Runaway Alarm Clocks

It seems my long lost "mad scientist" twin brother has been inventing gadgets that I desperately need. He also seems to be getting a lot of Slashdot coverage, somethingh which I can only dream of. What a pity!

With alarm clocks running all over the place they would soon need "toll" booths for them. Heh!

Btw -- is there a patent for this thing?

Crossword-Ware

Last night I was solving day before yesterday's crossword (can't wait for a day to see the solution!) and figured out a 7 letter uber cool "across" word. The next 60 minutes were spent trying to force fit a whole bunch of "down" clues to the 7 letters I had already put in there.

Frustrated, I picked up yesterday's newspaper (I was solving day before yesterday's crossword, remember?) to glance through the solution, only to realize how completely wrong I was with my uber cool word.

It just reminded me how often we do this in software. Get one big module/component of the entire solution working and try to force fit all the other pieces around it. Gleefully ignoring the fact that the central piece, though ostensibly correct, may be the culprit holding up the entire process.

Thus, I coin a new term "Crossword-Ware". You heard it here, first.

Review: Bheja Fry

I was going to write a glowing review about Bheja Fry, but then I read Rashmi's post , and came to know that it's been copied from a French film - "Le Dîner de cons"

Now, I'm a sucker for originality. When people were raving about Chachi 420 (Kamal Hasan's take on Mrs. Doubtfire), I was pissed that it was "inspired" from a Hollywood flick.

And after laughing my ass off for two hours last night, I don't like the fact that Bheja Fry is a "remake."

Anyways, that doesn't take away the fact that everyone's acted amazingly well. Vinay Pathak steals the show, but Rajat Kapoor also rocks. However, Ranveer Shorey was a tad wasted with that forced look on his face. What was the director thinking?

I'm sure no one will be able to pull off such a good comic character in the coming year. If Vinay Pathak doesn't get an award for this role, film awards pe jo thoda vishwaas hai, woh bhi uth jaayega!

"Dauda Dauda Bhaga Bhaga Sa" by Juhi Babbar

Went to see this play yesterday at Prithvi Theater. Hilarious! And the most interesting part was, even when I was laughing to the comic stuff going on in front of me, I was well aware of the fact that had this been in a movie, I would be pulling my hair out in sheer frustration. But the spontaneity and "liveness" (just invented this for the want of a better word) -- was keeping the audience in splits.

And not to forget a freak incident at the beginning of the play. A lively Juhi Babbar comes hopping (literally) on to the stage and greets the people with an irritably lively hello, and all. She repeatedly asks the audience to switch off their mobile phones and leaves. Suddenly a phone whimpers a stupid ring tone from somewhere. Juhi comes stomping back shouting

Juhi: Who was that?
The lights are switched back on rudely. She points out a lady who's trying to switch off her cellphone.
Lady: I'm putting it on vibration.
Juhi: No ma'am. Please switch it off.
Lady (visibly irritated): I'm putting it on vibration!
Juhi: Can you guarantee that when it vibrates inside your bag and makes a buzzing sound it won't disturb others in my audience?
Lady (shouting now): What do you mean? You want me to write it on a stamp paper or something?
Her friends start getting up with murmurs of "how rude" and "what the fuck" and related stuff.
Juhi: Yes. If you can do that.
Lady: This is shit! (etc.etc.)
Juhi: Please leave the hall RIGHT NOW!
Lady (now leaving the hall): I don't want to watch your play. I want my money back.
Juhi (shouting out to the staff): Ramu Kaka (that's not what she said -- but what the heck!) Inke paise abhi waapas kar do!

And the lady with her two friends leave the hall only to appear on the stage! One of the best April Fool jokes I've seen in the recent past! And what a way to liven up the audience and start a laugh riot of a play!

And talking of April Fool pranks, GMail Paper from the gods! The "it's not even funny" part is that Google is a company which can actually pull off something like that! Rock on!

Trip Treasures

Can anyone guess what this is?

Found it on my recent trip to Kolaba Fort...

Kihim, Nagaon, and Alibaug Weekend Getaway

Last weekend (March 24 & 25) I scooted off to Kihim beach for a quiet getaway. It was good. Nothing compared to Goa beaches, but good, nevertheless. Heh, you can't expect to get anything better once you've seen the best :P

Uploaded some pics on FlickR (go forward in the photostream from this link).

Thanks to Dubey, I've learnt to click silhouettes on automatic digital cameras as well! You'll see LOTS of them in my current pics :P

Saw Kihim beach, Kolaba fort, and Nagaon beach. Kihim beach was a bit boring -- no frikkin' beer shops anywhere in sight. What's a beach without beer, I say! Nagaon was HUGE! And the winds were pretty knotty. Check out the video on YouTube. The ground is not inclined. It's the fucking wind causing the beer can to roll like that!

The best parts were
a) the ferry ride (a first for me),
b) the dare-devil loading and unloading of bikes from the ferry,
c) the lovely sunset at Kihim beach,
d) walking through the marshes in low tide to reach the Kolaba fort,
e) the vast expanse of Nagaon beach.

Select pics...

I Run Maidaan...

After years of wait... after so much of hype... it turned out that a local college circuit band was better than the Beast! A classic case of ghar ki murgi daal baraabar!

Seriously, I thought Parikrama, who opened to Iron Maiden, were better than the Beasts themselves.

Maiden was opened by three bands:
1. F.T.N -- winner of some all India college band competition
2. Parikrama
3. Cauren Harris -- who?

F.T.N. were acting like a bunch of wannabes on stage. And I never quite liked the growling kind of music anyways.

Parikrama rocked with an all original line up. And the lead singer made a snide remark on the critics calling them a "cover band" at the end of their show. They're coming next week to Bangalore again. In an IIPM (yes, the same Arindam "Dare to think beyond the IIMs" Chaudhari's IIPM) college fest. Wonder who'll go to listen to them again!

Cauren Harris was a blood sucker. Straw laga kar ek litre khoon choos gayi sabka. She was like, Britney Spears Learns To Rock! The crowd was continuously booing her off stage with chants of "Fuck Off", "Fuck Off Bitch", "Cauren, Cauren, Who the Fuck is Cauren?" But she continued her torture for a full 45 mins!

After half an hour of that... Maiden came on stage to a cheering and ecstasic crowd. With blinking red lights on stage, and a sea of blue mobile phone hues in the audience. All jumping, craning, and stomping on the hapless fellow in front of them to capture THE moment.

Three new songs from "A Matter of Life And Death" which I did not know at all. Add to that a FUCKED up sound system. Seriously. I'm not joking. And I was not the only one who felt that. I had recently been to the Roger Waters show in Mumbai. And I was literally surrounded in a sea of sound. The sound quality at the yesterday's Maiden show was like a good quality college fest. What a let down.

I don't know. Probably I'm getting old. Probably my music taste is changing. Saala paaglon waala enthu nahin bacha in sab cheezon ke liye... But fuck I came down from Mumbai for just this gig. It was okay.

Free Speech.

Rashmi Bansal says in her post titled "The Orkut Party Ends"

[...]you have to be responsible for what you say online[...]

Completely agree.

But you don't need to be forced to apologize for hating India.
...or loving Pakistan.
...saying you don't like the political views of Gandhi.
...speak out against the reservation politics.
...lashing out against the latest Deepa Mehta flick (no one ever went to jail for that!)
...joining the "I Hate Himesh "Nasal Drops" Reshammiya" on Orkut.
...or being prosecuted under the law for "hurting national sentiments" if you think that playing the national anthem in movie theaters is a stupid idea.

The only good that can come of this law is that, people who fake identities -- putting up a fake profile of a girl, putting up a fake profile of a teacher, etc. -- will get caught faster.

But what's stopping the next political leader from jailing the moderator of the "I hate XYZ Political Party" tomorrow?

Nothing. Exactly.

That's why this is bad. Very bad.

Why Microsoft is Bad for Computer Education.

I used to be a fanatic anti-Microsoft (or anti-M$ to some) spokesperson. There was a time in college when I used to hate everything Microsoft. Soon after I tasted Linux for the first time during (yes during) my 12th standard boards -- and managed to get X working on my SiS VGA card -- I uninstalled Windows from my machine. And have taken pride in the fact that since then Windows ke liye mere computer ke darwaaze hamesha hamesha ki liye band ho gaye hain!

But later, during my job, I realised that there are places that still require Windows. Some places where Windows actually does a better job that Linux (operatibility with LCD projectors, one; presentation software, two). Therefore I found myself shifting to Microsoft Powerpoint on a Windows machine for making a client presentation whenever I needed to.

However, I still held the strong opinion that Windows users are on average "dumber" than Linux users. And I don't mean dumber in the IQ kind of sense. I mean "dumber" because they don't know what's happening under the hood. It's just like you and I, or the average person off the street, would be dumber about cars than an average car mechanic.

And my opinion was reinforced last week. Microsoft is bad for computer education.

I had recently gone to a college to recruit freshers for the tech team at Cleartrip. (It wasn't any of the IITs or RECs.) We were interviewing final year BE students (IT/CS/EE streams). A few were with a work ex. of one year or so.

I was stunned, and I mean absolutely STUNNED, when people who claimed to have worked on their college website did not know what a URL meant when I asked them for it! When people who had claimed to work on e-shopping carts could not tell me exactly how sessions were maintained.

And these are not your typical B.Com. + GNIIT kind of students. These are people who would, in a matter of months, be passing out with a computer engineering degree. They would become part of the so called "talent pool" of India.

Out of the 15 people I interviewed (there were about 45 divided amongst three interview panels), not a single person was able to write a program that generated the Fibonacci series!

No one was able to tell me what IDE they use to write C/C++ programs. After a series of indirect questiononing (what are the steps you do before you start writing your program, etc) only some were able to tell me that they used something called "tc" (Turbo C). No one had heard of "bc" (Borland C). I didn't bother asking about BloodShed.

Apparently, their college lab had only Windows installed. For four years they had been fed on a staple diet of .Net, ASP, C#, VB, VB.net, and what M$ technology have you. Where you simply right clicked on an HTML form control and set its property to hidden instead of learning that was happening under the hood. Where you didn't care what cookies or URL rewriting was – the session object just worked.

No one had seen a Linux command prompt ever, despite of having done a theoretical course on Unix.

Average Joe users can get by without knowing the innards of a computer.

Computer engineers can't.

Had the students been exposed to the Linux command prompt, they would've been introduced to an IDE, after they would've gone through the pain of writing a C program in a powerful text editor (like emacs), and then compiling and linking it by hand.

Had they been writing CGI scripts in Perl or web programming in PHP, they would've known how HTML forms work; the difference between GETs and PUTs. Some of them might've been exposed to more than one broweser, and the bad world of browser inconsistencies out there, and how to get around them (and over a period of time, most websites would work!)

Microsoft has kicked in a vicious circle of dumbing down the users. I'm sure the students were so clueless partly because their teachers were. And guess what OS the teachers had used in their college days?

I'm not saying that Linux is absolutely bare bones and you get no level of abstraction on it. It has multiple desktop systems. It has good IDEs. It has pretty mature WYSIWYG office suites. It has the best browser :)

You can raise dumb users on Linux. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.

Linux induces a sense of play. A sense of adventure. It encourages you to look under the hood. Millions of lines of open source code are an invitation to the inquisitive minds of college students to come, play!

And I'm not saying that you can't raise smart computer engineers Windows. But it would be goddamn hard to do it.

The evidence proves it.

(PS: We're still looking for freshers, or people with under one year experience to join our tech team. Drop me your resume nanda at cleartrip dot com in case you're interested, or know someone who is. )

Best "down for maintenance" message!

Made me chuckle so loud that everyone in the room turned to see...



See if it's still there.