RKVS Raman Blogs

Free, for life

2011-11-16T19:30:00.001+05:30

A guy called, said was giving away a software
And added it had all that i wished anytime
I grew keen, asked to come over
and was wondering, what it could it be, meantime

He came over, sat confidently,
and started explaining the product.
Wait a minute, I said,
I have some questions before you go about

I asked him if the product was free
He said, it can't be freer than this,
Is it under any license i asked,
He said, "Nothing that you would sign for"

Can i modify and use I asked
He said, "Users all over the world are encouraged to do that"
"To modify and find your own way to make it useful"
"is what the software built for"

What if the software goes obsolete I asked
"The upgrades are free forever"
"The user just needs to be ready to change"
"And software will be newer"

I asked my trump question "Can I share"
"Oh, please feel free"
"though most people find it difficult to share it"
"the more you share this software"
"the better it works for you"

Convinced with my basic questions
I asked what the software was for and what platform is it built on
"This software is platform itself, on which everything else is built"
"Has existed for ages, but has never failed to intrigue"
"Has been an inspiration to many creators worldwide"
"Linux, GNU, Apache you name it, have all been inspired by"

Oh please, you got to be kidding,
He smiled, and it dawned on me
The free software we talked about was in fact Life
And the person selling was He.

Any good given gets appreciated

2011-11-15T20:02:00.001+05:30

Some time last year I had written a small piece of code ( 4 lines ) to convert a circle to path in RaphaelJs. Was so happy with the utility of the function (with respect to animating and cutting it) that I posted it on Google groups (in fact twice :-) ). Generally any good thing posted on project groups gets immediate attention. This one did not. Not that it was a great piece of code which screamed for attention but still I think I expected atleast somebody to use it and respond about it. Nothing happened.

And time went by. The post went out of my memory.

Today morning after about 18 months i get a mail from a person who says that he found it useful and has put a page showing its use. So much so that he puts my name in the first line of the code. Boy, have i been smiling the entire day.

If this can happen for 4 lines of code, imagine what kind of adulation people get when they put out thousand of lines of useful code.

Give people give. Anything good given (code, money, time, love) gets appreciated.

Going beyond the Dunbar's number

2011-10-29T22:24:00.003+05:30

http://neevtech.com/blog/?p=436

The Known and the Unknowns

2011-10-27T13:49:00.003+05:30

Started blogging on Neevtech.com http://neevtech.com/blog/?p=418

In goodness I believe ...

2011-10-18T13:04:00.001+05:30

In goodness I Believe
in this mood Festive
to Rang De iGive
will ill feelings Forgive
and strive to Achieve
BTW now
I also belong to Neev

Happy Diwali!!

Ethnic day at Neev

Ain't no sunshine

2011-09-29T22:14:00.000+05:30

Ain't no sunshine where she is gonna be gone
It is not warm where she is gonna stay

Ain't no sunshine where she is gonna be gone
And this house is gonna be a dorm
Everytime she goes away.

Parichit - OCR for Indic Scripts

2011-07-11T16:03:00.000+05:30

Started an open source project to create Indian language models for Tesseract OCR. http://code.google.com/p/parichit/

FOSS Friendly Draft for Device Drivers

2011-06-29T12:29:00.000+05:30

Finally a FOSS friendly draft for device drivers policy while procuring hardware by government is out.

The draft is available on EGovernance standards website

Have a look and give feedback.

Hunting Happiness

2011-02-08T17:17:00.000+05:30

He walked out of the interview room confidently,
for he knew he had cracked it
The offer letter arrived immediately
and he was gazing at it fondly.

Soon it was the day of his first paycheck
And his fond gaze returned,
"Are you happiness?" he asked at the check
The paycheck nodded negatively

"I will give you means to spend and splurge"
"But happiness is not me"
"Many confuse me for that"
"But that is sheer folly"

He spent hard days at job
and many times night too,
His boss was pleased, so were his colleagues
And one day he rose to fame.

He was named as resource of the year,
His name and picture flashed across
The proud fellow looked at the trophy in his hand
And asked the question again

The trophy said no patronizingly
"I am just a reflection of your efforts"
"I go into hands of those who toil"
"And make them as proud as I can"

Sometime later he met a girl
And his heart throbbed like never before
A thousand colors his days saw
And in his dreams he saw more

On his knees he went one day in front of her
Guess what, she said yes
Their love grew as days went by, with certainty
he asked to Love, "aren't you happiness?"

Love too said no, with pity
"Cos i bring commitments too"
"Some can't handle both of us"
"Cos we give stress too"

Our friend now had settled into a life routine,
as years went by mildly
Daily he would now sit in his balcony
Now and then wonder what it means to live happily

One such day a butterfly came,
and sat on a flower near him.
It greeted him with "Hello", poor fellow
managed a "Hi" with a stumble

"Are you rich?" it asked, he replied
"I have enough for needs and emergencies"
"Have you achieved?" it probed
"To my satisfaction and best of my abilities"

"Have you found love?" it asked
"Enough to give and receive"
"And do you have hatred?" it glanced
"None that i cannot forgive"

The butterfly flew towards him
and now perched on his shoulder
folded its wings and leaned towards his ear
"That my fellow is happiness" it whispered

"When you forage enough for your needs"
"And are satisfied with your deeds"
"When you have given and found love not hatred"
"And are not subjected to greed"

"You my friend, do not realize"
"That happiness is not outside but in your mind"
"But that said, please beware"
"That has come to you because you have been drudging, forging and kind"

Certain emptiness this weekend

2011-02-06T13:39:00.000+05:30

Savs is in Indore
this Sunday is a bit bore
a certain emptiness since morning
definitely something less than more

I realize how I have
got used to her coaxing to get up
today i lay late in the bed without
any purpose to wake up

I do not hear her work in the garden
I do not see the happy face with some soil on her cheek
The garden looks lot less greener
and is going to be like that for a week :-(

The TV does not entertain
cos there is no competition for remote
I am calling her to come online on Skype
The laptop is my only hope

My afternoon is silent, and how haunting it cud be
As i lay in the couch, I see no quilt covering me.
Cos the hands that bring the quilt, are in their hometown
How I wish they come back soon, safe and sound.

My Sunday temple visit is
for once filled with desire
I have a prayer, get her back soon
and He knows, in this, I am no liar

Reluctant runner

2011-01-28T17:16:00.000+05:30

I don't like the word "run"
oh, how I hate the word run.
for I am the reluctant runner
and I don't think running is fun

I don't enjoy competition
cos that what 50-5000 people do
the thing is about who does it fast
and not about what good does it do

Race is a bad word for me
cos it inherently means getting ahead
why can't we just get together
isn't harmony the best bet?

I am a reluctant runner
I do run sometimes
I do get pushed into competition
and is made to hunt for position prime

I see the city I live in
I go crazy with what I see
people have little clue of how much they run
and how little they need to, to be free

People running today,
for those happier days to come
with lots of money, they will enjoy when they retire, they think,
guys, wake up, thats never gonna become.

Running hard today is gonna make you tired
and weaken your limbs to core
when you retire you may have to anyway rest
cos moving around will be sore

I am a reluctant runner
But I run very less
I do take time to stand and watch
and catch up with my breath

Time... tread softly please

2011-01-18T16:24:00.000+05:30

I would like to sit down
and take a soft look at my life
look at life walking with me
and be happy with my stride

I would like to go slow
and not be asked to run
would like mornings to be calmer
and be as mild as winter sun

Would want the day to begin
when I want to arrive
and should be able to switch off the lights
when i want to retire

Never been a part of rat race
never would want to be
Would want to take a less tried route
and make a path by me

I want time to take note of
when i do things
And not involve in petty business of
doing things in time

If life like this
could be granted unto me
I would never beg for anything more to Thee
And would sing your praise with glee

This year.... not only

2010-12-31T14:20:00.000+05:30

This year I will not just remember what I gave
but will remember what I got too

I will not just count the favors I did
but those that were done to me too

I will not only count the arguments I gave up
but what others conceded too

Not only the times I gave somebody a glass of water
but times I was served too

This year I will not only devise ways to reduce my anger
but of others who are angry at me too

My time will just not be spent making a million rupees
but will try to become a 'temporal millionaire' too

Less harm will I do to myself with my vices
and lesser will I do to others too.

Will be kind in helping others
And will humbly seek help too

Return calls more often than what I did
And initiate calls more often too

Read more than what I did
and write more too.

Make life more interesting and exciting
at the same time more meaningful too

Tip the balance in favor of "We"
than being concerned with only me

This year will definitely not be an another year
I hope to do something new too.

Rendezvous with Rain

2010-06-23T17:33:00.005+05:30

The rain drops splashed on the windows and drops trickled down
Balcony was wet, leaves glistened and far off frogs would jump into ponds and drown
But Mom would not let me out cos I would catch cold
For I was just five and would have to do what she told

At ten I got bit bolder and life was too cool
Play in the rains, while returning from school
Jump in the waters from puddle to puddle
Afraid of Mom, into grandpa's legs cuddle

Fifteen was the time for first love,
That was the time I had already met my dove
Walk in the drizzle hand in hand in the grove
And how these memories now remain as a trove

Hormones were in abundant supply as I turned twenty
And rains and cold would actually make them go freaky
Tis was the time to get a little naughty
Call the college sweetheart home when parents were away and get a bit cozy

Twenty five and was already couple of years into my career
Work hard, party harder and I couldn't have been freer
Rains would make the friends come together
And hoot loud into the night with smoke and barrels of beer

At Thirty I bought my first car and a house on loan
Had finally found someone who would make it a home
Was fun in the rains when I would take her for a long drive
World looked so wonderful with her seated by my side

Responsibilities at work and home, made thirty five bit sober
To sit in the balcony, mind would seek, whenever skies would shower
A quite drink in solitude with nobody to bother
Find inner peace while listening to outside pitter-patter

At forty, success personified, things got grander house, clout, car and reign
Affection, love and understanding with my wife matured as fine wine
Used to look into her eyes each day and thank the one divine
For she was the only one who could have, for all that you would say, got along with me just fine
Still remember a rainy evening on the way to attend a party
Asked the chaffeur to detour to a restaurant to share a smile, meal, moments hearty

Sometimes you wonder if life is all about becoming busier
At forty five it seemed, going back to home and family was becoming rarer
From the high towers of my corporate empire, signing of an acquisition deal, while it would rain outside
Me and my business partners, would share a drink late in the night, conversing with dignity and pride

By Fifty, life had gone into a comfortable auto drive
Kid had grown, business had settled and nothing required a strive
It was lovely at that age to settle down in my bed with book
while rain made sounds on my portico
I still looked forward to get cozy, though not naughty with wife
let the excitement of youth, forgo

Fifty five is the age when past starts seriously questioning
With diabetes, arthritis and heart aches hauting me, my journey to end was beginning
Doctors prescribed walks and that I would do
And thus on rainy evenings would find myself in parks (not groves), with my partner true
Would hurry to a bench under a tree and hold a umbrella high
Have shared many a calming moments, I recommend you to try

Sixty was the time for me to resign, from work, from struggle and from myths
Live with my son, watch TV and be a loving grandpa to his kids
It was my grandson now who plays in the rain jumping from puddle to puddle
And when his mom chases him for that, runs into my legs to cuddle

I do not know how last 10 years went and am weak in my legs
I do not care anymore but am always well looked after, nevertheless
I don't got out in rain no more, for kids say I will catch a cold
For I am seventy now and would have to do, what my kids told

Taming Prejudices

2010-04-17T23:37:00.001+05:30

This happened about 5 years back when I had been to Hyderabad for Telugu software release. On one of the evenings I expressed my desire to visit Charminar area to one of my colleagues. This fellow being a native of Hyderabad warned me that it is not safe enough to wander alone in that area during Ramzan time after dark since there are many rumors of unexpected communal violence or misbehavior in that area. I rubbished it and went ahead alone. Caught a bus and got down about 2kms from Charminar. Asked a person direction and he gave a reply in Hyderabadi Hindi/Urdu. Started walking down. Slowly I could clearly see the difference between this area and rest of Hyderabad. This area has a pre-dominant Muslim population. You could hardly recognize people of other faith in the region. And that started bringing pictures in my mind. Pictures which were fed in by tv channels and other media including films where Muslims were shown in negative light for their fundamentalism and low tolerance for people of other faith. Add to this the scare that my colleague gave about walking in this area after dark. It was getting pretty uneasy and I was getting pretty conscious about people looking at me. Amidst these thoughts I approached brightly lit Charminar and was amazed by its splendor. Just beyond Charminar is the Jama Masjid. Believe me I had never entered a mosque before in my life and I must admit I was not very comfortable in that area alone. While I was looking at the entrance of Jama masjid from outside, an elderly person tapped on my shoulder and said, "Don't stand at the entrance, go in." Given my highly fluid state of mind, I could neither react nor resist. I walked in. I did not know the etiquette inside mosques. I stepped slowly inside, lookind around suspiciously. A stern voice came from behind, "Where are you going with your shoes?", I shuddered. "Remove your shoes, wash your hands and face in the tank and come". I did that mechanically. I approached him. "Are you new here?", he asked. There were others too who looked at me. I would have fainted there. I said yes. "Let me show you around" he said. I meekly uttered "My faith is not Islam, I am a Hindu.". He looked at me and said, "Everybody is equal in eyes of Allah. Come in" Those words were a revelation.And suddenly my prejudices could not find any platform to stand on. They crumbled to nothing. The clergy at Jama Masjid showed me the place and then asked me to sit on a bench. "Sit here and wish for anything, Allah will fulfill it and bring you back here." I was sure I will be going back there someday. I came back a happier, more tolerant person.

Yet another incident happened last week. I was travelling to Kumbakonam, my hometown by train. For past couple of years I am used to travelling in 3 Tier AC sleeper class and I took pride in my net-savviness in booking tickets using IRCTC. IRCTC gives an option of class upgrade in case of availability. I wud never opt for one. I boarded the train, found my seat and berth and settled down with a book on short stories of O'Henry. About 15 minutes after departure, somebody tapped on my shoulder. As I lifted my eyes out of the book, I saw a 30ish guy with a lady next to him who had an infant in her arms. This guy definitely did not look urban neither did the lady. "Sir, this is our seat he said". You get lot of such characters in train, who board the wrong compartment and demand that the seat is theirs. I immediately dismissed this fellow as one of those. I showed him my ticket and said, " Please see this, this is my seat.", He insisted, "No sir, it cant be, our ticket has been upgraded and I am allotted this seat now". I said, "That can't be, see this ticket" and showed it again. He wouldn't listen. "Let the traveling ticket examiner (TTE) come", he said. I was pretty confident. We waited for TTE to come. Meanwhile the lady with the infant sat in the little space that was available. I felt bad for them and was getting irritated at this guy who was confident that the seat was theirs. I could not see the inconvenience of the lady for long I decided to approach the ticket checker myself who was a few rows away. I went and requested him to direct the guy to his right berth. The TTE asked me my seat number. I told. TTE said "Sorry sir, but your seat has been upgraded, you are alloted a seat in 2 Tier AC now. This is your new seat number" Suddenly I recalled that this ticket was not booked by me, but by Savs who had chosen the option of upgrade. I was embarrassed as I approached my seat. I told the guy meekly "I too got an upgrade"."Congrats sir, you too are very lucky. Please check the charts before you board the train.". "I will" I said "And sorry for all the trouble."

"No problem sir, everybody makes mistakes, no big deal." He said. I smiled.

Prayer of a contented mind

2010-03-11T13:28:00.002+05:30

I do not know
what I shud wish for
life and You
have given all that I vied for

But as I stand with
my eyes closed and hands folded
let me convey to You the images
that have now and then occured and faded

Let my friends know me as a nice man
as somebody who picked up the phone when they gave a call
let people who think of me as foe find me more forgivable
as somebody who was just frank not harmful at all

Let my dear ones when they have to go far
not go in hatred
let them remember that before they left
"I will always love you" I had said

Let me be in a position where I can
resolve conflict and not create
put me in a condition where I can
receive anger and not retaliate

Let me earn more
than what I can spend
and let me spend less on me
and more on loved ones and friends

I welcome all the opportunities
that You provide me to serve
but do pace it well and even
cos that lets my interest preserve

I ask not for a long life
for frail body becomes dependent
I ask though for a quiet and quick death
whenever it happens without pain and experiment

I wudn't have listed all these
but then You might doubt me
have a look when You will
or You can just let it be.

Building on Google App Engine

2010-02-25T13:53:00.000+05:30

Had heard people talk around me about putting their application on cloud and so on. Had never tried it myself. Recently I got to see this book on Google App Engine in our library.

Explored a bit on the Appengine site. Looked pretty neat. Decided to try a small idea.

And thus came Termslator. Felt nice to get back to coding after some time. Termslator gave an opportunity to explore lot of stuff which I was not comfortable with earlier like CSS, AJAX, JQuery etc.

So if somebody needs some hand holding on building a Google App using Java, let me know. I can help.

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Oye, Its Friday!!

2010-02-12T15:50:00.000+05:30

Yup!! And a good friday at that I guess.

After more than a month's silence, I am writing this post to announce the most exciting work that we have ever done and released.

We are calling it Dramatize and it is a web-based collaborative platform for creating interactive plays and dramas.

Visit Dramatize web site and let us know your views.

Happy Dramatizing!!

Amnesia is live!!

2009-12-29T19:20:00.003+05:30

Hello,

Past one month we have been busy packaging Amnesia, a collaborative web-page annotation tool. Today we are glad to release the beta.

Visit us at http://trinetra.cdacbangalore.in/amnesia/

Here is a video describing its functionality.

Do request an account if you are interested in giving it a spin.

It is on a 'member' invites 'new user' basis since we are still unsure on the amount of load our server will be able to take. But we hope to open it up soon.

See you on Amnesia.

Happy 2010!!

New Home on Web

2009-11-18T16:47:00.001+05:30

Am moving my homepage to Google sites.

http://sites.google.com/site/rkvsraman/ will be my new web address. See you there.

Bringing in the Daughter-in-law

2009-11-16T17:20:00.000+05:30

In Indian homes, unlike Western societies, a lot of guys (read sons) live with their parents even after they have married and have got kids of their own. This phenomena can be seen across most of the ethnic and linguistic groups in India. It is almost an unwritten law that sons have to support their aging parents. In such a scenario, the guy's mother (MIL) decides the rules and practice of the house and more than often when the son gets married, the daughter-in-law (DIL) comes to stay at their in-laws place than at her husband's place. Naturally she comes into a fortress where already systems and workflows are in place. This is where interesting cat and mouse stories start. DIL comes in with her own set of aspirations and dreams about 'her own' house and MIL stays with an assertion that this house will run as per her laid down guidelines. Given the strength of each of these actors, the tussle can have various magnitudes.

The conflicts are pretty obvious. From MIL's point of view (POV) it is the authority and comfort of known practices, while from DIL's POV it is the bringing in of the practices that she has been used to at her parent's place and things that she wanted to do new at her husband's place. In both the cases it is the inertia to change and adopt which causes a lot of friction. It is perhaps because of this reason too, that mother's don't prefer their sons to marry outside her community much. The fear is that you might be forced to bring in some changes to established routines. This fear casts its shadow on every action of DIL who does not belong to same community and she is seen with suspicion constantly and any minor flaw is accentuated.

In contrast to it, a DIL from same community is welcomed with much more forgiving disposition. Because MIL is sure that the processes will not change drastically cos the upbringing will be of similar nature and thus there is more comfort level. So from that perspective, a relatively immature DIL from same community is any day more preferred than a trendy, mature modern one from a different community. Funny.

In such a scenario the best strategy for a DIL from a different community, for getting along amenably in the new house seems to be, to start aping the practices of new house. Do it the way MIL does. Slowly bring in subtle changes to process. In this way MIL is also sure that nothing much has changed and things are still to her preference. Inertia is not confronted with.

Now there are wonderful insights that this MIL-DIL dynamics can provide to the migration from Windows to Linux that we as FOSS workers face when trying to convince our customers to use Linux. Users can be seen as mothers-in-law and the operating systems as daughters-in-law. Now users get used to a certain way of working on their computer over a period of time. Whenever we try to replace the existing Windows UI to one from Linux Environment like GNOME or KDE , there is an immediate resistance to it from Users. Where are my shortcuts ? Why does the icon look like this? This is all small crib like the ones from MILs. Cooked rice does not go into freezer. Eggplant needs to be more burnt. All small crib. But could lead creating great friction.

If you had noticed people more easily migrate to from XP to Vista or Windows 7 than to BOSS or Ubuntu cos somehow the 'community' remains the same in case of XP and Vista while when it comes to GNOME or KDE there is a change in the look and feel. Though how advanced and easy KDE or GNOME might be, the change in look and feel sometimes act as the biggest barrier to welcoming Linux systems.

This leads me to wonder if having a Windowmanager which looks and behaves like Windows XP or Vista would help increase the adoption of Linux. The window manager need not stop at aping XP but can also slowly morph into a much better GNOME over a period of time.This will help reassuring the user that nothing much has changed from the past and yet at the same time daughter-in-law slowly and surely brings in newer and better systems in place. For some people who do get convinced with my idea, XpGnome is a good place to start.

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How many you have?

2009-10-31T12:35:00.002+05:30

OK, this is the team showing off its fastrack collection. How many yo have?

Relevance and Reference

2009-10-20T12:34:00.004+05:30

Teacher: The mark and sweep algorithm of the JVM's garbage collector starts from the root objects in the JVM and mark all object that are referenced in the chain. The garbage collector then removes all objects that are not referenced from memory

Student: Why should an object that is not referenced, be removed?

Teacher: Very simple. Cos it has lost its relevance to the program and so it is no longer needed. If it was needed, it would be referenced by some other object.

Student: Then should it be also fair to remove all those people who have lost relevance. Those who are no longer beneficial to society. Should it be fair to legalise euthanasia?

Teaching Java and Object Oriented Programming can sometimes bring up interesting analogies and discussions. But to do that it first needs to be taught in an interesting way. I have found students struggle with the concept of references in Java as I have found them struggle with the concept of pointers in C/C++. Concept of references almost always draw a blank in majority of the audience gang. Some who do understand also struggle with its application in most of the scenarios. Finally most end up making extensive use of global variables and thus defeat the purpose.

In most of my java discussions, I start with comparing primitive data types like int , char and double with the elements of nature like earth, air, water and fire. It makes sense in comparing like that because all other classes and object are composed of primitive data types like all man made things are made up of these natural elements . Once this simple premise is established, you would be surprised as to how the complex topics like objects and references can be neatly explained.

Taking a philosophical detour in the discussion, it is enlightening to notice that in a sense, basic elements in nature do not have an ownership or an address because they are omnipresent. It is only when human being acts on the basic elements to create derived forms, they get name, address, ownership and other aspects. So while iron in raw form is still iron, it becomes a bridge after human intervention and becomes a Mumbai bridge or a San Francisco one .

Strikingly, human relationships and interactions provide good pieces of comparisons for teaching 'references'. For example a person cannot have a meaningful existence without being related to the society. For any human being to have fruitful life it is necessary that other human being know her/him, benefit him and benefit from him. In a way the purpose of a human being is to interact with the society in some way or the other. Similarly an object does not have any purpose in a JVM unless it is referenced and used by some other object. And object continually change their internal state and external behavior based on the interactions with other objects just like human change their behavior based on experience. So the same person is a daughter, a sister, a friend, a soul mate to different people (ahaaa ... now is that polymorphism ?).

Suprisingly the inventor of Java did away with the delete construct that existed in C/C++ and thus gave the JVM the God status by giving the power to destroy. Destruction of objects can be done only by JVM. Other objects in the JVM can only delink the reference by using null . This is similar to a person being forgotten and thus becoming irrelevant.

And all this brings us to a big realization that nothing in isolation is useful. Things are relevant only when they are referenced by other things, interact with other things and used by/use other things. Else they can be destroyed/recycled. Same principle seems to have been applied for mark and sweep algorithm.

Now don't apply it to Euthanasia. That is altogether a different issue. The social system isn't stable and sane enuf to legalize it yet. Let us not mix up its discussion with Java and OOP. :-)

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Preferences, Luck, Embarrassments and Relief

2009-10-10T16:21:00.006+05:30

Sixth pay commission had definitely disturbed my blissful state of existence. I was at peace with my job, my office accommodation and the daily pick-up and drop that office bus provided. And then sixth pay commission happened. The Basic pay did not increase much in the revised scheme of things, but there was a huge increase in the allowances that Government paid to people who did not avail office transport or accommodation.

Suddenly staying in office accommodation or using office transport seemed economically foolish. Adding insult to injury, both me and Savs were losing out home rent allowance due to a convoluted government rule which says that couples working in same government organizations and living in the same office accommodation will both tend to lose their house rent allowance. And thus we were losing more. Now there were only 2 options. Either me and Savs get divorced and start to live-in instead, so that the office accommodation affects only a single person's paycheck or both leave the office accommodation and search for a new place. The first option was a non-starter. And any which way my state of blissful existence was disturbed.

The issue of not using office transport was resolved fast. We got a new car. And sooner than I expected, I took a liking to it and I realized that my self-imagined issues of not being able to drive well were in fact non-issues.

The issue of finding a new place to live was a big one. And we did not want to move to a new place on rent. So we decided that we will go for a purchase of a new apartment.

And I realized that finding a new house for purchase was uncannily like finding a partner for yourself. Just about every apartment you see, you start wondering if you could own one. Just about the same way as you check out people when you are hunting for a partner. Both are driven by nearly same parameters, taste and affordability.

Some apartments are quite to your liking but unaffordable and some are quite affordable but not to your taste. And some apartments like some people are taken up by others by the time you gather interest in them. And some are just not approachable or thinkable. And some, you will agree, start feeling unacceptable as you get nearer to them.

And after sometime you enter a zone of compromises. You give up on some of your preferences and thus increase affordability. And after many rounds of such give and takes between preferences and price, you finally arrive to a final option.

Many a times luck plays a big role and you get a huge bonus. That happened to me both in terms of partner and recently, with house. You sometimes land up with an option which is your dream choice and yet is totally affordable. Once you get your dream choice, different things happen to different people.

In some cases people stop looking for any further option. You no longer are interested in finding the price of any apartment cos your needs have been met and you now look at other priorities in life.

For some people like me, getting their dream choice brings a wave of relief and embarassment. After my marriage to Savs, I have quite often wondered what would have happened to me if I had ended up with some other woman that I was considering for a partner. All the people i 'browsed' seem so 'not for me' now. Sometimes getting the right person, makes you feel ashamed of not knowing yourself and your own nature well. Sometimes you feel embarrassed for getting interested in 'not so right choice' for you because you had no other option at that point of time. Such embarrassments haunt me till date. Luckily it comes with a relief that in the final outcome, you have not been subjected to a wrong decision and are better off than what it could have been otherwise.

So ladies and gentlemen, yet again I have been lucky in getting my dream choice, this time a flat in Mantri Woodlands. Me and Savs will be moving in into C-001, Mantri Woodlands in a couple of weeks. Look for this name plate when you are visiting us.

Happy Diwali !!

Questions people ask about open source software

2009-09-30T15:16:00.005+05:30

I am just back from almost an all India Tour. I was part of this "Opensource Demystified" Workshop Series organised by BOSS Linux Team for government offcials. We did this roadshow in all the major cities in India including Bangalore, NOIDA, Mohali, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Trivandrum, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai.

The workshop was aimed at senior Government officials who wanted to know more about open source software and how it could help them. At each venue about 100-150 ppl attended the one day workshop which covered introduction to FOSS, Linux, Applications, Migration path and Case studies.

Needless to say, when you are introducing open source software to non IT people like senior officers and directors of departments like transport and agriculture, you have to start from basics and explain to people everything right from what is piracy and what is proprietary software.

It was a great learning exercise in trying to share with them advantages of open source software. In the process we invented a lot of analogies to explain the FOSS concepts. I am sharing in this post the way I explained some of the FOSS related queries.

1) What is open source philosophy?

Yeah... in such workshops we really start from start, like this question; What is open source philosophy? For a start we compared it to wisdom for explaining. You could say that wisdom or a good advice is something that you give to people and then they pass it on to others with modification and thus it grows richer and is applied to varied fields. We had used this cliched blah umpteen times and i got bored of it.

I invented a new one. Suppose you and your partner go to a restaurant and like a particular item that was served. What you would immediately wonder is how that dish was prepared. You either ask the chef or try to look up the internet for the recipe. Once you get it, you try it out at home and then also modify it to suit more to your taste. You enjoy it and you also pass it on to your neighbors who pass it on to others with their own modifications and additions.

Open source software philosophy can be compared to such evolution of recipes.

People found this comparison more amusing than the wisdom one.

2) Why do we need the source code?

Most of the common computer users do not appreciate the need of availability of source code of an application. To explain to them why availability of source code is an important deal can be really tricky.

To explain this aspect, I asked my audience why aren't they generally happy with government processes. Almost all of them say that it is due to the non-transparent behavior of some of the government officials. I used that response against them. If they expect accountability & transparency from the government cos they are tax payers, why can't they expect the source code from the software vendors to know how their software works when they are paying for it? This stumps most of the people. Suddenly I see that nod of agreement in most of the people. And by the time they can think of any arguments to that, I would have already moved on to next slide ;-)

3) How does one earn from open source?

Yet another big question. And the cliched response to that is "Open source software guys earn thru services and support". I realised that, people are just not able to understand that concept. They start arguing that if i know how to operate a software and know how it works (cos of availability of source code), why would i need service and support?

For this, i generally ask the audience if they know the basic housekeeping jobs like sweeping, washing clothes, dusting etc. Almost all of them respond with a 'yes'. Then I ask them how many of them have house maids? Majority of them raise their hands. Their question gets answered. Sometime we do outsource things that we know how to do because that saves our time which we can use to do more productive work. Services and support are like that, so that we don't have to invest our time into things for which there are specialised people.

4) Is there an anti-virus for Linux?

Almost everywhere people ask this question. And i tried explaining to them that Linux is highly virus resistant and the architecture consisting of user level permissions, lack of registry files, no Internet Explorer and centrally managed repository makes it virtually impossible for viruses and spywares to creep in. But somehow i noticed that people did not get amply convinced. At Kolkata, an officer from Indian Navy walked upto me in the tea break and patronizingly said, "Raman, though i appreciate your effort in explaining that Linux in virus resistant, the general Windows user has got so much used to Antivirus softwares that s/he cannot feel secure working on a system without it." I changed my slides. I still explain to them Linux is virus resistant but add that if they still need one for additional protection, they have CLAM AV. People are happier now.

5) How can open source software be more secure?

This is another question that people get baffled with. I was reminded of it cos of Jaytirth's comment. Normal people associate security with locking up things like their cash. jewels, bonds etc. To them, it would seem that open source is 'less' secure cos it is available in open.

To them you need to explain that what is available in the open as source code is the material with which you build your 'secure safe'. So you need to have full access to the raw material to see if there are any defects to it. That's where I bring in the thousand eyeballs concept by telling that it is easier for 100 ppl in the room to find a lost clip than for a single or a handful of people to do. Same is the case with finding bugs and vulnerabilities in a software. Open source enables more people to have a closer, critical look at the software. One important reason why there are less viruses and spywares over here.

6) Why are open standards important?

Open standards is tough to explain to guys who have their souls sold to Microsoft Office and think that DOC, XLS and PPT are standard document formats. Bringing ODF into their thought process is a nightmare.

I used my Bajaj Scooter as an example. Bajaj stopped making the most famous Chetak model sometime back. Thousands of people own that model of scooter in India and I was sure that atleast 30% of my audience would own it. I asked them what do they do if the clutch handle breaks or the spark plug needs replacement. "We get it from any spare parts manufacturer" comes the reply. That helps me explain the concept of standards based document formats. I ask them to imagine if Microsoft goes out of business or decides to hike the price of its office suite so much that it becomes unaffordable. That's when documents created in formats which are open are of help because you no longer are dependent on a certain vendor. New softwares can be developed to read those documents. That wins me a lot of new users for OpenOffice.org which is ODF compliant.

7) How do we migrate to Linux?

At the end we get this question. Sitaram Chamarty from TCS had a nice answer to it. The best way to migrate was by first creating an inventory of systems in the organization. Identify and classify them into categories. The categories could be

i) General Office users
ii) Specialized application users

and i add the third one

iii) Pirated Windows users.

If you see any normal office space, most of the people would fall in (i) and (iii). People falling in third category need to migrated first cos they can cause damage to the data and reputation of the organization. Then people falling in second category. Applications which run on both platforms like Firefox , OpenOffice.org , Thunderbird and Sunbird can be installed first so that migration shock and resistance can be avoided.

These were some of the major questions that we tried to address in our workshops.

There were also questions like "How do I become important in a FOSS community?" and some others like "Isn't FOSS killing service oriented software industry in India?"

Each one of them need a separate post. Maybe sometime later.

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Looking past the immediate emotion.

2009-09-04T12:06:00.002+05:30

Have a look at this movie clip from A Beautiful Mind before you read further.

Did you see it? Though some may find the conversation a little objectionable, i am sure at the end you would find it amusing.

I found what John Nash (Russell Crowe) says in the scene very profound from a totally different aspect.

It goes something like this. Many a times in our lives, we get cheated, people fail us, we get used, people steal from us and things sometimes just take too long or things sometimes just don't work.

S*** happens in just about everybody's lives. And what are our immediate emotions? Anger, Frustration, Violence and Depression. Look at them. All are destructive, they destroy your peace, integrity and harmony.

More than often it is your blood pressure, heart rate, stress and temper that hit the rooftop.

More than often it is you who loses more, commits more blunders, get more negative vibes than the person who cheats you or fails you.

And the funny part is quite often you actually know and feel your emotions taking over you. You willingly submit to it because you think it is a natural thing to do. Get animatedly angry/frustrated at the person/situation who/which wrongs you.

And that's where what John Nash says can be applied to this aspect.

When such a situation comes when things/people don't go the way you want them to, or they cheat you, fail you or make you a fool, instead of performing your normal ritual of shouting, blowing your top/crying etc, assume all that is done and look beyond, like he asks the lady to assume that he has done whatever necessary to court her.

Assume that you have blurted out, shouted , called people names . cried and all that without actually doing it. And thus look beyond those violent expressions of anger, step outside of that scene and view it objectively. Most of the times you will notice that things could have gone only that way

Sometimes you might also notice that things are not yet that bad and you can correct the situation before it becomes worse.

In this way either it dawns on you that things have happened the way they have cos of your actions/mistakes or you have that controlled productive anger which you can use to give back a more cold and clinical response to the person/situation.

And you know what, restraint in expression of negative emotion always puts your opponent on a back foot.

Don't you agree?

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Accessor methods with side-effects

2009-08-15T15:16:00.005+05:30

Teaching Object Oriented Programming can be a lot of fun. I believe that learning happens best when some real life examples are given to explain concepts in programming and software technology. I have tried to do that in my lectures here and there with encouraging amount of success.

In that respect teaching OO Programming is much more easier cos OO paradigm was evolved to ease the abstraction of real life object in terms of computational objects. OO paradigm helps model real world entities in terms of Classes and Objects. Classes being the templates of types of objects (Human, Car, Bridges etc) and Objects being instances of those classes (Albert Einstein, BMW, Mumbai Bridge etc).

In OO Programming, objects are supposed to have attributes and behavior.The attributes of an object are the values of the various aspects of the object like the color of a car being red or grey and number of gears being 4 or 5. The behavior of an object is the way the object conveys its own state to other objects or allows other objects to change its internal state. Like turning the ignition is the way to start the car engine. The attributes of the objects are modeled as member fields while behaviors of the object are modeled as member functions (a.k.a methods).

It is agreed upon by most that it is a good practice in OO programming to avoid direct manipulation of member fields by other objects. This is also known as Data Hiding. The idea is that allowing the direct access to member fields of an object for manipulation can sometimes break the integrity of the object. It is more like trying to drive a car without the controls. You might still be able to do it but the car will kaput before you move too far. It is always recommended that data fields are manipulated using the member methods which can take care of the integrity of the object.

When we talk about member methods, there are 2 kinds of it, accessor methods and mutator methods. The methods which give out the information of a state of the object to other object are called as accessor methods. This is like somebody asking your name. You just tell them your name. Nothing changes in you when you tell your name to others. Like that. So generally accessor methods do not have any parameters passed to them. A signature of an accessor method would look like

public String getName();

Methods that change the state of the object are called as Mutator methods. It is like someone else telling you their name. Since it is information entering into your system, your state is permanently changed. You now know the person also by her name and so the information that you have now is updated/modified/added etc. Mutator methods receive information from other object by parameters. A signature of a mutator method would look like

public void conveyName(String name);

And there came a third kind. Accessor methods with a side-effect. These methods were supposed to give out the information of a state of the object to other objects but at the same time also alter the internal state of the object in some way. Explaining this concept was a bit difficult. How could some method change the state of the object while just conveying its state? I tried explaining it through Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle which says that position and momemtum of sub atomic particles cannot be accurately determined simultaneously without changing one of them. But i realised many students are not keen about quantum physics. I had to look at something more interesting.

And then i cooked up this one from my personal experiences. Suppose you have a girlfriend. And after you have been with her for a sufficient amount of time, you get really fond of her and want to take the relationship to next level. You propose to her. Now this is an accessor method. You just want information from her if she loves you or not. And you might express it in this form

public boolean doYouLoveMe();

See the method, a pure accessor method with no parameters. But the response to that is going to permanently change the way the she thinks and feels about you for the rest of her lifetime no matter the response is a yes or a no. In all probabilities your relationships might never be the same again. And this is what is called as an accessor method with side effects. The one that changes the internal state of the object while giving out information.

Do you get the concept now? Do I see you nodding?

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Amazing Abilities

2009-07-24T16:33:00.004+05:30

Look at this video

Can you believe these 2 kids cannot see at all? Amazing!!

"Reduce the Guilt" Syndrome

2009-07-23T13:52:00.006+05:30

I wonder if humans inherently live in constant paranoia. Constant fear of something going wrong, something going worse. How many times have I seen people telling that they are happy and then touching wood or doing something of that kind. A constant fear that prevents them from expressing their happiness more freely. A constant fear that if things are bad, they could become worse and if things are good, they could become bad.

And then we see defense mechanisms. Superstitions, faith and rituals are the escape route. Savs tweeted about somebody and though I was amused at first, I could understand the logic behind it. You do not want something to haunt you when things go wrong. When Appa died, somebody in the family during the mourning told me that according to my horoscope, my time had come to do last rites for my Dad. And so even though according to dad's horoscope he was supposed to live till 76, he had to pack up early cos my time had come to send him off. Rationally an utter nonsense thing to believe or say. But that left me in slight unexplainable guilt for a couple of days. As if I was responsible for his demise.

I wonder if society evolves ways to see that a person does not live happily by herself/himself. Invents ways to blame the people for things that go wrong in their lives. Society sees to it that chanciness and interplay of so many events that affect your lives do not leave you guilt free. If a person dies in a house, people try to see all kinds of things that don't exist. The Vaastu of the house, the poojas you did and all things. And if you have not done any things that could have been done, you are in for trouble cos nobody is gonna miss an opportunity to tell you how big a price you are paying for that small thing that you decided not to do.

And thus we spend a sizable amount of our lifetime engaging in "Reduce the Guilt" activities. Performing rituals, touching wood, avoiding black cats and so on. Just to be less blamed when you are not getting married even at the age of 35. Wrong things, bad things still continue to happen. But atleast you can now blame the fate and not something that you avoided to do or did something that you shouldn't have.

"Reduce the Guilt" syndrome is only way I can explain the things we do but cant explain. And we would keep doing it cos of our own fear and our hope that something supernatural has the power to make our cholestrol vanish by uttering some sounds and save us from heart attack.

Funny people us.

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An optical illusion

2009-07-22T16:24:00.005+05:30

Look at this photo below.

At first sight you might get a feeling that this is a picture of a tall tree and the photo shows a part of the stem with branches around it. Well if you do, it is an optical illusion.

Scroll down for the actual photo.

Here is the picture.

It is a photo taken by yours truly near the banks of backwaters of Dal lake

More photos from Srinagar trip are here.

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There goes your lower berth!!

2009-07-04T18:22:00.003+05:30

You know what's very weird about one's name. It is the most coveted possession of yours and yet it is others who use it more than you. I wonder if same kind of weirdness can be attached to the lower berths in trains in India. I have observed that people who are in the age-group of 20-45 and more so if they are men, they automatically forfeit their right to lower berths even if Indian railways allots them one. I have been an victim and an observer to others getting victimised many a times to this unwritten law. The law that young men (and some women) are hereby ordered to give up their lower berths to any person who demands for it.

Let me list some people who assume that they can ask anybody for lower berths.

1) Old and not so actually old (but visibly old) people (people above age of fifty).

2) Fat women even in their early forties (Should i be the victim of their uncontrolled diet and other reasons).

3) Diabetics (why can't they just get down each time. That exercise will do them good).

4) Old men with cute daughters (You become a victim of your own chivalry). Its gone the moment you see the girl.

5) Young woman with infant (Small sacrifice that you do for the next generation). The husband looks at you as if it is your duty to help him raise his kid. No wonder somebody said, "It takes a village to raise a kid". In this case it is the train compartment cos the whole compartment is going to suffer the high-pitched midnight celebrations of the infant.

6) This one is a personal experience. Recently an Indian couple with an American lady came and sat next to me. I had a lower berth. The Indian host said, "She is from America and has never travelled in crowded Indian trains. We should be good hosts to our guests. Can you give up your lower berth?" WTF nearly popped out of my mouth. I managed to give a sarcastic smile, nodded negatively and looked away. And the whole journey that fellow was looking at me as if I am enjoying a privilege that is nearly criminal.

Do you have any similar anecdote?

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Gaps and Vacuums

2009-06-08T12:27:00.003+05:30

There used to be a time when I used to take the Hosur Road to reach office if i was driving on my scooter. That was the only road available and used to be a crowded one at that (it still is). I used to find it fun to drive on that road. Although I don't fashion myself as an aggressive driver, being on a 2-wheeler, you could always sneak in between 2 cars and get ahead. Because of the smaller size of your vehicle, you could easily get ahead of bigger vehicles. And it was fun cos, you could get that feeling of getting ahead of somebody whenever you wanted it. You could close the gaps between your current position and the vehicle ahead of you by pushing that extra bit. You could "Race on Demand".

And then Hosur Road Elevated Highway construction started and it became too dusty a road to ride on. We found an alternate route which we call as the Bettadaspura route. This route was a totally unexplored one. It was a 2 lane road, with vast undeveloped areas in between. The 14 km drive on this road would actually give you a feeling of travelling through a country side with vast open lands and very less development. There were hardly many vehicles you would meet. And at times, if you are driving after dark, you start feeling eerily lonely. A total contrast to Hosur road where you would find vehicle and road side shops open well beyond midnight too. This new route would be deserted by 7 in the evening. On that road, you had nobody to race with. No getting ahead of anybody and sometimes you don't even get the feeling of moving ahead cos the terrain is so uniform. It would be like moving in a vacuum. And on this road with my 15 year old scooter, it was a bit of a risk too. If anything went wrong with me or my vehicle on that road, it would take some time before i could expect any help. This would play on your mind and your motive would be to get home, ASAP.

Recently I got to drive on Hosur Road again on my scooter. I found that road horrible too. There were just too many vehicles around. You just could not have a space for yourself. Somebody is always honking from behind and somebody was getting dangerously close to you. And there was the conflict. I now found both roads uncomfortable to drive on.

And then it changed. We got a car.

We still travel on the same Bettadaspura road but now 'we' travel rather than 'I'. Nowadays we car pool. Me, Savs and Selva sir come together. So it is one of us driving, while others look around. And suddenly it is so much more fun to travel on this new route. From the comfort of your car and more faith on its performance, you no longer are very tentative about the sparse traffic. You now have the guts to look around, find new routes and take new ways. You suddenly move out of that 'reach home' attitude to a more exploring one. You are no longer afraid of long drives. In fact vacuums gave you an opportunity to explore laterally too. At the same time even city traffic like Hosur Road is undaunting cos with a car, you know you have your space in the cabin of your car and no other biker is gonna step on your feet when he stops next to you at a signal.

And as I turn 36, I am changing my perception about my profession on similar lines. I realise that I have been indulging more in using my professional skills in 'city traffic' areas and closing the gaps. Most of my and my team's efforts have gone into filling up the current requirements of the market and the people. We thought it to be of more value to fill the current gaps and not look at vacuums. And not that the efforts that we put in were not fulfilling. In fact some of the visibility we have had were all cos of the work that some would term as "low hanging fruit". And I am not complaining. Those activities at that phase were partly required for survival as a group and partly as a skillset building exercise.

But I guess time has come to change.

While talking to Dr Mudur once, I heard him say "We at NCST, never wanted to do things that companies like TCS or Satyam or Infosys could do. We never wanted to be that Panwala (Petty shop) software developer. We wanted to do work which differentiated us from others. Not the regular GIGO work." Those words sometime hurt and sometimes were an inspiration. And now reporting to a boss like Dr Sasikumar gives me an opportunity to try to do things that this place is/was made for. Can we look beyond? Can we look at vacuums? Can we explore some bigger problems in computer science? Can we look at going vertical and deep rather than horizontal and relatively shallow? Some questions that the team is giving positive vibes to now.

So are we gonna stop closing gaps? Not at all. Driving thru city traffic is still a skill that we need cos thats where ATMs and Malls are. We need money for the group and we need to do projects that fund us. Sometimes these projects are more development oriented with little or no 'research'. But thats OK. That forms part of our bread and butter. Thats where the team members have an opportunity to get individual visibility. But thats not the only thing we will do henceforth. Each member in the team will be part of a group that will dig deep in a selected area. And we will venture into open lands. Our aim in that activity will not be to reach, but to create landmarks on the way. To collaborate with the few whom we meet and ask directions and talk about the road behind and road ahead. To share and not to compete. That will be a wonderful journey too if you could balance it nicely with the rat race.

I turned 36 now and I am just starting. It is a new journey. Wish me luck.

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You can GXLiterate on OpenOffice.org now

2009-05-29T14:55:00.003+05:30

GXLiterate is a Google Transliteration Service based transliterator for OpenOffice.org.

It currently supports transliteration from English to Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.

You can download it from here.

If you are interested in developing your own transliterator, you can use it as a framework.

Download the source from here.

Happy GXLiterating!!

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The picture says it all...

2009-05-17T11:54:00.008+05:30

Me and Savs are happy owners of our first car Hyundai Santro Xing GLS.

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Exploring OpenOffice.org API through MindMaps

2009-05-11T13:48:00.002+05:30

Started this pet activity over the weekend.

I am building XMind Mindmaps for select OpenOffice.org service APIs.

Visit this new blog.

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Indic Scripts and Jasper Reports - An Interesting episode in Open Source Development

2009-05-04T16:11:00.007+05:30

This post explains our efforts in providing Indic Script Support in PDF Export of JasperReports. The whole sequence of searching for the solution was very enlightening, entertaining and engrossing. We hope it to be a good case study in how open source solutions are developed using various on line resources like Forums and Mailing Lists.

About 2 months ago, one day i receive a call from Mr M R Rajagopalan, Director of CDAC Chennai and Head of the BOSS Linux Project. "Raman, do you know why Jasper reports does not support Indic Scripts in its PDF Export while it supports Arabic?" I had no clue. "NIC guys need it yaar, can you do something? I heard it is based on Pango". Pango was familiar technology. I said "It shouldn't be an issue if it is based on Pango. Will look into it."

And there I could sense the start of yet another activity. Looked around. Laxminarayana from my team was the best suited for this activity. The fellow had intelligence, enthusiasm and huge amount of gumption. I asked him if he would like some activity which involved a bit of 'search' and 'research'. He looked excited. Gave him the job.

In a couple of days he came back with his first finding. JasperReports was not based on Pango. It was based on iText. Ouch. Wrong start. Had no clue of how iText works. We downloaded the source, built it and tested it for Arabic scripts. It worked. We tested it for Devanagari and Tamil. It royally goofed up. Look at this output (see Hindi and Tamil rendering).

I use to believe that except for the script direction, there were lot of similarities between Arabic and Devanagari as far as Font Rendering was concerned. Both scripts heavily used ligatures and in both scripts, the visual representation for a character could change based on its position in the word. When we tested for Arabic, all these joins and ligatures were perfect. And it looked so sore with Devanagari. Naively i sent my first mail to iText mailing list.

We got no response. We looked into the code. We found a Java file called ArabicLigaturizer.java. Had read about a discussion on Ligaturizers on the iText Mailing Lists. Looked through the code. Couldn't understand its usage. So dropped yet another mail. Still no response.

At the same time Laxminarayana realised that the code had no reordering logic. Reordering is very inherent to complex scripts. In complex scripts like Devanagari , the characters change their order of visual appearance which is unlike Latin scripts in which characters are strictly left to right in order of appearance. In complex scripts 2 or 3 characters combine to form a totally different shape (what we call as glyph). And surprisingly no such ligaturization or reordering code was visible in iText source.

This led to an enlightenment. Arabic script needs no ligaturization, only substitution. The Unicode standard had created character representation for all possible Arabic glyphs. While Indic Scripts like Devnagari were grossly underrepresented. So no reordering logic was needed in rendering Arabic while Indic scripts relied heavily on opentype tables and rendering engines like ICU or Pango for representing the complex text layouts.

The next step was to get the reordering code into iText. I sent a mail substantiating my request with our findings. The conversation with the original developers was interesting. Finally found out that the solution was not going to be a trivial one. iText had no provision in its current state to support Indic Scripts.

The capability had to be built ground up and was not a job to be over by the weekend. And i could not invest longer duration into it since it was not an activity that I could account in my mainstream work. Maximum we could invest was a couple of months and that was already spent unearthing these findings. Had to look somewhere else. Was it end of road? Thankfully not.

Maybe it is due to our association with OpenOffice.org or maybe not, but, whenever I had thought about creating PDF files, OpenOffice.org was the only thing that came to my mind. For a long time, ability to export to PDF was one of the major features of OpenOffice.org. I knew OpenOffice.org rendered Indic scripts well and that it was based on ICU's rendering logic. We tried exporting PDF from OpenOffice.org for a document in Hindi and it did well.

We saw a light. We got an idea. An idea fundamental to open source development. Why re-invent the wheel? Why couldn't we just use the capability of OpenOffice.org to export Jasper report to PDF. Our involvement in developing couple of extensions for OpenOffice.org made it comfortable for us to explore the OOo SDK. The idea gripped us. We found 3 resources.

1) Ability to export Jasper files to ODF format
2) API and code to export OpenOffice files to PDF format
3) Ability to write OpenOffice files to an OutputStream

Got it into the JasperReports code and voila, the system's ready. And we did achieve it in a relatively short time, something that seemed as a huge task. We could now support scripts like those of Devanagari, Tamil, Thai and Sinhalese in PDF export for JasperReports. And in true open source fashion we release the code today.

Go get it from here and incorporate it in your projects if you need support for these kind of languages in JasperReport's PDF export. Would be happy if you drop us a line or mention about it on your web page.

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Normalize your notions

2009-04-19T18:47:00.002+05:30

There is a saying in Tamil, which roughly means that "the people who are near and dear express with concern and others express with mockery". Same thing happened even when I developed a paunch sometime last year. My mom and Savs starting insisting that i start taking my shape seriously, while others would mock that I was now slowly slipping into that middle age sedentary lifestyle and that now I have "settled down".

Nevertheless the message was that I should now start exercising. I am a person who was in good shape for a long time and have a high esteem about my fitness levels. I used to work in a workshop before and was quite confident about my physical strength and stamina. And thus when I started preparing myself to get into this new habit of walking in the mornings, in that half asleep, half awake state early in the morning, I used to dream that I am sprinting between my apartments and Meenakshi temple which is about 1.5 Kms away. In the dreams I found sprinting a distance of 3 Kms a very easy and simple thing to do. I found it easy because I had read Srinivas's accounts of his running 12 Kms and 10 Kms in marathons. I thought running 3 Kms a day is a cakewalk. Then I actually started it. I started walking 3.5 Kms a day and after a while started running portions of it. Thats when it dawned.

It dawned that my stamina levels aren't as great as they used to be. I could hardly run for 100-200 meters before I would start panting and puffing. The guy running 3 Kms a day wasn't going to be me. I recalibrated my dreams. I could be sure that I can briskly walk for 4 Kms a day but sprinting wasn't gonna happen by any stretch of imagination. This has been going on for last 1 year. I have been more or less regular in my habit of walking and thus I have got back into that habit of exercising. I now notice that my stamina levels are improved. I can now actually jog a couple of laps before I start gasping for air. And now when I look at that dream of mine about sprinting to Meenakshi temple, I am still not upto it, but i definitely know that I am much better off than where I was, last year same time.

Similar thing about what i thought about driving cars. I have seen so many of my friends and colleagues drive so effortlessly that I thought that even I would be able to drive car very easily. And the day came when I first sat in the driver's seat. I realised that it was nowhere near to what I had imagined. The controls were all different from my scooter and I nearly went into a roadside trench. I was devastated. My self esteem took a drubbing. Before that day I used to actually imagine that I would drive as effortlessly as my friends or as those stars in the movies. And that day I realised that it wasn't gonna happen that way. I joined a driving school. Couple of days at school and I found out that i had to unlearn a lot of things from my 2 wheeler experience. Things are not as easy as they seem. And now, a fortnight after my driving classes, I know that I can now drive. I am still nowhere near that comfort level that my friends have but I am sure that I can take a car out of the parking space and get it on road. That's what i have recalibrated my driving abilities to. Today I am sure that with enough practice it is not gonna be long before I might drive with ease that I had taken myself granted for.

Thats the chautauqua for the day. Its very easy for us to assume that we will be able to do what others do, because when we see others doing it, it seems very natural. What we don't see is the subconscious coordination that happens between their efforts, thoughts, judgement and actions. That coordination comes after a lot of experience and practice. We simply choose to discount it at first. Then when we start attempting same set of tasks we realise the hardships and our inabilities surface. But at the same we also realise that given enough time to it, even we are not far behind. Time and our efforts are the only factors. If we too put the kind of time and efforts people have put on certain tasks, we would perhaps will be able to do as good as even better than what others do.

But if that's not possible, it is better to normalize your notions. Have a great day.

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Couple of cases of comforting calmness

2009-04-02T16:17:00.002+05:30

Long back when we used to live in Mumbai (at Vasai), my uncle (Mama, mother's brother) used to live in a nearby apartments. My Grandma used to live with him. On one of the evenings, my aunt (Mami) was out with kids and Grandma was alone at home. She finished the work and came out of the flat to get some evening breeze. Usually she would see that the door does not close by itself, by putting the stopper. That day she forgot and as luck would have it, the breeze from the balcony pushed the door to close and lock. When Grandma came back she found the door closed on her. Panic gripped her. Mama had warned her at times that these doors lock by themselves and there is no other way to get in except to break open one of the windows. She got nervous and started cursing herself for being so careless. What would my son say? Shudnt I be more careful? All questions tormented her. About an hour later Mama returned from work. Grandma told what happened. Mama promptly asked her not to worry and went to a neighbor and arranged for a screw driver. He went around, unscrewed one of the windows and entered through it. He opened the door for Grandma. Instantly Mama became a hero to my Grandma. Not cos he arranged to opened the locked door, but cos he did not utter a single word of annoyance or disappointment at Granny. Umpteen times I have heard her say in the later years "The door locked by my mistake and he did not say a single word."

True, it is so easy to get mad at people. And it is our tendency to get mad at those who are near to us. But in most cases it does not help. If somebody has done a mistake, by all probabilities people would feel guilty about it. Your expression of annoyance or disappointment by shouting or blurting is only gonna make the person feel more defensive making her/him justify being 'not wrong'. The chances that they will realize/admit their mistake is far reduced and thus is their chance of being careful in the future. The best strategy is to keep calm when you see that the person who has done the mistake is already feeling guilty. You can become a hero just like that.

Another incident that comes to my mind is when me, my yet another uncle (Periappa, Dad's brother) and aunt (click on the Who link on this page to know about them) were going in a car. Uncle was driving it and we stopped at a traffic junction in the middle lane of the road. Since it was gonna be a long before it turned green, uncle switched off the engine. The traffic lights turned green after a while and uncle tried to turn the car on. It would not start. Instantly the cars behind started to honk and Aunt got nervous. She yelled at Uncle, "Raja, do something, start the car, people are getting impatient". Uncle coolly replied, "What do I do Jaani (sweetheart), the car would not start?". That did it. I could not help laugh and Aunt too cooled down instantly. Uncle tried again and engine purred to life.

Sometimes being aware of the situation you are in and acknowledgment of your relative helplessness alleviates the tension a lot. Try laughing at the problem and notice how the gravity of impact is instantly reduced. Solutions become visible and situation is much more under control.

So next time in a pressure cooker situation, take a chance, be calm.

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The door is open, but please knock.

2009-03-22T14:03:00.005+05:30

"Standing at the door syndrome" was one of the terms that fascinated me and Savs quite a lot after our marriage. We found the term very profound and used it in multiple contexts. It was applicable to any context where we would hesitate in exercising any right over each other. Be it in asking for any help, or permission to commit something on behalf of both of us or, to that extent do anything that we thought would annoy our partner.

And the hesitation was for obvious reasons. Both wanted to reassure each other that we hadn't made the wrong decision of choosing incompatible partners of different wavelength and frequency.

One of the areas where the syndrome was very visible was when each of us had to take some decision pertaining to our own personal matter be it career, studies, financial or any thing related to one's friends etc. Since both of us had lived our lives as an individual away from parents for a considerable amount of time, both had developed a high sense of need for personal space. And both of us respected each other's personal space. So we would restrain ourselves from giving our opinion or advice to each other in what we perceived as one's 'personal' matter. In a way we would leave each other to resolve their issues themselves until explicit help was asked.

But again since we were that kind of people who had highly developed sense of individualism, we would hardly ask each other for help since we thought we could handle it ourselves. But slowly we also started to realize that our partners who have also been in similar situations and have also had their own share of mistakes and right decisions in life can offer some insights on the current issue that we are facing. Slowly we realized that our partner was standing at the door silently to be invited with her/his opinion.

And it turned out that we did have good insights and pieces of advice that would help each other. And thus we started asking each other their views on whatever the issue may be. Slowly we got used to asking each other about anything and everything.

And this took a logical turn. We started assuming that "The door will be open always". In fact we reassured each other sometimes even explicitly that "The door will be open always" It was a good feeling to start with. It gave a satisfaction of being wanted and being listened to. Both actually started believing that this lead to better bonding. We felt very free "To trespass" into everything.

Maybe the society around us also had a role to play in making us believe that "To trespass" lead to better bonding.

But that is actually not correct.

Slowly we realized that we actually abhored an opinion on all things. Sometimes we did want to take our own decisions all by ourselves. We definitely did not want to put our relationship on a backseat but we did not want to find ourselves asking and listening to our partner for just about every small thing and sometimes things that involved our partner only remotely.

Slowly we felt the need "to close the door again." But we did want to close it entirely cos we valued each other's opinion a lot. We left the door slightly open, latched with the door chain. We now made it mandatory to knock. Now we did not have to stand at the door waiting to be invited, we could knock. But to entertain us or not was left to our partner now. Most of the times our opinions would be welcome through the door, but we reserved the right to sometimes give our partner's opinion a 'delivery boy' treatment (settle at the door itself) and sometimes, though very rarely, slam on an unwelcome opinion.

This works well. What do you say?

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I carry office with me

2009-02-26T17:32:00.004+05:30

Had gone to speak at the "Open Source for MSME's" seminar organized by CII yesterday. It was a small gathering but attended by relatively big guys like Nandu Pradhan from RedHat, Manish Malhotra from Sun, Vinay Deshpande from Encore and our own Dr M Sasikumar.

There are somethings about these kind of 'open source' seminars. People outsource the event management and so invariably you end up loading your presentation on a Windows machine and show it using Microsoft Powerpoint. Nandu was having his presentation in ODP format and so was I. The stage management guy had never heard of ODP format. But i carried my own OpenOffice.org installer in my pen drive. Installed it immediately and both presented it in ODP format. Felt nice to see BharateeyaOO.o splash screen on the big screen over there.

This in a way demonstrates the power of Open Source. I could not have imagined to carry a Microsoft Office 2007 (if i had my presentation in pptx format) in my pen drive and install it for free on a third party machine. It would have felt like giving away my iPod or mobile phone (it does cost that amount, at least the licensed ones). But this time it was more like a piece of timely advice, which both the parties feel nice about giving and receiving.

So a lesson learnt. Am going to carry installer of OpenOffice.org on my pendrive for ever. Next time you see a BharateeyaOO.o splash screen somewhere in any conference, be sure it was me or someone like minded :-).

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WiRWiB is available

2009-02-24T17:11:00.003+05:30

Well, Savs has released WiRWiB - A Wordnet Based suggestive writing aid for creative writing in English and Hindi. I will not talk much about it and let you experience yourself if computers can help you in creative writing. Get more information about it more from here or here and download it from here.

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GMail Search History

2009-02-17T18:17:00.008+05:30

It was surprising for us to find out that GMail's mail search textbox cannot remember the past searches that we have done on our Inbox and other folders. It does not support the drop down of past searches we have made.

And add this up with a not so lay man friendly command line search features like "from:Amarghosh before:2009/02/14 filename:*.odt !chat" which means that get only the mails from Amarghosh which were sent before 14th February this year and which had a file of type ODT attached to it.

Surprising to see such an oversight from Google, the search company.

But anyways AmarGhosh has made this small Firefox extension called "GMail Search History" which is a drop down box next to the GMail's search box. This remembers all the searches you have made on your GMail account. Don't worry it is very personal until you share your login account on the computer with somebody else. Moreover nobody else can see your mails unless you share your GMail password with them. So it is totally safe.

Here is a screen shot.

Go download the Firefox extension from this page. It will save you some time next time you search something in your GMail Inbox.

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Millipede Mo(ve)ments

2009-02-15T17:17:00.004+05:30

Normally I walk about 10 rounds in the basement of our apartments. On one of the days as I was into my third round I saw this cute colorful millipede (or is it a caterpillar, nevermind)near one of the compound walls going about its daily activities of finding some thing to munch on.

In my fourth round I saw this same thing much into the middle of the road crawling across the driveway. But since it had reached near the other end of the road i let it go in its own way and did not bother to disturb its trajectory.

In my fifth round I saw that this cute new curiosity of mine had taken a detour and was heading back towards the driveway. But still he was not on the driveway. I continued on my walk. I would have walked another 100 meters when I saw a car pass by me. And suddenly thoughts of this millipede being crushed under its wheels crossed my mind. I got uncomfortable. I rushed to the same place and was relived to see it still in the middle of the road taking a sunbath. I found a stick. I helped it onto the stick and then settled it to a nearby tree. Whew!!

But Alas!! In my seventh round I again saw this fellow down on the road. This time picked him up again and placed him near a hole. And this fellow happily disappeared into it.

I completed my walk and somehow I felt quite nice about my Millipede Mission for the rest of the day.

But as an afterthought I wonder if I had really done any good to him. Maybe he was on a suicide mission. Maybe he would have crawled out in the next 10 minutes to get attached to any vehicle's tire that was passing by. Maybe some bird picked him up for lunch next time he sneaked out of that hole where I had left him.

And I also wondered if the millipede felt anything at all about what i did to it. Whether it appreciated my 'help' and whether it mattered anything at all in the universal scheme of things.

Whatever it may be, I did feel really nice about what i had done. And that's what mattered. I wouldn't have liked to see the squashed body of this cute thing in my next round and that's what pushed me to help it out of the way. So in a way i felt nice because I decided that I would not want to hold myself guilty for its death which is why I did what I did. I feel nice because i did what was necessary to have a guilt free day. And nothing more than that.

This leads to a big realization that people sometimes do what looks as selfless acts of altruism because they want to avoid their self imagined guilt. Sometimes these seemingly selfless acts have some returns to people which only they can appreciate and hence they do those things. So continuing in this capitalist stream of thought I wonder if it is necessary for people to feel unusually and disproportionately grateful about sacrifices by their partners, relatives and friends. I have reasons to believe that everybody is getting what they want in return of what they do, be it in a relationship or at their work or profession.

So next time somebody does something which seems selfless and s/he looks happy about it, rest assured, s/he has got in return what was needed.

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(Dis)Comforting Designs

2009-02-10T18:31:00.008+05:30

I am just back from a trip to hometown and Chennai. Nowadays I prefer to travel by train rather than the Volvo buses. Maybe body is starting to seek more comfort while traveling. Talking about comfort, 2 things about the design of Railway coaches caught my attention on this trip. One was good and the other was bad.

The bad design first.

Look at the pictures. This is the exit door from the 3AC compartment of Indian Railways. It opens inwards and you can see that the height of the door extends the Upper Berth. Now if a moderately tall (6 ft) person had to get the middle or the upper berth, the length of the berth would not be sufficient for her/him and her/his legs would extend out. This becomes potentially hazardous every time somebody opens the door. Only if the door could open outwards, it would be lot more safer.

And now the good one.

While I was returning from Chennai by Shatabdi express, I found this refreshing tray design in the chair car. Notice that though the seat positions are different (the left one in reclined and right one is upright) the tray positions are same. When opened, the tray position does not change if the person sitting in front of you changes the angle of her/his seat's reclination. You can have your meal peacefully without having to wonder if your plate will suddenly be gifted a jerk by any innocuous action of the person sitting in front of you. I wonder why they don't incorporate such a design in Airplanes.

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Guide to getting addicted (to walking)

2009-02-03T15:37:00.005+05:30

If you are in your mid-thirties like me, people would have definitely warned you about your cholesterol, BMI, triglycerides, diabetes, obesity etc. They would be eager to tell you how sedentary your lifestyle is and why you should adopt some exercises like morning jog, walk etc. Any literature you pick up warns you against the 'lifestyle' diseases and asks you do some exercises. If you are somebody like me who has not done much physical exercise in last decade except for playing that occasional cricket or badminton match, getting back to daily exercises can be a true challenge. And it is a challenge because it is not something that you want to do by yourself but something you have to do out of either social pressure (friends, colleagues, doctors etc) or cos of your medical report (in my case, triglycerides > 350).

One of the biggest temptations when you have decided to walk or do exercises is to join a local Gym. Joining a Gym can be encouraging and discouraging at the same time. Encouraging cos you might see some people way too fat and obese than you are and discouraging too cos you will many people showing off their six-pack abs. Another thing about Gym is that you would walk on a treadmill which is not quite as natural as walking on a pavement or in a park. The air is still and stale and you have to walk at the same place which is not very convenient and sometimes hazardous. My suggestion is find a local ground or park where you can hear morning birds tweet. The tips that follow might help you in creating an impetus which will get you into the habit of walking.

1) So you have decided that you want to walk. Great. The first thing that you need is right attire. Spend some money on a good track suit. More so ask one of your loved ones to gift it to you (like my team did on my birthday). When you wear a good tracksuit that itself makes you feel healthy and energetic. It gives you that feeling of being athletic. Prepares your mind to look forward to get on to that walking track.

2) Next buy a pair of good shoes may be half a size bigger than your normal work shoes. If you are a person who sweats a lot, you should be wearing Nylon/Synthetic socks and not Cotton socks cos cotton socks can cause blisters.

3) Next thing that you want to do, especially if you like fast music, is to create a playlist of about 8-10 songs on your Ipod, Walkman or any other portable MP3/music player. These songs could be of about 30 minutes duration in total. Arrange them is such a way that the beat frequency increase gradually and drop in last couple of songs. This also helps in slowly increasing the efforts while you walk.

4) So your apparatus is all set. Now it is a bit of mind game. You need to decide if you want to do it in mornings or evenings. If you can spare 30 minutes in the evening it is much more easier to get into the habit. Else it eats into your sleep hours. This is bit tricky for people (like me) who love their morning sleep. Try going to sleep quite early. You will find yourself quite awake early in the morning and thus getting out of bed wont be very difficult. On the first day you will be full of enthusiasm. Make sure you empty your stomach well and then have a glass of soothing warm water (cold water in the morning can cause throat irritation). Take time to dress up. Wear your shoes. Put on your music player. Make sure that the wires of the music player do not hang out of your dress cos they may tangle in your hands and fingers when you walk fast.

5) Get onto the ground and start walking. Do not walk fast at start. Find your natural brisk pace. The first few days you will be full of raw energy. You need to be careful about over exerting cos that might make you mighty tired in a couple of days and your thighs, ankles, shin might all start paining. Walk for not more than 30 minutes. Try to walk in laps. This will help you time your walk against the playlist.

6) It is quite possible that after the first week or two, you might not feel like walking on certain days. Don't be harsh on yourself. Skip walking on the days that you don't feel like walking. This actually helps your legs and body to relax and be ready for walk on subsequent days. If you can manage to walk 4-5 days a week, nothing like it. Don't compete with others who come to walk. Form your own pattern. After some days try jogging half a lap or quarter lap. Keep monitoring your fatigue levels and readjust.

7) One mistake that you might end up doing is jumping on to the weighing scale after the first couple of weeks of walking. Don't do it cos nothing much would have changed. You need to give yourself atleast 30-45 days into the programme to notice some changes to your mass. Another mistake people do is that they try some clothes which were previously tight. They would still be tight after couple of weeks.

8) Having somebody who observes your body constantly can be a great advantage. They will tell how better you look after some time. This helps as positive reinforcement. That's the time you can try your tighter clothes. If those clothes fit, your addiction has started.

The brisk walks in the morning for about 20-30 minutes have lot of positive effects on your entire day. You are much more agile and alert. Your appetite is good. Your posture improves. In fact walking actually destresses you. On the whole you feel much better about the world. And this routine is actually addictive. Once you get into it, you will want to do it whenever you have some free time. Just get up and walk and BTW my triglycerides are 160 now :-) .

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Look at This LookAtThis

2009-01-22T17:54:00.004+05:30

AmarGhosh of the SelfControl and LinkIt fame has come up with yet another micro firefox extension called LookAtThis.

It helps you to zoom some selected text in the browser. Just select the text, right click and click on "Look At This" menu. This is useful especially when you are making some presentations or you want to draw the attention of somebody to a particular section of text on the webpage.

Download it from here.

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Have you seen Magmypic.com

2009-01-22T11:09:00.004+05:30

Gauri Shankar Arya, whose marriage reception me and Savs attended sent me this photo done by Ritesh Gupta (both my students).

Found out that you could make these kind of photos at Magmypic.com. Nice Idea. Thanks guys.

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Heavy heart, Heavy head and an enlightenment

2009-01-19T17:00:00.004+05:30

I realise now that there was something odd about that Sunday evening. I asked Savs at about 6:30 PM itself to serve my dinner which was very unusual cos I never eat before 8:30. I guess I was looking forward to some nice movie late in the evening and so did not want to get disturbed at that time. At about 7:45 PM i receive a call on my mobile. It was from my parents home number in Kumbakonam. Savs had called up dad in the morning casually. Savs was talking about all things and dad told about his regular morning walk and other daily things. We couldn't talk to Mom then as she had gone to chat with my aunt. I was expecting Mom to call back and so eagerly picked up the phone. It wasn't Mom, it was our neighbor. She said "Appa (Dad), has suddenly become unconscious. Mom and uncle are taking him to hospital. Please start". Kumbakonam, where my parents live, is about 12 Hrs by road from Bangalore. All the while i was hurriedly getting dressed up and starting, an unusual shiver ran across my body. Savs continuously urged to keep calm. I started (Savs stayed back) from home and reached the nearest bus terminus and hopped on to a bus hometownwards. I would have travelled about 45 mins when I get a call from my aunt from hometown. "Appa is in coma on ventilator support. But he is breathing." I wondered "What? How? Coma, my God, Dad was fine in the morning and by no stretch of imagination was he a coma candidate for atleast next 5 years". At about 10 PM, I had reached Hosur and that's when my aunt called to tell that Mom and Uncle were bringing the body back and that I should get Savs too to Kumbakonam.

I got down from the bus. Appa was no more.

How do you react to something like that? Standing at the Hosur bus stop. Not a single familiar face around and you are told that your Dad is no more. Honestly, you don't get any reaction. Your perception about your surroundings go numb. I reached for my mobile. "Savs, Appa is gone." I dont' know if i screamed, i cried or what i did cos there was total disconnect between my mind and my actions. The whole world around you suddenly goes silent. And then slowly it becomes utterly noisy. Alone over there, with my mobile in my hand, I had a torturous work to do. Inform others. Called up my uncles from Pune. "What? How? He was fine yesterday" I too had the same questions. If only i knew the answers. Called up a taxi service and told him to go home and pickup Savs and come to Hosur. Subbu offered to accompany her till Hosur. Thank you sir. And then was a long wait for taxi to arrive to Hosur. One of the most confusing, lost and lonely hours of my life. Called up several more friends. Told them I am heading home. All offered condolences, support and help. I wanted Dad. I wanted to cry but realised that tears don't come on a press of a button. I was still confused. Called up home. Heard my Mom tell that Dad was gone. That was the button. I broke down. And tens of people watched.

Subbu and Savs reached Hosur at 12 AM. Subbu briefly held my hands. Felt so nice to hold on to somebody, when you had just lost the biggest support of your life. He asked me to take care and also provide talk company to driver since it was night drive. I got onto the cab and he started on his way back to Bangalore. Me and Savs were on our way to Kumbakonam. This was going to be one long drive. And slowly my heart started to feel heavy. Images of Dad started to surround me. I moved onto to the front seat next to driver and started my chatter. Dad's images kept on coming back every time i looked out of the window. I fell silent again. Savs helped continue the chatter. Was mindless talk. And it was all so gibberish. It just failed to sink in. And I was moving ahead in trance.

We drove for 9 long hours. I started receiving condolence calls from relatives, friends. My heart felt heavier and heavier. But i could not cry cos the thought was not sinking in. And then at about 9 AM in the morning, we reached the outskirts of Kumbakonam. I saw those markets from where Dad used to bring vegetables. Saw the temple in front of which Dad would momentarily stop and chant a prayer. And then that unusual shiver returned. How is Dad going to be when I reach home? How am i going to go into a house where people are going to be around my dad's body? The shiver was gripping me. We reached the street. I asked the driver to stop at a distance itself. Savs ran towards home. I settled the money with the driver, thanked him and walked towards home. I was violently shivering and as i reached the entrance of our house, and there I saw Appa.

Inside a glassed freezer box, he lay silently with his hands tied and mouth bandaged and nostrils stuffed with cotton. That was it. "Appa" I wailed. And all the heaviness flowed out.

An inert body of an active person whom you had met just 2 weeks back is the most unacceptable sight in the world. And there was my dad, silent, unmoving and cold inside the glass box. It was just so impossible. I looked deep at his chest, at his lips, at his eyes expecting that they would move and suddenly he would wake up and say "Hi everybody". None of those things happened and I continued to whimper and wail as relatives and friends started pouring in. Everybody was there. Uncles, aunts, cousins. Just that Appa wouldn't wake up.

As day progressed, the last rites had to be performed and cremation had to be done. My aunt told that I shouldn't be crying anymore and have to be sturdy and 'brave'. The priest asked me to take Appa's head on my lap and pour water on him. I lifted Dad's head and found it heavy, very heavy. And a truth sank in.

It was no more Appa. It was just a body in which Appa's spirit lived. And the spirit had now left the body. That was just a mass of useless flesh which needed to be disposed off. Appa had exited the body peacefully, painlessly.

Appa was contented. He had done his duties in life with utmost devotion. Been a loving husband and very caring father who was more of a friend. Had seen to it that everybody would take care of themselves and had provided for all. "I have no more goals" He had said. "When i die, it should be a snap and not a drag". Thats what happened.

Appa will live on. He will live in his ideologies and as memories. What was going to cremation ground was just a body. I could not cry anymore.

My dad continues to live...

2009-01-12T11:01:00.005+05:30

My Dad, an always 'Thumbs-up' man, decided to leave his body and start living in our memories and thoughts on December 28th 2008 at 9:00 PM.

May he live forever.

What has changed after marriage?

2008-12-22T19:10:00.008+05:30

It is 18 months now since Savs came around. And i guess this is a good time to put down what has changed after that. Any longer than now and I fear I would forget how I was before marriage, and any earlier, I would have been too quick to conclude. This is a growing list but nevertheless worth a start. It is jotted down as it occurs in my mind and not in any particular order of gravity.

Nowadays I come to office on Sundays only if I have some work and not because I dont' have any other thing to do.
Nowadays there is at least one person who knows when I have a headache.
I have time and purpose to have my morning jog. Time because Savs is persistent in waking me up early and purpose because I wouldn't want the tasty food that she cooks to get blamed for my unhealthy paunch and cholesterol levels.
When talking to ladies, I don't anymore bother whether they are single or seeing someone.
I don't anymore take my scooter and go around aimlessly. Nowadays we go with a definite aim, to shop aimlessly ;-)
Knowing different varieties of silk and spices is fun!
I still don't take care of my finances, but somehow my investments are much healthier than before.
I have realized that washing utensils is not an easy job and hands do get awfully dry after doing that.
I have realized that waking up to find a cute face next to yours is much better than waking up alone.
House is in much better order now. And if I don't find something I have a 24 Hrs support service to find it :-).
Fresh towels are always available when you open the closet.
I have realized that I snore :-) when I sleep. (Savs actually recorded my snore once)
Traveling alone is a boring thing nowadays.
I don't sit and stare at my mobile phone expecting one of my girlfriends to call me on a weekend.
My conversations on GTalk chat windows are much much shorter.
Whenever I come back from an outstation trip late in the night, I can still get some hot food at home and don't have to search for any bread or noodles stock at home.
I have realized that my time is not just mine anymore and lesser the number of unilateral decisions, better and peaceful the life.
I have one more brain now to think of a solution to any problem.
I have somebody to narrate all my personal victories to, however small and however boring they are.
I got back my childhood in a sense. Get yelled at when I throw my towel around or be pampered when I am of some cute help.
I don't have to go back to an empty house anymore and search for my keys.

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Which girl should I choose?

2008-12-22T18:00:00.003+05:30

And suddenly this fellow RK (name changed) pops up on my GTalk window and asks this question;

RK: if there are 2 options to get married
1. hot girl, but u may encounter some differences

2. homely girl who doesn't speak a word against you but not so hot

which one to choose??

I replied

Depends on kind of person you are,

if you are a control freak

second option is good

if you are great on self confidence go for first one

at least you will enjoy the company till it lasts ;-)

He said it was the best of the four responses he got. Even I was pretty impressed at my own response. Thought I would share this gyan(wisdom) with you folks.

Inconvenienced state, searching solutions...

2008-12-01T14:30:00.002+05:30

For past few days, the country's state of well-being has been highly inconvenienced. The failover city once again bears the brunt of Terrorism. Terrorism seems to be a very easy activity. A perfect profession for cowards and people who have given up on getting things done the social way. And unfortunately these people also get volunteers for it. Volunteers who have never known what is death or pain. I wonder what would people who train them tell to them. Is it something like "Take this AK-47 and go around shooting till somebody shoots and kills you." I wonder if they know what it is to get hit by a bullet and die. The suicide bombers are not the guys who come back to tell how painful their death was and so the new volunteers have no way of knowing whether the death is worth it. Unfortunately they are not even heroes. They are hated after their death and don't even get a decent burial. Once again is it all really worth it?

And all these people have given up. It is very easy in this world to give up and get angry at society. Giving up and taking to arms is not the social way to do things. The human way of doing is working within the social system and get it to give what you want. This needs struggle, dialogues and perseverance, not AK-47s. Stepping outside the system is a damn easy job. I guess anybody will be able to kill a dozen un-armed people if they have a AK-47 or a couple of grenades. If they think that's heroism, it is time for them to think again. These things get tolerated only to a certain extent. People and countries can tolerate such shocks only a limited number of times. They havent been able to penetrate US after 9/11 and so it is just a matter of time before India puts up such systems. And then, their's is a lost case. Neither would they able to hurt people nor would their cause be heard. Who is losing is anybody's guess.

Yes, I too am deeply inconvenienced and have been glued to news channels for past some days now. Now there are reports that our intelligence had information on these attacks which they ignored. People ignore such warnings when they think they are False Positives. False positive is a condition when a symptom indicates a state which actually does not exist. Intelligence and other security agencies, i assume categorise a great deal of information as false positives. Ironically some of them turn out to be true.

Being an open source enthusiast I could not help wondering if it is possible to open source such information to general public. What would be the security implications of it? Every "intercept" I guess has a shelf life and after that if these intelligence agencies categorise some intercepts as false positives, they might as well release them to public. If releasing might be compromising, they could at least leak it out someway that others can study for patterns in it. Maybe some people might be able to see what guys from Intelligence missed. If the saying "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.", can be true for FOSS, so can they be to catch such activities.

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Give a chance to goodness

2008-10-13T18:26:00.002+05:30

"Oh My God" Savs exclaimed today morning.

"We didn't pick up the bag containing toiletries from supermarket, day before yesterday; How forgetful of me" she lamented.

Ooops. You definitely do not want this realization to happen on a Monday morning when you are getting ready to go to office.

Last Saturday evening me and Savs had gone to the supermarket in our neighbourhood. Savs got some toiletries while I went hunting for junk food. When we got out of the supermarket, somehow we had missed one of the bags in which the toiletries were packed.

And we did not realize it until today morning. The first reaction would be "Oh Shit".

The second one would be to find out how much was it worth that we left behind. This was worth about Rs 100/-. Thankfully not too much.

The third one would be to blame the carelessness on the other person. Luckily Savs never indulges in that because she has given up on me and takes the role of being responsible herself.

So she had only herself to blame now and was feeling wretched about it. She announced, "The shop opens at 8:15 AM. I am going to go and ask the shopkeeper if he had found any unclaimed pack"

"That is ridiculous" I said. "You dont expect the shopkeeper to keep the pack safely for you, do you? There are hundreds of customers each day. You don't expect that kind of attention. And even if you did, it is not their responsibility to keep things for you till 2 days later."

"Let me try" she insisted. With Savs, I dont dare to argue much. "Do what you want, I said." I was feeling bad that she was so much disturbed. But then she got ready quickly and left the house. I could actually see her running to the supermarket while I was walking down to our pickup point. After about 10 minutes, she reached the pickup point looking victorious.

Obviously she had got those things back. I congratulated her and asked her how? She said I just went with the bill and asked him. He realised that I wouldn't be lying for things worth Rs 100/- and he picked it up from shelf and gave it to me. Simple.

Boy, wasn't she happy about it. If the shopkeeper hadn't obliged her, it would have ruined her day (and mine too).

On the way to office, I realized something else too. This time I had given up on the shopkeeper. I did not expect him to be a believer in honesty of his customer's words. I did not expect any goodness from him. If I would have had my way, I would have never approached him with this enquiry. It would have not changed my views about him in any way either. I would still continue to see him as a cold face behind the counter.

While Savs did the other way. Savs went ahead and gave him a chance to exhibit his goodness. And he did. And the whole perception now is changed. The shopkeeper lost nothing while won the loyalty of a customer. I wonder if Savs would go to any other shop anymore.

That's what small acts of goodness can do. But more than that you need to give others a chance to show their good side. Most of the times we wrongly assume that people needn't be good and so wouldn't be. That's where such small lessons help.

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A Gotcha For HP TouchSmart PC and Linux

2008-10-11T15:41:00.004+05:30

HP TouchSmart PC is a wonderful equipment to have in your lab. Touted as a complete multi-media device, the PC comes with a touchscreen. The team recently got one for its exploration on touch based computing.

HP TouchSmart comes preloaded with Windows Vista which is damn slow even with its 2GB RAM. The team loaded UbuntuStudio 8.04 on it which looks great on its widescreen. But to our dismay, the touchscreen responded very erratically. The pointer would just not follow your finger.

This gotcha explains how we made it to work.

1) Installed xserver-xorg-input-evdev
2) HP Touch Smart uses NextWindow TouchScreen. The tricky part was to find which input device is connected. A cat /proc/buc/input/devices pointed wrongly to event2.
3) After googling a lot, we found evtest. Downloaded evtest.c and compiled it.
4) Ran evtest as root with various input devices like /dev/input/event[1...X]
5) One of the runs showed Input Device as NextWindow TouchScreen. That was the one. The device was /dev/input/event4

Input driver version is 1.0.0
Input device ID: bus 0x3 vendor 0x596 product 0x1 version 0x200
Input device name: "NextWindow TouchScreen"
Supported events:
Event type 0 (Reset)
  Event code 0 (Reset)
  Event code 1 (Key)
  Event code 3 (Absolute)
Event type 1 (Key)
  Event code 330 (Touch)
Event type 3 (Absolute)
  Event code 0 (X)
    Value      0
    Min        0
    Max 32687
  Event code 1 (Y)
    Value      0
    Min        0
    Max 32687

6) Made the necessary changes to our xorg.conf according to this page. Change the /dev/input/event1 to the device that we found as connected to touchscreen (/dev/input/event4) through our evtest runs.

7) Saved xorg.conf and rebooted. And Voila, touchscreen works.

Now that touchscreen works, let me load Sugar, it's gonna be fun.

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Bloggers .... Link It ( LinkIt ) at your convenience.

2008-09-25T13:37:00.002+05:30

Link It is a truly amazing utility. Every Blogger will appreciate it because it is the feature in the browser every blogger would have missed at some point of time. What is that feature?

Everyday when we are writing a blog post or a news letter or just any other article in a browser, we come across terms that need to be hyperlinked to relevant pages on the web for clarity. Unfortunately the URLs of these websites are often long and cryptic for us to remember and we need to google it and copy-paste the URL from the search results. That's exactly what LinkIt will do for you. Watch this video for a demo on how to use LinkIt.

LinkIt is an extension to the Firefox browser.

Visit the LinkIt page to know more about it.

Download LinkIt here.

This was actually an idea pursued by Savs with her students and finally AmarGhosh chipped in to complete it.

Thanks people, it is truly wonderful. And weblinks in this post are linked using LinkIt.

No one is myopic in hindsight

2008-08-29T09:38:00.003+05:30

Yesterday was teaching Graph Theory and Djikstra's Algorithm to students. Was explaining to them that how Djikstra's Algorithm was myopic at the time of execution. And I concluded explaining the whole algorithm saying that in hindsight after the algorithm has fully executed, it seems all so planned and does not look myopic. "No one is myopic in hindsight" I said.

Savs was attending that lecture of mine and found that quote quite profound. She put it on her GMail Status Message and couple of her friends found it interesting too. So I decided to blog it.

Savs said later that she found it profound in a positive way because it reduces the guilt of having made wrong choices. Djiktra's algorithm progresses in a greedy way by making the "Best Choice at that moment" (This was from Varuna, one of my students). Humans too work in a similar way. They make best choices from available options. Some choices work, some don't. In hindsight it is easy to say I could have picked up the other choice, if your choice does not work out. But at that moment that was the best you could have done.

So don't feel guilty or remorseful. No one is myopic in hindsight.

B-Trees, N-ary Trees, Autocracy and Democracy

2008-08-28T16:45:00.003+05:30

B-Tree, I guess is one of the more difficult topics to teach to students in Data Structures. And all this years I would struggle explaining it to my students. To try and explain B Trees after exposing the students to Binary Trees and Multi way Trees is like telling them to unlearn the way things were done till then and learn new way of doing it.

For starters B-Tree and N-ary tree differ in fundamental ways like, N-Ary trees grow from top to bottom while B-Trees grow from bottom to top. Secondly in N-ary trees the lower levels are jagged with leaf nodes at different levels while all the leaf nodes are at the same level in B-Trees.

I am a believer in teaching a concept through real life analogies. My classes are more of story telling than hard core technical discussions. Technical discussions happen through stories and examples.

But all this while I would struggle with an analogy for B-Tree. I just did not have one. Until today. Now I have one.

When you have to compare and contrast N-ary Trees and B Trees, try the analogy of how an organization grows and how people in a democracy select/elect their representatives. There is a fundamental difference. An organization grows out of nothing. It grows from one to many and so tend to be autocratic. While there are already a lot of people in a state and representatives are selected for better management and function through elections.

Bingo!! N-Ary trees grow in an autocratic way while B-Trees grow in a democratic way. That was a revelation. And rest all the concepts of B-Trees could be mapped to the way a democracy grows.

In B-Trees, a node splits to create a root or a higher node. Just like a leader is elected from a group of people to represent the region. When higher nodes are created by splitting existing nodes, the median is chosen in the same way as a person who is a representative of majority of mass is chosen as a leader.

Now it is quite possible based on the number of representatives, that elected leaders may themselves need to be managed. This leads to higher elections, like a Prime Minister is selected from a group of ministers who in turn represent many people who elected them. Similarly the root node of a B-Tree when it becomes crowded splits to form a higher node which now acts as a root node.

The height of the B-Tree is directly proportional to the number of leaf nodes. As the number of nodes increase, new nodes are formed in middle levels by splits happening at lower levels. This in fact very nicely also explained the formation of new states in India by splitting of existing states. As population increases, existing boundaries need to be redefined for better management.

Look at this applet to further understand B-Trees. Does it look like a representative democracy?

Do you have any other analogy to explain B-Trees?

My morning walkway

2008-08-27T11:20:00.003+05:30

This is how the basement of Mantri Woodlands (our apartments) looks on most of the mornings when I take a walk.

Self Control is now possible.

2008-08-22T10:56:00.004+05:30

Do you spend a lot of your 'valuable' time on blogs, YouTube or other similar websites?

Have you ever felt that there should be some way to control your browsing habits?

Then you need SelfControl. SelfControl is an extension to Firefox that will warn you when you open one of those time-wasting sites during office hours. You can customise the time period for each page separately. (You might want to block YouTube for the full day but read blogs after lunch). If you really want to waste time (when your manager is on leave, for instance ) you can temporarily disable SelfControl by clicking the toggle button on the toolbar.

Click here to install SelfControl. When the download popup window appears, click 'open with' and select Firefox. You will be taken through the installation process.

Now whenever you feel that you are spending a lot of time on a particular website, open the home page of that site and click on the icon on the bottom-right corner of Firefox. It will open the SelfControl preferences window. Enter the time range during which you want to block the website and click on the Add button. You will be warned when you open that page next time.

SelfControl is developed by my colleague, Amarghosh . Visit SelfControl page for more details.

A Promise Kept

2008-08-19T18:30:00.004+05:30

For people who don't know Savs much, Savs was one person who never wanted to marry. And, in those late evening chats on Gtalk (I was in Bangalore and she was in Mumbai), I would try to convince her to find a partner for herself. Little did I know that it would be me that she would finally say yes to. Every time I would ask her to marry someone, she would simply shrug it off and say that marriage was too much of a commitment for her and would be too much of a torture for her partner (I wouldn't yet agree on the latter part) . She would say that she would like to be like a bird and be able to pack her bags and go whenever she wants, wherever she wants.

When we decided to move in together, I made her that promise. That she will be able to pack her bags and go wherever she wants, whenever she wants. I have kept that promise.

She still packs her bags whenever she has to travel and she still can go wherever she wants, just that either she comes back in a week's time if she is going alone or I tag along with her ;-)

Now that's what I call gentleman's promise.

Savs is visiting my in-laws and honestly, life isn't too great without her around.

Testing times are temporary

2008-08-05T19:45:00.003+05:30

While I sit here and build OpenOffice 3.0 for 22 Indian languages, listening to a Kenny G CD, mood is definitely one of contentedness and a kind of happiness that you get after you have done something worthwhile. The kind of happiness that guarantees you a good night's sleep for a number of months to come.

And why do i feel like this? Cos Vinod Kumar is placed. And who is Vinod Kumar? Vinod Kumar is one of the students passing out from 2007-2008 FPGDST batch this year. And why is he so special? Because he was the first guy in my past 8 years as placements coordinator over here who wasn't getting a job even after he had cleared all the modules in the course.

And believe me, that's very unusual about the people who pass out from the course here. In my past 10 years of association with this place, I had not seen a single instance when somebody had passed the course and was still unemployed after completion. I would generally not bother much if people still had some backlogs, but this time I had reason to be disturbed. Vinod was all set to break my belief about the employability of people who passed out from here. Vinod, in fact had got about 4 to 5 chances and would crack all written tests and fail at interviews.

Yes, his case was definitely a cognitive dissonance. I kept on probing the reason of his failures at interviews. I found out that his communication skills were not upto the mark. He couldn't somehow communicate well in English and I repeatedly said to myself, "That's the reason", "That's the reason". Somehow I was not able to accept the mistake was mine or that the system on which I had faith had failed. Every other day Vinod would either come and meet me or send me a mail asking me what to do. He had a family which was getting dependent on him and he could not afford to stay unemployed in Bangalore for long. And every time he stared into my face quizzically, I would want to sneak away from him cos I had no answers. Each time I would manage to tell him "Just have faith, something will work out". Though I myself had no idea what would work, bcos he just won't communicate well in English. Still I kept trying to arrange visit from various companies and various kind of jobs.

And finally he did get placed. Just a day before the course ended. Believe me, I would have celebrated more than anybody else. And suddenly I was reminded of the days when my father was serious with 2 consecutive heart attacks and intractable hiccups. People who have seen patients with chronic hiccups would know how unbearable the sight is. And you get that helplessness feeling. You can't do much. And the best thing you can do at that time is stay calm and give hope to others (though you may not have much of it in you). Along with that another thing you do is keep doing things that are to be done without applying too much emotions to it. And then things get better, much better. Dad recovered in a month's time. It has been 6 years now and touch wood, Dad's doing great.

You would have seen Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. In that he says, "Given enough time, people turn out to be good, nobody is permanently evil" , I would want to say "Given enough time, things turn out to be good. Testing times are temporary" . Good times ahead :-) .

Watch the video. it is one in a zillion experience.

Each quarter in an Airtel Ad

2008-07-07T13:25:00.002+05:30

Well, I and Savs completed our first year of marriage on June 28th. Couple of guys asked us how it had been. And looking back at it, it seems to fit the new Series of Airtel Ads (featuring Madhavan and Vidya Balan) completely.

Here's how?

The first quarter is when we couldn't be without each other. Every time I needed to travel, it was quite an effort to pack bags and go.

The second quarter eases on the passion a bit. I could now travel but still I would want to call up and talk frequently. Every break I would get, every moment I would be alone, I would call up and exchange sweet nothings.

The third quarter gets in the social angle. You start looking beyond each other. You become aware of a society around you and that you have others to be concerned about too.

And in the last quarter, you are settling in for responsibilities for the rest of your lifetime. By now you know each other really well and start taking each other for granted at times.

Yup Guys, we have settled in for good now. Do drop in whenever you get time. (Do call up before you do).

Turning Thirty Five

2008-06-10T09:47:00.005+05:30

What was a very easily forgettable and non-descript 06/06/2008 until 4:30 PM turned to be the most memorable one of a lifetime. And this time, it is not only Savs to whom I owe my thanks. Just about everybody near and dear to me conspired against me to make it a memorable one. It includes mom, dad, my team and my students.

The enactment was perfect. Savs picked up a small fight the previous night and I was feeling totally wretched by the time I went to sleep. Morning she woke up and feebly wished me Happy Birthday more for a formality. She complained she had a headache and said she is not gonna come to office. Mom and Dad blessed me just as much as they would everyday when I touch their feet after bath.

When i reached office, the way my team wished me HBD, it seemed more out of a necessity than affection. Though i didn't bother much, it was nowhere near the kind of Birthday excitement that my team shows. And frankly I have been used to huge pampering from the group and others on my birthdays that i did at some point of time feel a bit let down.

And the whole day people in my chat list would keep asking me what was the program for the day. What could I say? I had a fight with Savs last night and things looked glum since morning. My cute sis-in-law suggested that I take the family out for dinner. I called up Savs. In a very disinterested tone she said, let me ask. I was wondering what went so wrong suddenly in my life.

At about 4:30 pm, my students called me for a cake cutting. Whew!! Atleast somebody remembered the cake cutting. That was a pretty happy scene. All students wishing me and then of course a cake facial.

I got on the bus at 5:30 and headed back home. I was not upset but i was not very cheerful either. The sabotage was nearly total.

Reached home to a very pleasant surprise. A full scale party had been arranged. Just about everybody had conspired in this. Right from the fight the previous night to the dull reception in the team, every bit was choreographed to perfection. Of course, Savs was the director-in-chief. Mom, Dad and team were accomplices. And rest was pure fun. Right from Laxmi's idea of Magic Candles to the yummy dinner.

As the evening progressed, a realisation came across that I so badly wanted people to acknowledge my existence. When nobody bothered about my birthday the whole day I was pissed off a bit. I had started to feel a bit miserable too. Though the positive side in me was telling, "it is OK, not my day i guess", the other side was asking what went wrong. Why have I suddenly turned so much of an anon. Guess the surprise helped me put things in perspective that not always would you get the attention that you crave for. And you better enjoy the attention when you are getting it. You might at some point of time become lonely and you might not be entirely responsible for it.

The Partners in crime

Thanks a ton guys!!

One role at a time.

2008-06-05T11:16:00.001+05:30

This is a Chautauqua.

Let me start with a cliche, "man plays many roles in his life at different points of time". He plays a son, a husband, a father, a student, an employee and so on. Every situation that a man encounters in his life requires him to play some role. And a man plays that role. But do you know when things start going out of control or start taking unmanageable proportions, when you are required to play 2 or more roles simultaneously.

Team leaders might identify with this situation. They have to take care that the mood is upbeat and positive in their team and at the same time reflect/acheive the demands (sometimes unrealistic) of the higher management. This is when a conflict comes. Cos at this point of time, the Team Leader is required to play 2 roles simultaneouly; on one hand, be a benevolent senior understanding the problems of the junior and at the same time be stern in conveying that the job has to be done. You know what? Most of the times we do not face this kind of conflict, but sometimes we do, and we do it when we want to play both the roles well.

Another interesting such situation is at home when we have to simultaneously play a son and a husband's role. Many can identify with this. In this situation, you want to play both the roles well and nevertheless, believe me, it is near impossible to do it.

And so how do you solve it. The first step in the process is to identify that you are in a conflict. Your mental distress will let you know about it. Once you know that, next you need to do find out which 2 roles are you trying to play simultaneously. This can be tricky cos your mind wont accept that you are trying to play 2 roles at the same time.

And then compromise with one of the roles. Tell the compromised role that you will give preference to it at some other point of time. Assume one role for the situation and do what the role must do. This is hard. But atleast it does justice to one role. If you try and play both of them, you will end up buggering both.

Dad says, "One thing at a time and that done well", I would say "One role at a time, and that played well."

Autorickshaw Anecdotes

2008-05-27T19:13:00.005+05:30

The Autorickshaws are perhaps one of those very precarious looking vehicles that i guess, exist, only in South Asia. My aunt from Australia once told me that some Indian had tried to introduce Autorickshaw in Sydney and it was not accepted because the people there felt that it was a safety hazard. I don't know how true that is, but I know one thing for sure, going in an Auto (abbr. for Autorickshaw) definitely can be an adventure in Bangalore.

More than a safety hazard, it is the fare negotiation that is more adventurous. Large number of the Auto fare meters in Bangalore are tampered and would show much more a charge than what's actual. Sometimes the Auto drivers won't even come at fare meter rates and would demand exorbitant flat rates. Negotiating such drivers could be nerve racking at times. It needs gumption, guts to use libelous language and a lot of time. Let me tell you that though I am quite careful in the amount i pay for engaging an Auto, I do get taken for a ride at times. But in this post let me narrate to you 3 techniques that I successfully used at different points of time to avoid the Auto Hazard.

1) Once I had to get back home from Railway Station early in the morning. Auto drivers charge 1.5 times in the early mornings and I accepted that and boarded an Auto. Generally the fare from station to my home would be about Rs 110/- but on that day the meter showed Rs 150/-. I knew that the meter was doctored. I told the Auto driver that the meter was showing more than expected. The guy won't listen and started his song of how honest he was and that he took a longer route due to new one ways and all. I finally told. "I know that it does not exceed Rs 110/- and I very well know that this meter is tampered. I can still give you the money you want but let me tell you, I am sure that if you go on doing like this, you are gonna stay as an Auto driver your entire life because this dishonesty will bring you a lot of bad karma and you will never ever get to live an easier life" That sounded like a curse to him and he immediately returned the extra money and said "It does not matter if I earn less this trip but I don't want to start the day with a bitter wish for me"

I wish him well.

2) The second one was bit more interesting. Me, Savs and Amar were returning home from office in the Auto and after moving a certain distance I noticed that the meter was tampered and was moving at an usually rapid pace. I told the Auto driver that his meter was malfunctioning and gave the reason for my doubt too. He just wudn't listen. At a point I had to threaten him that i would like the vehicle to be diverted to the police station. 8 out of 10 times, this threat works and the Auto drivers agree to the normal fare. But this fellow was obstinate. He was unshaken to the threat and agreed to come to police station. I told Savs and Amar to catch some other Auto and reach home while I deal with this fellow. Most of the times the Auto drivers tend to assume that if women accompany men, the men dont easily pick up a fight and agree to pay up. I am not that kind. The moment he saw that I was prepared to take it to the end, he stopped in the middle and said that he won't come to police station and would want me to pay the current fare and get down in the middle of the way. I refused to pay up and continued to be seated in the vehicle. Finally he agreed to waive the entire fare. Given that, even i wasn't keen in taking him to police. I got down and caught the next bus back home :-)

3) The last one does not deal with auto fares. This deals with rash driving. Auto drivers in Bangalore are notorious for their rash driving. Recently i got on to an Auto and was headed home. I guess the driver fancied himself as a F1 racer. I generally dont mind pacy skillful driving but this fellow seemed a nut. He took off his leg from the brake pedal and folded his legs and sat on the seat. Next moment he removed both his hands from steering handle and was lighting up a smoke. And this was in a peak hour traffic. I gently tapped him on his shoulder and asked "Are you suffering from AIDS?". He said no. I asked "Cancer, Heart disease". He was getting irritated but still nodded negatively. And then I asked, "Has your wife ran away with someone?". This did it. He stopped, turned around and asked me "What was my problem?". I said "If any of what i asked was true, I would like to get down so that he can go alone and commit suicide if he wants". He laughed and we both safely reached home.

A David for a Goliath

2008-05-26T11:27:00.003+05:30

It is a great day today. A David has risen to the challenge. Finally MaTra is out. And whats MaTra? MaTra is a English Hindi machine translation system built by the NLP team of the KBCS Group in CDAC Mumbai.

The system translates a given English text to Hindi. Amazing ain't it?

Congrats to the team. And it is a great effort. The strong Google team released its English-Hindi Translation Engine a couple of days ago.

And the world thought it could only take a Google to do that job. No Sire. Here is a David upping his sleeves.

MaTra for starters does more or less as much as Google's system does and sometimes even does it better.

What it does best is the way it lets you suggest improvements. You can do it in English itself.

Go try it and importantly help us improve it. It is yours.

Existence Vindicated

2008-05-21T10:41:00.002+05:30

When unknown people send such mails about your work, your existence is definitely vindicated.

Not many issues matter after that.

Better a yorker than a bouncer

2008-05-02T18:45:00.005+05:30

Savs and IPL are the 2 things that have been on my mind after 5:30 pm in the evening for past 1 week. IPL because there is so much of noise about it everywhere and Savs because she is not in town. And this fugue of Savs and IPL for past 1 week lead to this interesting analogy.

Me and Savs have distinctly different way of handling people in a conflict, especially when you have to make a person (and a senior at that) do some task. I generally take the confrontation approach. I would speak of rules, ethics and all that stuff and try to show the other person's shortcomings. This approach sometimes works and a lot of times does not. Not only that, the relationship between me and the other person becomes highly volatile. The war of words (which inevitably happens) leaves all the parties exhausted and hurt. This has happened umpteen times and I have now lost the count.

Savs deals with it totally differently. Savs would not tell you what you need to do. She would actually make you realise what you need to do. She would go about doing work in front of you and would let you laze around. You would start feeling wretched about yourself and just then she would ask you to do something which you would be more than eager to do. She actually would create that guilt factor in you and resolve the conflict. At the end of it, nobody would be needed to apologize verbally but message would be across as to who won the argument and who was wrong. Yes things get done eventually.

And this exactly matches the difference between a bouncer and a yorker.

A bouncer confronts the batsman. It challenges him. And depending on his temperament and skill, the batsman either hooks it or ducks and evades the ball. In any which way, the bowler announces his offensive stand. The batsman has a choice to play or duck.

Yorker is altogether different. It is more of a mind game. The batsman get cramped up for space and yet has to play the ball. And it is very difficult to hit a Yorker for a boundary. Most batsman cannot play it adequately. And bowler's skills are actually appreciated when he bowls a yorker. And yet there is no offensive. You can actually see the batsman getting frustrated at his inability to play a yorker. He does not get angry at the bowler.

Guess I need to learn to bowl yorkers. Will help a lot.

"Not the last" Theory of Happiness

2008-04-30T18:57:00.002+05:30

Sometime back me and Savs got on to this one day sight seeing tour of Mysore. This bus tour conducted by KSTDC starts at about 7 AM in the morning from Bangalore and comes back at about 11 PM. The whole of Mysore is covered in the trip.

On the way to Mysore at Srirangapatna, there is a temple of Lord Sri Ranganatha. The bus stopped at the temple and the guide gave us 30 mins to visit the temple and be back.

Me and Savs got carried away window shopping near the temple and did not realise how 30 mins went. When we came back to the bus, we were the last and everybody was waiting just for us. Everybody looked annoyed.

And as we settled down in our seats, i felt a bit embarrassed. Not only that, when the next time the bus stopped the guide reminded us to be back in time. And for the rest of the trip we made sure that we were not the last to board the bus after any halt. The embarrassment was not worth it.

And suddenly a Theory of Happiness emerged in my mind. I would like to call it as a "Not the Last" Theory of Happiness.

I guess this theory defines my attitude and approach to life. Helps me to be at peace with myself.

"Not the Last" theory does not force you to be a perfectionist. It does not force you to excel than the rest of the gang. It does not put enourmous pressure on you to struggle hard to keep others behind.

"Not the Last" is an optimal approach to struggle and competition in life. You only chose to be somewhere in middle in the table. You neither wish to be the ahead of the rest nor want to end up last in the race. In this way you always have something to aspire for and you always have somebody to look down at. When you are somwhere in between you can always afford to slow down when you are low on resources and catch up when you are reenergised.

And in a race where there are billion people, a little bit here and there is not gonna matter. Being the first in the race is very sapping cos there are more people trying to pull you down there and you got to struggle hard constantly. Being last also is not a very pleasant position since the whole world is looking down on you.

I prefer to be somewhere in between, where I have some people to look up to and some people to look down at and enjoy comfortably my "Not the last" position in the race of life.

What's your theory of happiness?

Is that a calculation mistake?

2008-04-16T09:43:00.002+05:30

These are the images of the Elevated Highway currently being constructed on the Hosur Road. Look at first and the second. In the second one, the pillars look normal and the bell-mouth extends up to the structure above it. In the first one, the bell-mouth ends abruptly and an ugly 'packing' structure of about 15-20 feet height is used to hold the structure above it.

I am not a Civil Engineer, but somehow I get a feeling that the engineers over there have goofed up on some calculation and have then made this 'packing arrangement'.

Any civil engineers out there who can explain if it is a error or has a purpose.

An ICICI Bank Phishing Mail

2008-04-15T12:28:00.005+05:30

A mail from riskofficer@icicibank.com

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

Dear Customer,

This is to caution you that our security team had observe some login attempts in your NetBanking Account from many blacklisted IP Addresses so that we have send you a mail to inform you and verify your NetBanking Account to provide you highest standards of security. However, if you didn't verify your account we will block your account to prevent any misuse of your account.

We do this because whenever you or any third party wants to login from outside India, Our Security team got a caution message to prevent your account from any Unauthorized access. Click here to verify if you have Personal Banking Account https://infinity.verification.icicibank.co.in

Click here to verify if you have Business Banking Account https://corporate.verification.icicibank.co.in

Visit Site to know more NetBanking security.

We seek your cooperation for serving you better.

Thank you

Sincerely,
ICICI Bank

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

And the funniest part is, I don't have an ICICI Bank Account :-)

Live your dreams...

2008-04-07T14:54:00.002+05:30

When Savs asked me "Do we always have to live for somebody else's image?", it lead me to think a bit more. And it was to do more than the image alone. We are constantly required to live somebody else's dreams.

Children have to live Parent's dreams
Daughters-in-law have to live up to dreams of Mothers-in-law.
Wives have to live up to Husband's dreams and image.
Boyfriends dance to the tunes of Girlfriends.
Students are expected to live up to the dreams of the teachers.
Employees are expected to live the dreams of the CEO.
Individuals have to live up to the dreams and expectations of the society.

Excuse me!! Aren't we passing our dreams to others a bit more than we should. I am reminded of a post Subbu once wrote. He talks about a child's cry to the parents to stop dreaming for them. Somewhere down the line we have started to stop pursuing our dreams ourselves. Parents think that i need to forgo my dreams to give a good life to children. It is a very noble thought till here but the trouble comes when the same parents start expecting their children to do what they wanted to do.

Do they ever ask the children what they want to do? Not many.

Same thing may apply to Husbands, Wives, Teachers, Students, Employees, Employers, Society, Individuals. When you have to live somebody else's dreams and image, you would get frustrated. And such frustration cause unhappiness because at the end of the day whatever you do, it is not what you wanted from yourself, it is what somebody else wanted from you.

Recently me and Savs had gone to see a play called "The Common Man" at Rangashankara, an interactive style drama where the audience is asked to suggest how the story ends which is later enacted by the artists. The main protagonist in that play, "The Common Man" does not have any dialogues for himself. Through out the play he is an audience to what others do to him and around him. Maybe this is how most of us are. Audience to what others want from us. Hardly do we express about what we want from ourselves and feel about ourselves. And finally at some stage and age when we start wanting to do something for ourselves we are too old or incapable and ask others to do it for us. Vicious cycle.

Yup!! Better live our dreams and image ourselves than asking others to live it for us.

Whew!! Thanks Savs for marrying me.

2008-04-03T15:07:00.003+05:30

I was invited to give the inaugural address at a Science Exposition at Kavery Engg. College at Salem. I was taken to the venue in the Dean's car and was welcomed by the Principal at the college. Soon after I reached there I was introduced to the entire management team, the Chairman of the trust, the Secretary, the Advisor and HODs. Was on the whole a very nice feeling.

Soon we were sitting around in the Chairman's chamber talking about various things. Suprisingly the second or the third question people would ask me is "Do you have a family?" which means "Are you married?". Next question would be of course "What does your Mrs. do?" (Mrs means wife) and of course finally "Do you have kids?"

About 10 months ago, similar situation and questions would have irritated me to the core. I would wonder what the hell is their business to ask me such questions and why do I have to be judged by what I was doing with my relationships. What's their problem if I was single, living in, married or divorced. But whatever would be my irritation, the questions would still come and I realised that if i need to be a person who prefers being socially extrovert, I had to answer these questions. I had to come up with socially acceptable answers like "I am searching" , "There is a problem with my horoscope for another 2 years" and all that kind of excuses. Still I would leave the person asking these questions with a lot of unanswered queries about my social fitness. It seems that people who don't get married after a certain age or are living alone are seen more as a burden or a threat to the society. Savs joked, "It is more so if it is a female".

And this time around, I was more than keen to answer them. I gleefully replied "Yes, I got married about 9 months ago." In fact I did not stop at that. I continued, telling them how me and my wife work in the same organization and same department and how it is so wonderful to be accessible to each other all the time and how we have postponed our idea about kids for some time since we are keen on doing something worthwhile in our careers and so on. Virtually i bore people to hell now if they ask me these kind of questions. I start telling them about rising land prices and falling quality of mushrooms and broccoli available in the market. It seems that just by marrying, a person suddenly is expected to be worldly wise even if s/he marries at age of 18 and a person of age 45 if is unmarried is still considered 'inexperienced'. Funny world this.

Whew!! Thank Savs for marrying me, I atleast pass this test now ;-) .

Funny life this has been so far ....

2008-03-28T11:23:00.003+05:30

To come to think of it ....

I had girlfriend(s) to whom i could never get engaged or married.

I got engaged to a woman who was neither my girlfriend nor somebody i could get married to.

Now I am married to a woman who was neither my girlfriend nor my formal fiancée (I still haven't given her a ring).

I hope this funniness ends here and things get regularized.

Open for Placements - Recruit from us

2008-03-20T10:00:00.004+05:30

The current batch of my students are ready to rock. Take them away.

Please visit our "Why us, Know us, Meet us" site. Or you could download the "Placements 2008 Brochure". Please email me with your requirements and I will get in touch with you.

Welcome to Placements 2008 !!

Linux for You, March 2008, Page 53

2008-03-19T10:34:00.002+05:30

Thankfully it is Page 53 and not Page 3 :-)

An Apple for the Team

2008-03-18T15:15:00.003+05:30

The team just got a new Apple MacBook. Yahoooooooooo

Thanjavur Brihadeeswara Temple

2008-03-17T11:13:00.002+05:30

Snaps from our recent visit to Thanjavur Brihadeeswara Temple

How would you feel...

2008-03-12T16:11:00.002+05:30

1) When the flight stewardess asks you to tie your seat belts before she has made the safety demonstration?

2) When your new housemaid teaches you how to operate the washing machine you have been using for more than 2 years?

:-) . Fun life this is.

The Beehive Theory for FOSS Contribution

2008-03-03T18:50:00.003+05:30

"We wonder why contribution to FOSS does not happen much from India inspite of so much of talent". This question always figures as one of discussion topics in most of the Open Source meets like FOSS.in or FREED.in . In past I have tried to ponder over several reasons.

The philosophical ones,the economic ones and some others too.

Here i am with one more and its more intriguing than previous ones. This one deals with ownership and possessiveness.

The educated class in India until recently has followed a very traditional lifestyle. Father is the head of the family and in majority of cases also the bread earner. Mother is a housewife who looks after the upbringing of the children. The roles are well defined. And this is how a child sees the society as s/he grow up. Until the child goes to school, Mom is nearly always accessible to the child. Mom nourishes, cares and protects the child from the external world. The child gets very little exposure to other elders unless they happen to stay in the same house. And thus the child grows up getting the undivided attention of her/his mother.

And when such children grow up, you can hardly expect from them to be open about their creativity. They would have the tendency to nurture, develop and protect their code. It is difficult for them to open up their code and invite scrutiny, criticism and adoption. The possessiveness just does not allow that. Giving up or sharing attitude is very less and understandable too. Mother and Father are supposed to take care of child and they have total right on their child.

But things will change as society changes. And the culture of working parents, if you can see the way i do, will become a boon for bringing in a culture change. If both parents are working, the child gets to know others apart from their parents. It could be a babysitter, it could be grandparents or it could be the crèche 'aunty'. Still parents do play a role but the child sees that it is not only them. S/he also sees other faces frequently in her/his formative years. And realizes that many people play a role in one's development.

The society now works as a Beehive in a child's development. Parents give birth to children, take care of them initially and then leave them for the majority of the daytime in company of other children and caretakers. This leads to a situation that a child grows as a community member rather than an isolated individual. These impressions that are formed early in childhood last longer. S/He now understands that in development of a being, there are lot of people involved. Parents still play a vital role but there are others too who figure in the personal development of the child.

Thus a child grows up in a environment (in a crèche or daycare centre) where people are less possessive about her/him, where activities are more participative in nature and where there is more access to a varied resources some of which are not owned by her/him and are public goods.

Naturally s/he could tend to be more collaborative, sharing and communicative in nature. Essential qualities for a FOSS developer.

Again this is just a theory. And every theory is just another point of view.

Cooking up a Management Lesson

2008-02-20T17:24:00.001+05:30

This management insight comes from straight out of the kitchen and developed by Savs. Here goes.

Most of the people who can recollect the incidents of their newly-wed days would identify with this situation.

The situation is something like this. There is this newly wed Daughter-in-law who comes to stay with her hubby in his house. Already his parents stay with him which means that her Mother-in-law is the manager of the house and more importantly the kitchen. In a couple of days the Daughter-in-law tries to enter the kitchen. Mother-in-law is non-chalant to her presence. Mother-in-law goes about doing the work as she would. Daughter-in-law asks Mother-in-law if she could help in anything. Mother-in-law tells the Daughter-in-law that there is nothing much to be done. This happens a couple of times. Daughter-in-law gets annoyed. Senses hostility in Mother-in-law. Resigns to avoiding to ask at all and thus gets alienated from the kitchen. And after a few days Mother-in-law notices that Daughter-in-law does not come to kitchen at all. And thus the distances increase between the two.

Same thing could have happened with Savs and my Mom. My mom has been handling the kitchen alone since I remember and even after Savs came in, Mom would go about doing the kitchen work by herself. Savs did feel bad about it in the beginning but decided to handle it patiently.

And after some time I saw Mom happily giving work to her. I was more than glad to see it. I asked Savs how did she do it? The insight was pretty impressive.

Savs just said, "I just made Mom a manager from an executive". All these years Mom was the only person in charge of the kitchen. She had to do just about everything in kitchen and had got to working that way. Never did she have anybody to delegate some activities to. And thus she never got to learn that skill. When Savs came in, suddenly Mom had somebody to assist her but could not identify what to delegate since everything was being done by her. Savs slowly started doing small things around her and thus indicated that she could help in some ways. Mom realised it slowly and thus they started working in tandem.

Come to think of it, there is a sizable management lesson in that. In organizations, we tend to see that people who work well get promoted to managerial posts and then fail miserably. The reason could be that people who work well by themselves are not actually very good at delegating work. They tend to take up all the work themselves and since being a manager your responsibilities expand, you start falling behind. I think it is the ability to delegate which makes you a real manager. Otherwise you are just a good executive.

I wonder if there is any course like "Art of Delegation" in management schools. High time they had one if they already don't.

Totally Domesticated!!

2008-02-19T00:12:00.000+05:30

The other day I was talking to my students about their placements and I told them that as a batch, they should present themselves as a basket of fresh vegetables like those available in the markets in the morning and not as those mixed ones available in the evening, so that the recruiters don't have to take efforts to pick and choose.

Huh. What's happening to me? I have also started giving examples from vegetables markets. eeeeeeeeesh!!

Castle has a new Caretaker

2008-02-14T04:09:00.000+05:30

Sometimes it is hard to believe. I guess many of us who are in 30s indulge in looking back 10 years and wonder how things have changed in a decade. If 10 years back somebody had told that I would be working at CDAC with "Senior Staff Scientist" as my label, I would have considered it as wishful thinking. I was nowhere near academics at that point of time, leave alone Research. If somebody had told me 10 months back that I would get married to Savs, I would have disposed it off as a fantasy cos at that time Savs was all packed and ready to go to Sheffield for pursuing her Ph. D in NLP. But things turn around and life gives you new gifts, opportunities and challenges. It is just that you need to be ready to pick it up.

Yet another such gift is coming my way now. I have been given the charge of course coordinator of FPGDST. And with that comes new avenues to contribute to the organisation that has changed my outlook to work and life at large. The role as it is currently, is small, but potentials are huge. Like people say, it is just a matter of time. Yet another opportunity to learn new trades and new skills.

I am gearing up to it. Wish me luck.

Amusing Observations.

2008-02-09T02:55:00.000+05:30

I got a mail from the IndLinux Mailing List on SourceForge . It had the following mailing list signature ....

> ------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
> Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008.
> http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/
> _______________________________________________
> IndLinux-group mailing list
> IndLinux-group@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/indlinux-group
>
>

Interesting. Microsoft sponsoring a sourceforge mailing list and that too of a hard core GPL group like IndLinux.

Surprise, surprise. They are also sponsoring the Open Source India Week. What's happening Bill?

CDAC Formerly NCST

2008-02-07T03:14:00.000+05:30

After nearly 5 years of merging with CDAC, about a couple of weeks back we got a new CDAC logo in our reception area. But the old NCST logo still remains. For past 5 years we had been writing CDAC (Formerly NCST) wherever we had to fill in the name of our organization. This photo is a logo form of same. The word 'Formerly' was added using an image editor.

:-)

Raman's Spot

2008-02-03T00:46:00.000+05:30

While going towards Electronics City from Bangalore on the Hosur Road, this spot occurs next to the road. Have you seen it?

With the new elevated highway coming up, I wonder how long is it going to stay this way. The (Raman's) spot is in a spot of bother. Anyways capturing it as an image.

Could this be true?

2008-01-31T00:13:00.000+05:30

Would it be fairly true to say that:

In private companies, it is freshers who are on bench while seniors have to increasingly slog

while in Government organisations, seniors keep the seats warm, while freshers slog.

:-)

The Solacement Treatment

2008-01-29T03:09:00.000+05:30

The other day I was traveling with one of my friends from Delhi and I casually asked her views about how the political situation was for the UPA Government and whether it would get a second term in office.

She felt it was highly unlikely. She said:

Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh though being a very educated and a wise person fails to connect with people at grassroots level. And this might be his undoing.

If a child fall down and gets hurt, there are several things we as parents could do. We could immediately take it to a posh medical facility and get it treated so that it recovers from the injury ASAP. We could apply some first aid and then depending on the severity of wound decide if it needs any further medical attention. But by far the most effective would be to immediately comfort the child by cuddling it and comforting it by kind and loving words as you administer some preliminary first aid. This in fact helps the kid to spring back into action in minimum time.

Our PM has failed in this aspect. Though he might have gone into great detail in solving some fundamental issues, he has not been able to communicate with the people and gather their confidence. Sometimes some ministers get away with not doing anything but just offering solacement in response. Because most of the times we do not seek for solutions, we seek only a patient hearing and a few kind words.

What she feels about our PM are entirely her views and of course we could differ. But there is an important management lesson that I got. In my scheme of things, either problems have solutions or problems are intractable. I would feel that if problems are solvable they need to be objectively approached, or if they are not solvable, silently endured. In my scheme of things there is very little space for complaints and annoyances. And so if somebody comes up with a complaint, i would immediately seek to dismiss it either with a solution or with a cold shrug saying "this is the way things are". Then I would observe some amount of disconnect and disappointment and would be surprised at the way people react to practical and objective answers.

That's the lesson. Many times people aren't looking for answers and solutions. They already know it. They have already seen the black and the white. What they need is some amount of solace. And even if you wanna give some solution to alleviate their problem, please do it after the solacement treatment. Your solution might be heard better.

And yeah Savs, the promise of solacement treatment every time you are hurt is my gift to you as i celebrate today the loads of happiness you have brought to my life in past 7 months.

Right to Remain Silent

2008-01-26T06:06:00.000+05:30

Any man who marries when his mother is alive learns one big thing, the advantages of being silent.

It is in his best interest to be silent cos when the Daughter-in-law and Mother-in-law have a difference of opinion, he better not take any side.

And once a person learns this art, he can use it to wriggle out of a lot of situations be it personal, professional or political.

I ended up being in the situation a couple of days back.

I was asked to participate in the TUNE/TACE16 Meeting at Chennai where Mark Davis and Michael Kaplan from Unicode were supposed to meet the TACE (Tamil All Character Encoding) Task force to discuss the possibility of encoding all Tamil characters in their pure consonant forms in Unicode.

This would of course require altering a lot of Unicode charts and thus break a lot of implementations.

But the Tamil guys had their own valid arguments too.

And me as a representative of CDAC and Government of India could not take any side at all.

I could not take TACE side cos that would lead to lot of inconsistencies in systems and at the same time would have larger repercussions on the national standards. I couldn't side on Unicode cos after all TACE guys were fighting for my own native script and completeness/correctness of its representation.

This is when you get caught between your passionate stand and your informed professional stand. Exactly the situation when the guy gets caught between Mom and Wife.

In these situations, it is not necessary that you say correct things but it is definitely necessary to say amicable things to both the parties.

You have only one choice, nod your head both ways and be silent.

Exercise your right to remain silent, sometimes that's the right way to get out of the situations where your actions would also affect others negatively.

The Question is....

2008-01-25T23:51:00.000+05:30

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Taking cue from it could we state that ,

If you say a lot of things, atleast somethings would make sense,

If you do a lot of things, atleast somethings will work,

and If you write a lot of articles, atleast somethings will get published :-) .

But the question is, do you want to believe in the " infinite monkey theorem " and secondly how much time do you have?

(Meanwhile me doing somethings right, keeping mom and dad happy)

Parking Equality

2008-01-08T00:27:00.000+05:30

A Mercedes CLS 350 next to Bajaj Pulsar DTS-i. One is worth 7 million and other is worth 70,000. Both share the same parking space.

Have you met Subbu?

2008-01-05T04:17:00.000+05:30

Subbu a.k.a N Subramanian is the head of the networks group at CDAC Electronics City.

This is introducing his alter ego as a blogger.

Subbu blogs in Sidaral as one-liners, sometimes bi-lingual (English and Tamil), sometimes poetic and sometimes in narration. Most of them are thought provoking.

Go meet him.

Is happiness contagious?

2008-01-02T03:20:00.000+05:30

I would have heard umpteen times people saying happiness is contagious and that a happy person makes environment happy. But is that really true? Would somebody else's happiness make you happy if you had nothing to do with it? Would you feel happy that your colleague got a promotion but is not bothered to invite you to her/his promotion party while s/he has invited a lot many others.

I have some questions here.

A happy person wouldn't make her/his environment happy by just sitting around happily. The environment and people around her/him become(s) happy only if they share the value/reason of/for her/his happiness. Others need to feel connected with her/his acheivement. If I won a lottery worth a million rupees and am happy about it, the people who would be happy about it along with me are Savs, my parents and her parents. If i need to increase this circle, I would have to share the prize with more people.

A fundamental realization seems to be emerging. Your happiness can be shared only by those people who are either the cause of your happiness or benefit from the result of it. Simple as that. My parents are happy that I am happy. Cos my happiness emphasizes the fruition of their efforts in bringing me up. I derive happiness from the news that one of my students gets into some Fortune 500 company cos I see my success in her/his success. If one of my students were to disclaim my contribution to her/his success, I wonder how much would I feel happy. Honestly, not much.

Similarly if you want to make others share your happiness, you need to develop the habit of giving. The giving could be in terms of knowledge, love and money. Keeping what you earned by your efforts is not going to keep you happy for long cos nobody is gonna be interested in your feat. What's the use of earning a million dollars a month if you dont want to be happy. And long term happiness can be derived only by giving, because our social acceptance depends on how much we give back to society. And nothing gives more happines than an overwhelming social acceptance as a humanitarian. This might be the foundation of Altruism.

So here's the message. No matter what business you are in, get into the habit of giving. You can either give credit or give value. In both ways you are gonna make people happy. Start this new business of making people happier. This does not need any license or permit. And it is a worthwhile job cos it's gonna help you remain happy too. You can choose whatever you want to give from these 3 Ws (Warmth, Wisdom or Wealth).

BTW here are a couple of happy faces wishing you a very Happy New Year!!

Visit by Hon. Minister Shri. M V Rajashekharan

2007-12-16T04:49:00.000+05:30

Yesterday Hon. Union Minister for Planning Shri. M V Rajashekharan visited our campus. Quite an affable and enthusiastic (for somebody at 78) person. He spent quite some time with us. Addressed our staff and students and then personally met each team. He even met the students batch and talked to them for about 5-10 minutes.

A videos clip of his visit to our lab.

Seen in the video are The Minister himself, Nobby Varghese, Laxmi Narayana, Srinivas NK, our R&D head Ms Supriya Pal, our Director Admin Mr. George Arakal and Dr. C Murali Krishna Kumar (Advisor, Planning Commision).

An amusing email!!

2007-11-28T04:30:00.000+05:30

~~Well people say that, when you grow real big, some people start hating you.~~

BharateeyaOO.o group today received this email :-)

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

Hello and Namaskara,

I see that the OpenOffice is being released in Indian languages, which does not contain Kannada version. Is the Kannada version being developed, or in the process? If so what is the deadline for its outcome?

If it is not being developed in Kannada, then it is a shame on your part being in Bangalore, Karnataka. It also shows your audacity being here, utilizing the natural resources of Karnataka and not able to give back anything in return as gratitude.

Please reply.

Regards

Badri

KANNADIGAS need to send 10000 emails to these people.

Every Kannadigas need to send an email !!

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

Well I was quite amused. Here is our reply.

Dear Mr. Badri Shyam,

Kannada OpenOffice.org is already released under the Ministry's
National Language CDs Release Programme. All these tools are available
from http://www.ildc.in/Kannada/tools/6.htm

Please download and use it. You can also order the CDs from the ILDC
website. We appreciate your love for Kannada.

Best Regards
-Raman

Lessons from Linguistics

2007-11-22T06:40:00.000+05:30

Talking to Savs about NLP (she happens to be an NLP researcher) the other day, she was telling me that some of the tougher problems in Machine Translation were related to grammar and sentence formation. This is observed in humans too. Any person who is trying to learn a new language has relatively tougher time with grammar and correct sentence formation than knowing the words. Most of us who are learning a new language first get to know the equivalent words in the foreign/new language. NLP folks call it the dictionary where every word has a equivalent translation in the target language. The size of the dictionary is determined by our domain of usage and so can be limited and easily acquired. But this is never enough to start speaking in a new language. To speak a language properly you need to know the rules of grammar, the gender and tense modifications of the words, the prepositions and connectives.

Have you ever heard any foreigner speak your mother tongue? S/He might be using all the correct words but in all the raw/wrong forms bereft of any of these word modifiers. They would sound anything from funny to outrageous to totally incomprehensible.

This brings me to an interesting observation. It is not important that we use big words when we speak. What's more important is how these words are connected. It could be quite possible that a person uses all fantabulous words but doesn't make an iota of sense because s/he could not connect it properly. Just like some of Hollywood or Bollywood flicks which have great locales and actors but no strong storyline, thus failing to resonate with the viewers. And at other times simple words in well-formed sentences render much more pleasantness and meaning.

I had a take-home insight from this observation which i thought i could put down here. An insight, that to have a smooth life, more than doing the big things, it is more important that you also do the small connecting things well. This is one big realization to happen. Before i married Savs, i used to think that love for your spouse is best expressed by providing a lavish lifestyle, a posh bungalow, a slick car, regular holidays in Switzerland and diamond sets from De Beers . I have a friend who took his newly wed wife to Mauritius for their honeymoon. But he borrowed money from a bank for that and is still paying off his debts.

Lately I have started to realize that it is not these things that sustain a relationship. To nurture a relationship you also need to form the sentences of your life well. This could be done with or without big words. It starts with how do you conduct yourself each day. Shouting at your spouse one day at the top of your voice and taking her/him to a 5-star restaurant next day is not gonna help take the relationship forward. It is only gonna affect the uncertainty each one has about the other. Just like the way 2 big words sound jarring when connected by a wrong preposition. A gentle hug each morning, subtle assistances in household chores each evening, a warm appreciation of the dinner each night and an affectionate "I love you" before you go to bed do much more than gifting a 20 grand diamond set at the end of a year after all the fighting. These are small words but well connected and well meant.

I am picking up the language of love well. By concentrating more on connectives and prepositions than the big words.

Take my advice.

2007-11-19T23:32:00.000+05:30

Look at this picture (it is worth a thousand words) ....

Got the message?

...... No?

OK, Don't marry unless you are ready to do this on early Sunday mornings.

:-)

Dapper campus where i thrive

2007-11-13T23:46:00.000+05:30

Here are 3 photos (with a lot of gimp work) of CDAC Electronics City

Credits : Quick Sketch and Sketchify

Romantic Rails

2007-11-13T23:18:00.000+05:30

My first attempt at nature photography.

All taken thru my Sony Ericsson W700i.

http://picasaweb.google.com/rkvsraman/RomanticRails

Enjoy..

BRB works!!

2007-11-08T09:54:00.000+05:30

It was last Saturday morning and following day we were supposed to go and stay with my in-laws at Indore for a week for the first time after our marriage. Indore by the way is about a 30 hour train and bus travel from Bangalore. Savs had planned the Saturday for shopping cos we needed to get some things for our Diwali. Until my marriage during weekends, days used to be extension of my nights i.e: sleep thru the entire morning and laze around for rest of the day. After marriage however when i continued doing the same, Savs found the habit irritating and felt weekends should be used to get things done for home and expecially so when we have an impending day-long travel next day. There were not too many things to be purchased and i was sure we could get it done in a couple of hours and so i wasn't in a hurry. 9 AM in the morning and Savs gently tried to wake me up. I turned around and pulled up my sheet. 9:30 AM and Savs was again nudging me to get me out of bed. I wasn't yet in a mood to see daylight. At 10 AM Savs blew up. I still couldn't understand the reason for her hurry. Anyways I got up. Went to the drawing room. Savs was there in the hall with all defenses up. I looked at her as if to say "Thank you for spoiling my Saturday morning sleep" and i said in a cold tone "I will be ready in 30 mins. We can go for as much shopping as we want".I took my towel and slammed into the bathroom.

Under the warm shower, I decided to have a relook at the transactions with Savs since morning. I had definitely won the first battle. I had made her feel guilty that she had spoilt my weekend morning sleep and I could use it to sulk around for the rest of the day and make her feel miserable about it.

But then, what purpose would it serve? On one hand it would definitely serve the purpose of sending her a strong signal that I am annoyed at her behaviour and i strongly condemn her infringing in my personal space that i cherish so much. What she did was clearly a violation of our marital terms and conditions .

But by doing so on the other hand, I would slowly start to alienate Savs from me. She might start feeling tentative to tell anything to me and at a point it might just happen that everything that we do in the relationship might just become as a favor to each other. Did I want it? Definitely not. I decided I am gonna make up for immediately. I am gonna go out and apologise for my laziness right away. I finished my bath and came out and there was Savs standing with a cup of tea for me, and with a smile on her face she cutely said, "I am sorry for this weekend. I will try and not disturb your weekend sleep anymore". And i couldn't help feeling embarassed. I was totally defeated. I meekly managed to say "I too am sorry for not understanding your point of view". And here I am in Indore snoring away till 11 AM for past 2 days.

That 10 minutes of my shower break worked wonders. If I had continued with the argument, it might have snow-balled. But the break made us ponder and reflect on what did we want. Both cooled down and perspectives changed. The result was much amicable.

Savs calls it the BRB (Be Right Back) effect. She used to practice it even when we were just friends. Everytime an argument got a bit annoying while chatting on GTalk, I would suddenly get a BRB status message. I used to assume that she was on some other work. By the time she was online again, I would have lost the steam and purpose of my argument. Little did i realise that she was just postponing the argument. And by doing that most of the times I would lose the interest in making my point. And thus conflict would be avoided. Even if we did succeed to bring up the issue again, it would be more to arrive to a solution rather than nit-picking each other.

BRB works most of the times with us. And i am sure it will work with you too. The only point to be careful about is you have to get back to the issue at some point of time. Indefinite BRBs dont work. They leave you with a feeling of being cheated and ignored. Thats not gonna solve the problem.

To put it in a pseudo-code form

{

..... // as you lead a normal life
issue_raised(); // When there is an issue
set_status("BRB"); // Tell a BRB to the other person
think_and_ponder(10 mins);// Think for 10 mins
revisit_issue(); // Talk about the issue now
..... // Live happily ever after
}

Happy Diwali!!