Random Thoughts

Modular Testing

2011-11-17T06:45:00.001-08:00

One of the key things that I have discovered while doing automated testing especially using Spring is “Progressive Testing”. Say you have a suite 1200 test cases and they all use a Spring configuration. More often than not the complaint is usually that “Testing failed” because the Messaging was not OK in an environment. It appeared all the 1200 test cases would fail when the creation of “Spring Context” failed. This is however not what we want. Sometimes it might take a week to get messaging in that environment but we would like to proceed with coding if everything other than messaging worked in that environment.

A good alternative to that is to wire your spring configuration so that spring beans are used only at the very very last minute. LazyInitTargetSource can be used to achieve this. Say we have two Services "ReservationService" and "MessageService" like below

public class ReservationService {

   private MessageService messageService



   public void showPrices() {

      //does not use message service

   }

   ... more methods that do not use message service

   public void reserve() {

      messageService.sendMessage(params);

   }

}


public class MessageService {

   private JmsTemplate t;



   public void sendMessage(Map params) {

      //publish on to the broker

   }

}

The problem here is that you don't want message service is accessed until you need it. So you declare something like below with "lazy-init" set to true. However the problem is that whenever you "get" a ReservationService bean, Spring would create the MessageService bean since it is a dependency. In our case about 80% of methods in ReservationService do not need the MessageService at all and if in my test cases I had something like,



@BeforeSuite

public void beforeSuite() {

    context.getBean("reservationService");

}

Then the suite would fail even for tests that does not need MessageService. We could delay the construction of MessageService until we actually have a test that calls the "reserve" method. This can be done by using the LazyInitTargetSource. The configuration is very simple and make sure to use the "idref" !!!

Aadukalam

2011-03-05T02:33:00.001-08:00

Aadukalam - is a refreshingly wonderful movie after a long time. I have always ranked Polladhavan as a mediocre movie but a very interesting one, because there are like about 4-5 scenes where you could see a “genius” director but then you would have to sit through 150 minutes of rubbish to get a glimpse of that. But going by the standards of tamil movies these days Polladhavan was definitely above average.

Dhanush is one of the most under-rated actors in Tamil Cinema. He got me shocked with his portrayal as a dark-psychotic killer totally enamoured on a girl, who only considers him as a good friend in Kadhal Kondein. There was also bits of genius in his other movies but like most other heroes you had to endure 4-5 total cheap movies to get a good movie from him.

Aadukalam totally rocks though. I have always maintained that Dhanush and Karthi are two of the most “natural” actors along side “Rajini”. They really do not have to do any make over or hair dos or method acting to impress people. Tell me when did Clint Eastwood did any of these? Enough has already been said about Cast, Plot and the wonderful execution. Now special points for those who spotted these...

There is a one line dialogue in my mother tongue “Sourashtra” in the movie. Did anyone notice it?
The end credits show “Filmography” and “Bibliography” and lists a few movies/books including Cache, Amorres Perros. I did not get what the point of that was.

Aadukalam - ore adhakalam....

2010 Review

2010-12-28T15:06:00.001-08:00

It is that time again. The time of the lists. Best movies of the year, Best jokes of the year, Dream cricket team of 2010 etc. That time when website authors of all sorts, start writing up articles such as these trying to eke out every single ad-click from poor readers like us. I am not going to do one of those, there are better jobless people for that.

This was one of the first times in my life where I (coughs) jotted down some KRAs for 2010. And trust me this was during the start of the year so I am definitely not making it up.

Swimming - This was a carry over from last year and I got a head start on this. It is a shame I did not know swimming for 28 years of my life. Not anymore ! Cos I just finished my beginner course on swimming.
Badminton - This is one of the very few sports that I can play. If you know me, you know what my athletic skills are like. But hey ! I was tutored by one of my friend, we started playing every weekend at a local club. I was quite shit to begin with but but.... I actually won a game against my tutor friend around July after about three months of training. That was the last time I played Badminton... sigh..
Gym - I have been a midget, slim (bordering on the lines of the "emaciated") guy all my life. I have tried everything anyone could possibly try such as gymming, honey with milk, roasted grams (no protein bars) but I simply could not put on weight. I did regularly go to gym for about 3 months and built a somewhat healthier body. I also did cycling for a couple of weeks. Around July time frame I had this very annoying knee pain and experts have finally diagnosed that this could be due to the cycling I did in july. It does not help that I am a bit flat - footed.
Keyboard - One of my dreams has always been and will always be, "music". To be able to learn and play music. It has never really materialised. My attempts to learn violin in 2003 was a shocking failure. I thought this was because I chose the wrong instrument. So this time around I chose the Keyboard. I started going to some classes, found some passion, put some money into a keyboard. All I could manage in this front was to be able to play some crap hindi songs. So no tick marks here ....
Driving - Hurrah !! Full marks here. I have passed the most challenging driving test in the world. I am a full UK driving license holder. It was one of the toughest "exams" for me and I am quite glad I got it out of my way.
Yoga - I had planned to learn some basic yoga at the bare minimum. Sadly, I have not yet made any start in this front.
Books - I did read my fair share of books, but by no means can I be compared with other avid reader friends of mine like the ones here, here and here.
Movies - I was supposed to start watching some good world movies. I did have a shortlist of some swedish, korean and japanese movies. Again no tick marks here (or may be a 10% tick mark) since I did watch only a very very small number of em.

Last but by no means the least this year has seen some very significant changes to my personal life which has been a truly roller-coaster ride !!!!

All in all a very enjoyable 2010, and welcome 2011.....

Ubuntu... yet again

2010-12-28T14:40:00.001-08:00

It is that time of the year again. The time when I try install Ubuntu in my personal desktop, try it and see if I can get to use it for my personal computing purposes. Every single time, without fail, Ubuntu has come a cropper. Most of it is definitely not Ubuntu’s fault.

The last time I tried Ubuntu, Google Chat Video Chrome was not yet available for Linux (remember Google talking about Open Source and all that??), Skype messenger was pathetic bad and crap. And no, don’t even go to softwares like “Wine” which allows you to install Windows packages in Linux. They are like Cross-dressers... neither here not there. You will end up trouble shooting most softwares to work with Wine, when all you need to do is just start using them.

So today I installed Ubuntu on my Windows using the “Windows Installer”. It works like a charm especially if you have admin rights on your desktop. I was up and running in about 15 minutes and here is what I immediately noticed.

Google video in linux works … atlast !!
Some softwares for which linux packages did not exist earlier now have them which is good news.
No need of an Anti-Virus software that slows your system down by 80% while claiming to protect it.

Now the bad ones (and like I said it is not Ubuntu team’s fault at all)

Skype for Linux is still bad, outdated and crap. They simply cannot be bothered to make software for Free OSes. Same for “Yahoo Messenger”
There is no iTunes. This was the situation earlier as well, and making a software for Linux was never on their agenda. However, the last time around I was able to use softwares like “MediaMonkey” to manage music. This time around I *really* have an iphone and ipad. So I would like to sync videos, photos, apps (including books), vlc apps. So there is simply no way around it. (Like I said “Wine” is not an acceptable solution)
SMPlayer installation is still flaky. You still have to run the “sudo apt..get whatever smplayer”. I mean seriously, are you guys going to make users remember syntaxes to various commands and torture them with command line clients.? FFS, why can they not do a “deb” package or something like that. I say that again, and not for the last time “Software Installation should be just one-click on a downloaded artifact from internet”. And if it isn’t then that OS will not be deemed “fit for personal computing purposes”.
Again not Ubuntu’s fault, but there is no evernote for Linux at all. I mean Evernote is the best piece of software you would ever get “for free”.
Office - Let’s put it this way “Office is NOT a cloud thing”. There are very few things that Microsoft as a company got it right and one of them is definitely “The Microsoft Office”. Despite Google screaming from the top of it’s voice that “Documents are meant to be on the Cloud”, I am not quite satisfied with that argument. Not unless they can build every single feature of the desktop into the web (which is probably a couple of years away). Anytime you want to use a remotely non-trivial feature of the Office, Google docs come a cropper.

So I go back to Windows..... bye bye Linux !!!

Webservices for the utter dummies

2010-10-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

Webservices has always been the dark-corner of the house for most people. Even for some of the most experienced developers, "webservices" is their nemesis. A lot of them cannot write a simple working Web service and a client to go with it. In the last 3 weeks or so, I was asked by atleast 3 people about how to write/consume web services and I actually figured that there are no "useful" tutorials to get a webservice up and running in no-time. Trust me, just google and you will find around 100s of tutorials using CXF etc etc but not a single example that I can download, copy, run with no external dependencies. I was sure it was possible to create/access web services with ZERO external dependencies outside the JDK (although this means I wont get some goodies associated with other frameworks), so here is my attempt. I like tutorials that are totally dumbed down, downloadable, pastable, runnable. So to follow this you just need a working JDK 1.6+ above and may be eclipse. With eclipse, create a new Java Project (Make sure to use the 1.6+ JDK in Windows -> Preferences), create a package and start pasting the following classes. Lets first write a service defintion for adding two numbers,

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

import javax.jws.WebMethod;
import javax.jws.WebParam;
import javax.jws.WebService;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding;
import javax.jws.soap.SOAPBinding.Style;

@WebService(serviceName="MathsService", 
  targetNamespace="http://www.ekanathk.com", 
  endpointInterface = "com.ekanathk.webservices.MathsService")
@SOAPBinding(style = Style.RPC)
public interface MathsService {

 @WebMethod
 Integer add(@WebParam(name="first") Integer first, 
   @WebParam(name="second") Integer second);
 
}

And a very complex/scientific implementation for this service (and make sure you understand this class thoroughly)

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

import javax.jws.WebService;

@WebService(serviceName="MathsService", 
  targetNamespace="http://www.ekanathk.com", 
  endpointInterface = "com.ekanathk.webservices.MathsService")
public class DefaultMathsService implements MathsService {

 @Override
 public Integer add(Integer first, Integer second) {
  return Integer.valueOf(first + second);
 }
}

Thats it!! You have written a web service. Now lets write an application that will publish this service,

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

import javax.xml.ws.Endpoint;

public class Server {

 private static final String ENDPOINT = "http://127.0.0.1:9112/maths";

 public static void main(String[] args) {
  Endpoint.publish(ENDPOINT, new DefaultMathsService());
  System.out.println("I am up and running at " + ENDPOINT + "?wsdl");
 }
}

Right click this class, Run as -> Java Application. Assuming 9112 port is available and if it is not available surely something is wrong with your computer (it is a weird number BTW). Ok, if it is not available choose some other number it does not matter ! When it is up an running it prints out the following,

I am up and running at http://127.0.0.1:9112/maths?wsdl

Do not shutdown the server. Fire a browser and point to this URL, you must see a beautiful WSDL file. A WSDL basically explains what a web service in a complex xml file. Lets start sending messages to it. Download SOAPUI, install it, and create a New SOAPUI project. Provide the wsdl link above and you can now see operations available. Under the "add" operation you should see a sample "Request 1". Put 4 and 5 for the arguments and ensure you get a 9 back. If you get something other than 9 make sure to debug the complex logic that we did at

return Integer.valueOf(first + second);

Did you type it correct? Sending messages via SOAPUI is good, but we are programmers aren't we? So lets write a client that simply uses SOAP protocol has no knowledge of the MathsService.class

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;

import javax.xml.soap.MessageFactory;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPBody;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPConnection;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPConnectionFactory;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPElement;
import javax.xml.soap.SOAPMessage;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;

public class DynamicClient {

 private String endPoint;
 private String method = "add";
 private String namespaceUri;
 
 public DynamicClient(String endPoint, String namespaceUri) {
  this.endPoint = endPoint;
  this.namespaceUri = namespaceUri;
 }

 public Integer performAdd(Integer a, Integer b) throws Exception {
  SOAPConnection connection = null;
  try {
   //Lets first construct an empty message
   SOAPMessage message = MessageFactory.newInstance().createMessage();;
   SOAPBody soapBody = message.getSOAPBody();
   //Lets add our "add" message part
   SOAPElement requestElement = soapBody.addChildElement(
                        message.getSOAPPart().getEnvelope().createName(method, "web", namespaceUri));
   //Lets add our "arguments"
   requestElement.addChildElement("first").setValue(a.toString());
   requestElement.addChildElement("second").setValue(b.toString());
   //Print the request xml out, just to amuse ourselves
   System.out.println("Request is " + getMessageAsXml(message.getSOAPPart().getContent()));
   SOAPConnectionFactory soapConnFactory = SOAPConnectionFactory.newInstance();
   //This is our connection to make a call
   connection = soapConnFactory.createConnection();
   //Actually make a call
   SOAPMessage response = connection.call(message, endPoint);
   Document doc = response.getSOAPBody().extractContentAsDocument();
   //Print the response again to amuse ourselves
   System.out.println("Response is " + getMessageAsXml(new DOMSource(doc)));
   //Extract the value of interest ie, the sum
   return Integer.valueOf(doc.getElementsByTagName("return").item(0).getTextContent());
  } finally {
   if(connection != null) {
    connection.close();
   }
  }
 }
 
 /**
  * Use this to print a request message or a response message
  */
 private String getMessageAsXml(Source sourceContent) throws Exception {
  ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
  TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
  Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
  // Set the output for the transformation
  StreamResult result = new StreamResult(baos);
  transformer.transform(sourceContent, result);
  return baos.toString();
 }
 
}

And now finally lets invoke the client as below (Remember the server should be up at this point. In eclipse you can click on the drop down in the console whenever multiple clients are fired)

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

public class Client {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  //The end point and the namespace
  DynamicClient client = new DynamicClient("http://127.0.0.1:9112/maths", 
    "http://www.ekanathk.com");
  System.out.println(client.performAdd(5, 7));
 }
}

Make sure this prints 12, otherwise you know which line to debug, no?? The DynamicClient is not using the fact that the MathsService class is in its classpath already. So, it does not have to go about constructing explicit messages? So lets write a NeatClient as below

package com.ekanathk.webservices;

import java.net.URL;

import javax.xml.namespace.QName;
import javax.xml.ws.Service;

public class NeatClient {

 public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
  URL url = new URL("http://127.0.0.1:9112/maths?wsdl");
  // Qualified name of the service:
  // 1st arg is the service URI
  // 2nd is the service name published in the WSDL
  QName qname = new QName("http://www.ekanathk.com", "MathsService");
  // Create, in effect, a factory for the service.
  Service service = Service.create(url, qname);
  // Extract the endpoint interface, the service "port".
  MathsService maths = service.getPort(MathsService.class);
  
  System.out.println(maths.add(5, 7));
 }
}

That is much neater because it does not show you sending soap xml documents (does them internally). But the key is you need to have access to the class "MathsService" in the classpath. This may not be always true. So CXF, AXIS and wsimport offer to create these proxy classes from a wsdl.

Immortal chess game

2010-07-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

Immortal chess game - This is the legendary immortal chess game played between Kasparov and Topalov in 1999 and I am glad that Kevin chose to commentate on this match. This is still a game that I have memories of when I was around 12th grade and I had heard that this was one of the best games ever played. Without further ado here is the link... This game is all about how Kasparov could sacrifice a rook (and potentially two rooks) to finish off the game and how deep his insight was since he could actually look 15 moves down the line. Also Topalov thought for one full hour before he accepted the sacrifice thinking he could manage to be safe... but boy could he be any more wrong? Kevin is obviously an excellent chess commentator and all his explanations are so easy “even an MBA can understand it”. And remember I have an MBA ? So go ahead take a cup of coffee and re-live this magical game played about 10 years ago. I am trying to locate an Anand v Kasparov game in the 90s which was won by Anand which I thought was fought very hard..... if any one can remember please post back ...

Raavan - Don't run away ...

2010-06-21T02:56:00.001-07:00

Raavan - Don't run away ...

No this is not a review. Plus I don't get the point of telling the story in a review. I mean my nephew who was born 2 months ago might know the story. And telling the story in a review is a precious waste of time and words.

Besides, if you don't need reviews for one thing, then it has got to be cinema especially as an Indian. Oh yes I would read reviews for SLR cameras, Philips shaver kits but cinema is something where I can have an opinion of my own. Of course it will be a cliche if I tell you that photography is out of the world. Oh and before you judge make sure you see/read these.

As a data lover I also love metadata, the data about data, the "making". So here it is

http://starvijay-tv.blogspot.com/2010/06/raavanan-manirathnam-paarvayil.html

If you do not have 40 minutes at your disposal you need the third and fourth videos.

The bridge in the climax was a bespoke set built by the team.
The villages were a set in "Kata kata" song so they had to paint them in white to shoot the tamil version and again in yellow to shoot the hindi version. Making a movie in both tamil and hindi is like having two legs in two boats that are not essentially going parallel. Sometimes they get close and you are happy and sometimes when they part your trousers (and many other things) get torn.
Some of these sets are so original that people think they were actually real.
Music, oh yeah if you thought that the movie had 6 songs then look further. I am an avid collector of BGMs or re-recordings. In the video Rahman sings a song which is when Vikram sees Priyamani after the rape scene. Very touching !!! There is another song that comes towards the end, I am trying to locate the audio piece for it.

There are two schools of film making that I know "Hollywood surrealism" and "Italian Neorealism". I won't delve into what they are, but Mani is a Hollywood surrealist. He had sets for Nayakan and the slums in Dhalapathi, Bombay were all big built sets.

Are torrents legal ?

2010-05-20T06:02:00.001-07:00

Are torrents legal ? is what I get asked many times by my friends.

A torrent is a protocol for peer to peer file sharing. If you don't know what torrent means already, then I am very sure that one line definition did not make sense at all. What that means is if I have a file of 700 MB (yeah, those DVDrip/avi files) and host it in my server for my dear pals to download, and if 100 people download from my website, then I have to pay for 700 * 100 = 70GB of bandwidth, plus server maintenance etc..

Lets say, I divide the 700MB file into 700 parts and specify them in a torrent and store them in my machine (aka seeding), and when 10 people ask for it simultaneously, lets call them p1, p2...p10, I give 70 parts to each one of them (hopefully disjunct set of pieces). Now, a torrent has a tracker, so a p1 who downloaded parts 1 - 70 knows how to find p2 with parts 71-140 and p1 gets those parts from p2 instead of actually harassing my server. Once p1, p2 .. p10 all get their parts they all have the full 700MB file. Now when a p11 comes in and asks for the file, they simply do not harass me, the torrent gets p11 the pieces from p1-p10 in whatever random order it pleases. Now, that was oversimplifying so you can wiki/google/bing these terms and read the 20000 page protocol spec to see how these are done.

Are they legal? The key defence for these torrent file hosters (thepiratebay, isohunt etc) is that they do not actually host the 700MB file content which violates copyright. They just host the torrent files which enable people to find other people to share content.

US DMCA is the act that governs copyright issues with digital content in the US. One of the clauses that was added was a "made available" clause which meant that even if you "made available" by direct/indirect means any copyrighted content it amounted to violation. This obviates the question of legality in the US. Note the boldface, only in the US. European union also have similar laws but there are minor differences in the way it is implemented.

Our pals over at Sweden have a slightly different copyright law which can be explained in many 1000s of words but to cut long story short, they don't have the "made available" clause. This means hosting torrent files in Sweden is not illegal. Note "not illegal" does not essentially mean "legal" in legal terms. It just means that no one can bring you to court for that act.

"The Pirate Bay" is a company hosted at Sweden. It is one of the biggest providers of torrent files and they have successfully warded off some many high profile lawsuits from the heavy weights like Microsoft, EA, Warner Bros etc. All notices have been posted here and some responses are very funny (If you are not the person who is losing out because of these pirates)

This website has been banned in many countries but not in the US and UK simply because they have "Freedom of Internet" there. This means a government does not get to decide what is suitable for an adult, the adult decides for himself :) Plenty of debates always happen around this issue including asking all ISPs in the world to block torrent traffic but in one sentence "downloading material with torrents is not legal in most countries, you can be sued for that" but "hosting torrent files is not illegal in Sweden"

To me, copyright owners should reconsider their marketing/sales strategy. There simply is no way to prevent people sharing files in torrent. There simply isn't. The copyright laws in Sweden may change but no business should ever bank on that. The music companies are still sticking to the strategies they invented in the 1920s viz creating CDs, sending them to stores and making people buy them for £10. iTunes just cuts the "physically going to the store" effort but literally costs the same if not more.

Music listening has changed over generations. My father listened to only 4 artists in his lifetime. This generation listens to about 40 artists, 7000 songs (globalisation you see). Is it possible to buy all these songs ? The fact that people listen to songs in 12 different languages does not help it either. Music companies need to also think about alternate strategies like Spotify. It is an excellent model which makes a lot of sense and also ensures that copyright owners get a fair share of the revenues. The key then is, can music companies come forward, shed their ego and collaborate with other music companies and work with a platform like this ?

Same can be said about online movie rental companies where you can buy say 20 movies of the same production house for a flat rate of $20. To me, you can keep blaming people for what they are doing, but the intelligent business folks will find an opportunity everywhere.

Moral: When 99% of people do something the wrong way, there must be something wrong/inconveniencing about the right way!

Apple iPad

2010-04-26T03:12:00.001-07:00

Apple iPad is definitely value for money !

Yes I said that. Don't go by what market says, Or what those reviewers say, Or by what the Apple bashers say. It may be a good value for money if and only if you fall into the category of people explained below.

Do you own an e-book reader? Do you even have the faintest idea how much the best book reader costs? Kindle as it is, costs $259 (in UK life can be even worse). Now if you think an e-book reader is not really a good device and you don't find a necessity for it then iPad might not sound worthwhile for you.

Do you own a music player? Not just the cheap ones. Are you an avid music lover? A good test for this is check if your music has the fields like "Album Artist", "Composer", "Year" etc filled out. Have you edited the "Info" section of a song, ever? If NO then you really really don't care about your music. Don't worry about it. Ignorance is bliss of course :)

A good music player gadget costs at least $80-$100. I can explain why in 2000 lines but lets skip that. I get the point that it can be integrated with your mobile phone. Some Sony Ericsson phones beat Apple when it comes to their music quality. But, their album browsing interface is certainly not as good as Apple's iTunes (although I think Media Monkey is the best in this business).

Do you own a blackberry or some such device ? (Yes that device which has a small screen and about 50 small buttons that is considered cool by the office going suit-wearing Bankers) You certainly need to keep your contacts, calendars and mail synced with all devices. Any one who thinks this feature is not necessary does not clearly understand the effort involved in keeping the phone numbers of contacts in sync with ... say to your gmail contacts. My only source of contacts is GMail. I keep it synced with my iPhone (2 way) and I will certainly never ever send a message like "I have lost my mobile and all the numbers with it. Please mail me or message me or send pigeons with your numbers !". Never ! It is a night-marish situation and one I will never have in my life. Any device that is capable of doing this costs about $200+ upwards

Put all three together and you already spent about $500 on these (iPad is a little less than that with no 3G but with 3G I think it is $650+) . Now the final question is, do you already have an iPhone? When I bought an iPhone, I thought the Stanza app (for reading pdfs) will be good enough, but the point is the more I read the more I feel the need for a bigger interface to read/search documents. So if you want a decent gadget that does all these (and you don't mind carrying a bit of weight) then iPad will work for you.

Also, if you are one of those guy who thinks tablet PCs are not needed for this world at all (and I am one of them) then we are certainly wrong. Read what Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky said about Tablet PCs, different sized hand-held devices for different people. They are here, and they will be the future.

In a nutshell, if you think either Kindle/Notebook PCs are worthwhile then please do yourself a favour by buying an iPad :)

Why should "StackOverflow" matter?

2010-02-16T06:09:00.001-08:00

Why should "StackOverflow" matter?

If you are a programmer and if you have not heard of http://stackoverflow.com/ just visit it once. If you have already visited this website and if you have not asked a question then please use this the next time you have a programming question. If you have already asked a question but never answered someone else's question, then freaking do so. If you have done all the above then don't bother reading further .....

Stack Overflow is a colloborative wiki + blog + forum + digg/reddit/any-other-voting-mechanism as described here. Clearly it is in the list of "Top 10 brilliantly done websites" in my list. This website is designed by a programmer called Joel Spolsky (The next time someone asks you who wrote MS Excel you have an answer), Jeff Atwood and many others who don't need any introduction (at least from me) in the programming circles.

The idea is simple, you ask questions, you get answers. If your question is not well formatted and if you are lucky some expert can actually edit the question (it is a wiki you see) and answer the question for you (and also a forum). You get to accept if the answer worked for you (like experts-exchange) or not. If you are another person who has the same/similar problem, you can upvote/downvote any response (just like reddit/digg/any voting mechanism). Those blokes who made those responses will have their reputation enhanced by a few points depending on your reputation and the upvote. Beyond a certain rank, a user can do as much as an administrator.

"Why would someone be motivated to do that?" is a very common question. Because there is also an ulterior motive to most programmers who do this, as they earn more reputation they get badges and move up the ranks. You can create a resume from this website and your answers, upvotes are there for everyone to see. Employers can see them, analyse your answers and get access to what you have done in the past before hiring you.

This might turn out to be a much better hiring policy than picking a candidate from "LinkedIn" (which these days also offer some Q&A kinda thing but not as full-fledged as this). In LinkedIn all you get is "canned responses", where every X has atleast 4 people who can vouch for the fact that X is an excellent team player, technical guru, accountable ...yada yada.......

Right back to the point, just use this website :)

Ray - The complete Man

2009-11-10T14:32:00.001-08:00

Ray - The complete Man

"Speaking of Films" is a book by Gopa Majumdar which is basically an English translation of Satyajit Ray's "Bishay Chalachitra", a collection of articles/lectures over a period of time. I am simply amazed by Mr. Ray's vision, his thought process and his keen observation. It goes without saying that Mr. Ray brought "neorealism" in Indian movies and he is probably the founder of "Parallel Cinema".

For once, I really wish our country had just one language, so that I would have been able to enjoy Ray's writings in his native medium of thought ie, Bengali. Nevertheless Gopa has done an excellent job of translating and it is an excellent book. I always thought Ray was a more hands-on person than a theoretical person. Atleast Quentin Tarantino was. When someone asked him which film school he went to? He said he went to "films" and not "film schools" (He could say this and still make great films because he was simply brilliant). But Ray was not just brilliant, he also had sound theoretical knowledge to back it up. This book has about 16 chapters and each chapter analyses in depth about Art, Color, Background Music and Literature in Cinema. I could have grasped roughly about 10% of what Mr. Ray has tried to convey given that I am a slow and poor learner.

All these articles are intense and cover depth, so this is not exactly a Chetan Bhagat novel (which I am not denigrating by any means since I love his novels as well). It is simply amazing how well read Ray is and how much he knows about world cinema. He even gives a "workshop"ish exercise by taking a passage from a novel "Pather Panchali" by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay and contrasting it with a scene in his movie. Extensive discussions on what kind of camera angles/positions used can also be seen.

When I read about his views on the Hollywood talkies and the New cinema wave in Hollywood I was just in awe of the amount of knowledge this person possessed. He simply seems to know the entire spectrum. For example, a simple read of his chapter on "The Language of cinema" gave me a notion of what Hollywood greats like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Ingmar Bergman (Swedish), Jean Renoir (French), Goddard, Truffaurd were all about. In the same breath he also contrasts Eisenstein, Pudovshki and about 20 different Russian film makers in a different chapter. He also gave glimpses on different styles of film making and the different shades of art found in these cinemas. For me it was more like an "Information Overload" since I had never heard about 90% of the names.

Finally he was quite critical of Bengali movies because they did not "ooze" artistic excellence and realism. According to him, Bengali Cinema was filled with stage actors who took all the principles of the theatre like "over acting, over emoting, loud/unrealistic dialogue deliveries" to Cinema. In software parlance, this can be contrasted to the code that got written when all Plsql/c++ developers migrated to Java in the 2000s. I worked on a code base in Java mostly written by PLSQL developers and had to put up with field names like m_personId in classes (with the m_ to indicate that it was a member variable) and local variable names like l_orgId (l_ indicating that the variable was local).

In the entire "Indian Cinema" circle, yours truly thinks that only "Bengali" and "Malayalam" movies reflected reality. Bollywood, Tamil (Balu Mahendra, Mahendran, Balachandar) and Telugu (K. Vishwanathan) supply realism in minor doses but it is largely "lifeless" art. Given these I was not sure why Ray was hyper-critical on Bengali contemporary movies (Contemporary here means the 50s-70s) but perhaps he has high standards.

Overall a very recommended read for people who want to understand the nuances of film making.

PS: The previous blog was a small excerpt from this book by Mr. Ray.

Guess who said this

2009-11-09T12:13:00.001-08:00

A small teaser from a 220 page book (yes I like small books you see) below. Hopefully I am not sued for copyrights...

"Our films have consistently neglected these details (of how a story is being said) in their preoccupation with content (what is being said). Our critics too have shown a tendency to judge a film predominantly on what it says rather than how it says it. I have no wish to belittle content, but we must remember that the lousiest of films have been made on the loftiest of themes. That a director says all the right things is in itself no guarantee of artistry. At best it is a reflection of his attitude, or his ideology. If it is a true reflection and often there is no way of telling it will mark him out as an honest man, but not necessarily as an artist. .... There are film makers who are not overly concerned with what they say as long as they can say it with style or finesse. One would sooner describe them as craftsmen, because it is difficult to think of an artist who is totally devoid of an attitude to life and society which he reveals in his work."

Guess who said this ?

What is Honorary citizenship of the U...

2009-11-02T03:41:00.001-08:00

What is Honorary citizenship of the United states? My guru Wikipedia states that it has only ever been conferred to 6 people. What does this mean? They can do what any citizen could do in the US? As in really, did/can Winston Churchill vote in US general elections?

The biggest question for me is what is the Honorary Citizenship that was given by the states? Does that mean one can stay in the city on their own merit? Ms. Mallika Sherawat (wikipedia says her age is 28, now guys I got eyes and I can see ....) was awarded honorary citizenship for LA. I remember many people like Dr. Sivaji Ganesan given citizenship for Ohio.

Is there some clarity on what does this honorary citizenship awards given by states mean? Is it just a medal and a shield?

Shakespeare and racism

2009-10-29T04:02:00.001-07:00

Shakespeare and racism

It is not an unsurprising fact for most language experts but I could not comprehend this accusation. Not that my knowledge of Shakespeare was extensive by any means. I wanted to read his works "verbatim" and find out if this was true. On a largely uneventful Sunday with nothing to do, I tried to search for his books in my library. It is a blessing if your library is within 100 feet from your house because your only excuse i.e, laziness to go to a library is no longer valid. I searched the whole catalogue and got books which were dissertations, summaries but I wanted a verbatim copy. Finally I laid my hand on one "The Merchant of Venice" and lo ! I could not understand one bit of it. How else could you comprehend the following iambic pentameter,

You know me well, and herein spend but time
To wind about my love with circumstance,
And out of doubt you do me now more wrong
In making question of my uttermost
Than if you had made waste of all I have

This is nothing but Antonio's plea to Bessanio to not waste time and tell him what he wanted right away. The verbatim dissertation is "... Doubting I would back you unreservedly hurts more than squandering my fortune!...." Ah even this dissertation needs another dissertation to be understood.

Portia the beautiful maid is proposed by the Prince of Morocco (of dark colour of course). There are three cases of Gold, Silver and Lead of which one contains the portrait of Portia. Portia already tells her maid that she hates him because of the colour. Fortunately for her the prince chooses the gold case and it has a manuscript that reads "All that glitters is not gold.." and he loses her, whereupon Portia utters the words,

A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go. Let all of his complexion choose me so.

Which literally means "May all of his dark colours choose the same" [and never marry a woman like me]. Portia also ridicules a German for his manners, a Scottish for his accent, a French for his manhood?

I won't even go near Shylock because he is a Jew villain. He is just one among the many villains in Shakespeare who are non-Christians. It is also known that Antonio has spit on his Jewish beard, kicked him before asking him for money.

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,

Shylock's origins are constantly the matter of contention and even Shylock rebukes Antonio with anti-christ taunts. And now last but not the least the mother of all instances. When Shylock is defeated in court he is subjected to several punishments for treachery, intention to kill etc. His punishments include "conversion to christianity"??

Two things provided more, that, for this favour,
He presently become a Christian;
The other, that he do record a gift,

And this punishment is of course accepted.....

Non profitable website ??

2009-10-20T03:17:00.001-07:00

Non profitable website ??

Charu Niveditha is a popular writer in tamil. He has written english novels as well and commands respect for his writings. This is his website. Can you spot what I think?

It has Nalli silks ad in the left, Eagle T-shirts ad below the ad, a link to buy his books from his publication in the center frame, an ad for SKP Engineering college, and an ad for travel website "nearmyairport". It also has images of his spiritual GURUs and then there is something staring at you...

".. is a non profitable website. You can contribute for developing this website. ...."

I do not have a problem with the second statement "you can contribute...". Of course contributions are a major mode of sustenance for these websites which cannot be monitored on the basis of revenue or pay-per-click ads. But to call this a "non profitable website" ? That is wrong. Simply wrong..

Even if he did not take money for these ads it is still not a non-profitable website because it clearly advertises a whole bunch of things that is commercial. Will people close to him point this out?

பொதுவாகவே இந்த விமரிசகர்கள், விமரிசனம...

2009-10-19T04:15:00.001-07:00

Written by Sujatha in 1972 ..... (took about an hour to type)

நவம்பர் 1972 - சுஜாதா "கணையாழி" பத்திரிக்கைக்கு எழுதியது. மிகுந்த சிரமப் பட்டு நானே டைப் செய்தது

-----------------

பொதுவாகவே இந்த விமரிசகர்கள், விமரிசனம் செய்யப்படும் புத்தகத்தையோ அல்லது திரைப்படத்தையோ பற்றிக் கவலைப்படுவதில்லை. அவர்களுக்கெல்லாம் முக்கியம் தத்தம் சொந்த அறிவுகளின் விஸ்தாரத்தைக் காண்பிப்பதே. விமரிசனம் எதற்கு தேவைப்படுகிறது? பார்ப்பவர்களின் அல்லது படிப்பவர்களின் ரசனையை உயர்த்துவதற்காக என்று கொள்ளலாமா ?

பார்ப்பவர்கள் அல்லது படிப்பவர்கள் யார்? இந்த விமரிசகர்களின் இருபது முப்பது நண்பர்களைத் தவிர மற்றவர்கள் "ராணி" அல்லது "ஆனந்த விகடன்" தொடர் கதை வாரந் தவறாமல் படித்து விட்டு "விமலாவின் தியாகம் என் கண்களில் நீர் வரவழைத்து விட்டது" என்று ஆசிரியருக்கு கடிதம் எழுதும் ஜாதி. அல்லது கே. பாலசந்தர் உலகிலேயே தலை சிறந்த டைரக்டர், சிவாஜி உலகப் பெரும் நடிகர் என்று "தலை சிறந்தவர்களை" சேவிக்கும் ஜாதி. சங்கராச்சாரியார் அல்லது சோவின் நாடகம் அல்லது ராசியின் புதிய சில்க் புட்டா, டிசம்பர் மாதத்து சீசன் கச்சேரி, அச்சாணி போன்ற நாடகங்கள்.. இப்படி எத்தனை பெண்கள், பாட்டிகள் , ஆபீஸ் அவசரக்காரர்கள், அல்லது "நான் தமிழ் படிப்பதில்லை" என்று பெருமைப்படும் தலை கலைந்த பம்பாய் பக்கம் மூக்கை நீட்டிக் கொன்டிருக்கும் மாணவர்கள் மாணவிகள். இவர்கள் தான் மிகப் பெரும்பாலானவர்கள். இவர்களை இந்த விமர்சகர்கள் எப்படி அடையப் போகிறார்கள்?

எல்லா விமர்சனங்களும் கால விரயம், பேப்பர் விரயம் என்று படித்தது ஞாபகம் வருகிறது. சாதாரணமாக ஜனங்கள் விமர்சனத்தால் பாதிக்க பட்டு, ஒரு புத்தகத்தையோ அல்லது சினிமாவையோ தவிர்ப்பது தவிர்க்காமல் இருப்பது இல்லை என்று நினைக்கிறேன். அவர்கள் முன்னால் தீர்மானித்து விடுகிறார்கள். அவர்கள் சினிமா பார்ப்பதும் படிப்பதும் ஏதோ கலை உணர்ச்சியைப் பொருத்து நிகழ்வதில்லை என்று நினைக்கிறார்கள். அவர்கள் கையில் இருக்கும் பணம், கடன் வாங்கும் திறமை, அவர்கள் நேர நிலைமை இவைகளைப் பொருத்தது தான். சினிமா கதைகள் எல்லாம் பொழுது போக்கு மட்டும் அல்ல, ஒரு கலை வடிவம் என்று அவர்களுக்குக் காட்டுவதற்கு நம்மிடம் உதாரணங்களும் இல்லை. இது தான் இதில் சோகம்.

எனவே இவர்களின் பழக்கத்தை விமர்சனங்களால் மாற்ற முடியாது. அதுவும் இந்த விமர்சகர்களால் நிச்சயம் முடியாது. இவர்கள் தெரியப்படுத்துவதெல்லாம் தத்தம் மேதவித்தனங்களையே. படிக்காமல் கேட்காமல் பார்க்காமல் எழுதுவது இவர்களுக்கு கைவந்த கலை. ஸ்டீபன் பாட்டரின் "review manship" வழிகளை இயல்பாகக் கடைப்பிடிப்பவர்கள். இவர்களை ஒதுக்கி விடுவது நல்லது. மற்றொரு வகை ஹிந்துவின் ஞாயிற்றுக்கிழமை வகை "This book is vellum bound in calf leather, contain 384pp"

இந்த இரண்டு வகை விமரிசகர்களுக்கு நடுவே சில விமரிசகர்கள் நமக்கு இன்னும் தேவை.

E Book Reader suggestions?

2009-10-02T03:07:00.001-07:00

E Book Reader suggestions? Please help me out ! I want to buy an e-book reader. The internet is bombarded with features of the ebook reader that I hardly ever care. All I want is a reader with about 1GB memory or to be more precise the ability to store say 10 pdf books at the max.

I hate these talks of "Oh you could buy books at amazon store for $10 a book". I agree that book writers are to be paid the money they are due. But what if I already paid for an e-book and downloaded it as a pdf? Do they want me to pay a license once for e-book and again for the kindle-book?

Righto, back to the point. I need an ebook reader and all I care about is whether it can store/read about 10 pdf books.

Any suggestions, please?

I never read movie reviews. And will ...

2009-09-20T03:55:00.001-07:00

I never read movie reviews. And will most probably never write one. Infact I think if "IT Manager" comes across as the most hated profession, a "Movie Reviewer" comes as a close second. When I am about to watch an English movie I do read about the technicians involved and their related movies so I get an idea what to expect. This is because there are some genres which are not at the top of my priority list. Like chessy romance (Marley and Me), people with unrealistic powers fighting against each other like X-Men 1,2...100. I don't understand how different it is going to be from playing say, a first person shooting video game to watching X-Men or Punisher.

A few people are always exempt from this. Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Al Pacino, Rajini, Kamal and AR Rahman. I don't care what the reviewers tell me. I am an avid watcher of cinema and even if 11 out of 10 reviewers tell me not to go for a movie I would still watch it if the movie involves some of the afore-mentioned people!!!

Don't read any reviews for Unnai Pol Oruvan. If you did not watch "A Wednesday" (I did about a year ago), then even better !! Just go and watch this Kamal Hassan movie. You wouldn't repent it. I have never seen anyone in any language saying a remake was better than the original. The best comment could be "honest remake" but never better than the original. So because I can't define what "better" means I am not going to attempt contrasting these.

I always look out for hidden sarcasm in Kamal's movies. My highlights for the movie....

No more "Ulaganayagan" (Universal Hero) title. It is just Kamal. Nice !
He (Unlike say Aamir Khan) has always been accused of not giving his co-stars enough space to perform. But if you go by the screen footage in Unnai Pol Oruvan, Mr. Lal has more and he actually dominates !
The dialogues have some interesting "Kamal" bits. Watch out for the bit where he talks about "A common man walks into the election booth and finds his name missing. On further questioning, he is being told that he does not exist". This actually happened with Kamal in the last election. The big celebrity that he is, he was told that he did not exist in the voter list !!!

Overall this not a review and I don't even understand how people assign N stars out of M. But just go and watch it !!! We need more movies of this kind :)

Who else thinks that iphone - G2Andro...

2009-09-17T06:05:00.001-07:00

Who else thinks that iphone - G2Android comparison is very similar to the IDEA - Eclipse comparison ? If the question was "Which was the better phone/IDE?", the answer would be a straight forward - IDEA / iphone.

But when most people ask "Which is a better phone/IDE" they are actually asking "Which is a better phone/IDE considering all factors mainly COST/addon licenses". Most people know that IntelliJ is the best IDE for Java/J2EE (or whatever names you call it) for the features but at $500 per license it makes us think if the delta is worth the cost.

I was planning to buy the iphone but I am ditching it to buy a Tmobile Android. I have lived in denial about the need for phones being the computer in 2010 for a long time now and I think I should join the "smart phone" bandwagon now !

So of I go ....

No good movies on History

2009-09-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

Perhaps one of our curses is that we will never get good quality "history movies". Never ! Any attempts to make such a thing will be opposed by radical groups, politicians with an idea of getting some mileage out of the hype by opposing these. What these people do not understand is that, after a few years no one would even know what happened on a historical event. The younger generation would not have enough awareness. I for one feel I do not know enough about many events in my country.

I am a history lover and I admire historical documentaries, movies, books around it. There are so many books/movies around First World War, Second World War, Pearl Harbour, Nuclear bombs, Illuminatis, French revolution, Great economic depression, Great train robberies, emperors everything. But when it comes to Indian history? None ! Absolutely none. Except may be for the old badly made sops like the ones on Tippu sultan that were relayed in DD in the 1990s. What I also admire about history is their "view - points". While "Pearl Harbour" (2001 movie) vividly paints the American side of things it was great to watch "Pearl Harbor, The view from Japan" by Kunio Kurita.

Here (India), there is only one way of making a historical movie. You cannot take sides, you have to be politically correct, you have to satisfy a wide breadth of audience and not offend even one person! If you do then your movie/work is doomed. The only movies that stand out from these are movies like Mangal Pandey, Jodha Akbar (I am told Jodha was compromised to a large extent to appease a section of people). I don't want to get into reviewing them. They may be flawed but we need such "attempts". So that at least after 5 attempts someone will make a great movie. The movie "Gandhi" was not made by us. Heck, the person who acted as Gandhi was not amongst us. We managed to put up some dharnas and burnt some theatres though, when this movie released in the 80s because it had some content about Gandhi's abstinence from sex.

If I had to know about say Operation Blue star or Indira Gandhi's assassination or Rajiv Gandhi - anti LTTE operation, all we get is old reports, news articles and books written by the subordinates of these guys which promptly glorify them as martyrs. I am not claiming they are not. But I don't think there are enough diverse "view-points".

The other day I saw a documentary on BBC about Partition of India and felt it was great. It used actual footages, voices of actual personas and where possible shot sequences to illustrate the point. It gave a matter-of-fact report on the mis-doings of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. If not for movies, at least such documentaries should be made on almost all historical events. They would make a better watch than a "Kyon ki saas bhi kabhi bahu thee..." type serial (killers). No ?

Spotify

2009-07-28T05:43:00.001-07:00

Spotify is my latest craze. To put in simple terms, it is an online music library. You do not have to store all 16.5 GB songs in your hard drive, organise them, tag them with artists, album artists, composers, year etc. Just download the free client of spotify and given a decent internet connection (which is not a big deal nowadays) you are good to go.

Just search for the songs you want and start playing. Oh yes, because it is Web 2.0 it has a liberal dose of concepts like communities, sharing, playlists and commenting yada yada yada. Presently it is available only in some locations in Europe. But er, if you are not on paid service you have to listen to ads for about 0.01% of the time I guess.

I can really see a lot of potential for this kind of a service. Infact for the first time, I feel if this service covers Indian music I will pay for this !! (I have never felt like buying a paid service for any software) That way I can get rid of a huge hard drive that I keep carrying between work/home with about 17GB songs......

Another tamil blog but unfortunately ...

2009-07-28T03:48:00.001-07:00

Another tamil blog but unfortunately contents are in Tamil. So people who cant read tamil may not find it worthwhile....

http://mokkaimami.blogspot.com/

New york (Hindi)

2009-07-06T03:33:00.001-07:00

I don't understand why some great movies have really misleading promos. Take New York for instance from wiki. The image is a typical "bollywoodish" one with two guys and a girl. It is from the great Chopra house which means someone like me will immediately associate it with "Rab ne bana di jodi", "Dil to pagal hai" etc. Not that those movies are bad, just that I don't really place them in the "must see" category.

On Sunday, when "Kambhakt Ishq" was housefull, New York was the only sensible choice left. I expected 150 minutes of love, friendship, ishq, pyar, mohabbat, yuck.. whatever. But New York managed to shatter all my preconceived notions. It deals with a very difficult line of how immigrants of Islamic origin have been treated post 9/11 without taking a stance. I really liked the movie for it's originality, content and presentation. Yes, there is a love track in the movie but that serves as a nice support instead of hindering the movie's pace.

Minuses:

The initial 45 minutes features too many songs. I don't like the idea of songs in movies (except may be under exceptional circumstances).
The length could have been trimmed towards the end making the movie more crisp.
The climax inevitably adds some needless sentiments with Katrina, John and the hero in the rooftop of the FBI headquarters with shooters in helicopters around them. This almost spoils the entire movie !

Pluses:

Everything else really. And for once Katrina has showed us that she has something beyond her NRI looks and legs.

If you are really into excusing movie makers for a few silly mistakes and enjoy the bigger thing called the "movie", then this movie could work for you.

PS: By the way, this was the only movie where I saw many people of European origin filling the movie hall !

Google money saving tips

2009-06-30T06:57:00.001-07:00

Go to http://www.google.com that is the google homepage without any widgets (igoogle) or anything like that. Do a right-click and "View Source" and see the html. What do you see?

No closing </body> or </html> tags. Reason? Bandwidth. Google home page takes about a few billion requests per day and so removing about 12 characters from 1000 characters is still 1% bandwidth conserved. Google wants to conserve network bandwidth at each and every micro-penny level and this is one startling example. Most browsers know how to handle unclosed body or html tags so they just don't send those tags ! If you are a beginner in html you don't want to take that as an example !

Just for the sake of curiosity I checked the source of amazon/ebay and they have all the closing tags !!!

Dhoni was not wrong

2009-06-15T03:37:00.001-07:00

One failure and this was what the entire media was waiting for. For far too long the media could not carry bad stories on Dhoni and they had enough writing about the Mr. Unflappable, cool, level headed blah blah. Now the media gets a chance to poke the Mr. Unflappable and they do so when it really hurts :). You can read some junk here, here and here.

First for a few things, any one who still keeps saying that India does not play bounce has been in a coma for the last 5 years or so. So where was this theory when India had success in Perth, West Indies and even New Zealand? Suddenly the reports claimed that those pitches were batter friendly. No, India has won in far too many places to put that claim just because of one failure (The correct thing would be Jadeja did not play bounce well enough).

Secondly, I don't understand why people pick on Dhoni on his selection. I think he is good. People ask why Ojha was dropped? Irfan was not performing well and he must be dropped. People need to understand a few fundamental things. You have to drop a player to pick another since a squad can have only 11 players (elementary!). India's problem was the 3rd seamer in the form of Pathan was not playing well.

So most brainless people will think replacing Irfan with RPSingh was the solution. But that is not it, India HAVE to bat deep. The theory of "what can a 6th batsman do if 5 batsmen could not do it?" is rubbish. Take the last world cup where we simply won because of a partnership on the 6th wicket. It would be stupid according to me to swap RP with Irfan. To combat a loss in batting quality, the swap of RP - Irfan was compensated by Jadeja (better batter, lesser bowler than) - Ojha swap. On paper, Jadeja was an untested in international level but a decent spinner. I think Dhoni got his squad right !!

Thirdly, sending Jadeja at number 4 was not that bad a decision. You want some one to amble along just to neutralise the momentum which was ok. So what was wrong?

One, I think Jadeja should have taken some risks a little earlier, should have maintained a run a ball rate. If you cannot maintain that after 20 balls then try and get yourself OUT. This is the key in 20-20 ! Jadeja made 25 off 35 balls and the deficit of 10 balls was more than what India needed in the end.

Second and the most unpardonable offence that Dhoni/Yusuf made was giving up. India needed 9 off the 2 balls and the commentator announced that India needed every ball to cross the boundary here on (Could he be any more wrong?). And the moment Yusuf hit the ball along the ground straight to long on they ambled across for a single giving up that India could not get out of defeat. If only Yusuf tried hard and ran a TWO on that prefinal ball (let us say he had a 40% chance of completing the second run), then we needed 7 off the last ball and a six would still bring a TIE, and we could still be alive in the tournament.

I think Dhoni (as well as the commentator) lost this plot and both Dhoni and Yusuf ran along the ground for a single in an unhurried fashion. They certainly missed the fact that they could still tie had they run harder or atleast they could have stayed alive for atleast one more ball ? (What if the last ball that dhoni hit had travelled 2 inches further?)

To me, I think most of 20-20 is impulse and momentum. But you need to do the right/sensible bits. I don't think the problem was with the squad selection or batting order. The problem was common-sense. Giving up early and failing to see oppurtunities. If my crisis man Steve Waugh had been there he could have easily spotted this chance of a 2 run in the last but one ball keeping the match afloat !!

Bing..

2009-06-08T02:47:00.001-07:00

Some time ago Microsoft launched Bing "the second largest search engine" at about 8% of the traffic with "Google" in the first spot at 87% of the web SEARCH traffic (not email or anything else). The launch was very "Microsoft"y, with lots of advertisements, marketing campaigns, heavy blogging etc etc. This is in stark contest to Google where they silently slip out code, probably write a couple of blogs and then you have the millions of technology writers like "tech-crunch, reddits or read-write-web" each claiming that they found the feature first and effectively doing the marketing themselves. The only product that Google "sorta" advertised was the "Chrome" browser where they even put a download link to the supposedly fast browser Chrome in their Google search home page.

I don't know which kind of marketing is better "subtly-put-the-product-and-let-users-discover" or "bang-flood-the-user-with-here-you-go" type of marketing but this MS-Google war is good to watch.

Tendulkar's Bests

2009-03-25T04:04:00.001-07:00

I was startled when one of my friends claimed that Lara/Ponting have played more series altering innings' in the One day format (aka the dying 50-50 over format). Apparently it seems many people have the impression that Sachin has not played enough great knocks in the semi-finals/finals/series-deciding matches. That sounded ridiculous to me. I told him "I can quote atleast 10 knocks in such so-called series altering matches". And I could just quote 10 knocks from my mind without even consulting my favourite StatsGuru. I have arranged it chronologically below.

Criteria : The match must either be a final or a do-or-die game in a tournament that involves 3 or more teams. A do-or-die game would be like a knockout game which is of very high importance and you can go ahead in the tournament only by winning that match.

Wills World Series - final (India v West Indies) - Calcutta 5th Nov 1994

Sachin was the top scorer and also the bowler with the best economy rate (plus a wicket). I remember this match as Kambli's match because of some of the monstrous shots that he played. Nevertheless, the player of the match + the player of the series was this man !

Titan Cup - final (India v South Africa) - Mumbai 6th Nov 1996

To me this was the best innings of Sachin Tendulkar in an important match. Most people tend to disagree with me but here is the context. India lost to SA the last 7 times they played in an ODI (and they will lose the 4-5 matches after this one). SA had exceptional bowlers like Donald and De Villiers. Till date I think De Villiers has the best average/runs conceded stat against Sachin Tendulkar. In all the previous matches it really did not matter how much India scored, SA just knocked them down. Symcox coming in at No. 9 is testimony to how deep SA bat. (During the mid nineties all these allrounders like Gillie, Flintoff, Symonds, Dhoni had not proliferated in other teams). Kumble was the man of the match but Sachin's was an equally important contribution. The match was a delight to watch and Yours truly faked illness to miss a half-yearly physics examination just to watch this match :)

Silver Jubilee Independence Cup - 1st final (India v Pakistan) - Dhaka 14th Jan 1998

Most of you may remember the third final in this series, because of the last 3 runs off 2 balls knocked off by Mr. Hrishikesh Kanitkar who starred in atleast 20 ODI matches just because of these 10 runs that he scored. India chased their first target above 300 in the third final. But the first final is a little known match where Sachin dismantled the Aaqibs and the Mushtaqs to give us the lead. Just in case, it matters he was also the top wicket taker !!

Coco cola cup - semifinal & final (India vs Australia) - Sharjah 22 and 24th April 1998

I do not need to say anything about this match. This was the historical sand-storm match where Sachin had Australia on their knees, disposing off their bowling to wherever he fancied. Quite easily, this was considered his best.

Singer-Akai Nidahas Trophy - final (Sri Lanka v India) - Colombo 7th July 1998

Just to prove that his show in the Sharjah was not a fluke! Srilanka were the world champions in 1996 and with the likes of Jayasurya, Aravinda they still were very strong. But Sachin and Sourav had other ideas and they made the THEN longest opening partnership of 220+ runs.

Coca-Cola Champions Trophy - final (India v Zimbabwe) - Sharjah 13th Nov 1998

For ardent Sachin fans, I just have to say "Olonga" and this match will immediately spring up to their mind. Zimbabwe were by no means minnows in 1998 and they had the habit of springing up all kinds of surprises. The last time these two sides met, Olonga just ran through the top order and India lost. It was time to show who was the "Badshah of Sharjah" and Sachin rightly put this man to where he belonged. I still remember the way he walked down the track for the first ball that Olonga bowled.

ICC World Cup - India v Pakistan - Centurion 1st March 2003

Many of us who followed the 1999 world cup knew how important it was to carry some points to the super-six format of the world cup. No points would mean that even winning all the games of super-six will not guarantee a place in semi-final. India had to beat Pakistan in 2003 world cup to carry some points to super six (Refer the points table to exact scenario/understand why). When Pakistan piled up 270 and had Wasim, Waqar and Akhtar in their ranks, most of my friends went for their dinner and started making plans for the night (assuming India were going to lose this). Thankfully me and some of my friends did not. And we were rewarded with the most audacious strokeplay against the best bowling side in a pitch which was lively !

TVS Cup (India) - India v New Zealand - Hyderabad - 15th Nov 2003

This was a virtual semi-final where we had to beat New Zealand to meet Australia in the final. Australia were still the world champions and by far one of the most difficult sides to beat. Sachin and Sehwag decimated the attack. Yours truly regrets till date why he did not use the ticket he had for watching this match in the stadium.

Commonwealth Bank Series - India v Australia - Sydney and Brisbane - 2nd and 4th Mar 2008

This was an important match because Tendulkar was being written off for "losing his charm of early days" and he proved not so against the reigning world champions. Both finals were a delight to watch on very lively pitches :)

It is not difficult even for the dimmest of the minds to see that these matches cover almost all grounds across India, Sharjah, South Africa and Australia. They also cover instances where India bat first or chase (which is considered more difficult). Even the bowling attack was not spineless in any of these matches. So Sachin has covered geography, batting vs chasing, grassy vs flat pitches, excellent - good - moderate bowling conditions, time (from 1994 - 2008) in his knocks. On most of these occasions Sachin was the player of the match + player of the series. This also excludes numerous tournaments played between two nations where Sachin single handedly won matches (there by winning us the series). This does not include many matches where Sachin made a second-best or third best contribution or even a very useful helping hand in winning some finals. (Remember the third final in 1998 against Pakistan where Sourav was Man of the Match and Kanitkar struck the winning runs? Well Sachin started it all with 41 off 26 balls at the top before Sourav and RobinSingh took over)

You may also remember that between 1998 and 2002, India did not win about 9 final matches on the trot (after making it to the final in these tournaments). Notably, Sachin did not play in about 4 of these matches.

So to me it is totally wrong and mis-informed to say that Sachin has not made enough contributions in "important" matches. I think he has more instances to show than Lara/Ponting although I do not like such comparisons....

So why did we not win a world cup when he was at his helm between 1992 and 2007? Simply because a world cup is not won by one man. You need to win atleast 10 out of 12 matches and you need good bowlers, good runners and an all round team :). Sachin was the top scorer in 1996 world cup (although Sanath got the Man of the series) and 2003 world cup. He averaged 47+ in 1992 world cup, 87+ in 1996 world cup, 74+ in 1999 world cup and 61+ in 2003 world cup.

Apparently my friend is now not convinced that Sachin has not played enough good knocks in important Test matches. So my next job is to point him to Sachin's "Series changing knocks in test matches in India/abroad"...

Essential Software

2009-02-05T05:43:00.001-08:00

Here are some softwares which I use to solve most of my routine headache with computer systems. This covers a wide range of categories so I am sure you are going to find this useful (useful internally means 0$, innit?).

Lastpass - Is the best password manager IMO. Like it says it is the last password you are going to remember. If you use firefox/IE, the extension sits on the browser and prompts for filling up user name logins whenever you visit any page. For chrome you could use the bookmarklet feature.
Free hide Folder - Ever wonder how to hide some files in windows explorer ? Such as the movies in an office system or some personal pictures ? You can use this tool to hide/unhide folder or password protect them :). Handy !! but certainly not super-smart-hacker-proof.
DownthemAll - Is probably the best ever download manager which is available as an add-on only in firefox (I haven't researched if it works in Chrome with bookmarklets or something). I was suprised at the way it accelerated the downloads, managed the file names etc.
Teracopy - You are not alone when you feel windows explorer copies files very very slowly. Teracopy can be used to copy files between folders and typically when you copy about 10-20GB (normal when you backup music files/movies) this software seems to copy at an excellent speed.
Explorer2 - Ever wondered that windows explorer is way too bad. I work in a software at about 10 different branches and 5 environments simultaneously and have alteast 6 explorer windows open. This amounts to clutter and explorer 2 is the best way to solve it.
Launchy - Why should you go to Start -> Programs -> (spend 2 mins searching the list) -> Program of your interest -> Program EXE every time? If you launch 20 programs a day that is about 350000 clicks extra per year :). Use Launchy which combines a MacBook style navigation. [Please note that if you use Google Desktop, a good software that I hate, it performs most functions that Launchy does]
WinDirStat - Your C: has no space why ? some folders in "Documents and Settings" (aka "All kinds of junk") and "Program Files" might be the culprit. How to find such culprits? If you are a windows guy then good luck with right click on each folder and seeing folder size. If you are a sensible-windows guy try WinDirStat.
SyncToy - Microsoft at times makes some really good software and SyncToy which I think was originally from SysInternals is a good one. If you are a geek then there is a good chance that you have high-capacity mega hard drive which backs up your movies/music/pictures etc. SyncToy can sync between your backup folders (and only copy what was changed, thankfully)
TeamViewer - Trust me when I say this is the best software for seeing a remote desktop. Or if you fancy paying money try FogCreek Co-pilot (google what that is) or GoToMyPc.com. Remember !!! the team viewer license is free only for PERSONAL use.
Unlocker - You delete a file, windows says it is in use. You try and close all processes which are possibly accessing the file and still same issue. After pulling whatever hair is left in your head you give up saying that directory will stay there forever. You don't like that? Take Unlocker :)
Dropbox - You want to send a 800MB file. You have tried yousendit.com, isendit.com, someonesendit.com with multiple variations like 7 days/14 days/48 hours in the server. The best option for this is Dropbox where you are given a 2GB space. Open dropbox and drag a folder/file into it. The upload happens in the background so even if your internet connection flicks, you wont lose all contents. Once you upload you get a easy download link which can be sent to people :) A simple browser is enough for downloads but for more fancier stuff like recovery etc, the other party can use dropbox as well to sync. (Windows live folder share is a close competitor to this software)
BitMeter - You use broadband with limits and want to know how much you have guzzled. What if your provider gives 4GB free and charges therafter, be extra careful when you are at 3.7GB. This software records the amount of data that goes up/down in your computer so it is handy when you have usage limits.
Wink - You want to record a screencast? For example, instead of saying "Go to this site -> click on this link -> enter these details -> Press button -> Open another link -> See if your data turns up" you can simply record what you did and send him over?
Command Window Here - No more registry tweakings to get a "Open Command Window here" in Windows explorer.

PPPPS: Any software here is just a recommendation. The authority of any information about licenses in this blog will be superseded by the actual license information at their individual websites. Some/most softwares may be free for personal/academic use and not for professional use. This is just a recommendation, so please use your judgement.

Raaja and I

2009-01-14T13:46:00.001-08:00

Apparently Mahesh has tagged me to share my thoughts about the legendary Ilayaraja. If you are from south India there is very little chance you will not know him. If you are from North India you might remember the mysterious musician behind the melodious numbers in Cheeni kum, Shiva, Sadma, Hey Ram (and the like). I am supposed to answer five things that is part of this blog :) so here we go..

The moment I got introduced to Raaja..

This would be very tough to say because I grew up with Raaja. As a kid I always woke up to hear "Ceylon Radio" (It was early 80s so we did not have Satellite TVs, iPODs or any other gizmos) and in the 80s and 90s Ilayaraja ruled the roost in Tamil cinema. So it would be more like asking "How I got introduced to my sister/brother" etc :). However I knew that the man who makes this music is called Raja when I was 4 years old. I liked the song "Vikram.. Vikram" from the movie "Vikram" sung by Kamal Hassan himself, in a really gruff voice. I was mesmerized as a kid by that song and my parents finally had to buy an audio cassette and our first tape recorder for me. Because I was only 4 years old, I could not fully memorize the lyrics so I made my own lyrics and sang the song more number of times than I blinked :)

Name one occassion where Raaja’s music directly/ indirectly influenced your life

I really do not know how to answer this. But I think music has always been a healer during my troubled times and a stimulant when I am brimming with joy. Music into my life has been more like an organic deep-rooted passion rather than a one day enlightenment.

Lets take Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi into account. Assuming that one of this is either your mother tongue or native language, name a favorite song in each of the other 4 languages that immediately comes to your mind.

Tamil - Sundari Kannal Oru Sedhi from Dhalapathi

Malayalam - Haven't heard many

Telugu - Anything from Salangai Oli and Sippikul Muthu

Hindi - Cheeni Kum hai song from Cheeni Kum, it was even better than the original tamil version (Mandram vandha...)

One song of Ilaiyaraaja that you consider rare and think a song that many people should have known but don’t.

There is a song from a movie titled "Bharathan" with many good songs that went so unnoticed. My pick will be the song that starts as "Alage amudhe poonthenral thalatum...". It is an amazing song and this gives me a feeling similar to what a painting of Monalisa would give to a connoisseur of art. I am told that the painting of Monalisa looks happy when you are in a happy mood and looks sad when you are depressed. Similarly try as hard as I can, I really cannot identify whether the mood of this song is cheer or pathos. It is simply the most loveliest song I have ever heard.

Lets keep the last one simple…Raaja’s number that you are hearing right now/ most recently heard..?

Paravaye Engu Irukirai from Tamil MA and Machan Machan from Silambattam. I consider Yuvan Shankar Raja as "junior Raja" and these songs were sung by IR himself. But if I were to pick a Raaja composed number it would be "Siruponmani asayum adhil therikkum pudhu" from kallukul eeram.

To conclude, although wikipedia (my favourite website after Google) terms Music as "an art form whose medium is sound organized in time", I would say it is more than just art/entertainment. It could mean everything for some people. To me music comes right after basic necessities in life :)

Legend Bows Out

2008-10-07T04:59:00.001-07:00

Call what you want, say what you want but this man to me was truly a "LEGEND". He did instill a sense of self-respect and aggression to the Indian team and all of these happened when I was a passionate teenager searching for role models......

Where are my books?

2008-09-18T10:03:00.001-07:00

Where are my books?

Ever wonder where all your school books went off? That very nice Geography text book of class seven which talked about "Tropical Forest" in depth? I hated books when I was in school because I felt they were thrust on me. Mathematics was the only exception since I had genuine interest in the subject and I read other books just so that I can get on with the game called education.

Many years have passed ever since and at some point I started craving for those history books. Those history lessons that were missed in teenage because it was thrust. Those lessons that we skipped so we could watch Sachin Tendulkar and Anil Kumble bash up South Africans in the Titan Cup Final in 1996 after being beaten for 6 times in a row before that. Seriously, I used to wonder why so much Cecil Rhodes, Imperialism in Africa, Fascism, Nazism was being thrust on a 15 year old lad. For the record, I cleared class X with decent grades and did not stop until I graduated in Engineering.

A few years before, my desire to learn history (both Indian and world) from a grass root level started itching me. I thought the right place to start would be the Class X History book (Matriculation board, Not the CBSE or the Stateboard one) since it would complete a circle (Craving now for what you hated like 12 years before). The idea stuck me today to check if the history book was online. I started googling and the obvious search terms like "class x matric", "history class x book", "tamil nadu history syllabus" did not do the trick. Finally I discovered what I wanted the most,

The Tamilnadu Syllabus Blueprint and the

The Tamilnadu course text books completely online

My joy knew no bounds, when I saw that the Tamilnadu State Government's NIC (National Informatics Centre) website had the complete books online for reference purposes*. I went through the subjects and I could see equivalent books from Matric board. All..all..all....except for the History subject for Matriculation.....

So near yet so far....

So if anyone can hack around or guess the url of the history book let me know!!!! (I tried putting history instead of geography in the url to see if the file was hidden in the server somewhere, but that did not help!!!)

10£ for someone who gives me "Class X-Matriculation-History Coursework" book :)

Narcissim

2008-08-27T04:18:00.001-07:00

Narcissism is described as "the trait of excessive self-love, based on self-image or ego". In India, celebrities are expected to be politically correct, polite, respectful, considerate towards media and always maintain an extremely upright image. Any 0.0001% deviation and the media will go around branding you as a ruthless, arrogant and a brash narcissist. Not surprisingly, the often liked celebrities are also the "always polite" types. Vishwanathan Anand, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Amithabh Bachan, Shahrukh Khan are good examples and the list goes on.

This just makes me wonder, why do we want celebrities with an artificial outer coating when in reality they may be some personality on their own? Sourav Ganguly wore his own attitude up his sleeve and for some godforsaken reason branded as arrogant and ruthless (Tell me please, what was arrogant about him?). Why is it a problem if Aamir Khan names his dog as Shahrukh? Ram Gopal Varma to me comes across as someone who doesn't give a hoot about what the media thinks. At times, he makes you wonder if he has gone nuts. So, any trace of RGV in indiaglitz news I make sure that I read his question/answers.

In case you are tired of all politically correct interviews you can read some of RGV's Q&A here, here and here.

Biased Opinion

2008-08-26T16:19:00.001-07:00

Biased Opinion and a turnaround - Rhythm (Movie)

Do you need an example of a Biased opinion? It was circa 2001 and me my gang (proudly called the_decagon) were out in a hot summer saturday for a movie called "Rhythm". It was like 6 months after Mudhalvan had released and byfar Mudhalvan is one of the biggest blockbuster movies I have ever seen, especially so since I had seen it with my college gang with lot of shouting/screaming in the theatre. Rhythm released in this hype with Arjun and Jyothika (the then dream girl after Kushi) in the lead roles. A R Rahman had scored the music and it is one of the rare albums that get themed. There are five songs in the movie that talk about the five forces of the universe, viz. Sky, Water, Land, Fire and Air. Combine this theme with the amazing songs, put in AR Rahman, Arjun, Jyothika and Vasanth and nothing less than a mega blockbuster was going to satisfy us.

We saw this at Cauvery Theatre in Trichy, which meant that it was no straight-forward bus route, so we had to travel around 90 minutes in two buses. By the time we reached the movie hall we were soaking in sweat and the person in the ticket counter promptly closed the shutter after selling 4 tickets as a formality. This being the first day most tickets got sold in the black market. So we were left with only one choice.

Determination, can lead you to so many things. Pradeep, one of my great friends and myself had loads and loads of this. We convinced the remaining gang that we had to watch the movie on that day itself (Pradeep is better than me at this) and pulled out whatever money we had. The movie ticket was priced at an astounding Rs. 150/- (Ok, this is not PVR but Trichy, Cauvery Theatre and we were students with no income in 2001). We had to pull out every single note from our pocket and we finally made some Rs. 1300 and told him "We are Rs. 50 short". The ticket seller, grabbed the bunch of notes, gave the tickets and sped away. We thought we could have bargained but this was no time, because the show would have started.

The first five minutes was routine tamil movie stuff. A very nice introduction song for Arjun and great picturisation. Then came the bad news. Hero is a journalist (in advertising sector, so no bashing up of politicians) a widower and heroine is a bank employee a widow. Both go in mumbai electric trains to their office. Now how dull can a story get? This was too big a disappointment for poor college kids like us who wanted to shout their throats out seeing item songs, fights and punch dialogues.

What followed from us was extremely biased ridiculing of this movie and I went on to say this was the worst movie of my life in a theatre (FYI Dilip, Raghavan we went to movies like Kuberan, James bond, Cheenu after that) But in my life, this was my most biased opinion. I told my parents that it was the worst movie I have ever seen. My parents took me seriously and did not watch it. About 2 months later, my Dad happened to see the movie in a bus or something and told me that "It was not bad after all". This was the first time, my opinion differed from my father. I then asked my relatives who had seen this movie and they said it was "not bad" types.

Ok why am I going back to 2001 now? I saw this movie Rhythm yesterday (26 Aug 2008) and let me be honest, it was "not a bad movie after all". It touched my heart at places and had some (ok, many) bad patches but overall it was not a movie to be branded "as the worst movie in my theater life".

Sorry Mr. Vasanth. You were the victim of my himalayan expectations and to be fair the movie was atleast "above average", if you go in without expectations.

PS: I am not a big fan of love movies :)

Some day I will write about my adventures in a theatre when I was like 4 years old while watching the movie "Mouna Raagam". The movie I (and many of my friends) rate as the best tamil movie in the romance genre.

Neenga Vijay Fan or Ajith Fana?

2008-08-15T02:02:00.001-07:00

I promise you, I am not going to bash any one in favour of the other. Most kids tend to have some liking towards me (because I can talk very childish at times) and one my favourite cousin who is about 14 years old asked me this,

"Neenga Vijay fana Ajitha fana" ["Are you a Vijay fan or a Ajith fan"]. I could think of only one answer
"Theriyalaye pa theriyalaye" (Classic "Nayagan" movie isshtyle)

I have been denying this for years to come since I was an ardent fan of both Rajini and Kamal . A few years back a girl asked me the same question about Vijay/Ajith and I said "Naan Kamal Fan" (I am a Kamal fan). No wonder that girl did not talk to me after that (That was the time when Hey Ram, Aalavandhan and Baba had come and Kamal-Rajini were considered dead)

But having spent 26 years in this world I started questioning myself about 2 years ago if those days of IR, Rajinikanth, Kamal, KB, S.Janaki, SPB are over. Fair enough, my father would have felt the same thing when MSV, TMS, MGR, Sivaji gave way to these people. I kept away from discussing movies for the last year or so, fearing I might sound outdated.

But I need to adapt now. I have to identify myself with a bunch of people so that I can follow the next generation of movies involving Vijay, Ajith, Yuvan, Hariharan, Goutham Menon, Myskin, Rahman, Bala, Ameer etc. While I feel that Vijay is the most talented among the present lot and has the most graceful dancing and histrionic skills, I feel he hasn't delivered enough depth/variety. The fact that he wanted to do a set pattern of movies right from his early days makes me feel that as an audience I am manipulated. I was amazed when I saw Ajith 's interview a while back and how upright he was when he said things like "My body is stiff, So I cannot do standup comedy like Kamal/Rajini. So I attempted a slapstick sort of comedy in the movie Villain" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZpC0Pwz8GI). To know your strengths is good but to know your weaknesses is great. He has also expressed his desire to act in experimental films if the right script is presented to him (Hmm I hated him in Asoka though). Surya and Vikram are acting in far less number of movies these days to even pass a judgement.

Yuvan seems to impress me only in every one out of three albums. AR Rahman seems to do justice only if he is presented with ample time. Harris Jayaraj falls flat and Hariharan-Sankar Mahadevan-Unni Krishnan-Anuradha Sriram all sound trite to me. Agreed they may be musical greats and I am by no means good enough to judge them but to put it simple "Their voice do not strike a cord in my soul like may be S.Janaki did".

There are far too many directors right now and I dont know who is my favourite. To make it to my elite list one has to direct atleast 20 movies on a broad variety of subjects with atleast 50% success rate. So I dont know who among Mysskin, Simbu Devan, Goutham Menon would be the next KB, Barathiraja or so on (Shankar will have to show some variety and depth if he has to go into the next level).

Ok enough of confusions. I know there is a fairly intelligible crowd who read this blog (who by all means know more than me). So movie buffs please suggest? Whom should I become a fan of or associate myself with so that I can enjoy the next generation of tamil cinema? May be pick good directors, cameramen, actor, actress (???), technicians, music directors, singers of the current era who have variety, depth and longevity to take me through for the next five years atleast :)

Old questions....

2008-08-05T08:42:00.001-07:00

I always had a few questions for this Ulaga Nayagan "Kamal Hassan". Like most things, my opinion on things have always taken a complete u-turn. I was a Rajini fan until I was 14 years old. I liked the way he jumped in the air to beat the baddies and his renditions like "Evan en mele modhalla kai vekkurano..." which in English roughly means "The first guy to touch me, will spit out the milk he drank from his mother in his childhood days" (What would you say for this figure of speech?). Teenage made me a Kamal fan because he was the one to do all the love antics in innumerable movies. Again a few years ago when this talk of entering politics came to Rajni, I swayed back and became a Rajini fan simply because of his simplicity and mannerisms. Now, If you ask me I do not have much to choose between them. To keep it simple, I am a bigtime fan of both and unlike most experts I feel both are equally talented (just that the execution differed).....

Ok..back to the topic. There is a lot of explanations on how he did the makeup for his many roles these days. But I still do not know how he managed Appu Raja in the 90s without much technology and graphics. Here is what the veteran had to say "I have never discussed how we shot the dwarf. It would be like a woman explaining what’s inside her bra.". It took me a good two minutes to stop laughing hearing this line. But such is the man......

Incase, you are into reading old interviews by actors, here is the original source. Kamal picks his top 10 challenging roles that he had to.......

I know how you feel

2008-08-01T03:06:00.001-07:00

I know how you feel....

Rahul Dravid walks out although it was theoretically a "not-out". I know exactly how it feels. You are outdone, outplayed and outclassed so much that you dont want to embarass yourself by looking like a cry-baby. You are down so much that you don't want even want to check if it was fully taken. Rather you did not care, because you already accepted psychological defeat. 30 balls from Mendis and 8 runs but Rahul Dravid has been dismissed thrice.

Perhaps it is a mind thing. But my advice to Indian cricketers is this, why do you not want to make sure that you are actually 110% sure before you move out? I have seen this defeatist sort of attitude of Dravid/Sehwag/Sourav starting to walk even without looking at whether the catch in the slip was completed or whether someone actually grounded the catch. It so upsets their ego that they have edged something and they deserve to go back.

"To Deserve", doesn't mean one dirty thing. I can imagine what my favourite cricketer Ricky Ponting would have done in this case. He may have been going through a rough patch. He might have been dismissed 5 times in less than 50 balls from Murali. But still, every time he edges every time he walks out of the crease, he will be 150% certain that it was infact "out". No moral dismissals, no ego-hurts, if there is one small inch of a crevice that you can scrape through, scrape through it. Because, it is legally not-out.

I may not like Ricky for his batting skills. I sure like him for his attitude towards opponents. He was criticized by reporters during India's defeat that he rallied his men like a pack of hunting dogs. But that hurt us because we were at the receiving end. I absolutely do not think he was anywhere against the letters of the law or the spirit of the game in that "defamed" test against India. Coming to our present case, to Dravid and all other batsmen with ego, if you happen to edge, see if the catch is completed, see if it was a no-ball, see if there was some small element of doubt (3 Referrals per innings is good enough), see if any one rule of the game was missed.

PS: I remember some discussion between Slater and Gavaskar as to how Slater always looked immediately at the runner even if he edged and the ball went behind him, because he was optimistic that there would be a chance of a run if the ball was put down. Only after he sees that the runner is not signalling, he looks back to see if the catch was not complete. (Am trying to locate that video in youtube)

2008-07-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

En Iniya Iyandira (My Dear Machine in English)

If ever I was asked to pick one tele-serial I enjoyed in my whatever short life, I would pick this serial amidst the heaps of junk-mega-serials like Gayathri, Chithi, Varisu, Varpugal, Kula Vilakku.... The televised version of this serial was a trashy rehash of a real science fiction by the same name written by a legendary Late Mr. Sujatha. Most (I think all) of his works are in tamil and I never quite had the chance to read them while I was back in India. In London, for the 33% tax that you pay a library is one good value you get (apart from the clean air, gardens, parks etc). After I enrolled myself in the Barham Park Library, I was amazed by the amount of tamil books they had and read my first book from this legend. The story was "Priya" which was made into a movie with the same name starring Rajinikanth. The original story, which is a proper detective thriller was rehashed to be an action movie with 3-4 fight sequences and toned in some places to suit the tamil movie industry. After that I have read novels like "September Bali", "Pirivom Sandhipom 1 & 2".....stop stop where were we? Ok, En Iniya Iyandira.

This is a story written in the 70s I believe (or in the late 80s) and Sujatha lays this story in the year 2032 where

Robots are employed for all manual chores
Birth and death are controlled - you need to have a government order to give birth to a kid
Everyone has a identification number and you are a "number" to the government
Infrastructure is well developed
Robots are used as pets from doing small chores to entertaining people.

The heroine Nila has got a Government Order allowing her to have a kid, I think the allowance is for a girl kid and if it happens to a boy kid the government takes care of killing it (Yes, Infant murder still prevails....) On the same night her husband has committed a crime against the government and is taken by the government. Nila is not given any details about why he is arrested or where he is kept or if he is alive etc.

All Nila has is a small robot dog called "Juno" to win the game that is extremely loaded against her. "Juno" has been taught heuristic algorithms and machine learning, so during the start of the story Juno starts as a powerless harmless servile Robot but towards the end of the story, Juno has used his machine learning and improved his knowledge so much that he starts to develop feelings like fear, love, pleasance and starts appreciating beauty (He says that he would love Nila if he was a human).

Now Juno is portrayed extremely well by Sujatha that I would go on to say it was the best character portrayal among all the novels I have ever read (English included). It starts out to be a Robo and through the course of things learns most things and ends up uncovering the fact that the President of India, is just a holographic projection (Apparently a student from IIT Chennai has sent a detailed letter in the 80s to Sujatha the writer stating that this holographic thing is technically impossible).

All in all, if you ever get a chance to lay your hands on this book dont miss it!!!! It has traces of Matrix, i-robot but remember this was written in the 80s. Some nice lines from the story (translated in english)

Nila: Tell me Juno, I am so confused, should I go into the cell or not?
Juno: I am not the one to make decisions, I can present only statistical figures on probability.

Another charactar: Will it pain Juno if they shoot us with that laser gun?
Juno: I dont understand what you say (Obviously a robot doesnt know pain yet).

Nila: Did you say the garden is beautiful?
Juno: Yes I seem to feel certain things. I can see the garden is beautiful, and so are you :)

2008-07-22T01:43:00.000-07:00

Sir,
I have recently read your review on http://charuonline.com/july08/dasavatharam.html and I feel I am rightful in pointing out a few things. I am a tamilian by birth and have enough affection for the language (I am not good at type-writing in Tamil, and hence the english mail)

I agree that everyone in this country has a right to speak and express what he thinks as right. More so, if you are criticizing a piece of work, everyone has a right to choose and say that he is not inspired by some piece of work. However, as a popular critic and writer you also earn some responsibilities in addition to your rights. I would not mind if it was some common person writing fiercely about Kamal but you are one of the very well known writers writing about someone and you may also know that your works are very much looked upon by your fans.

Here is my earnest opinion "A reviewer is someone who presents a dispassionate opinion about things". Now to me what this means is that a good reviewer criticizes on a piece of work without being passionate about who made it, why it was made etc etc. Now my question to you is, would your review be the same if say someone like Vijay or Ajith put that much effort in the movie?

Agreed it might not be the same as per your "Ulaga nayagan" standards (Even Sachin cant score a 100 in every match) and I cant stop laughing at you sympathising at Karunanidhi and Manorama. Believe me, Karunanidhi I am very sure was not forced in any way to see this movie. There were instances where Kamal's screenings were rejected by PMs and CMs. So I think your idea of forced appreciation by such legends of the likes of Karunanidhi and Manorama is not true.

I think from a man of your calibre a very honest review of things was due. This was total bashing of someone who has decent amount of talent and the movie was reviewed as though it did not have positive things at all. A good reviewer highlights what he thinks are good things about the movie and the bad things about the movie, and says on a whole if this movie advances Tamil Cinema forward or backward (or stays neutral). I think your review lacks reality, yes it is ok to highlight the negatives but certainly I do not agree that there were no positives in that movie.

If you need some inspiration please read some reviews by Madan, where he talks about judging a cinema as a piece of work and about being dispassionate about what he thinks about someones reputation is :). What matters to your readers is in your opinion how the movie stands :) To me, it is easier to gain popularity atleast in the blog world by rubbishing something, but a good reviewer contrasts both good and bad things and presents a holistic view of a movie. The very language of your review makes you an untrustworthy reviewer....

2008-07-11T03:26:00.000-07:00

Reservations? bring them on please !!!

One really shocking piece of news in hindu about what happens when a BC category person who gets a seat in Open Category moves to a better college. Disturbing it is really. Like most other things my opinion on topics take a full swing around every few years, so from being completely "anti-reservationist", I have been transformed to a "pro-reservationist" over the last few years.

Also, when someone says "I studied 18 hours a day and got 87% but couldn't get into the IITs where as my pal with 40% seems to have got a seat", I can only pity them to have been a minority victim of what looks like a reasonable scheme.

But however, "pro-reservationist" you may be this news seems to be a little hurting............ I think the game is getting "increasingly unfavourable" for the so-called forward communities.

2008-06-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

Long class names?

Spring, one of the most complete J2EE frameworks is getting more and more popular now. It has been touted as the most well written Java Framework (Chances are your tech lead is going to point you towards Spring code if you are a code junky).

I find Spring a joy to use and a convenience that I cant dispense with. But here are a few things I dont like about them. (These things are grossly outweighed by things that I love about them)

What is it with long class names? AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests, AnnotationAwareAspectJAutoProxyCreator, AspectJAdviceParameterNameDiscoverer, CallbackPreferringPlatformTransactionManager, DelegatePerTargetObjectIntroductionInterceptor,HashMapCachingAdvisorChainFactory, IncorrectUpdateSemanticsDataAccessException, InstantiationAwareBeanPostProcessorAdapter. Please have some mercy on common people like me. Now I am no Rod Johnson but would it make sense to rename a "IncorrectUpdateSemanticsDataAccessException" to "UpdateSemanticsException" we could infer that it is a DataAccessException since it subclasses it and we could also avoid "Incorrect" since it is fairly easy to guess that a SemanticsException is raised when semantics are "incorrect"(null being one exception). I dont understand the other class names enough to suggest an alternative but am sure it is not hard (or so do I think?).
For God's sake please please build and keep all the old source repositories, you have done a marvellous job of breaking the Spring jar into modules which is fantastic but often to adore the code you have written I dont get the source libraries (Try for example finding springmvc-2.0.7-sources.jar ?)
Please also fix the Spring OSGi libraries, in order to get our newbies started about OSGi you need a bundle that works right out of the box (so that they can get to play around quickly with the examples). I was involved with eclipse plugin developement, and kinda hacked a bit to get the commons-logging working but one of my colleagues with no previous knowledge of OSGi took like 3 days and still wasnt able to get Hello World going. He was hoping that adding the logging jar in class path of a project will solve it, whereas in OSGi you got to export/import packages and add dependencies in the manifest.mf (and the actual version of the library being resolved by the container at runtime)
Wherever possible aim for a simpler solution. If you attempt to debug a simiple TransactionBinding issue, with just 10 seconds of navigating I have as much as 20-30 files open (Agreed I am very bad, when I see more than 5 files at at time in eclipse). Transaction IMO is fairly complex thing but take something like PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer (huh again long class name) for example......

PS: No disrespect meant to the springsource, by any means. I can write about the 1000s or so good things I like about them, but you could find them in blogs, articles anyways......right?

2008-06-18T06:32:00.000-07:00

Poor bowlers.....

For all those who saw Kevin Pieterson's latest batting tactics of staying completely left handed once the bowler started his runup...

You may have already seen the news that MCC has said it was ok to play such a shot. My question is the game becoming increasingly loaded in favour of batsmen? Would the batsman agree if the bowler did not mention before hand whether he was going to bowl over the wicket or around the wicket? Or if he was going to bowl left handed or right handed? Or atleast if he was going to bowl spin / pace?

Why wouldnt the same people who call this shot innovative also approve of that?

Makes me wonder, what if Wasim Akram, was allowed the liberty of flipping from "over the wicket" to "around the wicket" at the last moment (The very thought tickles a funny feeling on how clueless the batsman would be).......

2008-06-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Ten reasons why Orkut is not a web 2.0 site

Despite orkut being the most popular social networking site in India and Brazil, I would say when I compare with other web 2.0 sites it stands miserable.....

Just change your screen resolution to something bigger than 1024 * 768 may be 1280 * 800 and see the website layout. The backgrounds, html elements are all fixed pixel size probably and it sucks. I cant just tolerate it especially since it is from the Google umbrella (Disputable since I am told that orkut was bought over).
Have you tried friends search in orkut? You know your friends name but typing the first few letters would not do any auto-complete for you. Alright, you type a partial name and hit enter..zoom 0 results. (Try searching for "Pet" when you have a "Peter", you have to give a full word for the search to work for some reason)
Our orkut friends have the nice habit of changing their name to reflect what they are doing (There is a nice way to set status instead of changing name, a feature introduced recently) and if you search for "Peter" and if he updated his display name as "I am going to Spain" you wont be able to catch him at all.
Communities/Forums, no scalable way of participating in it. No RSS feeds (without using greasemonkey scripts/extensions) for groups, No mailer alerts for a single thread.
No way of seeing all threads in all communities that I have been participating in the last week or so in one shot (I mean if you are participating in 15 topics on 5 different communities God save you, before you locate things)
Have you ever seen the left side menu? (photos, scrapbook) I like perfection and I name my folders "My Documents" and not "mydocuments" (Note the CAPS and space). To me the left menu seems to be a let down. It sucks....yes it does....
Click on settings, and see the 4 tabs "general", "privacy", "notifications", "Google Talk". Notice the words in small letters except for the Google Talk one. If all smalls was what they wanted why would they not say "google talk"? Notice the way options are structured, It doesnt look like one professionally built application. (It is used for social networking that is a different thing)
Still lot of security holes to expose user albums, user feeds etc which explains why you get 100s of scraps asking them to click their javascripts to unlock someones scrapbook or albums etc (these issues get addressed somewhat quicker than other issues by Orkut)
You scrapped X, he scrapped you back, you want to scrap again but X is a busy person and he has about 10-20 scraps in the meantime. Now if you want to locate the last scrap that you made, it is very tough. I know it is a complex thing to solve (scrap chaining similar to gmail is going to be tough), but at the bare minimum filtering the scrapbook based on some search critieria or atleast a link to see only "My scraps" or "scraps from X" would be preferable.
Last but not least, If you had ever mentioned your blog url in your orkut profile in settings remove it (Keep it in the "About Me" section). By default orkut adds a blog application which lets someone view the blog completely from orkut itself. But they would not be able to comment (in other words contribute)...

2008-05-21T02:47:00.000-07:00

How will Mahabaratha look like on Facebook

Have you ever wondered what Mahabharatha will look like on Facebook? Here is an extremely enjoyable piece of work

http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/facebook-mahabharatha/

My highlight and the favourite was "Draupadi joined the group Molested Women". If you love reading exciting blogs, give it a try !!

2008-05-13T05:58:00.000-07:00

How big is your music?

I have always kept wondering how big and how diverse is my taste in music. After a lof of softwares I settled on iTunes finally because of the variety of information it gave me about myself. Here go some of the statistics....

My whole music (excluding video of course) is,
4043 songs, 11.7 days, 16.35 GB

Tamil music is about 2704 songs, 7.4 days, 10.01GB (66.88%)
Hindi music is about 522 songs, 1.8 days, 2.59GB (12.91%)
English music is about 817 songs, 2.5 days, 3.80GB (20.2%)

Out of Tamil music my favourite music director would be Ilayaraja who is about 1043 songs, 3.2 days, 4.31GB(38% of tamil music, 26% of my library) and the second best would be AR Rahman is 1083 songs, 2.4 days, 3.40GB (another 38% of tamil music...)

However my listening patterns have shown that I hear Ilayarajas songs about 71% of the time (someone mentioned 80-20 rule??) and the only English Songs notable are from the Eagles........

Tamil music industry is not as organised as the English, so whenever I hit upon a good movie or a good song, the wikipedia entries are almost always useless, imdb just has the movie name and downloading/sampling the mp3 file is next to impossible. However I did manage to do a good collection of Ilayaraja (trust me, I have some really really rare songs from the Maestro) from the following sites,

http://www.s-anand.net/tamilmp3
http://www.thenisai.com/tamil/mp3-song-download/tamil-mp3-song-download-index.htm

If both do not have the sample then go and hit the cooltoad directly with search parameters. The biggest challenge would be spelling out the song name in English (I was googling for a long time on "Idhalodu Idhal Serum" when finally I realised that the english spelling would be "Idhazhodu")

So if someone wants some rare IR songs, please post back...I will check if I have them :)

2008-05-09T03:55:00.000-07:00

Learnings from IPL

I would not care a rotten damn about what these "so-called" cricket purists think about IPL, but for me this could be the second best thing that could have happened to cricket (After of course, the debut of one Mr. SR Tendulkar). Large franchises, shortened version, amazing talents, money that can make even F1 racers widen their eyes....etc etc...good start guys!!!

I started betting on IPL so I have to watch the action closely and do a lot of data, to be able to make predictions (Like Zaheer has a slightly better record against opening left-handers like smith, ganguly than right handers like McCullum etc). Trust me, I have never enjoyed the game so much as I am enjoying now.

Over the course of IPL, I have learnt that it is not just your international records that counts, it is about how useful you could be to the team. Bangalore in my opinion is the most rotten team of all with a squad that could be labelled "Boring Test XI" (except may be for Boucher) and God save Dravid if he thinks Akash Chopra and Wasim Jaffer are going to give him great starts in T20. The middle order isnt great either with Dravid and Kallis standing firmly. Only Ross Taylor and Mark Boucher are candidates for winning matches and the latter gets far less overs to play. Hyderabad, I would say was very very unlucky in that some of their great batting efforts have gone waste with shoddy bowling (remember Symonds 100 going for a waste?). They are still my favourites for the tournament. Whoever said Rajasthan was the weak link 4 weeks ago, kindly check the points table :)

My ideal T20 would have Dhoni as captain with Gilchrist, Sehwag, Sangakkara, Andrew Symonds, Rohit Sharma, Afridi as batsmen and McGrath, Morkel for bowlers. But I am sure if I owned a team I cannot buy all of them (unless ofcourse I printed money) so then intelligence comes to the picture. For example, Shane Watson is the bargain of the season at $100K, Ishant and Kallis are overvalued at $800k, McCullum, Morkel, Afridi, Rohit Sharma, Asif are all great buys. Dravid, Laxman, Sourav, Jayasuriya (past his prime) are an utter waste of money.

And atlast we are not far away from performance based pay-checks :) something we craved for over a century in Indian sports. I am very sure if the auction was held again there would be less takers for people like Kallis and probably the value of Watson, Morkel will increase.

While this is happening, there will be a bunch of morons in their 8th round of beer in a bar mumbling to themselves that cricket has lost its charm blah blah blah. Remember a similar reaction when Pythagoras said the world was round?? Basically being the absoulute anti-conservatist I am, I feel any change is a good change, If it was not a good change then it wont stand!! If IPL is bad and brings losses to the franchises it will get dropped sooner or later wont they? If they are bringing profits to the players and also brings entertainment to the crowd, why not have them ?

2008-05-02T02:07:00.000-07:00

Sink In

This has to sink in. No one to discuss/fight/brag about the latest SpringSource Application Platform. In my old team we would have atleast 5 different vehement opinions about the same thing (that too if it is as big as this news) but I am longing to find a lot of like minded people to discuss these things.

2008-04-29T05:58:00.000-07:00

Would someone tell the biggest job portal?

Would someone tell the biggest job portal in the world that "h1bvisa" is not a valid "Key skill"? I took the below screen shot from a mass job spam website which cannot stop advertising that there lot of jobs in US or UK. For the young kids out there Compilers, Algorithms courses, programming languages, certification courses are not skill sets, "h1bvisa", "hsmp-visa" is......

2008-04-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

In sports betting terminology, a green book means that you get PROFIT no matter what the outcome of the match is. Such a thing typically happens if you back a team at high odds and lay the same team at low odds.

It is a little hard to explain, but here is my honest attempt to explain it. Today Bangalore team plays the Rajasthan team and when the match started Rajasthan team was available at the odds of 1.95 (what this means is that if you put 1 pound for Rajasthan to win you get back 1.95 pounds). However as time progressed Rajasthan which was the supposedly weaker time made quick inroads into Bangalore teams lineup and the odds went low (meaning Rajasthan now had a greater probability to win) until 1.24 (this means that you get 1.24 pounds for every 1 pound stacked).

Now lets say at odds 1.95 I am betting (call it bet b1) 3 pounds for Rajasthan to win, and (after 30 mins into the game) at odds 1.24 am betting 4 pounds for Rajasthan to lose (call it bet b2). Note carefully that Bet B2 is a reverse bet (a bet saying some event will not happen)

If Rajasthan wins,

Bet B1 gives an amount of 3 pounds * 1.95 odds = 5.85 pounds
Bet B2 I loose out (1.24 odds * 4 pounds) - 1 = 3.96

My overall profit is 5.85 - 3.96 = 1.89 pounds

If Bangalore wins (I know it is less probable but still),
Bet B1 I loose my stake of 3 pounds
Bet B2 I gain 4 pounds that I had laid.

My overall profit is 4-3 = 1.00 pounds. This is shown in the figure below. Note the numbers in green below the team names :)

Although quite rare and possible only if you are very keen and diligent punter, I am very delighted that I could get a green book on my 2nd day of betting.

2008-04-24T01:52:00.000-07:00

For most people in India, today is another festival like Diwali, Pongal. It was the day a Master was born whose only job on earth seemed to be fulfilling the heavy expectations of a billion people in every single cricket match he played. The man, the miracle, the master Sachin Romesh Tendulkar was born 35 years ago....

Exactly ten years ago, he had a cracker of a match which confirmed his status as "God" (No Exaggeration here). What a way to play on your birthday...Just in case you have forgotten about it,

The scoreboard

The full match

The highlights (for the busy dudes)

And again, before we keep saying "He has not fired/won crucial encounters for us". Think of the sharjah 1998s, world cup 1996s, world cup 1999s, world cup 2003s (especially against Pakistan), recent VB series (back to back again). I can easily quote atleast 10-20 matches where sachin was the only difference between winning and losing in an important match involving 3 teams or more :). No matter what those experts say, he is still the best and I am glad HE graced the world in my generation.

2008-04-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

Employed at Last

After a lot of struggle to get my HSMP visa out I finally landed in the UK on March 8th 2008. It has been an interesting ride from there on. I got a job offer on the second working day of my arrival with a company called Signature Technologies (A very interesting company for the type of the work they do). However, I have started my employment with Betfair the largest betting exchange in the world (This I did not know before joining the company).

The company seems to have a unique culture, decent pay scales, 20% off time to do some engineering work (Am yet to figure out what my colleagues are doing about this), health care blah blah blah.....

The work sounds very different and poses totally different challenges that I havent faced in the last 5 years of J2EE i.e, Large systems (about 45 different applications in the system which means they use slightly old technologies), Huge load (3 billion web pages served a day), Different domain (Sports betting is not the usual Finance, Manufacturing or Telecom and there in lies the risk as well as uniqueness) and 900 odd strangers (colleagues) to get familiar with :)

2008-03-03T01:55:00.000-08:00

Remembering Design Patterns

Do you find the 23(Did someone add more?) Java(OO) design patterns, very tough to understand or remember?

Whenever you are asked for real life examples for a specific pattern do you have to coin your own set of "PlotOfLand", "KnightMeetsQueen" type of classes which makes it very difficult to remember these patterns?

Do you ever wonder, if there has been one real life application of each pattern where you could appreciate the value of these patterns?

From whatever knowledge I have gained from my experience in J2EE, I am trying to note down some real life examples of all patterns (I am trying hard to avoid swing based examples and the ones with Employee, Person, Company type objects). Real-life here means you should be able find such a pattern manifesting itself preferably inside the JDK or any other typical open source framework like the ones from Apache or JBoss or Spring.

Creational Patterns:

Singleton (java.lang.Runtime), Factory - Overused, we wont even attempt giving real life examples

AbstractFactory - I am assuming the xml parsing in JDK uses this pattern. First you get the document builder factory and then build your document on it. Any expert advice on this ?

Lazy Initialisation - Anyone with some hibernate or ORM background can easily figure out that if you have a persisted Employee with 100 or so departments, then the List getDepartments() can be evaluated only when that method is called (Also an example for proxy pattern)

Prototype - I think the rails ActiveRecord does something similar....might update this section when/if I learn it :)

Object Pool - JDBC connection pooling, App server thread pooling

Structural Patterns:

Facade - Hide a complex subsystem from user, by giving a simple abstraction layer. JDBC is an excellent example, it hides the complex jdbc, odbc-jdbc from the user and provides a set of interfaces for Connection, ConnectionMetaData, ResultSet etc.

Decorator - We all know of a java.util.List. Ever known of a "FixedSizeList", a fixed list of 10 Items? Or an unmodifiable list? Or may be a list where duplicates are not allowed? You do not really subclass the java.util.List for all such requirements. Instead the elegant solution is to "decorate" the list. Check what apache's commons-collections has done here.

Proxy - Anyone familiar with hibernate or AOP will know this pattern in great depth.

Adapter - Java IO was majorly revamped in JDK1.1, InputStream(for reading bytes) was augmented with Reader(for reading chars). Let us say there is a library code which needs a Reader and you have a InputStrem. A class called InputStreamReader will have to be used. Till this date this class has been the best example of this pattern. If you see the source code, this class just maintains the input stream and adapts method calls to reader object into the input stream object.

Behavioural Patterns:

Chain of Responsibility - Imagine struts in a typical web application. You want to have the struts FilterDispatcher for all urls "/*", you want the OpenSessionInViewFilter (a filter which keeps the session open until a page paints) for urls of type "/*.action" and you want authentication/authorization for all urls of type "/.../secure/....*". Depending on the url a OpenSessionInViewFilter will have to open a session an Acegi security filter will have to authenticate. This chain is kinda hierarchial. (The definition of this pattern says that only one client should handle the request, but in struts there might be multiple filters for a request)

Template - It is common to write some code irrespective of what kind of implementation we use. For example, in persistence no matter whether we use JDBC, Hibnerate or any other ORM package, it is very common to do standard operations like doing the connection initialisations, convert hql into sql etc. Spring, the most critically acclaimed framework for code clarity has devised a template pattern for this. Without much ado, here is the link for more info.

Command - Here every operation is modelled like a command with state and a typical "execute" method. There are many advantages of such a pattern like undo, transactional behaviour etc. XWork which is used by Struts is an excellent Command line Framework. Check this link of xwork to find out a simple explanation of the command pattern and this link for an implementation in Spring MVC

Strategy - Consider the ORM engine hibernate. This has to default the column names and table names for attributes and classes. Let us say it encounters a field called firstName in a "Person.java". What should be the column name that this field should be mapped to? What table should Person.java be mapped to? or even better if there are two classes Person.java in two different packages say a and b, what will be the table names called for those classes? (Obviously we cannot put both in the same table). What if there are two embedded "Address" entities in Person and both have a "addressLine1" property ? (We cannot create two columns with same name in a table). All of these are algorithmic and they are abstracted into a NamingStrategy, google for a "ComponentSafeNamingStrategy" to understand what I am talking about :)

Visitor - Most of us know about Spring and its Container based Dependency Injection. We also have heard about BeanFactoryPostProcessor and BeanPostProcessor. During the creation of beans from a context, it is required to call these post processors at appropriate life cycles. Check the source code of AbstractApplicationContext to see how they call these processors by "visiting" all processors and allowing them a chance to change/read information about the bean context

PS-1: Please suggest any corrections or misinterpretations in this blog :) (since the content is purely based on my understanding)
PS-2: If someone has a pattern and an example which I have missed out please let me know

2008-01-31T22:54:00.000-08:00

Kinder Garden Functional Programming

Not very long ago, I had presented whatever little I knew of "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" (Presentation here). Being in Tavant like most people know is a little different from any other service company (in that there is a desire to do things better by funding research even if that means sacrificing a little bit in the billability front). We had restarted these gyaan sessions this time for a slightly bigger audience. Was happy to give a session titled "Kinder Garden Functional Programming" - A session which was supposed to introduce some nuances of functional programming to a slightly diverse audience (People from Java, .NET background etc) Here is the presentation that I had http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=ajjmqsgnmjnn_44f7sfngcf&skipauth=true. It has references to some code samples which can be downloaded here (Both downloads less than 100K)

2007-12-02T23:15:00.000-08:00

Usual Suspects

Whatay movie !!! I had watched the first 20 minutes of the movie 3 months back and could not grasp so many charactars introduced in so less a time, and I ditched watching it. I am pretty bad in following movies/stories, where so many names/roles are introduced in a movie in a very small time span. And heck, each guy will have a first name and a last name and worse enough they will be addressed by both first and last names depending on whether the speaker is in a formal/casual context and whether the scene happens in Europe/America :). If I am not wrong, if the scene is somewhere in Europe, it is quite common to use the last name in both formal and casual context, while in the US, you could hear the first name being used. The movie moves at an amazing pace and unless you are a native *english* speaker you have to be careful in remembering the full name of the guy and who is being referred in a particular dialogue. Add to this the fact that same guy is known by multiple names and you will feel like puzzle solving for the whole movie.

I had the same problem with a movie called "BASIC" (another amazing movie with John Trovola and Samuel Jackson). I felt the plot was very convincing but somewhere I got lost in trying to remember too many names. However "Usual Suspects" deserved a second nod, as I saw the movie rated at 8.7/10 in IMDB and convinced myself that it must be some really good movie. Finally it happened yesterday when I made the effort to watch the movie again, this time concentrating on the names for the first 20 minutes (and of course switching on the subtitles), and Oh boy! what a breathtaking movie it was.

A definite "must watch" if you like complicated screen plays !!!

2007-11-28T21:21:00.000-08:00

What if GMail was designed by Microsoft

One of the recent blogs I read, talked about how GMail would look like if It were to be designed by Microsoft.

Good entertaining caricature !!!

Couldnt agree 100% with the idea though :)

2007-11-26T21:54:00.000-08:00

Paadum Office

I do not generally like these so called "reality shows", however Vijay TVs Paadum Office somehow kept me interested. Vijay TV has been a pioneer in hosting reality shows and if you happen to like any reality shows in any of these Tamil channels, there is a good chance that the first original version must have been by Vijay TV. (Vijay TV is called "Star Vijay" and the brains behind these programs are possibly the same as Star group of channels in Hindi/English)

Chinmayee's compering can be best described as "banal" (Although I like her as a singer) but the enthusiasm shown by Software professionals was refreshing. Most companies had people who could sing (almost like professional singers) both carnatic as well as light music with equal elan. Most of them had a band with atleast 5 instruments going along. The companies that participated were along the expected lines CTS, Infosys, HCL, TCS (I did not see WIPRO why?).

My choice was the AdventNet team (They were dressed in a t-shirt bearing the zoho logo)....

All in all some more time pass.....

2007-06-03T22:15:00.000-07:00

Trends of search

Java :

J2EE :

Ruby on Rails :

I can understand that there have been spikes in the number of searches for rails in 2006 and 2007 but I was not really sure, why Java and J2EE were dipping (Of all searches made for Java/J2EE, atleast 55-60% were from India specifically Bangalore). I still feel Java/J2EE is THE language for the average outsourced maintenance programmer for atleast 1 more year before Ruby/Groovy/Python...can catch up.

I would want to believe that people might have started directly going to java.sun.com instead of hitting java in the search button, since most of them know the urls anyways... (Or so I think?)

2007-04-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

Why Australia should win 2007 world cup?

Amidst prayers from many Indians that Sri Lanka should win the world cup (People think it is unpatriotic to not support your subcontinent counterpart), here is one prayer wishing Australia good luck to conquer the world cup for the third consecutive time, which I think they truly deserve. I have never liked Srilanka and their defensive way of playing cricket ever since I knew the game, and more so during 1996 world cup (which they won by virtue of having two great batsmen in flat tracks in their side).

Of late, I seem to really like the grit they have been showing in the field, the sheer grit to never resign to defeat. They do not have even a single batsman in the ICC top 10 and if you take Jayasuriya, Sangakkara out, they dont even have a world class batsman (ya ya ya like Sachin, Sourav, Azhar.......) and outside Murali (and may be Malinga) they dont have someone who can roll over the opposition. So they have like 3-3.5 great players and around 8 support players unlike India who have like 7 super stars and for that matter even Australia who have like 8-9 match winners.

For people who underestimate this "grits" value, try making a wild guess to find any match where Srilanka have panicked and lost a game in a span of 6-7 overs. India, West Indies, England, South Africa, New Zealand (to some extent) top this chart of losing a game because of sheer heroic instinct (or may be panic instinct). Here are some matches.... (from a big list of Greatest Panics of One Day History), most of them knock out matches

...
India moved from 98/2 to 120/8 in 1996 semi final in a span of 9 overs
India again from 98/3 to 112/6 in 2007 world cup group match against Sri Lanka
West Indies our great forefathers moved from 165/2 to 202/10 in 1996 semi final
South Africa who could not make 58 runs in 70 balls with 9 wickets in hand in Mini world cup (for a change India was a winner here)
New zealand in the 2007 world cup match against Srilanka, England (there are too many matches to quote)
....

In all these matches the opponents were either Australia or Srilanka (India on one occasion), all these matches were won by quality spinners. Having scratched my memory very hard, I cant remember an instance where Srilanka or Australia collapsed like this against any opposition. Therefore it is only fitting that the aggressive, hard hitting, talented and tough Aussies take on the gritty, spirited, defensive Sri lankans. It must be a battle of raw talent + class against sheer grit. (Something like classical Federer against gritty Nadal)...

And ya..did I forget to mention, Australia should still win it, since I personally feel that a champion comes hard at you, knocks you, strikes you like Australians do and a champion does not wait for you to make a mistake, does not wait for you to give up on patience, or wear you down until you are tired and beats you in fitness/temperament levels. A champion hunts like a lion/tiger like Aussies do and does not hunt like a pack of wolves trying to kill a lion, by wearing the lion down giving a bite every now and then, timing the lion out. A champion boxer is Apollo or Rocky who wants to deliver killer punches and knock you off, and not Mohammed Ali (Am I wrong with the name?) who waits and tires out the opponent, and doesnot finish the game with killer punches.

Love Hate Relationship

2007-03-25T06:17:00.001-07:00

Love Hate Relationship

Cant resist posting a cricket blog now that we are in a depressing state of mind. Well I am not getting into Country/Cricketer bashing mode, to describe our cricketers as good for nothing people. For me, the batsman I like the most is the one I hate the most. And yeah, that is Yuvraj Singh.

When he burst into the international arena, he simply impressed me. To me, I had never really witnessed an Indian batsman who was aggressive, and who also delivers when it matters (before India's World Cup 2007 outing of course). For us aggression meant, someone who could throw the bat around without worrying about his wicket. We had some players branded aggressive, but who were useless 99% of the time because they would never deliver when it mattered. This list includes Kris Srikkanth, Ajay Jadedja (Sans may be 2 one day matches), Amay khurasiya (Hate this guy)....I can name another 20 names and each one mite spring a debate (We have like 1200+ cricket experts in India). I simply liked this guy because of his strong, aggressive, kick-ass kind of attitude, thirst to win no matter what, and a tinge of anger in his outlook. Even in the Srilanka's world cup 2007 match Srilankans jumped for Yuvraj's dismissal more than anyone else.

Coming to his negative traits,

He never plays spin bowling well. Well I agree to it partly, He is not a Laxman or Dravid when it comes to playing spin. I guess most people are disillusioned here. It is not that all kinds of spin that troubles him. For example, he has played Warne, Giles, Gayle, Jayasuriya etc..very well. The only kind of spin he is weak against is a spinning track which also keeps low combined with a spinner who is capable of bowling doosras. Murali, exploited this well, You could even remember Yuvi getting out to a Dave Mohammed's dusra while attempting to sweep, and Monty Panesar also troubled him in a pitch with low bounce. Underlying problem is he doesnt pick a ball from the bowlers hand (Some expert I know told me this), he only reads off the pitch. In order to play a doosra, you need to watch a spinners hand closely (and play a shot very late), some examples of players who have an exceptional run in the subcontinent are Chanderpaul, Jimmy Adams, Laxman, De Silva, Damien Martyn, Younis Khan etc. I guess he is still improving in that, and I dont think there are enough pitches like that so in the long run, Yuvraj mite still have an average of 35+ even with this weakness (Although of late, I *think* he has improved)
Has a rush of adrenaline at all the wrong timings. During Natwest final when we needed 61 of 54 odd balls, when he had to just push around for some more overs, he skied a sweep shot directly to the short fine leg I guess he was a hero that day, mainly because Bhajji and Kaif dint panic after that. Snip...2nd One day against West Indies, with 10 runs needed off 3 balls, he had ability/luck to crack two boundaries and when you needed a 2 run off the last ball, he just succumbed to a full toss from Bravo. Snip....Final of IOC tournament, where we beat WI to meet SL in the finals, and we needed 79 off 90 balls with 7 wickets in hand and Dravid, Yuvraj amidst a great partnership(I guess they get along really really well, perfectly complementing cricketers), and suddenly Yuvraj had a rush of adrenaline and skied a shot to deep fine leg. No points for guessing that the match was miserable loss..Snip, World cup 2007, same sweep shot, same short fine leg, opponent is Bangladesh, his wicket - priceless....I still felt if ever India would have a perfect finsher, it must be Yuvraj Singh....until this happened. This was probably the first time that I saw him panic, usually he gets out trying to be over aggressive.....for me, I really dint mind Indians losing, I guess they deserved it...but it still defies logic, why Yuvraj panicked, they just needed 150 off 24.2 overs (RR: 6+) with Dhoni yet to come.....It is all over now anyways :)
Having told about all his bad matches, It would be bad on my part, If I did not list the ones, in which he just decimated the opposition, on matches that were *important* (Most Sachins critics say he hasnt delivered in important matches dont they?). In case you care, I have listed some matches here, here, here, here, here and here

I have never really got myself attached with a player as such, but I guess Dravid and Yuvraj are the only exceptions in this. I just cant see them fail.... :) Now that the official verdict is out, Yuvi mite have to wait till 2011 to even demonstrate that he is capable of overcoming his nerves and prove to be a perfect finisher.

2006-11-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

A visit to my Alma mater

After a long time, I paid a visit to my Alma mater, for a good reason. It would have been definitely in my wish list to come to my campus for recruitment even when I was studying there. Now It was a dream come true. So off we go on November 23rd, as a 3 member team with me, a Tech Lead called Subbu from Tavant and a HR guy to Trichy. I would not delve into the kind of feelings you would have when you visiting your campus, land on the training and placement department, to be welcomed by your professors :-D, and most importantly to be having food at REC Trichy guest house. I would like to thank Ann (the placement representative) for welcoming us like this. (Pics of the trip here) http://picasaweb.google.com/kannan.ekanath/TavantRECTrichyCampus2006 End of the day, we recruited 2 people Sathya and Utjal. Two candidates whom I thought were probably the best among the ones that I had interviewed.

2006-10-05T02:41:00.000-07:00

In light of Champions Trophy,

A cricket blog after a while. This is one picture from one of the matches that I have cherised like hell. Traditionally, as a matter of fact whenever we hear of "Good cricket" and "Great cricket matches" we associate it with mind blowing bowling or magnificient batting....but this one is....

7th October 2000 - Quarter Final between India and Australia at Gymkhana Club Ground, Nairobi:

India going through a not-so-good-form as is always are playing Australia, Sachin makes some initial onslaught and falls, a batting whiz kid called Yuvraj was born that day(when no one even heard of an Indian batsman playing with so much authority against McGrath and Co - save the little master...), India make a cool 265. Come second session and we have a pleasant surprise with Gilli, Ponting and Co having other plans. At one point Bevan and Steve Waugh were coasting along at 4-163 from 31.1 overs and 103 to win from 101 balls (Aus were fined 2 overs), an equation where everyone would have favoured Australia. Bevan defends the ball a few yards wide off the off-side fielder, and sets off for a quick single assuming that it is an Indian fielder. Unfortunately for him, the fielder happens to be Yuvraj who makes a clean pickup and throw, and which ....of course crashes the stumps, and he was out by a whisker. Although I have been watching cricket for all along matches I saw were almost always, Follow the Master and crumble behind him. This was really startling to see our guys making direct hits :). Not to say that India safely won the match. (This probably is one reason why I seem to like Yuvraj although he pisses me off on most occasions). He was probably the first among the new generation of Indian batsmen, who could bat outside Sachins Shadows, then came Sehwag, Pathan, Dhoni, Raina who on their days could score well faster than the little master..

But this will be one moment, which I would cherish, where I really started feeling that Indians are infact good fielders (given some coaching). We won this match by virtue of good fielding alone, remember Robin singh pulled off a stunning catch to dismiss Ponting who was also playing really well until that point of time and our extremely athletic Dhadha running out Shane Lee in the end with a good direct hit.

As a matter of fact in that tournament, India beat South Africa in the next match (About which I can speak to no end, when Yuvi struck 3 consecutive boundaries off Allan Donald) before promptly folding to Chris Cairns Magic who has the final laugh.

Come what may, and even with criticisms like India folding easily to New zealand in the finals, I will always have my fond memories on the first two matches where we beat Aus and SA with some extremely athletic fielding.

Google amazes you everytime without fail

2006-04-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

I think the services sector has grossly overused/abused the word "Out of the box thinking". When someone just optimises a for loop to exit once the criteria is satisfied which will save say about 50% of the time you are given a tag "Out of the box thinker", am really not quite sure what that means, but to me "Out of the box thinking" is totally altering your "Design premises" and then providing a solution. Google does that everytime without fail !!! Cometh the Messenger: In the early 2000's and late 90's we all had an illusion about a messenger, that you must be able to add contacts in a messenger, logically group it so that you can pick contacts easily and then click on a person to ping/message him. I guess any workflow analyst would have guessed that this was a perfect "workflow" for a chat client. When i first looked onto http://www.talk.google.com the first thing to irritate me was i just cannot group the damn thing. I mean i just have to live with the way they give it to me. There were no groups like "Buddies", "Colleagues", "Irritants", "Frequent Ones". And what more i need to search for "Ash.." if i had to ping Aishwarya Rai when i know that if i grouped it i would probably create a group "Loved Ones" and put her there. No there is no way in Google Talk. Slowly, i started getting the heat of *WHY* google is spending a whole lot of time and effort and *WHY* they specifically decline grouping and stuff like that. I think their idea must be simple "Dont organise/group/manage things, leave it just the way you would normally do and we will manage it". Yes 99% of the time i got the guys that i *have* to ping up my list right there. And i dint bother to type in the names remaining 1% of the time. Wow...no more artificial grouping, thinking whether a colleague who is also your class mate has to be under colleagues group or under friends group. No more multiple clients. Simple Leave it like a *MESS* and let google figure things for you. Cometh the Mail: I am a rat pack when it comes to managing mails. When something has to be retrieved it has to be got quickly otherwise i get really pissed off. When GMAIL came, i thought it *sucked*. It really did, because it said to me "Your IDEA of putting mails into folders is stupid and has lot of disadvantages". I said who are you to tell me that, give me way of arranging mails into folders...i cried like a baby. For some reason, i had to send some more mails through GMAIL and lo i felt that i was subtly getting lazier and lazier....Ooooh, i can put same mail under logical folders (called labels), define filters same way i would normally do. And searching, man i can easily get *WHAT I WANT* and that goddamn thing is so bloody fast as if i am on Outlook or thunderbird with all mails downloaded on my machine (Outlook sucks by the way!!! It does 100%) Cometh the blog reader: This is something not many would have tried at http://reader.google.com oh man, here again i always used to arrange blogs into categories, then put folders like "Java", "Oracle", "Friends" etc and i used to think that "Organising" is a good thing to do. Then i move to the framework of googles blog reading where you basically do not *SORT, ORGANISE* i mean what the hell.....was my initial reaction....why cant i just group them and read them. Then something told me "You were wrong with GTalk and GMail, might as well with the blog reader". Then i started exploring stuff in the reader, you could label the feeds (remember it is still buggy) and lo oh aaaah...man it just gives the recent entries in all the blogs i just dont have the pain of organising them into categories then everytime i change my machine save a copy of that xml somewhere and import it..and periodically have the pain of updating my blog reader (Omea Reader sucks!! by the way) I was welcomed to the world of "Lazy Living". Just live life, dont sort / manage / analyse / organise things, just let google do those worthless things for you :) Google !!! well done (although i am not the first person to say it).........Welcome us to the world of lazy living.. One more thing to add here, is their creativity, they just dont waste time in load testing, stress testing a product (Enterprisey dudes may be find it odd, because half of these guys will lose jobs if these were taken out from software development life cycle). They just put the products under "http://www.labs.google.com" and ask people to use/abuse it and whatever comes out from that is the final product. (Interestingly, all above mentioned products are still in beta....that is a good way of saying "expect a few bugs" rite?) And yeah, if you find some bug, you dont have to go into JIRA, feature requests and all such crap. Just send a mail to the associated mailing list, and they *DO* watch the list for requests. I had logged a feature with the blog reader "to be able to delete label s". I thank 2 users who had given a 5 star rating for that post. 10 days down the line , that feature is there....right there...ooooh uhhhhh i was jumping.....(and i am still...) I can write pages about http://pages.google.com and again about http://www.orkut.com ooh i feel like having a small space in the big web...(Remember the TVS GLX ad were the guy saya "I like small things, small house, small office....small skirts...but this GLX victor is too big) Out of these i guess orkut gets a slightly bad ranking because i feel there are a million better ways of doing it better. If Microsoft did out of the box thinking when it came up with GUI windows against DOS it was called "Microsoft's era". If Google goes this way i would be destined to believe that it is "Google's Era" and in case they release their OS that will be a final nail in the coffin on Microsoft :-D

Open Source or Open Soars!!!!

2006-02-27T01:39:00.000-08:00

[ PS : This post is intended to be taken in a very lighter tone. Much of these i am sure, would have been experienced by people surrounding the open source space. This post has nothing to say like Open Source sucks or Microsoft licks or anything related to that. Just my thoughts on how you can possibly screw yourself using open source stuff. ] Yes so-called Open source experts have had enough fun mocking at poor BEGINNER developers. It is time to pay back. While i am very happy about open source i still feel that a whole lot of people who proclaim themselves as experts(here in after referred as so-called open source experts) derive pride only by making users feel "Look what we have done :)" and firing the odd poor less knowledgeable user. We want to announce a community called "USERS-ARE-ALSO-SMART" as against the general opinion of the so-called open source people that users are almost always dumb. As part of this community policies, we proclaim that,

When we say a open software X does not work, simple it does not work. Next lines of our mail will say what does not work. When we say it sucks, it does so big time!!!!!
We HAVE read the change logs and your never ending JIRA bug reports before asking a question as simple as, Is X compatible with Apache 4.x with Y enabled?
When we say a feature A doesnt work in a software X, dont ask us what version of X we are using, UNLESS it is absolutely relevant. Instead you as a developer, think if at all the feature A worked in any release.
We mean it, we have read through your X.sourceforge.net(which really sucks by the way) before asking questions.
We have endured the pain of subscribing ourself to the mailing list that you mentioned in your website, got the acknowledgement, clicked on the link in the acknowledgement mail, waited for an activiation, only to find that the list is no longer used.
In case you are talking about the archiving facility of your mailing list, yes we have been through that only to find that, you dont have a search facility and we have to manually download the 980MB text file of the archive and search ourselves, and even if there was one search facility it must be the one with simple keyword search(Havent you guys heard of a website called "GOOGLE"????)
We have had enough troubles posting a 85 line mail to your mailing list, only to get a reply as simple as "Please do not use HTML in your mails, it simply clogs our space"
NO, we cant just download CVS versions of your software go through the extremely painful process of upgrading your library version, finally to report that "IT WORKS IN THE LATEST CVS VERSION, AMAZING!!!!". No definitely we have more important work than that.
We cant help you, if your error message is "Cannot find required DLL". No amount of "I tried X 2.4.1, in Windows 2000 OS with 2G processor, with Y enabled, modified the config.xml to point to ZZZ and restarted AAA .....etc" will do
We will never accept releases which have 4 dots in between "4.5.6.1beta release". 3 is more than enough for you guys to play around
For Gods sake there is something called "Final Release" after a Beta Release.
One Day is good enough time for you guys to think of the answer for a question (In case you actually knew it)
WE say whether it meets our requirement or not
Last but not the least, We perfectly know that "FREE software is the freedom to source, and NOT FREE as in zero dollars" (although no one finds the source any useful)

Street Cricket

2006-02-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

We all know about street cricket and about how it is played etc. Was trying to note down some terminologies about street cricket which are amusing,

Mattai - Etymology Tamil - The piece of wood to be used as the cricket bat. Need not confirm to geometrical trivialities.

Gaaji - Etymology Unkown - The indian reference for an 'inning'.It is a well known fact that captains of street cricket teams always prefer to bat first irrespective of conditions.

Double Gaaji - Etymology Unkown - An excpetional scenario wherein a batsman can bat twice if there are a shortage of players in the side.

Osi Gaaji - Etymology Unkown - A scenario where some stranger wants to bat for a couple of balls just for fun and then carry on with his work

Over Gaaji - Etymology Unkown - The act of a selfish batsman who purposely retains strike by taking a single of the last ball of the over to enjoy more "Gaaji"ing

Last Man Gaaji - Etymology partly english- A scenario where the last man who is not out with all wickets down gets to play "Gaaji" with no runner. It must be noted that, the fielding team can effect run outs on both the stumps when there is Last Man Gaaji

Current - Etymology English - The unique and distinctive way of getting a batsman run out. When a batsman attempts a dangerous run, He could be run out by any of the fielders who just need to land their feet on the stone at the bowlers end.

Adetail - Etymology Unkown - The most funny reference to a batsman being 'Retired Hurt'.

Return Declare - Etymology Unkown - Same as 'Adetail'. But sometimes used, when a batsman crosses a stipulated number of runs say 20 or bats for stipulated number of balls so that others can get a share of "gaaji"ing

Bongu - Etymology Tamil - The slang word used if a team unfairly cheats the other team while playing.

Full Cover - Etymology English - A situation where in a batsmen is taking a half stump guard thereby covering the complete stumps from the view of the bowler. Since street cricket typically do not have a LBW it is very difficult to get a batsman out, if he covers the stump fully

One pitch catch - Etymology English - A rule where a batsman gets out when a fielder catches it even after the ball pitches once. Typically street cricket batsmen do not go for lofted shots fearing to get out (refer the first paragraphy to know why lofted shots are not allowed in street cricket)

One pitch one hand - Etymology English - A slight modification of the above rule where a fielder can use both hands if catching the ball full toss, but has to use only one hand, if the catch is "one-pitch". Typically used to increase the chances of batsmans survival

Sundu - Etymology Tamil- A great forefather of the now popular "super-sub" rule, this rule can be used if a Sothai batsman's innings has to be played by a good batsman

La Ball - Etymology English - Last ball of an over

Full fast - Etymology English - Since street cricket pitches are a few yards long, a ball which is thrown with full pace and energy is considered a no ball as it will be impossible to handle such pace with short distance

Thuchees - Etymology Unknown- When batsman/any fielder gets distracted from the game due to highly technical reasons like a vehicle crossing the road when a ball is bowled (with the pitch perpendicular to the road)

Waiteees - Etymology Unknown- Same as 'Thuchees'

Common Fielding - Etymology English- Due to lack of number of fielders, it is possible that people from batting team who are not actually doing batting have to field or do wicket keeping or for that matter even umpiring

Ball Right - Etymology English- When a umpire/batsman declares a wide ball, bowler uses this term to say that the ball was not a wide. Typically happens because umpires are from the batting teams.

Dokku - Etymology Unknown- A derogatory term for a defensive shot. Typically a batsman is discouraged from playing such shots because of the constraints of less number of overs and because everyone in the team needs to have a fair amount of gaaji

Baby Over - Etymology English- When a bowler has no hopes of completing his over with lots of wides and no balls he is substituted by a better bowler and the over is called a Baby over, Baby because the first bowler was very amateur

Chain Over - Etymology English- When a bowler bowls two continuous overs. Typically happens when captains fail to calculate correctly the number of overs in the absence of electronic score cards

Uruturadhu - Etymology Tamil- When the bowler is unable to extract any meaningful bounce from the pitch. Sometimes used as a defensive tactic towards the deck.

Thadavuradhu - Etymology Tamil- (In the context of cricket) When a batsman is not able to make any contact with the ball using his bat.

Suthuradhu - Etymology Tamil- Same as slogging in cricket towards the deck.

Avishot - Etymology English- Appeal to Umpire for out(run out, catch, etc)

One Side Runs - Etymology English- When teams decide before hand that there are runs only on one side of the wicket due to lack of sufficient number of fielders

Granted - Etymology English- When a batsman hits a reasonable distance from which fetching the ball back is slightly difficult due to technical difficulties already mentioned (like vehicle crossing a road, presence of a thorny bush etc), teams agree that a fixed number of runs are GRANTED

Most of it can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_cricket which i keep updating every now and then

Welcome to ICICI bank

2005-11-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

Phone : Welcome to ICICIBank. Press * to continue Me : * Phone : If you are an ICICI bank customer press 1, for enquiries press 2, for ... Me : 1 Phone : For English press 1, hindi mein jankari ke liye dho dhabayiye Me : 1 Phone : For banking account queries please keep your debit or credit card number ready. For Banking accounts Press 1, For Credit Cards press 2, ... For Demat and online trading press 4 Me : 4 Phone : For Demat account press 1, for online account press 2, ...to speak to a customer service representative press 9. Me : 9 Phone : Your wait time is approximately 7 minutes Me : (Oh thank you so much, i have all the time in this world) (After a small sweet nap for 7 minutes) Phone : Good morning this is Nithya, May i please assist you Me : I want to do online trading in ICICI. But i seem to have forgot my username and password. Can you provide me the same. Phone : Yes, Sir. Can you please provide me your DEMAT account number sir. Me : 543***234**** Phone : May i know your full name? Me : ..... Phone : Can you please confirm date of birth (there are around 11 questions here) Me :....(patiently give out everything)... Phone : Ok, sir. I have taken down your request your password should reach you in 10 working days. Me : what? cant i have it over the Phone (i agree this was stupid) Phone : No sir, i have placed a request for changing password. The password will be sent to you in the address of hyderabad Me : Hei but wait, i am yet to change the address in my demat account. Phone : Oh in that case sir, you need to first raise a request for changing address which will take 8 working days, and after that you can request for a new user name Me : okay i understand, take down the request. Phone : May i transfer you to the concerned person Sir? Me : Yes please do... Phone : (Your wait time is approximately 9 minutes) Me : (Oh god.....again a small nap + browsing on my system...) Phone : Good morning sir, this is sundar (blah blah and all formalities) Me : See i want you to take a change of address for my demat + online trading account Phone : Yes sir, may i have your details please....(Yes guys the same 11 questions like date of birth, mobile etc that other person asked) Me : (ufff....i give everything again) Phone : Ok sir, may i know your online trading account number please for change of address Me : good heavens, that is the whole problem, i have lost my online trading accout number, user name. I only have a demat account. Phone : In that case sir, can i transfer you to the person who will help you figure out your online trading account from your demat account. Me : Please do Phone : (He puts me on hold. This time my wait time is just 5 minutes) Me : (la la la la la la) Phone : Good afternoon sir, this is Sarah, how may i help you Me : Ok see you need to give me my online trading account number Phone : Yes Sir. (yes yes she asks me those details again) Me : (sssssssss...giving her all details). Phone : Sir, i can take down your request, it will take 4 working days to mail your online trading account number to your address. Me : But no yaar, my address is changed. Phone : Do you want me to put you through a person who can take a request for change of address. Me : But he put me to you. Phone : I guess, i dont understand the problem sir. Me : (The analyst in me wakes up)See i actually wanted a username/password for online trading. The issue is that will be sent to my physical address. My address is changed. So i went for a request for changing my address. There they ask my online trading account number which i dont have i have only the demat account number. In order to get my online trading account number i have to get my address changed because you only mail the online trading account. This is a classical example of Cyclical deadlock. You need to break one chain here. You have three options a) You give username/password directly on email/Phone and not to the address b) You give my online trading account number directly and not to my physical address c) Or you take down request for changing my address without having online trading account number. Phone : I am sorry sir, but i have no clue of what your problem is. (she really makes a sorry face) Me : (Ok i take around 14 minutes to explain her what the problem is, and by then i myself am little confused about what i want to do) Ok, i think of alternatives, can you start a fresh online trading account? Phone : Sure sir, but new trading account also will be mailed to your physical address. Me : Oh no, can i start another demat account then? Phone : Sure sir, but if you are linking two demats with same savings bank account then you need to get a waiver from mumbai office. Me : What do i do for that? Phone : you need to submit a copy of your pancard, last 2 years IT declaration, and a letter requesting our manager at Mumbai asking for another demat account. Me : (ufff...) can i start a new savings bank account. Phone : Sure sir, our representative will reach you as quick as 2 days entire process will take just 5 working days. Me : and then you want me to create new demat account with all procedures link to savings bank account then again a new online trading account is it. Phone : yes sir (she seems impressed with my logical analysis) Me : oh shittt Phone : Sir, it seems a difficult problem, can you write a detailed letter to our head office at Mumbai Me : (WTF)...hmmm Phone : He will respond in 12 working days Me : (12 days for response+ 10 days for address change + 8 days for username around a month shittt). You know what for now i have lost the interest of trading in shares. Phone : Very sorry for such..sir.. Me : Dont be... Phone : Is there anything else i can help you with sir. Me : Grrrr....nothing Phone : (thank you for calling sir, you are speaking to so and so wish you a happy day ahead) Me : Ufff......it was 1 hour 14 minutes.......(sob sob)

Top 5 at the FORUM hall, Bangalore

2005-11-14T05:58:00.000-08:00

On sunday i decided, i had enough rest. Yes previous few weekends ware very hectic and at last i had 48 hours of freetime. O freetime! sounds delicious, wake up at 10, browse through tv channels, gossip with roommates have a nice afternoon sleep, now in the evening we decide that we are going to the forum for watching a movie. Needlessly to say our lazy attitude was duly punished when all shows were houseful (we guessed that). We both do not know what to do and decide to pick the TOP 5 AT FORUM. Here we start rating people.... 3rd floor FORUM, hmm people were busy locating their movie halls, for some reason nothing "GREEN". We decide to start from ground floor. Ground Floor Parking lot:Two girls ask us for "Way In", One rated very faaat but looks ok (considering that i am in a 22 member MALE-ONLY team) another gal doesnt clear our minimal eligibility criterion (believe me they are a *BARE MINIMUM*). We go into "Health and Glow" there is a couple, gosh we scream diatribes at the guy with that *REALLY BEAUTIFUL* gal. Even my fellow colleagues agree to the fact that any guy who accompanies a gorgeous girl is treated to all kind of "gaalis" by the general male public. We are no deviations. She enters into the top 5. We climb up the escalator, and ssssshhh there is ANOTHER ONE walking in the ground floor space with a blue skirt which extends only to a few inches below the waist. Guys around her have their tongue hanging out (Reminds me of the MASK in cartoon network) I decide that this gal picks up the "FIRST SPOT" without any competition, room mate nods (He had his mouth wide open :) ). The gal near health and glow will be second unless we find someone better to take that spot. Because we are to do something, me and my roommate decide to buy a shoe and start scanning "Adidas", "Nike" and "Reebok". Reebok seems to be the costliest followed by adidas and nike in that order. We scan three showrooms to perfection, finally manage to ask the sales person if there was a *SHOE* which costs less than 2k. His scoldings are gracefully accepted by us and we decide that we had enough. There isnt a shoe for 2k :( sob sob. I was impressed by a trekking shoe at adidas costs around 6k will buy that next month :-P Out we come, and infront of landmark we see a strange sight. A guy and gal walk infront of us (holding close to each other, POSITIONS, well better left undescribed) and suddenly the guy kisses her. We think where bangalore is going but my room mates notes her quite well. We hide our "Stomach - burning" and leave behind. A 12 year old kid (she looked innocent) asked her mom something pointing to that couple and duly got scolded by her mom. My roommate says she was good enough to make it to top 5. I give her the third spot. Room mate quarrles for second but finally settles down to 3 after i compare and contrast both of them. My room mate stumbles on a Gillette outlet right in the middle of the forum. He is gazing a gal with a blue jeans and black top( i think). I instruct him "When in forum, you need to watch out for Skirts ;) ". He is puzzled and asks me why?. I tell him that "If you go to Tirupati we only buy/look for laddus and not maisurbagh (it is another sweet)". Room mate acknowledges my intelligence. So we look at the gal in the gillette outlet (Yes she wears a skirt). My room mate fights with me to give her a 3rd place. We give her the 3rd place and move the gal (who got kissed) to 4th place. Since by the time i got tired and the ice cream that we ate stuffed us, we decide to award the 5th place to the gal who asked us for "WAY IN" at the parking lot (Yes the one who was very fat !!!). We have a peaceful dinner at jaya nagar and go for another nice sunday night sleep :)