediff published a guest column by S Raghotham on this. Substantiating it there was another news about Infy recruiting in Chennai (probably just out of coincidence).

Tribute to President of India

Though there are many qualities that one likes in our President APJ Abdul Kalam, I like to mention three top most of them

1. Not a rubber stamp

From the past experiences, most of the times the President is considered as a rubber stamp to the ruling government approving all the bills and amendments passed by the parliament. By rejecting the Office of Profit amendment bill our President stands tall from the usual claim. He has become a prefect precedent setting high standards for many other presidents to come in the future.

2. Active

Generally the eminent person selected for the President post are in the age group of 70+. At such age most presidents had lacked activeness and willingness to take risks. Again our president had ditched those myths and in this year he has tried travelling in submarines and Su30-MKI fighter planes which no other presidents would dare to do.

3. Reach people

Our president has again raised the bars in the area of reachablility. The interest he shows in mingling with common people and not staying secluded inside Presidential palace is well appreciated. Though I am not aware of how other presidents had their reachability, I am certain that our current President is much higher on this.

Win XP titbit

Have you ever noticed your screen getting color faded gradually and going into monochrome mode when you invoke and leave "Shutdown Windows" box for a while.
I am not aware of any preference setting to get this activated. Is there one?

Food poisoining

It has happened twice to me. Food poisoning on eating out. Last sunday I took breakfast at fast food hotel in jayanagar. In less than an hour I could feel symptoms of food poisoning and I had to suffer for two days with in-digestion, stomach-ache and moderate temperature. In this post I am planning to maintain an exclusion list of hotels/fast food chains. It is a WATCH-OUT list.

HotelName - Place - Food to avoid
Adthiya - Jayanagar - Karabath

New trend in surrendering

It is obvious, observing the incidents attached to the mysterious ill-health of Rahul Mahajan (the son of slain BJP leader Pramod Mahajan), of the new trend followed by the suspects. All the suspects has turned to private channels to air their statement before surrendering to the police.

With the media hypocrisy going among the channels, it is no wonder that media doesn't hesitate to air such fresh news to attract the masses.

The police will be put under immense pressure to get the real truth and prove their trustworthiness. They will not be in a position to manhandle the suspects to get truth out of them that contradicts the news in the media.

Apparently with the media airing all the angles of the story, it becomes quiet a overdose for any common man and ends up confusing things a lot. Will there be any prudence/discretion in airing such disclosures or will there be a ban on such things will be answered as time flies by.

Update: Apparently one of the suspect contradicted his earlier statement given to the media. What a heck!

Reservations - My take

Firstly I haven't been following the reservations issue closely. But this is just my take at how reservations should be implemented for educational institutions.

Rather than having a caste based reservation, I would prefer having a reservation against location or strata of the society. Primarily it is not just backward castes that needs help or reservation. There are lot of people belonging to forward castes who suffer economically and also from lack of exposure. Reservations should be looked in from a different angle so that all the downtrodden sections of the society gets uplifted and thereby we also alleviate the caste based stigma.

The current reservations are kind of overkill for all the forward castes and in this competitive world capabilities of the individual should be given higher priorities than their caste.

Bigger the Better

In my work environment, I am provided with Dell 19 inch Flat panel monitor. The bigger the monitor, the better the visibility and productivity. The other day when BillG told that he has multiple monitors connected to same PC to increase his productivity, I was surprised and quizzing how that improves. There is lot lesser alt-tabs and switching between applications. It is pretty awesome experience.

Busy Vacation

Finally I had the luxury of having a real vacation. Five years in IT Industry without any vacation really sounds ridiculous. Apparently the vacation turned out to be busy one, learning few things that I ought to know and forgetting few things that I wish to do.

It turned up to be much deserved break that I was longing for. Lots of stuff to catch up!

HashMap and memory

While working on a project, we were faced with classical datastructure problem of achieving a balance between space and time cost. HashMap datastructure allows to have a quicker access to data but has the overhead of space. Other linear datastructures has slower access to data with less hit on the space. The following post in the java forum provides a good insight into the space occupied by a HashMap based implementation to store the data.

Otherwise the HashMap can be tweaked with the initial capacity and load factor to suit to need.

Coding Standards

I am a big fan of coding standards. I get jitters when the conventions are grossly violated. It really hampers the understandability.

Most developers are either lazy or does not have the diligence to appreciate the advantages of following the coding conventions. It is really good that the contemporary IDEs has come up with the automatic code formatters to lend a helping hand.

For the past couple of days I had been working with a peer in a piece of coding. I could see how the absence of coding standard hampers understanding and impacts productivity.

A better way to spend lazy Sunday morning

It is always interesting when you hack around something. BSNL DataOne has a scheme by which anything downloaded between 2 am to 8 am is unaccountable. This scheme helps you to get some really heavy downloads from the net. It is pretty easy when you just need to schedule some download in that time. But the hiccup is that the router session should begin after 2 am.

So myself and Gops came with the idea of hacking this up. Gops knew that router CLI interface has option to restart the session. We wrote a simple perl script which connects to the router CLI telnet interface and restarts the session. We used Windows Task Scheduler to run this script after 2 am. The happy download hours are back in our control now.

Sharing of Contacts across multiple phones

There are various web services like Plaxo that help you to organize your contacts. These web services will allow you to import, export and maintain your contacts. They also allow interoperability/sync-up across various Email clients or Address Book softwares. But I doubt whether you have some service by which you can share your phonebook across multiple phones.

It would be a nice service to build up so that you can keep your phones books in sync if you use multiple phones. And in this time I see multiple phones is not a remote possibility. For instance I have a mobile phone and a LG Wireless phone (for landline). Both of these phones support PhoneBook feature. But there is no interoperability between these phones. So I will not see my contacts in one phone in another.

As a first cut thought, the phonebook contact should have a standard industry agreed format. All the phones should support that format. Then build a common service which can be accessed by any phone service provider. Keep your phonebook in your phone in sync with your account in the server.

ERO100

ERO100 is a quiet innovative service by the TamilNadu State Transport Corporation(Erode). There are umpteen number of buses that ply between Erode and Coimbatore. The distance between the two places is 100kms and it generally takes more than 2 hrs to reach the other destination. Thus the average speed is around 50 km/hr.

ERO100 is a non-stop service between Erode and Coimbatore run by the state transport corporation buses that reaches the destination in 100 mins. Avg speed equates to around 60 km/hr and it is a hassle free travel. Prior to this service, there were Point-to-Point services (PP) which on contrary had stops in almost all the points between the cities. At the least ERO100 lives up to its name now!

Mobile Nonsense

It is a lame title for this post.

Everyone knows that mobile penetration is very high in India and every other individual is trying to possess one sooner than later. But at the same time the mobile usage sense among people is in abyss. The other day I was travelling to Coimbatore from Erode in a bus. The travelling time is around 120 mins. More than 50% of the occupants in the bus should have possessed a mobile phone. And every other minute there was a call. I ended up hearing at least 30 different ring tones (all popular songs tunes in Tamil) all screaming at all possible volume.

Shouldn't people consider putting their mobile in vibration mode while in public places. This way they will not end up disturbing others.

Currency Notes

How long has it been since you counted currency notes in a pack?

I do not have an answer when I counted a pack last time. Most of us have started using online transactions say it for bill payment or account to account transfer. With credit cards being prevalent most of us hardly carry any cash these days for shopping. But the scene is not same in smaller towns in India. Hard cash is used in every transacation and monotonous counting still needs to be done.

Bangalore Weather

Temperature during summer in Bangalore has been scoring high in the recent years. Over the past four years of stay in Bangalore I haven't seen such horrible sweltering summer. Adding to it, the temperature controlled office space makes us much more less adaptable to heat. This weekend during most part of the day, I survived the heat with liquid foods like butter milk.

Maximum Temperature(Deg C) 34.9
Departure from Normal (Deg C) +2

An increase of 2 degrees from normal indicates where we are heading to.

Bangalore traffic update

Bangalore traffic woes are scoring new heights this week. Particularly the Airport Rd and MG Rd users has suffered major brunt because of VVIPs hitting the road during peak hours.

Here is a humble request to VVIPs. Please do not block traffic and make commoners suffer. probably if you travel once in the peak hour traffic in bangalore, I guess no VVIP would turn back again to bangalore. TOI reported that it nearly took 1 hour to cross the section of Indira Nagar, Domulur and Airport Rd junction yesterday. And believe me it is no exaggeration.

Choices

(In philosophy)
It is not just in Matrix that Neo, "The One" has the choice, every other move you make in life has choices. Choosing the right one gives you the taste of success.

Organization Phrases/Jargons

Different organizations use different set of jargons/phrases in their own terms. The following are the some that I have recently come across

1. Touch base with -- to check out what is recent or get the latest update
2. statying on top -- to get it done with top priority

Google Blog unavailability

Today Google Blog wasn't available for a short period time to much of a surprise. When they are back the update given sprang a much bigger surprise.

We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

Petrol bunk cheating

Cheating at petrol bunks is very rampant in India. It is done at various levels,either through adulteration (mixing kerosene with petrol) or tampering with the quantity.

I just came across an incident today, when I went to fill in petrol for my bike in a Bharat Petroleum bunk on the koramangala inner ring road. I was forced to fill in at this unusual place as my bike was in almost dry condition and I missed out the usual place when I regularly fill-in.

The service guy at the bunk was acting very hastily. I was keeping a watch on the meter at the pump, then another guy distracted my attention. Before I could realize the service guy finished filling in and has reset the meter. By no way I could ensure that he filled in the correct quantity. I was suspicious that he would have cheated at the least 1/2 litre of petrol from me. To support my claim the bike went to reserve mode even before I could travel another 5 kms.

404 - Page not found

It is rather unusual when I got Page Not Found in News.com when I cliked on a news link on their Front Door page.




In case of rediff, it is very rampant that you often hit upon Page Not Found or wrongly linked page.

Poster campaign

With the impending state elections in TN and the curb by the EC on advertising in public walls, the political parties have gone haywire in trying to reserve private properties and walls to do their campaign. I am surprised why the parties still haven't embraced other forms of campaign. At the least in metros, e-campaigns should take precedence. Bangalore is no exception. Even with the advent of multiplexes, one can see a lot of cinema posters all over the city. It really gives an ugly look to the city. Over the years, I haven't decided on the movie to watch by looking at the posters. Probably the poster campaign could work only in smaller towns where the e-media still nascent.

Photo blogging tool for camera phones

Couple of months back myself and Gops were thinking of writing a small app to upload photos from camera phones to blogger. The idea is to experiment and understand the capabilities of J2ME and getting exposed to atom specs/Blogger API.
We did start with some prototyping. Then the project went on hibernation as both us were occupied with office stuff.

Nice to see that ShoZu really implemented the complete solution. I guess this is the second time I came so close to conceiving a brand new product idea and failing to capitalize on it.

(via)

Telecom tariff tumbling

The Telecomm tariffs India are in flux. The tariff are tumbling down like an avalanchee. When there is a competition, the subscribers are most benefitted. Close on the heels of every service provider providing One India One Rupee tariff, the Reliance Infocomm has spearheaded another tariff cut. Now with reliance you can enjoy 40p per min to any Reliance number across the country and 75p to any other number in the Joy 499 plan.

Reliance customers are getting the best deal out of this tariff wars.

Not a surprise

Google is known for its pamper. It doesn't come as a complete surprise when I saw pug speak at Official Google blog. Even I remember Oracle Japan having a dog listed as their employee.

Awesome Photo

It took me some time to grasp the camels and their shadows

Spirit of Entrepreneurship

Over last week, I read an article on Rediff about how people take chances for pursuing their dream job. There were clear statistics showing people leaving their well-paid risk less comfortable office job to pursue their real interests. In a sheer coincidence, I learnt that Gopal (via) has relinquished his job to pursue his dream company for full-time. Eminent Infotech which has been nascent for a while is set to ramp up its operations. (the website is partially complete, hang on for while)

This initiative does answer my quest on India born tech companies rolling out its products and securing market leadership. I wish Eminent Infotech the very best in all their endeavors. And I hope to see another Joel in Gopal sooner. (Now I get a better chance of having shares in Eminent Infotech IPO !)

Jokes apart, the sheer experience that this exercise will bring is unquantifiable. This also reminds me of an adage, "Taking no risk in life is a big risk on it own".

Motivation - Failure is your friend

(via)

Failure is your friend

It is really a motivational article on Failure. To be honest, something has been bugging me down for the past couple of weeks. It was related to an attempt (I know this is vague but can't reveal anything more) I made, that got flopped drastically. Though I am convinced that the decision gave me a very good learning expertise on various fronts...Still there is a pinch of feeling that I miscalculated a lot of stuff while taking that decision. I had failed to give due significance to a couple of factors or suggestions that came along my way.

A quick read of this article really made me feel consoled. I hope this learning experience will help in the future!

Design caveat

Have you ever observed a coffee vending machine making a huge noise while delivering hot water? I could not understand why it makes such a loud grinding noise as if it is crushing coffee beans.

Messy Education System

This post is a rant about the illogicalness of the state board education system. For those uninterested turn away!

Over this weekend, I had a chance to meet a couple of people doing their Higher secondary study. With the academic calendar closing up and the imminent board exams has thrown a cover of anxiety over them. They are grappled with fear of performance and there has been a lot of pressure put on them to score good marks in the exams. The marks single handedly decides your career path. If your exam score is excellent, you are deemed to get enrolled into a top-notch college in the state and at the end of the four year degree course you get a placement in IT company.

First thing, I noticed in them is their lower fitness level. They look very lean and the stress has got enough energy out of their body. Their are completely occupied by studies (I won't be surprised if they tell me that they sit with their syllabus books all through their day) and look tired. They fail to understand the significance of mental and physical health. All that is going in their mind is to study, mug and vomit back in the exam. Nobody is really interested in learning things, rather only point is to score marks in the exams.

Even the case was same a decade ago when I prepared for the board exams. Competition has increased many folds now and it is more tough to perform.

The point of contention is that the students aren't developing critical and logical thinking. The sole purpose of Education is to make you to think, which gets beaten up. They won't be able to solve problems on their own and put to use the concepts that they have learned during their school times. There will not be any application of the basic learning that has been done. I feel it is real waste of time and childhood.

Though the state gov has come up with various committees to suggest revisions to the education system, until now none has helped to revive. Unless the education system is revived sooner than later we would be losing the potential younger generations who has to shoulder the burden of the country in the years to come.

Google Page Creator

Probably I will be the last soul on this earth to report Google introducing Page Creator. Google has released it in beta and due to enormous response, Google has limited the access to the page creator. But is there any significant difference between page creator and blogger?

Update: Page Creator is intended for hosting webpages of small business organizations. As per statistics, there are 45% of small business which doesn't have a website. (via)

Tech makes work harder

I some how had the feeling that technology is making life more miserable. From a common man's point of view, at the outset technology could help in doing things much faster and better. But at the end of the day, the satisfaction and happiness is less and cribbing about life is more.

CNET has an article published on this topic. Some excerpts from the article

"Technology has sped everything up and, by speeding everything up, it's slowed everything down, paradoxically," said John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based outplacement consultants Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

"It's harder to feel like you're accomplishing something."

"We think we're faster, smarter, better with all this technology at our side and in the end, we still feel rushed and our feeling of productivity is down," said Maria Woytek, marketing communications manager for Day-Timers, a unit of ACCO Brands.

Companies that are flexible with workers' time and give workers the most control over their tasks tend to fare better against the sea of rising expectations, experts said.

Is there a cutting-edge technology company from India?

I was having a pep talk with my colleague. I really wanted to record his observation.

"Name one(some) of the cutting edge technology company that has originated in India and are the market leaders in the world? "

I could not answer. I do not know one such company.

Windows XP rules

I was going through the site analystics of this blog. The traffic to this blog is very minimal. I manage only getting very few hits per day. But even with this minimal traffic certain facts stands tall. In the OS category Windows XP rules. I guess for a normal PC user still Linux sounds geek.

Google Chat in Gmail

The integrated Google Talk in Gmail is a bonus for users. There is an article about this in The Hindu which pointed out that this integration does away with the dependence on installed chat programs when one has to browse from internet cafes or parlours. This is a very common scenario in India and sharing PCs are very normal. The automatic saving of chat text within Gmail and making it searchable is a real candy.

What do project managers ask?

When you sit for a project meeting with project manager you deemed to face these questions

When can we expect this task to be complete?
Any timelines for this?
What is the status of this task?
How much percentage is this task complete?
What are the blocking issues?
Is this task in critical path?

...more to come :-)

Unconscious thinking

Nice article published in rediff.

I am going to quote heavily from the article, mostly for people who are lazy enough to click the link and read the article.

The study argues that difficult decisions are best handled by our unconscious minds.

The study -- published in the journal, Science -- showed that conscious thinkers could make the best choices about simple products, while unconscious thinkers could make the best choice among complex products.

Apparently, thinking about things consciously means a person can only focus on a few things at once. When it is a tough decision to make, therefore, the mind can sometimes give certain factors undue importance. Thinking about something for too long can also lead to different evaluations and inconsistencies. Unconscious thinking, on the other hand, can handle large amounts of information that can lead to a fairly evaluative summary judgment.

Reliance and their strategy

As I had been scouting over the various phone service providers, I decided to check on Reliance and their "One Nation, One Voice and One Rupee plan" with the fixed wireless phone. In this activity I did attain my goal but also suffered some brunt.

The Wireless handset that I picked is LG 350R which is quiet sturdy with all mobile type applications and options in it. The voice clarity is good and the instrument weighs light compared to the one supplied by Tata Indicom Walky. It has a built in Lithium ion battery and when it is charged to complete, the phone automatically switches to use AC power for its operations until it plugged out from the power.

I have been using it for more than a week now and I didn't face any poor signals or call drops. A good sign of service.

But the strategy that reliance opts for this service is bit weird. The model of service is based on the type of residence you have. It is not purely based on your salary or your capacity to pay the bill. For instance since I stay in a rented house along with my friends, I had to pay advance rental of Rs 1000 and the credit limit for my connection is just Rs 1000.

When I reach this credit limit, I need to settle the bill with the reliance and then renew my credit even when the billing cycle is not complete. Basically this is done to prevent defaulters from getting a connection, using it to maximum limit and then running off. This rule doesn't suit to every other customer.

Certainly the One nation tariff has lesser impact on one's pocket with increase in the call volumes. To prove my claim, let me assume that I make 1000 mins of STD calls.

With Airtel :
Rental : 150 + 50 (clip) + 75 (STD pack)
Call charges: 1000 * 2 = 2000
Service tax: 227

Total: Rs 2500


With Reliance:

Rental: 499 + 50 (clip)
Call Charges: 1000
Service tax: 155

Total: Rs 1700

So ultimately this exercise will save me Rs 800 per month and I recover the installation charges within the first month. All provided I make 1000 mins of call. The more the call volumes the cheaper the rates will be.

BSNL OneIndia tariff put off

There is going to be some more posts on the telecom tariffs.

The earlier post I did pointed to the proposed OneIndia tariff by BSNL. It now seems that BSNL will not be launching this tariff any time soon. When I read through a couple of articles on that area, most of them pointed out that it is hard to slash the STD rates to 1 Rs per min. The minimum tariff for STD cannot go below 1.85 Rs per min. But I wonder how Reliance manages to support OneIndia tariff. How does Reliance recover the loss? Through higher call volume and higher rentals?

Turning the heat on

When I was scouting through the tariff plans of various phone service providers, I was wondering why BSNL didn't bring down the tariffs of their conventional fixed line phone (FLP) to current trend. Though they were competitive in reducing their CellOne tariffs, they didn't touch the FLP tariffs. Just today came the answer.

Just in words - Reliance Infocomm

I was pretty interested in checking up the reliance broadband as a fail over option in our house. Yesterday I went to Reliance Webworld in BTM II Stage to enquire about the various plans. To my surprise the helpdesk guy told that the broadband hasn't been commenced yet and will start soon. But he is clueless about how soon?

Secondly I started asking him about the Fixed Line Phone(FLP) with One India tariff. He denied reliance providing such service. The helpdesk guy had no clue about FLP, though I asked him to check up their website.

Then I asked him about One India tariff plan with Fixed Wireless Phone (FWP). Again this plan seems to be not supported in the FWP. I do not understand to whom these tariff plans are provided.

After analysing Reliance's One India plan, I understood that for high volume users it works out cheaper when your call terminates with in reliance. Otherwise BSNL is much cheaper than Reliance.

Tariff wars

Reliance Infocomm spearheaded another tariff war this January with their One India tariff plan. With One India tariff plan, customers enjoy the privilege of paying a single charge to any number they call within India associated with any service provider. This plan at large simplifies the complexity in understanding the tariff plans and chossing the better that suits the individual needs. It also allows people to enjoy greater talk time for high volume users.

Close to the heels, BSNL also came up with a similar plan whereby you end up paying a single charge to any number you call within India within their network. It really surprised me when the state-run company came up to this competition much ahead than one would have expected. Observers accounted that these could revolutionize the telecom sector. But nothing changed in Airtel or Hutch or with other players over the past month.

As a customer of Airtel, it is really frustrating to see that the provider not keeping up with the tariff cuts. I have to pay nearly 60% more tariff for STD calls in comparison to choosing One India tariff plan. It is high time that Airtel should consider slashing their rates, otherwise they are going to see their customer base getting eroded by Reliance and BSNL.