Ramblings of Kantster....

Trip to Monterey Acquarium

2005-01-04T18:45:00.000-08:00

So to ward off the holidy boredom spell V. and I decided to pay our piscean friends at the Monterey Bay Acquarium. Not the cover charge of USD 20 was a bit steep, I felt. However, since there was a plaque on the counter saying that the acquarium is a non profit org, and my dollars will help fund science and all - ya sure go ahead.

The acquarium was pretty nice. There was this exibit which was basically a large cylinrical contrainer filled with water and tons of achovies. They were going around the tank at a pretty fast clip - almost seemed like follow the leader. Of course since their world wrapped around themselves(kind of what Einstien said when was talking of our space time wrapping around itself), no one was following anyone. But it was a really stupid idea on part of the anchovies to do that. I mean they are going to get the food anyways so why bother going around in circles. Maybe they did not know that they were going around in circles.

Then there was this huge exhibit of jelly fish. I'd definately like to touch one. Though I am sure if I got an oppurtunity I'd probably chicken out. I mean who wants to touch that slimy thing - it is slimy, is it not?

All in all, a good day.

Terrible Tragedy

2004-12-30T11:36:00.000-08:00

The tsunami tragedy has now claimed, according to most news sites, 120000 lives. What is sad is that we all, including myself keep talking about this number as if this was a score.

I don't think that this number does any justice to what has happened at all. Many families have been lost and in many families people have lost members. While it is easy to write it, if I pause to think about it, and translate that to my family I can't even imagine what I'd feel. I know that there was a bomb blast in Ghatkopar in Mumbai sometime back. My family lives in Mumbai and my brother commutes using trains that go through Ghatkopar. I know I was pretty worried when that happened and called up home to make sure all was well.

Also there are many families that might have lost a breadwinner, or lost the sole means of winning a wage - like a truck, or a fishing boat or whatever. And since the social security net in India(can't talk about Sri Lanka or Indonesia since I don't know much about those countries) is pretty thin, those families will have to work doubly hard to get back a sense of life.

I really don't think that numbers printed in the media even begin to portray what this means to many people.

[work] Meetings and conf calls suck

2004-10-26T20:12:00.000-07:00

So I am still at work, at 8 pm, attending a conference calls with people in Japan. Not fun. And I can't attend it from home because I don't have a land line at home and my cell phone company sucks.

Anyways, while I am listening to this guy talk about internationalization and localization I started wondering why there are no guidelines for meetings and conference calls.

For example, in this conference call, the presenter had sent the slides ahead of time(a definite plus) and is now going through the slides, just talking about them in order. Now a value of this conference call would have been if people were asking a lot of questions which the presenter could have clarified. But that is not happening. The content of this meeting is a one day data transfer. I just can't understand why this could not have been done over email - giving people more flexibility to do work on their own terms. And for discussion we could have had discussion forum, a news server etc, just for this topic. The team responsible for this meeting could have had people(s) who could have replied to emails/posts on this discussion forum.

The value of meeting other people, discounting the media, is either discussing to better understand something, or come to a decision.

For the case where the aim of the meeting is dissemination of information or discussion, a lot of ground work can be done via electronic tools. Starting with sending email explaining the problem, to creating a discussion forum where the problem can be discussed. Of course defined roles, about who is it who will reply to questions on the discussion board will help.

Only in the extreme case, and I think such cases should be very little, where such measures don't help clarify the issue should recourse be taken to a meeting or a conference call. In that case, it should be someone's job to summarize the issues discussed so far. In such a case maybe only 25% of the time should be used to reiterating the issues - all people should have absorbed information earlier. The only benifit of reiterating information once again is repetition. The rest of the time should be for questions and clarifications. Another possibility is that the presenter anticipate the concepts that are causing most problems and spends time talking about it.

Since this is an open ended activity, it is important to have a time limit at which everything will finish. If people still have questions, maybe they can talk to the presenter individually.

The other reason for having meetings, as I see it is to come to a decision about something. Again, it will be extremely helpful if ground work is done before the meeting is held. In addition to that, it is imperative that the agenda of the meeting is circulated before hand. This should include the aim of the meeting, stating that at the end of the meeting the participants should have agreed/disagreed on stated items. This sounds trivial, but never have I seen a good agenda in my work environment.

A bad example of meeting/conference call I have seen is in which flow of information is one sided. The presenter does most of the talking. In such cases, I wonder why this information can not have been sent via email.

Another useless format is status meetings, where different agencies give status about their part of the project. What is useful here is getting information, which can be lost in email status, which can derail the project. However, the frequently of such meetings can definately be greatly reduced.

A pet peeve of mine is holding up a meeting/conference call for about 10 min, waiting for quorum to gather. How can you trust people to do the right thing at work, if they can't be trusted to show up at time? Really pisses me off.

Going back to the different reasons for meetings, I think it is very important to separate discussion and open ended meetings with ones in which there is a fixed agenda, and output is expected. If the two things are attempted in the same meeting then things get confusing and most probably the open ended discussion will overrun and no decision will be made. Plus I feel that since the door was opened for open ended discussion, people are apt to go into tangents. If this happens, no decision is made and guess what - we need to do another meeting.

Another red flag to watch out for people who will hijack the meeting. I guess the need for an owner or moderator of the meeting. The person who called the meeting should have a clear idea of what they want from this meeting.

I am starting to get seriously pissed at the people whose meetings I have to attend. Fast losing respect for such people. They have no concept of professionalism. While they might think they are doing the company a great service by holding more and more meetings, maybe even get bonding but all that is bull shit. Most of the times these people are program managers or laison persons. They probably get thier sense of how productive they were during the day by the number of meetings they attended/moderated in the day. But they are not the only culprit.

Ok it is half an hour into the stupid meeting and hopefully it will end fast. And then I can go ahead and waste my time in my way :)

[misc] Nil Admirari

2004-10-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

I just read this essay by Paul Graham about Writing Essays. I found it very interesting to read. He basically argues about writing exploratory essays - the kind which are not, Take a position and defend it. In that one apparently misses out many subtlities. In addition it does not help in externalising thoughts, which is what any writing can do.

Nil Admirari is (apparently) latin for, To be astonished at nothing. People who fancy themselves to be cool try to achive this state. This is the opposite of being surprised, which is what is necessary to be getting new connections and knowledge.

[mba] First mid term and others..

2004-10-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

Kind of long time went by without a post and I can blame it squarely on my midterm today. Today was the exam for accounting. Never have I had to study 7 chapters after 4 classes. But it was still good fun.

I am now supposed to know to do double entry accounting system with the first equation of accounting. There are principles and assumptions in accounting. Just have to keep it in mind that the principles of accounting are not as inviolate as those of science or engineering. Now, imagine, for a second if the law of conservation of mass-energy was generally to be followed, but the universe would not complain too much if it was sometimes violated. Well it would not complain, but the universe as we know it will probaly not exist. But the principles of accounting are only to be followed, most of the times.

Other than that it was fun, all in all.

But studying for the exam was not fun. Not that it has ever been ever, in all of my academic attempts. But it does bring out the best of my creative side. I can usually come up with multiple reasons of why not to get to studying, almost instantly. Of course there is this thing more important than studying which needs my attention. In this matter, Nike did a good job of creating the catch phrase, Just do it. If I start thinking too much about what has too be done, then I'll probably never get to it.

Another way I see this problem is the overhead of getting started. Dilip D'souza also echoes similar sentiments in his blog entry.

Well getting started is only part of the problem. Then there is the problem of distraction. I think computers have done a great disservice to me personally by being the biggest distraction. Think about it. Had I been living in the early 1900's and had been fortunate enough to go to school etc, I could have gone to a library or a silent corner of my mansion and there would have been practically no distractions. Or rather, at most, the occasional tree branch hitting against the window pane or something mundane like that. In fact, one could have died from lack of stimuli in those days. Maybe that is why the world population was so low those days. But now, fast forward to 2004 and you have what is innocously called The Internet(s). One is literrally linked to numerous computers and the the people behind them, turning our meaningless trash(just like this one). Distractions.. they are surely a ... distraction.

In other events, I have surprised myself by following baseball and the World Series. I think what got in interested was the conversation during lunch at work, with MR, DD and AY about how the Red Sox have not won a World Series title and the Curse of Babe Ruth. This guy Babe Ruth, was supposed to have been traded from the Boston Red Sox to New York Yankees. And since then the Red Sox team has been cursed. But, what kind of a name is Babe Ruth anyways? Who'd name their child Babe?

Anyway, with all this discussion going on etc, my underdog supporter woke up and I have been following Red Sox scores all this while - since the time when they were 0-3 against the Yanks. I still can't watch the game for too long. Might be baseball, or might be total lack of interest in sports. Don't know. But I did find out more about baseball and now I can atleast follow the terminology.

So currently, Red Sox are in World Series against St. Loius Cardinals. Interestingly, R is in St. Louis these days and he is supporting them. He might even go to Boston(for business) and while there, he says, he'll lend his support to them. Ya, as if that will help!! I am sure Red Sox will win.

On the underdog think, Nike came out with this ad about a boy in Fenway park wanting the Red Sox to win. Kindda cool.

[misc] performance marketting?

2004-10-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

While talking with someone from a large Semiconductor company yesterday, I discovered that he worked for a group called performance marketting. It is generating performance numbers for marketting purposes. While the principles of performance analysis of chips remain the same, the end result, or the audience changes. Wonder what this does to the methodology they might use internally? Or even whether interpretation of data is now different. Also, he mentioned that their group works with consortiums etc to work out test benchmarks. A part of that is convincing the consortium to accept the benchmarks that will show their bench marks in a favorable light.

Interesting concept.

[news] sun allows their employees to blog?

2004-10-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that Sun allows, and even encourages their employees to blog. While I am sure there must be guidelines for SUN employees to follow while blogging, it is still a commendable step. Wonder who must have come up with this idea @ sun. I am almost imagine the protests that they must have faced. So it must have taken a huge leap of faith for those corporate managers to let go of this control.

I think SUN is a cool company.

[pers] spam filtering via spamassasin

2004-10-12T08:44:00.000-07:00

A few months back I started using spamassasin for filtering spam. Its has worked pretty well. After training it for the mix the of emails that I receive, I had the option of throwing away all the emails that spamassassin tagged as spam to /dev/null. At that point I was pretty confident about its tagging capabilities.

But for some reason I did not throw those emails into /dev/null and instead put them in a spam folder. Good thing I did.

Yesterday I looked in there, and as usual, there were a lot of spam mails. In addition though, there were two emails from my MBA school!

Since setting up the spam filters the mix of emails that I received changed. Now I receive more mails with marketting/accounting terms and spamassassin has to be trained again. Talking of marketting terms reminds me that I have to go learn how to be a networker. Some people know what I mean.

[mba] class format

2004-10-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

While I am in class yesterday, for MGMT 501, I was thinking about the format in which the class is being conducted. I probably should have been paying more attention to what the prof was saying instead of thinking idle thoughts, but then... Anyways, the class is about Management Effectiveness. From what I gather so far, they want to explore the issues that face a first time manager - and they are targetting a people's manager, not a business manager. So far we have talked about leadership, conflict, power, politics and performance appraisals.

But I digress. I wanted to mention about the format of the class.

The Prof usually has a point to make for a specific topic in mind. For example, he'd probably have something to say about politics at work place. The points that the prof is trying to make are already spelled out in the reader material that has been handed out before hand. So we are all supposed to be wheted to the idea. However, the prof does not just blurt out the idea. In class, he usually hands out a supplement reader which has a case study on it, of course related to the points that are being discussed. After reading it, we start discussing the case and all the students usually have something to say. The discussion is gently directed towards the points are are being sought out. At the end it feels that the class came to a conclusion on those points. In fact, those points are already decided on ahead of time, and come from some reseach of something.

Pretty interesting way of teaching. So far I am liking this class.

We had another teacher in undergraduate who worked this way. The main difference here was that the undergrad teacher taught us Operating Systems. Now, OS is very different from management effectiveness.

From first looks, OS is not a subject to be taught in this manner. But this teacher obviously did not think so. In fact, he'd make a proclamation, ask a question and then wait for what seemed like the end of world for an answer. He'd not proceed if we did not answer. Afte a first few classes, the class got the idea. In fact, just to avoid the disturbing silence people used to rake their brains to be able to say something( I know I did that). All in all he accomplished what he set out to do - make us discover the answer. To this day, OS concepts in my brain are very firmly embedded.

[misc] Whore of Mensa

2004-10-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

I remember arguing, long time back when I had not yet learned that prostitution was not a topic you discussed freely, that selling your body was the same as selling your time to an employer. That argument did not take me very far. But I still feel the argument to be true - shorn of all the crap society heaps on sex and children out of wedlock. Of course, children that are born out of such sex still need care and are still human beings. So, in one sense society's attempt to curb sex to people who have commited themselves to each other kind of makes sense. What puts me off is that holier than thou attitude that goes with it, and the moral judgement.

Anyway, I read this story by Woody Allen(wonder if he is that same guy who acts in movies - did not know he wrote stories too), Whore of Mensa. It is a short read but talks about intelluectual whoring, selling your intellectual time for other's pleasure. Pretty interesting read.

[mba] excellent advice for mba students

2004-10-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

Found this advice on a blog. Excellent read.

[work] secret society

2004-10-06T09:43:00.000-07:00

The way information flows in my organisation at work, it feels that I am a part of a secret society. Apparently, the unwritten rule is, Don't ask, Don't tell or maybe it is Need to know. All this is fine. But only if you are actually a secret society. Which, from what I can tell, we are not officially.

We are starting to ramp up for the impending release of our software. As part of that we go through these contortions which are aimed to facilitate transfer of information from the engineering organisation to field engineers and quality assurance organisations. So one of our local manager, sent out an email to our engineering organisation(apparently, or maybe hopefully, the engineers who are presenting at today's gala already are in the know) the details of this event. Attached were the slides.

I noticed that there is a feature in there that was developed by someone less than 10 officies from me and today is the first day I know about it!! I find it pretty amazing. There is no general information about this feature in the body of developers. Apparently someone from the field had enough clout to push this feature into the list, and got one of the managers to do it. I am presuming that the manager did it because the manager wanted to meet their quota of features developed. Or maybe I am being a bit too paranoid for this last part.

Anyway, it is not that this thing did not get reviewed. We have a review process that looks very solid on paper. The rules to get anything checked in are pretty turtous. However, the ground realities are far from real. Friendship is a great wheel turner.

Even without the apparent breaks in our review process, what I find troubling is that the only way one will know of what is going on with the product is that if one is a part of that select coterie who are in the review team. Now what about the others. They need to know what is going on too, if only in big picture format, just so that they can keep things straight in their head. The product is complex enough that we don't want the scenario changed beneath our feet. One works on assumptions about how other pieces behave in certain scenarios. If those assumptions are changed, it leads to incorrect information being propogated out of the engineering organisation at best, and broken functionality at worst.

The second part of that problem is that the manager only sent email to people in the local office. We have, five more development offices where engineers involved in the same project work. They are kind of excluded from this information.

From first looks it might appear that this was done because the remote engineers can't attend the session. However, the email also had a link to the slides about all the features - which is how I found out about this feature. So, one would think that in the spirit of open communication, of which we as a company, seem to make a really big deal about, this email would be sent to all the engineers.

Was the manager shy? I shudder to think if that is true. Imagine a person who is expected to make difficult decisions who is shy. Maybe not. Maybe the manager just does not care enough to think about other people. This seems more like it in this particular case. I shudder more. An apathetic manager!

[news] Bush for Nobel Prize for Peace

2004-10-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

The Hindustan Times is reporting that President Bush is in the list of people to be considered to the Nobel Peace Prize.

I find this very surprising. While the report does not go into saying what are the criteria that gets one into this list, President Bush does not seem to have done anything for peace. Instead he went to war with Iraq on pretty filmsy premises.

[mba] week two of the bloodbath

2004-10-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

The blooodbath continues. So far I have been unable to keep up with the pace of work. Fortunately neight of the two professors ask to collect homework or grade on basis of that. But if they start doing that then I am done for.

The Managerial Effectiveness class is ok. It mostly has reading assignments which I can read about before going to class. Not a problem.

It is the Accounting that is giving me sleepless nights. Sometimes literally. The class is already upto chapter 5 and I am just not getting enough time to do all the problems etc. I grasp the concepts generally, but I guess that is not giving me a very good feel.

[work] weird bug causing panic

2004-09-29T22:01:00.000-07:00

My co-worker P is chasing this bug which panics the system at seeming random occasions. He put in a debug build and hits a ted assert which says that one of the magic numbers is not magical anymore!

With some brilliant detective work P finds out what the problem is. Consider an array indexed by a variable index. We do

index = index++ % MAX_INDEX

That is just trying to increment the index with proper wraparound. Having done that we set the marker field of this struct element to -1(so that when we are debugging it we know that this is the last element). Since we had previously set the marker to -1 for the previous element we need to set it back to 0. So just before the line above, we do

array[index].marker = 0;

That above works fine, since we are doing it before incrementing marker. There is a tiny catch.

index is -1 to start off! So now we are doing, essentially

array[-1].marker = 0;

Wow! That is just overwriting memory that is placed before our array. Kind of explains the panic!!

Funny how these things happen. THis change to put -1 and 0 was done after the original code was written. I guess it worked fine - does not panic always. But still a bug.

[work] pushy remote manager

2004-09-29T08:20:00.000-07:00

So I am in this call with our OS vendor - their development team and testing team. Now we OEM our software to them so they test if, since they are the people finally selling it.

So the testing team said that they have a problem in which one of the levels of software was getting disabled. Of course that software is supplied by us. So now the development manager is asking me why our bits are getting disabled.

I tell them that as long as something is talking to pieces in our software we'll disallow shutdown of that piece, causing eventual disable. My question to them is who is talking to it? She does not know and asks me if I want to look at it. I tell her that our requirements are simple - talk to our software and we won't shutdown. So someone from their side, because they are responsible for integration, should look at who is talking to our piece. This kind of goes on for a couple of rounds in varying degrees of differences. Then she changes gears slightly and asks me if I understand the problem. By this time I am getting irritated in my head(hopefully I don't show it too much). So I say that yes I do understand the symptons but not the whole problem since I don't know who is talking to the software. So she says if I can look at the logs and I need help, to ask her! Wow - did I not say that I think it is their problem? I tell her, again.

At this point our laison person - from our side, jumps in and supports my side. Of course she does, we work for the same company. Again, this goes no where since the partner manager is still pushing for me to look at this problem first. I don't want to - not my problem and I am already busy.

Then an interesting thing happens. The testing person who had originally reported the problem, and who has been listening passively to this whole converstaion, says that she needs to talk to the integration engineers directly(their side) and we(our company etc) does not need to be involved. This kind of puts a spanner in the works of the remote manager(my interpretation). She says - ok, but she needs to speak with the testing engineer before the manager hooks up the testing engineer with the integration engineers. This makes me think that they have something going on internally and the development manager was pushing for the problem to be our problem.

Well even in retrospect I don't want to own the problem - definately not a problem at our end and there is nothing I can do about it. I just hope I did not say something rude or something like that!! But it was good fun while it lasted.

[news] earthquake in california

2004-09-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

CNNis reporting that there was an earthquake in california. I said reporting instead of saying that I experienced it, even though I did, because my attention was drawn later to the fact that I had just been in a mild earthquake. That corrrected my resolve to not each bad fruits, which is what I had been thinking 30 sec earlier, caused the wobbly feeling in my head. And it was not even a mild earthquake - it was 6.0 on the slave. Fortunately no casualties.

[news] Presedentil debates in US are flawed?

2004-09-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

From Slashdot, I came to know of a raging debate(and I think my co-worker P. also alerted me to it) about presidential debates(debate about debate!). Apparently the debates are pretty much scripted. There is this organisation called opendebate.org which argues for a greater openness in debates.

Pretty interesting. Maybe I'll actually watch the debate and see how much truth there is in these claims.

[mba] ABC of Incorporation

2004-09-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

So while I am listening to the lecture recording of ACTG 301, I hear that the first rule of incorporation for companies in US - ABC - Anywhere but California. Pretty funny that California is getting hit because of its employee friendly policies.

[work] running away from meetings

2004-09-27T18:35:00.000-07:00

So I had been volunteered for a 2 hour meeting with our OS vendor. And believe me when I say I really hate these things. So at 1500 pm, when the meeting is supposed to start I go and start playing foozball with a couple of coworkers in our lab - hoping no one no knows where we are.

At 1520, when the person who is running the meeting realizes that I don't intend to show up, calls my boss' boss. She calls my office but of course I am not there. So she calls my neighbor and instructs her to go look for me. My neighbour knows the open secret of the foozball in the lab. So she comes into the lab. And now I really have no where to run. I end up in that stupid meeting!!

Hate meetings!

[news] Next Steps in Strategic Partnership

2004-09-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

The Indian Express is reporting that India and US are entering phase II of NSSP, Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. Well that is good from my perspective - India gets to chose from a wider selection of components for our satellites, building up our space program even more.

But as I was reading through the story I kept wondering what was US' takeaway from this. I'd have difficulty beliving that they were doing this from the goodness of their heart. Then the article slammed right into the reason - ISRO has purchaced stuff worth USD 51 in six months.

The article goes on to talk about opening NSG(Nuclear Suppliers Group) to India. I can read that as a If you can't beat'em, join'em attitude by India(since India did not sign the NPT). or yet another attemt to US to bring India into the fold by raising the stakes.

[work] completionalist vs incrementalist

2004-09-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

Rands has this pretty good article about Completionists vs. Incrementalists.

Some choice statements from the article

Incrementalists are realists and Completionists are dreamers.

Admitedly I tend to be a completionist. And so as I was driving somewhere yesterday, thinking about this debate, or yet another schism in the world of people, if you will, I kept coming up with reasons as to why it was better to be a completionlist as opposed to an incrementalist. The reasons just kept popping into my head.

But I chose not to articulate them here. Instead I'll follow the spirit that is outlined in the following lines, from the article,

How does anything get done with Incrementalists and Completionists arguing about degrees of rightness?
{blank} know when to let the {blank} poke around and do their thing

The blanks above are filled with specific stuff in the article. But it works both ways. Completionalists should give a little leeway to incrementalists and vice versa.

There are other ways of doing things!

[news] Wifi in India

2004-09-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Economic Times is reporting about the usage of Wifi in India. Well there is not much of that. There are apparently 180 hot spots in the country with about 126 being in B'lore itself. And I heard, IIRC, from other sources, that the government has delicenenced the spectrum used for wifi only for indoors usage. For outdoors usage, one still requires a license. What is heartening is that many educational institutes are starting to use it. For example, Indian School of Business, Pune University and IIT-K.

[news] more hurricanes in Florida?

2004-09-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

Wow, Jeanne is the fourth Hurricane in Florida in about 6 weeks.

I can't remember the name of one Hurricane right now, but I think others were Ivan and Frances(in no particular order).

Wonder if some people are seeing this as an act of God or some how relate to these events fatalistically. I am not saying that this is a man(or woman) made event. It is very clearly a natural event. But is the cause of these events rooted in a sentient and designing creature or was it merely a powerful force that is not aware of itself. Right now all I can think of was it was nature gone awry. A powerful force that is not aware of itself.

Does this power that nature have over me want me to worship it? Not particularly.

Actually I want to extrapolate this and reason that maybe the universe was also a result of some such power, an unsentient(is there even such a word) power. Note, I said, maybe. Exploring possbilities.

[blog] Anonymous postings

2004-09-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

Well people have got to sign their comments at least with an initial. Actually this is only meant for people who I know who read this blog. And the reason why I want this is so that I can go yell at them - N and R, means you :)

[mba] technology in studying

2004-09-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

I just picked up my 512MB card for my Palm Tungsten T2, fresh off from Amazon. I am planning on using this to record all the lectures in MBA so that I can convert them and listen to them later.

Basically I am going to try to things right this time. As opposed to how I handled my BE and MS. Someone mentioned to me about getting enthu bouts twice a year. This surge in enthusiasm is akin to that. The trick is keeping that stuff up. Lets see how that goes.

[pers] Lunch at Benihana

2004-09-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Our work group went out for this lunch(paid for by the company) to Benihana. Pretty cool Japanese place where all the people sit around a table. The table has a grill in the center, which is where all the food is prepared right in front of your eyes. Plus that is not the only exciting part. They do antics with food too.

For example, they'll cut meat and vegetables very fast. Or they'll toss pieces of food into the air and catch it with their hat or shirt pockets. Also, they piled sliced onions one on top of the other to make a little volcano, poured vinegar into it and boom - a volcano like smoke. Pretty neat.

On a more general note, Japanese culture intrigues me. They have a pretty sophisticated culture with a lot of facets to it - ranging from food to arts to even war. They seem to have a artform around every area of life. Wonder what would be it like to life in society

[pers] BK Chicken Site

2004-09-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

A friend, AY, forwarded this subservient chicken site. Really cool. He also mentioned that one has go to try the command "dude you rock"

[mba] Outlook India stories about B-schools

2004-09-23T07:41:00.000-07:00

Outlook has a bunch of stories about B-schools in India. Very interesting. For example, they talk to some alumni about what they learnt and did not learn. For example, M. V. Kamnath, director of ICICI, a graduate of IIMA says that what is lacking is teaching about how to make decisions. Inspite of all the tools that can generate data it is still a very gut-feel thing. Ajayj Bisaria, who was private secretary to Ex PM Vajpayee says that he does not think that B-schools turns out warriors wanting to change the world.

Yet another post about exclusivity in IIMs. Interestingly the autor asks that a difference of one mark could send your rank down hundreds of positions. So what is the real difference between a person who gets 99.8 and 99.1? And since the stakes are SO high, candidates who try to appear for CAT will not take ANY changes with their preparation. The authors ends up wondering whether because of this, will IIM graduates not end up being the most risk averse? And end up working for other people who took risks and started their companies? Interesing thought.

Finally, one has got to read Hari Menon's story of why he dropped out of IIMC. It is about education and not a label. To keep things in perspective!

[pers] French is a really funny language

2004-09-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

I kinnda knew that during my trip to Paris. But don't take my word for it. Actually really don't take my word for it since I don't speak a word of it. But check out this persons blog and my comment(shameless plug)

[work] need to know?

2004-09-22T17:47:00.001-07:00

Our company operates a need to know basis. Well that might be too far reaching a statement. I only know of our group which definately operates on a need to know basis. That is not the only problem with our group though.

What I mean by need to know basis that an engineer will only come to know about the existence of a sub project or realated change if s/he is directly involved in it. Atleast that is what the management tries to be doing most of the time. There are devices by which this compartmentalized communication model is broken. For example when you commit or check in code, you have to give a brief description of the change etc etc. However, because of a total lack of standards or enforcement of any vestige of standards, these things don't always help.

But commiting code is pretty much the last phase of devlopment. That is not it is most useful time to know about projects. It is most useful to know about it in the start.

Why is knowing about projects in which one might not be directly contributing important? I feel that is the basis of open communication. If it communication about upcoming changes, features, add/drop of support of stuff etc is not openly communcated, or even encouraged, this leads to Empire Buildup. Empire buildup is the phenomenon where each manager or technical niche wants to project itself to land the plumest assignments, or hardware resources, or shine in the eyes of management. Most of the times, it is the managers of respective technical niches that benifit most, or at all. The engineers never benifit from these clandestine operations.

On the contrary, engineers tend to lose a lot from these motions. The Empire Buildup moves, which are played out by petty managers, eventually percolates down to the techlead of the project and from there on to the engineers. This breeds a distrust among engineers of different groups. The distrust will ultimately make it harder to get anything technical done, like cross-group code reviews etc.

But I digress from my main topic of communication, or rather the lack thereof.

I mentioned above that lack of communication or a need-to-know model allows managers to play political games. The other bad effect of this communication model is that it breeds very bad quality in the product.

As products gets more complex each change has the potential to break some assumption in another piece. An interface might break. Or functionality that is relied on by other pieces might be changed or removed. The way to break this jinx is called, unsurprisingly, peer review. And it is not even an outlandish idea. Most fields allow and even enourage it. But if only a few people know about the change, that beats the whole idea - which is to break fresh perspective and break the mould in thinking. Of course everyone in the know of the project thinks it is a good idea. That is probably why they are in the know in the first place. But has anyone bothered to get someone else's opinion?

Probably not. Either because they want to get this change done without a while lot of other people knowing(siniter, but happens) or because in the rush of business pressures normal processes are circumvented(unfortunate). In any case the product is the loser.

And when that happens, people morales start sagging and they lose interest in the product. The sense of ownership is totally lost.

How do I know all this. I happen to have the misfortunate to work in such a group :(

Now the standard poser. What is the right way of doing things. It is probably not a good idea to cc each email to each engineer/manager. Agreed.

The answer, IMHO, lies in the difference between push/pull model of information dissemination. Email, phone calls and voice mail are the push section of propogating information. Blogs, and newsgroups, and such are pull side of things. The difference lies in when the receipient gets to it. Most organisations, and unfortunately mine too, abuse email to try to do both. Information, on which one is expected to act, or need to know right away, is clubbed together with information which is for informational purposes too. All this information is sent via email which dilutes the utility of the channel and people start becoming suspiscious of email in which they don't have a direct interest. It start clogging their mail boxes and and does not afford them flexibility in scheduling when they get to emails unless they delete what they perceive to be crap. Message lost!

Instead, email should be reserved to action oriented stuff in which a small group of people are expected to take action. Push technologies should be used to stuff like discussions about possible changes, white papers, bugs, features etc.

However, doing so is only a part of the solution. When engineers start knowing more about projects etc, they are bound of have feedback. How is that channel. The organisation has to make cultural changes to accept and direct that feedback.

Finally, the capstone. Political willingness on part of middle management to make this change. If middle management feels threatened by an open organisation then nothing can happen. The group will wither away and be a listless, lifeless appendage going though the motions of software engineering.

I know !

[pers] what does Kramer do?

2004-09-21T23:08:00.000-07:00

So I am watching Sienfeld before going to bed and I get into a conversation with my appt. mate about what does Kramer do? Can't figure it out that easily. Unsurprisingly, there have been a lot of discussion on the net.

Yo Yo Ma!

[blog] best joke ever

2004-09-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Just saw this blog entry. This is about an imagined conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Singh. Had a hard time holding in my stomach!! Check it out.

[pers] My friend Mr R

2004-09-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

I have this friend Mr. R. He is pretty cool most of the times. But he has a deep dark secret. He sucks at making travel plans. I have been trying to convince him to fly down from his ivory tower to that we can both go and visit LA. He is convinced that it is a good plan too. But he can not bring himself to surf over to orbitz or something and buy a ticket.

The reason I am writing this here is because he is a very regular reader of this blog. So, 'R', c'mon before the next long weekend also goes away.

BTW, N, told me about the new trading style. Do you know what you were talking about or have you just convinced the poor guy to sink in some money. He bought stock based on that advice. If that tanks you know that you can be sued right :)

[mba] Accounting is a four letter word!!

2004-09-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

Well let me not start my MBA with that attitude!! But still having to study accounting deserves atleast a Yikes!.

Anyways, I got the impression that accounting is a large set of rules, which are arrived at by a group of people. I guess that kind of explains the term Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Now what I can't figure out, atleast not yet, is whether the complexity in setting these rules is something because of the nature of the problem, or because of a lack of trust and a need to verbalize and formalize everything.

Let us a take a simple example from physics. There is this thing called velocity. Now it is speed in a particular direction. There is only one way of measuring speed and if done correctly, all observers will arrive at the same answer, within tolerances and giving in for relativity. Now, let us assume that there were a lot of rules about measuring velocity. So my earlier question would translate into asking whether the rules exist because there is a lot of difficulty in measuring velocity(which as I described above is not true - mostly). In which case, the rules exist because the problem is natively difficult.

Or do the rules exist because one agency does not trust another agencies' measurements.

So the rules trying to solve the problem of either complexity or vagueness. In a sense the two are related, but still independent.

I don't think I have explained this very well. That is in part due to my own lack of crystalisation of this topic - yet. Maybe I can post on what I think of this topic after the quarter is over.

[pers] Anti IM

2004-09-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

Recently I have been a big champion of IM.

Now, one of my friends, lets call him Mr. RMJ, is averse to IM and cell phones. Well he finally gave in to the cell phone thing, because he and his girl friend lived on different cities and long distance is free in cell phones. Fortunately, he also gave me his cell phone number so he is reachable all the time.

This perceived rechability irritates him. Not that I get it, but according to him, it invades his privacy.

So I got to thinking about about it and could not figure it out. If he really wants to be no disturb he could say so in his IM or get off the IM system at that time. I do it and I am sure a lot of other people do it too.

Armed with this thought I was planning on calling him and forcing a tele-intervention(he is on the east coast, while I am on the west). But then, I started wondering, that if he so possisive of his privacy, he might not be appreciative of my attempts to redo his private decision. Dropped the plan right there.

As for me, my phases of interaction with technology are three phase. I don't need it, or what good is it, or why would anyone want to do it, is my first reaction. Then I get enamoured with it and want it so badly that I spend overpaying for it when I could have saved some dough and shopped for a sale. For a while the new toy controls all aspects of my life. Finally I learn to live with it and start seeing it more as a device than the coolest thing in the word. When that happens I figure out ways to control it so that it does not interrupt me when I don't want it.

I went through this with cell phones, IM, and now I am in my second stage with Wifi.

Long life wifi!

[pers] snowball effect

2004-09-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

The snowball effect.

This is something that I know very well - down to my guts. When I have a moderate work load, of any kind, I keep postponing stuff to a later date. Mostly, at work, I pushing it out to the weekend. The weekend comes, and I find other stuff that is equally important. I have done this during my college years and also during my Masters!

Of course, the end result is that I do find a way to get stuff done but to a level that just gets me by.

The root cause does not lie in the weekend but during the time when I am supposed to be doing what I am supposed to be doing. I guess the mantra should be, Do it now and Do it right the first time.

Do it now is simple - and now does not literally mean now but in the planned order of things.

Do it right the first time is basically a way of getting things out of your face asap. It is sometimes possible to do a job in multiple phases. And I am not talking of tasks that are naturally multi-phased. But rather simple things. For example, if someone asks me to change something and mail them back when it is done. I could reply to them right away and say that it will be done tomorrow. Part 1 of job is done. But the task is still unfinished. Or I could make the change and reply - atomically.

Oh well, if only ranting help my time management.

[blog] success factors

2004-09-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Just read this pretty cool blog. It is a list of thing that this guy thinks are cool to have in life - maybe for success or whatever. Anyway, one of the things is "No Balls, No Babies!" I am sure he did not mean it literrally - true but unlikely to be his intention. So what does it mean. If you have a clue let me know.

[pers] Mozilla Extension - Sage

2004-09-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

Just dicovered Sage - A mozilla extention. It acts as a news aggregator and lets me read all blogs which have been updated automatically. What I mean is that it notifies me when a blog is updated. Pretty cool.

Also, just dicovered something called OPML. From the website,

OPML an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments.

Sounds interesting.

[tech] BIOS and Intel's EFI

2004-09-18T09:34:00.000-07:00

From a slashdot article I came across this white paper on BIOS and why Intel is pushing and alternative called EFI. I have not read eiher of the white papers but wanted to link them there so that I can go back and read them.

[pers] The Giant Wakes up

2004-09-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

The giant here is the MBA that I am about to start on next week. For the next three years or so, every saturday I get up early enough so that I am sane right from the unholy hour of 0800 and stay in class till 1430!

Yesterday I dropped by the school of business at the university and picked up reader materials for one of the course - Managerial effectiveness. For reasons, I will not go into right now, I find this very very ironic.

The other course is Accounting. That has a test on the first class of the day itself. So I guess my work for this week end is cut out. I have to study both Accounting and the assignment for Managerial effectiveness. Unfortunately that is not the half of what I have to do. I have to get stuff at my appartment togethers, pay my credit card bill, electricity bills etc. Also, I have to get to work and start some regression tests for our next drop.

We are doing these periodic drops for our internal partners to enable all pieces of the software to be tested together. More than technical this kind of stuff is really very political. If you miss a date then the people who manage these things will make a big fuss. But what do I have to do to make that date? Not much - just have to run the regression tests.

Unfortunately the stupid regression tests take forever to run. They are not the most easy to set up either. I don't know if that is a property of just our test suite or something that goes with the nature of distributed stuff.

[pers] damn blogger

2004-09-17T14:07:00.000-07:00

I in last post, about office printers, I wanted to highlight the phrase "product evangelist". I chose color red. Now I had a touch time going back to the default color after the phrase ended. When I click on the color palate I can't figure out what the default color is.

One way to read the post below is the select all of it with the mouse.

[work] office printers

2004-09-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

Recently, at work, I have seen a new trend at my work place. In the group that I work for, all the managers and product evangelists (believe me - there is a thing like that) have been getting desktop printers. This inspite of that fact that our building is pretty well stocked with huge, very fast network printers. No one's walk to the printer should be more than 30 seconds. Can people not walk 30 seconds, one way, to pick up a printout? Maybe this is the cause for America's Obesity problem.

But seriously, what irritates me is that fact our company makes a big deal about efficiency and cost cutting. However, this one fact does not gel with that mantra. Actually a whole lot of actions that I see around me don't gel with what they say. Guess they believe in, "Do as I say, not as I do". Guess also, that don't know it that this does not work - yet.

Going back to the point of printers - what are the kind of things people print? Not emails? There should be no reason to print emails. However I have seen people print 5-6 page emails just to get a conf. call number of conf. room name. Talk about waste. The only thing that I can justify, and that too sparingly, printing are documents, which sometimes can be a pain to read online, or project plans with all those squiggles. So why are all these managers and "other people" getting printers for?

[pers] I am OS-X

2004-09-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

Pretty interesting quiz. You anwer some questions that they'll tell you what OS you are most like. I am OS X. Not sure why !! It is definately an OS about which I know the least about :) I would really have liked to be Linux since that is an OS I like. Guess that don't count much :(

Which OS are You?

[pers] more gmail invites

2004-09-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

I have more gmail invites. Can't seem to get rid of them fast enough. Do you want one? Email me or comment here.

[tech] uses and abuses of timeouts

2004-09-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

So I have been thinking about the uses and abuses of timeouts if software. The product that I work with uses timeouts in more than a couple of places pretty extensively. Moreover, we constantly get into situations where we have serious debates about the logic of increasing the timeout.

What is the use of timeouts in software and what are the implications of tuning it? This entry is dedicated to that.

Well first of all I need to understand what setting a timeout tells the system. To help clarify I'll use a familiar device - an analogy.

Well let's say that I am in a line in a cafe for food. And the server goes into the kitchen to apparently refill the dishes. Now I am waiting for the server to return. How long do I keep standing in the line? Definately not for eternity. I'll stop expecting food when either the manager comes by and tells me that the server has been hit by a bus(morbid) or when my patience runs out. Assuming that there is no manager at hand, all I have to help me out is patience.

The thing about computers is that they have no concept of patience the way we know it. So to help them out, we use timeouts. When the timeout expires the computer can move on and do other things.

What other things?

Going back to the cafe, I notice I am still hungy. So I go to another cafe. Now, hopefully the bus drivers in my city are not known for killing cafe food servers(that counts out New Delhi right?), so I get food there! What happened is that I moved from the failed cafe and got service in another place. I failed over to another cafe.

That is pretty much what most computer systems want to do when the timeout fires. They are programmed with a failover plan which is what they will do when the thing they are doing fails to finish in the specified timeout.

Now the question is where are timeouts most appropriate. Let us go back to the cafe scenario. Assume that I work as a cafe food delivery boy. A customer is waiting for their order and I have to deliver it fast. If the customer's patience runs out before time, then what good does it go. Ideally I should notice that the cafe food server is not returning, make a decision and tell my customer that something went wrong. Then the customer can do something about it.

Instead, if the customer get irate and timesout before I do they might sender another delivery person to the cafe. That would not help at all because that would only increase the queue at the cafe.

The point I am trying to make out is that in my opinion, timeouts should only be set in one place. Most software is vertically integrated with others most of time. An application integrates with a filesystem, which integrates with the kernel VFS layer, which integrates with the Virtual Device manager, which talks to the device driver. In a situation where we need to decide how long does the application wait for IO to wait before deciding that something went wrong and alert the sysadmin. That application could very easily implement its timeout. So could all the alyers that I listed above. That does not help since each timeout will have to be tuned to the one below. That is generally a recepie for disaster. Instead, the lowest layer, which is probably the HBA driver should do the timeout and from there on it there should ideally be a notification mechanism. Each layer alerts the one above that there is a problem and the layer above decides what to do.

There are two small problems with this scheme. A alert mechanism means well defined interfaces. Well that is only a small problem. OSes have huge amount of published interfaces. Secondly, there is the question of implicit trust. Each layer will have to trust the layer below it to do the right thing. That is generally not a big problem since OSes are well trusted, rather have to be, by applications.

Finally, there is the question why is a timeout needed at all. Why can't there be an alert mechanism throughout? Well someone has to initiate the alert. The only way I can think of to do that is timeout waiting for the event to finish.

On a slightly different note, polling is a form of timeout. You can wait for an event to finish. it does not, you can decide what to do. And interrupts is a form of notification.

[work] Division of work at the workplace.

2004-09-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have to write this to get my frustrations out. But first, to make any sense, I have to provide some background. I work for a fairly large company that makes software. It has revenues of around a billion(USD) a year and makes a fairly large spectrum of products.

Now some roles and responsibilities.

In this company, I work for a pretty big group. Our group is responsible for development and maintainece of a piece of software that can be considered a lynch pin of a stack of products. The product is marketted in four/five different OS platforms. But most of the source code is common. So, one way of division is by platforms. Also, internally, there are feature teams that are mostly responsible for various features. That is necessary since it preverves and fosters expertise. So, features within the product is yet another way of division of technical staff. A yet another way of division is development vs. maintainence. With a group this large within a company of any age, there are shipped products which have bugs which need to be fixed. Who owns them? Maintainers, or people in a group who will do this. Not developers, who develop "new" features. Atleast this is the way that it is done at my workplace.

So, now we have three axes for dividing the pool of people to accomplish the goal.

The question is which is the best way for this division. Of course, my experience only extends to software industry. And even that, my experience is not very extensive.

[work] Bad escalation emails!

2004-09-15T08:07:00.000-07:00

This is a gripe about some backline escalation engineers who only put in a minmum amount of information in emails while escalating problems back to the engineering organisation. The specific gripe is about some of them not even writing a complete suject line in the escalation email.

All escalations have an associated escalation number. When the backline engineer sends the email, most of them prefix the escalation number, and a small subject line. Why the subject line is important is this. We are a group of about 200 engineers(of course suitably, and some might say, too finely, sub-divided). The escalation emails comes to all 200 of us. Of course, not all 200 people need to work on it so every person/group needs to determine whether they are even interested in the escalation or not.

Now some escalation engineers only put the escalation number in the subject line. If I want to find out whether I am interested or not in the escalation I have to open a browser and read the escalation report in the internal database. How hard is it to put a proper subject line?

Well I misrepresented a little bit earlier. To figure out the context of the escalation I don't need to look at it in the browser but I can just scroll down the email - since escalation engineers are required to put in an escalation template. But again, why can't they put a small subject line? That way I can delete whole gobs of emails about escalations in which I am not interested.

[work] More thoughts on interviewing

2004-09-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

Well I did a second interview today too. Another thought that came across to me was while I was thinking about skills like problem solving and communication, what about the more abstract value of employability in general.

Should we, and if yes, how, determine things like being a team player, initiative and enthusiasm in a candidate. Also, is there a thing like managability?

One of the comments in my entry above was about "can-do" and "will-do" qualities. The first set of things, problem solving and communication and its ilk are in the "can-do" while employability etc are in the "will-do" set.

[work] Interviewing candidates

2004-09-14T14:26:00.000-07:00

I have had the oppurtunity to interview some people for a related project in my company. The people who I interview(ed), if successful will not be directly working with me though.

First off, interviewing is not easy!!

One of the things that I have to fight with myself to prevent is making judgements too soon. Also making judgements based on frivilous factors is something that I have to watch myself out for. Once in Joel's blog I read that most people making a snap decision in the first 5 seconds of meeting the candidate and then spend the rest of the interview time defending or reinforcing this decision.

I think I have watched all the three flaws in interviewing in myself. In my defence I can only say that I am human and I learn as I go.

First making decisions too soon. When I see a resume I am inclined to make some judement of the person from that itself. While useful sometimes, maybe in screening out some resumes, I don't want to carry over that judgement over to the interview time. That is a path that will lead me very fast to flaw number three - spending most of the interview time reinforcing the decision.

During the interview I tried very hard not to think of the resume. I think one mistake that I made was to write down a set of interview questions that I had prepared for the candidate on the resume itself. Maybe I should have used a separate sheet of paper. That way I would not have had the oppurtunity to look at the resume so often. This might prevent any flashback of judgements that I might have made earlier. However, at one point of the interview I did have ocassion to actually refer to the resume. I wanted to know some companies in which this candidate had worked. So maybe while I will still carry the resume the next time, I should not actually use it as a scratch pad.

Then during the interview as I kept asking questions and the candidate kept responding I found adjectives of the flavour of good and not good drifting in my mind. I think this has two problems. One is that I stop listening to the person, and instead start a train of thought about the adjective. Secondly, if I start thinking about good and not good too early then I am again following the path that will lead me to spending the rest of my time reinforcing that decision. Instead I think I ought to spend my time listening to the candidate with an open mind.

Hopefully if do this I will actually give the candidate a fair chance to come across to me.

What was I looking for in the person during the interview. In all my four interviews(!!) I have tried not to ask questions about specifics. For one even I can't remember those and man is my biggest friend. (For those of you not from the *nix background, man is not used here in the context of what you might be thinking!!). I want to know the persons problem solving skills.

For the project that we are looking for people, debugging is also an important skill. So I try to ask a hypothetical debugging question. If ever design became important, I think I'd want to ask a hypothetical question.

I should say one more time that interviewing is a tough job. Not only for the problems it poses but for the reason that you are asked to judge another human being in about half an hour to an hour. If I think about it, I am not perfect, neither personally nor technically. How can I hold another person's mistakes against him? Atleast give him a chance! But I don't have that liberty, atleast in this interview :(

Finally, it requires a lot of integrity to keep an open mind through the whole process. This is not a veiled attempt to say that I have a lot, but just a simple statement saying that a lot of integrity is needed. I don't want to make snap decisions based on frivilous attributes. For this interview, I came an jotted all my thoughts on a paper after the interview. I reviewed them and based on that I will give my feedback.

[news] India wants to become auto hub

2004-09-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Asia Times is reporting that Indian auto makers have desires on moving up the value chain. This is a good thing. There is also one thing that I did not understand. It mentioned that the growing number of FTA(Free Trade Agreements) that India is signing is likely hurting the Indian auto manufacturer. The exact statement is

The growing number of FTAs (free trade agreements) that are being signed by India is likely to hurt the domestic players as they pay a relatively higher duty of around 25%, compared to 1%-10% paid by their Asian counterparts

An interesting term used in the article is TOMA - Top of Mind Awareness. As I understand it, it means a concept or term which is in the top of mind of a given section. Interesting. Apparently this is what advertising aims to achieve. If a brand or product is in TOMA of a large section of consumers they are more likely to buy it. Sometimes when there are ads which promote no apparent product, I think all they are doing is pushing the TOMA of the brand in general. For example, about 6-7 years back I saw some ads for Essar shipping in some magazines in India. Now I was wondering why is Essar advertising in such magazines. They were not pushing a product or service of theirs. Now if we think in terms of TOMA, many readers of this magazine would be people who would make shipping decisions sometime. At such a point this brand awareness might come in handy.

[news] Sanskrit name for foreign star's baby a big deal!!

2004-09-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

Sify News is reporting that Monica Bellucci has named her daughter Devi. This surpised me. Why is this news?

Apparently it is not. This is a story from AFP. The news is that Monica Bellucci became a mother. And that she named her daughther Devi. On the last line of the story, it mentions that the meaning and origin of the word Devi - which is incorrect BTW.

"The name Deva is of Sanskrit origin and means divine."

It seems to me that Sify picked up this news item and rewrote the headlines to state the sanskrit bit, it it is free to rewrite the header. If not, then most probably they only picked up this story because of its Sanskrit connection.

Pray tell me who is Monica Bellucci? Please don't reiterate that she is a star etc. I mean what is her relevance to the world or India? She is not even that big a star in Hollywood. Why should Indian readers be worried about what she "names" her daughter. Note that Sify did not include the story in entertainment section but rather their mainline section.

It seems that they are trying to play up the fact that a foreign movie person has chosen a Sanskrit word for their babies name. As if that is another feather in India's hat. It is not.

[pers] All wireless now

2004-09-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

After my initial trials and tribulations with an Airlink USB wireless card and a Neargear 802.11g router, I am now totally wireless with an all Linksys setup. I have returned the other two pieces of wireless stuff. I am over my inital budget for the setup, but what the heck! Have setup the router to do 64 bit WEP encryption and DHCP. My laptop and home linux server, along with my roommates computers all go through the linksys router now. VPN also has no problems!

I think I will stop paying Comcast the extra USD 5 for an extra IP address.

I can't believe how easy it was to setup etc.

[pers] Gmail invite...

2004-09-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

I still have a gmail invite to hand out. If you need it, please let me know. Email me at kantster@gmail.com.

[pers] Woes with Neatgear wireless router

2004-09-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Recently bought a Neatgear wireless router to go with my new Dell D400. Just a simple word for feedback will be fine, "sucks!". Really does. I am not sitting more than two feet away from it and the signal strength is not above 40%. If I move into my bedroom the signal strength is so bad that I can not even connect. I think I will turn this piece of crap back to Fry's and get a Linksys router today. It is USD 20 more, but what the heck.

[pol] Are people of Indian origin who don't have Indian passport Indians?

2004-09-11T13:48:00.000-07:00

I have wondered about the Indian media going gaga over achivements of people who have Indian names who are not really Indians. For example, the recent(a couple of years back) Dr. Amartya Sen. The Indian media of course went berserk. And many Indians too felt pride in that.

But is that achivement really an Indian's achivement?

Of course, Dr. Sen was born in India, and even studied in India. But his work is not done in India.

The question to ask, in this case, and in that of others, is whether the achivement would have been possible had the individual stuck around in India? I have no qualititave argument for or against this, but my gut feeling is that the answer is no.

A world class achivement not only takes a world class individual but also a world class system that supports that person. A person can not be doing thinking about solving important problems while standing in the line to pay the electricity bill. Ok, so you say that person that employ someone to stand in the line for them to pay the electricity bill. Sure they can. But with that little device, we have just reduced the number of people who can do world class thinking for us to about 7-8% of our population. And of course, concomitantly, out goes the argument of the advantage of the large population India has.

But why is it important whether Dr. Amartya Sen did his work within or without India? It is important, because success breads success. A small little example is the Indian IT industry. It is flourishing, in a rather awesome away, when other attempts in India have failed. When one company gets an international order, other people are encouraged to start their own companies.

I started out documenting my feelings about our pride in the achivement of people of Indian origin who are not Indian's and went on to talk about why I think success in India is important. I don't have a neat way of closing this since I don't know all the answers. I just feel this is something to think about some more.

[pers] First Post

2004-09-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have decided to create my blog after all. Well, honestly, this is not my first attempt at doing this. Hopefully this is one that will last though.