About motivation and my next career move...

During the new year day of 2005, I made a resolution to start a website for myself. I was very serious about it for the initial few months and believe me, I even wrote up quite a few articles in preparation for it, but a few months later all of that got buried under lots of other things, both at the personal and work front. This is the usual way of life - priorities keep changing unless you are very careful and do follow ups every other day. Unless some motivation factor exists, it is most difficult to keep the priorities unchanged over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I found none and the whole thing was forgotten for long time, till about half an year back. During this period, there happened a few changes at the work front for me. My project lead made a decision to move out of the team, and a few of us who were working with him for the past couple of years were jolted by this news. Although, he tried his best to ensure everything went on smoothly during the hand-over, there was an un-known, un-spoken, un-fathomable feeling of loss over this among all of us, his team mates. It is not an overstatement to say that he was the driving force for all of us. All through my career, I've never worked with a guy so pro-active, knowledgable, understanding and compassionate.

Focus swiftly started moving away from the work we did in the group. I 'enjoyed' for almost 2-3 months at work, with nothing more than 'browsing' the net; at best, I spent time on learning some useful technologies. All of a sudden, I felt that 'worklessness' is threatening my career, like it never did before. Not long afterwards, I started to feel awful, as much as a 'cheat' not to do any work, but get my paycheque credited to my bank account duly at the end of every month. I talked to my manager about this, who couldn't do much other than ask me to 'go, look out for more work'. In fact, the problem was none of us knew where all the work we did over the couple of years came from. While a good amount of work we did carried obvious value, a large percentage of that didn't really benefit the group. However, since it benefited all of us in terms of learning, we carried along under the direction from our project leader. But, now things started to look different. I decided to quit what I was doing; and this needed some action from my side.

I revived my 2 year old idea of creating a website for myself. Websites are good portfolio setters for individuals. People appreciate you for what they read and see there. I believe that the effort and the money spent on it, is really worth that. My wife too joined me in this effort, who wanted some web-space for herself to host her teaching materials - she is a physics teacher at an international school in Bangalore. We decided to share the space and then, on came another use for it. My 4 year old kid too wanted some space for his nursery rhymes, photos...So, finally we came with http://www.my3dots.com after 2 months of effort. I had put up many of my own creations including some whitepapers, articles, downloads and even a 20 page biography for the entire public to see. No sooner than it was ready, I sported my site's address in my resume and circulated along in the Bangalore's vast job market. Exactly 2 weeks is what I took to land up in a great job. I talked to two guys from outside India during my interviews, one from the UK and one from the US. Both of them had been through the website prior to the interviews and infact, we even spent sometime talking about it during our discussions. It was evident that both appreciated my efforts in setting it up, even more than the actual contents I had made available through it. Presently, I've decided to move on from my present job to take up the new assignment on the month of February, 2007.

So, this is essentially what I've to say. Motivation is a must-have ingredient to enable you work on anything. Nobody else can supply that to you, or inject you with that. No amount of listening to stories of motivation or reading similar books will help in achieving that. It is something invaluable and all your efforts to gain even a tiny of amount of that will pay off finally. I was lucky enough to have a situation that could motivate me into doing something that is as - seemingly, but not really - trivial as creating a website. Not all people, may've this luck; but, in such cases, look around and you will definitely find some means to it. One of the good ways to achieve this is to talk to your own friends, colleagues or even neighbours. Most people will be able to derive motivation from peer pressure or pressure from the society we live in. Yes, it is the case of an artificially generated 'motivation', but it still will end you up somewhere good!

World is small indeed...

I work for a software services company in Bangalore, India. We undertake contract with many major product companies in the United States to manage their software product release cycles either completely or partially. During this process, we work very closely with the team in the US by way of regular emails, text and voice chat sessions, phone conferences etc. Every week, on an average, every single member of the team here interacts with our counterparts in the US, 3-4 hours only through phone or chat sessions. Emails communications happen in plenty and much more frequently. There are also occasional visits from either side to the other, for reasons like knowledge transfer and such things. All this has led us to understand each other better. Together we work on building the expertise on technology. While doing this, we rarely constrain ourselves thinking that benefits of technology should/will reach only the companies that we work for, or be localized to any specific part of the world. As a matter of fact, all of us are parties to this and all of us equally benefit from the technology we develop as a team, and ultimately will bring us even more closer and bridge the gaps that was perceived to be there, between us and them for long years.

I started to think about this more, and then I began to appreciate how much the world has become a much smaller place to live in than it was when I was a kid. During those times, I never had imagined that I will work for a software firm in the United States, and I will ever interact with a team over there and that we will ever meet somebody over there, who will prove to have such a significant impact on our lives. We were completely blind during those times, with my parents having heard about America only in the local radio news, seen it only in the pictures (there were absolutely no videos in those times) that appear occasionally in the newspapers, when some once-in-a-bluemoon international event happened, absolutely not seen an American guy in ‘flesh and blood’ in their whole lives. Imagine, having lived up all our childhood in high reverence of the people of America who gave our unlit houses, the much needed electricity (and lot more), it indeed is a great feeling now to reach this stage. Now, not only we work together closely and know each other a lot, we also get sincere appreciations from those people for what we do for them. I feel great! World has indeed become small, and with growing times, I hope it will continue to get smaller, before it becomes one big (or small?) village…

Sometimes, I even day-dream of such a global village, where all of us including the Indians, the Americans, the Russians, the British etc live in unity, helping each other with only love pervading our lives. Over the next few decades, or maybe centuries later, I believe, this will become possible. Even if that doesn’t happen, at least, all of us will be closer, much closer than today. The only thing that saddens me is I may not be around, to see it all happen…

Discuss outsourcing: just an ego clash?

Read this very interesting discussion on outsourcing/offshoring. Specifically, this targets outsourcing to India. Initially, I thought it just is an ego clash between two nationalities, but reading on, I found there are some people on both sides who preferred to think through the realities rather than just bark. Whatever it may be, the discussion was so interesting that I completely read it...

I'm speaking at the Step-Auto '07

I am invited by the SteP-In forum to present a paper on dynamic project scheduling and management, at the STEP - Auto'07 to be held on 17th Jan, '07 at Hyderabad. STeP-In forum is a non-profit organization based in Bangalore, India and organizes many international conferences on software testing including test automation, test project management etc, all around the year. During this year's Bangalore summit, Michael Bolton will speak on 'Rapid software testing'. Please visit the forum's website for more details.

This is my second time at the summit, presenting a paper. The first time, I presented a paper on automated generation of test cases, at the STeP-In Summit '05 held at Bangalore. Details of my paper are available at my website here.

For those who are interested in knowing what my this year's paper is about, here is an abstract...

Project scheduling and tracking is no doubt one of the most complex processes of SDLC. Though, this is typically performed by the project manager, the direct impact of this is often on all team members. Project managers need to collect essential information to assess the health of the project all the while, which typically all lies with the team members. However, most times the team member doesn't have all the necessary data himself, but is spread out in the team. Hence, the project manager is often forced to interrogate and extract information from the team members. If not practiced with care, it can be a painful experience for both sides. Most of us would have gone through such, often 'bitter', experiences at work. Trying to work out a solution for this, I realized that, most of such problems arise from the inaccuracy or even inability of the team members to prioritize tasks, plan/schedule them and predict measurable impacts of those prioritizations on yet other tasks. Team members need to be more capable of predicting their own performance and plan themselves accordingly. In essence, empowering of the team members rather than centralizing the control with the project manager is the philosophy that is fundamental to my solution.

DSM (the tool) has its goal at helping team members, who report to any level of management, to self-manage their activities in a typical project environment. This said, the activities don’t need to be project related activities alone, but any including those unplanned, task overheads, vacation plans etc. Original intent of the tool was to track moving targets, which is nothing but calculating the remaining days of each of the activities based on the input status (% completion) and helping the user to derive the start and end dates for the remaining period for each of them. In addition to this, the tool supports dynamic scheduling and maintenance of these activities. To do this, it utilizes the very simple concept of 'current task'. Thus, at any point in time, only one of the tasks can be current, which also implies that the start date for the current task will always be today. All subsequent activities are processed in a sequential manner. However, the user has the option to make any other among the activities as current and process accordingly. Another possibility with the tool is creation of burn-down charts, which makes it in line with the agile way of tracking schedules. The tool also has certain ways to manage expectations on deliveries to customer, primarily by way of generating a weekly delivery report.

Apart from the above features, the tool also has a few features that facilitate typical project management. It provides metrics like comparisons of the planned and actual, in terms of estimates, status updates, remaining days and end dates of various tasks. This is facilitated through a feature that allows 'snap-shot'ing essential details of all tasks at any point in time. There is also the facility to split up overhead among planned/non-planned tasks and to generate neat useful charts out of it.

Thus, his life ended...

Today morning, I came to the office as usual at 8.30 am. I suspected nothing. 2 hours later, I was subjected to a shock, one of the most terrible ones of my life. One of my colleagues gave me this news - that a terrible, most unexpected thing happened just today morning. It was to do with one of my other colleagues, one of my closest, who I worked with for the past 2 years - Suresh Alapati. He passed away today morning due to a cardiac arrest in a local hospital. I am trying hard to cope up with this news; it is really unbelievable that I can never ever see him again in my life on this earth.

I liked him, I hated him over the past two years, for several things. We went together to the US during the last year, on official purposes and stayed together in the same apartment. This was the time, I interacted ever so closely with him. He basically is a very sensible guy, but only with certain eccentric habits to his nature. He was a chain smoker and a drop-dead alcoholic till he recently got married. Then, all of sudden, about a few months before he got married, he stopped all that. While he was in the US, he didn't touch a drop of alcohol. What, he didn't even bite a piece of non-vegeterian food. He was so determined that if he wants something done, he definitely had it done. This is the best thing I liked in him.

He was one of those rarest guys who was so down to the earth and interact freely with almost anybody. He didn't have any pride or prejudice about anything. He didn't bother about his 'status' as a software engineer, but just went about joking casually with just about everybody at our company, including the office boys, cleaning people, security guards. He was a favorite of all these people and their faces will get lit up when they see him, for he always treated them with dignity and as equals to himself. He always used to address such people as buddies in their slang language, like nobody else I ever noticed to do.

Shouldn't this guy have lived more in this world. Perhaps, fate didn't want him to. There is a saying in our part of the world that GOD calls back those people who he feels closer to his heart than others, faster. At least for the time being, we can all believe it is true and console ourselves...

May his soul rest in peace...

Half century and a little piece of advice!

Woo-hoo! I managed to hit a half century finally. I never thought I would make it - 50 posts to this blog. It was fun, though. I enjoyed it, except for those rare occasions when it occurs to me I've perhaps the most pathetic readership among all the pages, anywhere on the net. But then, I continued. Here is why...

More than 2 months back I listened to this great piece of audio recorded by Robin Sharma, one of the world's leading gurus on leadership and personal success (I don't remember where I listened to this one, and couldn't find it anywhere in the net). This is what it essentially says - "Who cares to play when nobody is watching you?".

This is his version of the story. Apparently, when he was coming out of one of the hotels he stayed in, to get into a cab, he saw this advertisement by a shoe company. He watched this one for sometime and began developing a whole new idea on this. This line is no doubt quite catchy, and it might've meant (I am not too sure) that nobody, except a block-head, plays when there is nobody to watch. This is indeed what most of us do. Most of us don't feel like doing some thing, unless we get recognized for what we did. Some people call it motivation. I will tell you what happens to me. I am so proud of what I do, that I give my 100% the first time, then wait and watch on the response of the people. Only if things are favorable to me, I will continue the same way; else, I will reduce my 'motivation' level (sometimes, even forcefully) to a lesser value. I bet, this is what most people do. I also, most times, believe that nobody else could've done it to the same perfection, so fast as me...Now, when I see that somebody does it better than me, I get overwhelmed with sorrow, anger (to myself) and a bit of jealousy!

Ok, you might be thinking, what is all this got to do with this blog? Here is what. I just confessed about one of the major 'illnesses' I suffer from. I am aware of this, but often unable to control my emotions during such occasions. Few months back, I really started wondering what direction am I taking in life? Not long afterwards, I listened to this piece of audio, and immediately recognized it to be very similar to what the GITA - one of the greatest Hindu philosophical texts - preached. For those of you who may not know, it says

Karmanyeva Adhikaaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadaachana,
Ma Karmaphala Heturbhurma Te Sangostva Karamani"

Here is the English translation of these Sanskrit verses...

"Seek to perform your duty. But LAY NOT CLAIM to its fruits. Be you NOT the producer of the FRUITS of KARMA; Neither shall you LEAN towards INACTION."

Once upon a time, I used to be extremely proud of our ancient history and philosophical thoughts that preached to the world such great wisdom. But, now I realized that I never practiced what it preached, but just got carried along. Arguably, it is impossible to practice all that the GITA talks about, but I decided to take this particular advice seriously. I adopted this advice and decided to 'live' it through my blog. If the whole thing sounds funny to you, believe me, it doesn't to me, a bit...Of course, I like to write and my style of writing would've exaggerated it a bit, but I mean most of what I told here...

Essentially, this is what. I know that nobody is reading what I post here. I know nobody ever will, except for those those who incidentally happen to be in these pages, by way of Google search. But, I don't care. I will continue my posts, and I will spend the same amount of energy and dedication, as if the whole world is up and keenly watching my every move on this blog...

Anticipatory bail plea...

I know, I know, I haven't posted anything in the blog during the past few days. Of course, I wanted to, but didn't get the time. I have been more or less regularly posting for the past 3-4 months, and now I feel I don't have a little time to spare? It is actually a bit hard for me to believe too. One of the main reasons is that at the company I work for, we've a project runnning and almost at the verge of completion. Though, it was on for the past few months, I've never been involved in it beyond 2-3 hours/day. If you are working for a software company, you will definitely be thinking, "Wow, this company is great". If you have resumes ready, you may send it across to me at ananddotiyer@gmail.com. I will dutifully forward to the HR. One caution, however. I don't have control over which team you will end up working for here. There are teams in my own company who work like all hells broke loose, pretty much all through the year. Why, even some smaller teams within ours, are not very different. So, where you will end up, depends a lot on your luck.

Software guys are notorious to be 'busy' all the time. Though, most of that is a myth, there is some element of truth in this. This led to me write an article on this and post it in the same blog, here. It has never happened to me before that I didn't get even 'time to breathe', as most people say about software people (and many times some of us so 'proudly' state about themselves). In fact, it has been the contrary most of the time* But, yes, some rare occassions had been that I was so tied up for a long time (sometimes, for several months together), I almost hated that I work in IT. Now, I start smelling one of those rare occassions round the corner, but probably not as devastating as some of the previous ones. I hope so!

So, for the next few weeks or perhaps even a few months, you will see lesser of me here. But, I will try to make it regular, at least once a week. So, don't go away, please...


* Sometime in the future, I will share with you an interesting incident about what happened to me, when I 'complained' to my manager about this recently...

The 2 Great Revolutions of IT - Part II

After listening to the Google Story by David.A.Vise and Mark Malseed from audible.com, I was convinced that nobody could've ever imagined the power of internet, as much as Larry and Sergei, the young founders of the company. Starting with a small idea of helping the university campus with a way to wade through hundreds of research papers and the like, Google grew powerful enough to search billions of web pages within no time and it was no small achievement. Not only is the search done for keywords, but an intelligent search is employed that fundamentally** looks for references to the resultant page from other web pages. The search is primarily made possible by the very large hardware resources at the Google labs. But, Google didn't stop at this. It continued to create excellent solutions for many diverse problems. The very high calibre of work done at the Google, caused a brain-drain from the likes of Microsoft. So, the very people who created the revolution at Microsoft, begain to contribute to the revolution led by Google.

What exactly is this revolution? To understand this, we will take a peek at the products and technologies developed at the Google. The right mix of innovation and strategy is the reason for the enormous growth of Google. It actively encourages its employees to spend 20% of their work time on their pet projects. These 'pet projects' of its employees are evaluated and once found suitable, the launch is made onto the Google lab pages. This is based on my assumption about the way Google works, but I am sure it won't be too different from the reality. The reason for my assumption is that there are too many products, so diverse in nature at the Google labs. I haven't seen any other company as powerful and popular as Google, adopting the same strategy for product development. Google is very innovative in its approach, not only in its solutions for problems, but in the identification of the problems as well (perhaps to a higher degree). They work with an end in mind, but they do a thorough job of that. This, I believe, is the single-most reason why Google is where it is today. It recognizes the importance of people to build up the reputation, the business of it as many other companies claim to do on their own, but fail to live fully up to it. Google's strategy is unique and three-pronged as I see it. Firstly, it promotes innovativeness within the company and keeps up with top-notch technology. This continues to attract the brightest minds of the industry into the Google. This strategy has a ripple effect and the growth is spiral. Secondly, this strategy, which gives freedom to experiment and innovate to the 'Googlians', causes its own business to flourish and profits (which come primarily through advertising) to grow leaps and bounds. Thirdly, and most importantly, Google encourages 'public' participation by way of open-source technologies. For those who may not know, Firefox (see my post on this open-source browser a few months back) is liberally supported by Google. It is possible that Google had a hidden agenda to beat Microsoft with this strategy. But, it shouldn't matter to the world, as long as things are for good, which is really what I see now! I believe, all this are positive indicators of a revolution under way, which I call the 'Internet revolution - the Google way'...

**The real algorithm used by the google search engine is quite complex and discussions about this can be found in sources elsewhere in the net; and don't make a mistake - search using google!

The 2 Great Revolutions of IT - Part I

Here in this post, I will talk about my most simplistic interpretation and analysis how IT industry went through revolution about 20 years back, and how it is going through another one now! While the first of these revolutions was a sea change and re-scripted the paradigms for most of us, the second one, that we are witnessing now, is much more, because the world is literally exploding with information. After this explosion, world will be a very small place to live in.

The first of these revolutions was led was Microsoft. For long, Microsoft had remained the singleton and ultimate authority of the IT industry. The company changed the way the world works, when it introduced the PC. Year after year, it invented newer technologies, all of which touched our lives in ways beyond what most of us imagined. Microsoft started it all with the most simplistic DOS operating system for computers. The next contribution from the company was its enormously popular Windows system, several versions of which power many millions of computers worldwide today. Even if I argue that Windows is single-handedly responsible for the revolution, it won't be too much of an exaggeration. There are so many other aspects to the revolution, which are all not being discussed here.

So, all this and more contributed to Microsoft retained as the unquestionable for almost a decade - most part of the 80s and the first few years of the 90s. But, the 90's brought along with it, the internet revolution. The internet was looked upon as just a medium of communication in the beginning. It was not entirely untrue, because the internet was born because of the need to reduce the many hassles of communication. That it was the starter for the second IT revolution was not understood by many, including Microsoft. But, some did. Without going to too much of the inside stories, let me straight come to the point. However, some of these are quite important pieces of the great jigsaw, that created (it still does) the second IT revolution, that can't be skipped. The most important among these were the open source community. When the leaders and and those amazing visionary advocates of this community initially started off with the idea, nobody could've ever imagined that it actually are baby-steps to a revolution. While the actual revolution is brought about by the likes of Google and so on, the ever-expanding community of open source is the framework, the very thread of it. There are several, who contributed to the growth of internet and millions reaped benefits from it. The most striking example of the contributions by the open source community is Linux, the free operating system born off the spark ignited by a young researcher during the mid 90's and supported by hundreds of those like-minded developers. Microsoft was literally shaken by this development, but of course a giant like Microsoft was too much for Linux to conquer by itself. It didn't have to wait for long, before another spark was born at the Stanford University out of the minds of two youngsters doing their PhD's.

I will cover the rest of this article in my next post...

Some ideas to solve the online train ticket reservation issues...

Here are some ideas to get over the issue we discussed during the last post, about all train tickets getting booked during the first few minutes after its opening....

- Disallow i-Ticketing. e-Ticketing may be allowed.

- Booking through internet opens only a few days after it opens at the counter and closes sooner than at the counter. As a further refinement to this, booking at the internet opens at least 2 hours after the counters open, and closes at least 2 hours before the counters close, everyday.

- Establish a quota of tickets that may be issued for a particular journey through internet. No more than this quota will ever be available through internet, unless cancellations (of those tickets, that are booked online) happen in between. This may be further broken-down to limit the number of bookings/day through internet – on the basis of time (per hour/day), or place (from each zone, district etc) or from an IP.

- Fees (say, Rs.100/-) for registering account with IRCTC. Fees payable only through banks (as done during the final stage of booking)

- Similar to the 4 bookings per month restriction, there should be a restriction on the payment too, and that put in place with the help of the banks. Bank shouldn’t accept more than a fixed number of debits/month from a certain account towards booking charges and registration fees.

- To restrict un-manned computers from automating the booking process, insist on manual entries like ‘Enter the following characters as you see on screen’.

- Insist on details like DL, passport, ration card, electoral identification, PAN card or similar, while the online booking is processed. Optionally, have a process to validate these or at least have simple validations like number of digits and characters in passport number etc. Don’t allow multiple accounts with same details.

- Insist that the same documents (quoted during the time of booking) be produced while boarding the train or during cancellation of the booking. Disallow any such black-marked accounts (or even the individuals concerned) from booking tickets online again.

- Have a middle man/agency to process the data and perform verification of data provided during account creation and booking, apart from the automatic verification under each of the above bullet items.

- Automatic logout from session after 10 minutes.

There could be many more, but if all or some of the above are implemented rightly, I'm pretty sure, the rest of the solution will find its own way...

PPP (Private-public partnership) - Some ideas

Recently, I needed to book my train tickets to go from Bangalore to Trivandrum, my native place, by the daily Kanyakumari Express (Island Express) of the Southern-Indian Railways. The date of travel was 22nd of December, and since I didn't want to get caught in the RAC/waitlist categories, I approached the counter as soon as the ticket issue opened for the journey - exactly 60 days earlier to my date of travel. But, to my surprise, I found that, by the time I could reach the counter (which was around 1.00 in the afternoon), all tickets was sold out and I was waitlisted at 170. I couldn't believe this, since such a thing never happened to me earlier.

When I tried to book return tickets for my wife for the 30th December, again on the opening day, I found myself in a similar situation. I couldn't help wondering how this could happen. The last time I booked tickets on this train was during the same time last year and I had no such problem, even when I booked the tickets a good 10 days after the issue opened. What could've gone wrong between the last year and this year? The answer was 'Railway Online Reservation System'. Indian railways started giving away tickets through the internet sometime during the last year. I'm not exactly sure on the timeframe, maybe this system started before that, but it became popular only during the last year or so. So, during vacation times (which are aplenty in India), all tickets get booked just minutes after the ticket issue opens. Given the technological capabilities of the current internet scenario and the related technologies like online payments and such, I knew after all this was not really impossible to happen. Just for the sake of calculations, let us say there are 1500 (22 compartments * 70 seats) tickets available for a day's journey , and even if two tickets were issued to each district (there are more 600 of them) in India, you will be left with just 300 tickets. Carrying the same argument forward, the whole thing will be shot down by 2.5 tickets per district! The biggest culprits here is however, the travel agents, who can book tickets in bulk. Unfortunately, the reservation system makes it very easy for misusing it too, because there is no restriction in the number of accounts a single individual can create. Each account allows to book a maximum of 4 tickets. Simple calculation will tell you, that for 1500 tickets to go in a flash, you just need 375 acccounts, which may belong to just a handful of people...For all you know, all these 375 accounts could even belong to just one single guy! Things are so simple with the system...to misuse it!

But, the fact that the number of people exposed to the internet or even computers in India is way too less (maybe around 5% of the total population - this is a wild guess), makes the likelihood of somebody living in such circumstances (especially the villages) reserving a ticket online, miniscule. I don't think it is really exaggerating to say that the average Indian still is left behind of the technological advances that happen around him, unable to benefit anything reasonable out of such efforts by the government. Given such a scenario, what is the average Indian supposed to do? Is he supposed to be denied a ticket on the, till recently, very accessible mode of travel for an average Indian - the Indian railways - because of a "better standard of living"?

Don't mistake me for a social worker, who works for the up-lifting of the Indian public, or even voice their concerns, but I am just one of those many people who gets irritated by the carefree and negligent attitude of the concerned authorities over such happenings. Infact, one gets more irritated (even to the extent of 'blood boiling', so to say) when you learn that the authorities themselves promote such wrong doings, in many cases. So, it is upon us to figure out a way to fight these. Let us think about the possibilities, in this particular case, to distribute the benefits of technology to the general public and avoid miscreants getting away with all the benefits...am just asking you to wait till my next post...

Best practices!

There are often fun situations at work. Here, I will write about one (don’t expect to laugh loudly here, the situation is very subtle here) such that happened just two days back. I received a mail from one of the top guys in my organization two days back, who also takes care of the CMMI implementation at our company, enquiring with me about one of the software applications I developed to help smoothen the workflow in my team. I created this tool couple years back, but I digged up a bit and sent an immediate response to him. He too replied back immediately thanking me for my fast response, and assuring me that he will get in touch with me about this, soon. Additionally, he asked me something, which sounded quite funny to me…

He asked me, “Do you know of any best practices in your team in the last 6 months or so?”. My initial thoughts were guided by this article from James Bach. I believe, James’s thinking is right, but his thoughts are very radical. He totally defies the existence of any such thing as a ‘best practice’ in the software industry. I am not that rigid, but couldn’t nevertheless understand the definition of this term fully. The usage of this term is grossly relative and people often associate a sense of stylishness or being ‘state of the art’ with the software industry jargon. I don’t associate any more importance to this.

So, with all these thoughts in mind, I couldn’t help wondering what the sender of the mail meant by this term. To me, everything we do in the team seems good enough and can be called up to the mark of quality (again, quality is a relative term – but we won’t enter into another set of discussions on this now). So, can I term all of what we do in our team as a best practice? Essentially, my question is what is my benchmark for a best practice? Who defines it? As far there are no point answers to these questions, nobody can deny anything we do at work as being claimed as a best practice. Do you agree?

Long live software companies!

I work as a test architect for one of the leaders in CAD industry - on contract from a Bangalore services company. Today morning, I received a mail from one of our colleagues in the US mentioning a hotfix release for our software product. I clicked on the link in the mail to get to the hotfix. This is what the webpage said....(I've replaced the company name with XXX, for sake for privacy)

XXX DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY DOWNLOAD OR IMPLEMENT ANY SERVICE PACK OR WORKAROUND, OR ANY OF THE TIPS, TRICKS, EXAMPLES OR SUGGESTIONS OUTLINED IN ANY XXX PRODUCT SUPPORT TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS. TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS, SERVICE PACKS AND WORKAROUNDS ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU. XXX PROVIDES TECHNICAL DOCUMENTS, SERVICE PACKS AND WORKAROUNDS "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. IN NO EVENT SHALL XXX OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, LOSS OF DATA, OR LOSS OF BUSINESS PROFITS OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, THAT MAY OCCUR AS A RESULT OF IMPLEMENTING ANY SERVICE PACK OR WORKAROUND, OR ANY SUGGESTION OUTLINED IN ANY XXX PRODUCT SUPPORT TECHNICAL DOCUMENT, EVEN IF XXX OR ITS SUPPLIERS HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

The text in this paragraph, if you read it entirely and understood correctly, effectively states that the company will not be responsible for their own product in any way. All of you, users of our product, are basically fools, and we can't be liable for your foolishness. If you spent hundreds of dollars to buy our product, thinking that you will be able to get some benefit out of it, what else are you, but a fool? This is way we live, and feed ourselves and our families. (Internal talk: If you wish to call it cheating, so be it; we don't mind and we don't care!)

When I read this paragraph, my reaction was mixed - anger, sadness, despair and all sorts of negative feelings rushed into my mind. It is during such times, I feel awkward to tell people that that I am working for an industry who can't even guarantee that people can download their work product from the link provided at the website, let alone able to work reasonably flawlessly with it. This is not a distinctive case. This is the state of all software product companies all around the world, 'serving' customers who pay hundreds (sometimes thousands or even millions) of dollars to use their 'superior' products.

Software services companies are no better, because after all these are the people who serve such product companies. Imagine, it is a double stake - the supplier in one situation turns customer in a different one. Don't complicate it more, I will tell it in simple terms - software product companies basically fool around with their users and software service companies fool around with the product companies who they contract with. So, as in the famous quote from Lincoln, software industry is of the fools, for the fools and by the fools (because we use software produced by somebody else)....

I can only imagine…

Amazing bond between a father and a son, told so touchingly, so lovingly and so beautifully! In fact, none of the words I used here are enough to convey it all. While I was watching these two 5-minute videos, I couldn’t help comparing my fatherhood with this father…Am I anywhere close to him? I don’t think so. But, this story is truly inspiring to be that!!!

Vocabulary improvement in kids!

A few days back, my wife took my kid out for an evening walk. They were passing near to the railway crossing, nearby my home. The gate was closed, and hence both of them waited nearby to have a look at the train and wave at the passengers inside. Two minutes later, the train arrived, whistling in full blast and all the engine and all its twenty two compartments went out of sight in just a few moments. My kid was extremely happy to see the train moving so nearby him and waved his tiny hand enthusiastically. He exclaimed, “Bads train, bads train”! Bads train? What is that? My wife didn’t quite get it, but didn’t want to kill his enthusiasm in the midst of his enjoyment. Some passengers were kind enough to wave back, which increased his happiness and sense of achievement. Soon afterwards, they started their way back home.

On the way back, my wife asked him what does ‘bads train’ mean? He immediately replied, ‘This train has people in it’. “So what?”, she asked. “Yesterday when we saw a train here, you said it doesn’t carry people and is called good train. So this one is a bads train!”, he was innocent in his face when he said that. When my wife told us about this, everybody broke out laughing, except of course my kid. He couldn’t make it out, what is so funny in this. After all, he has applied the right technique (as it seems obvious to him) to identify the train correctly. Look at how kids develop their own vocabulary by connecting things up. Amazing! Of course, this time he didn’t get the relationship quite right, but most of the times his most simplistic reasoning is all that it takes to improve the vocabulary...There are numerous examples when he succeeded, but we won’t discuss them here. In fact, I believe that they fail only because the English language is so funny and doesn’t have much logic or reasoning associated with it. We will talk about this aspect of the language during a future post in this blog, but for the time being let’s stick to this subject.

Another such instance happened just today morning. Mornings, as usual, are busy for all of us at home with my kid getting readied for school, myself preparing to go to the office and my wife to her school. Presently, he just finished his breakfast and was playing in the drawing room. I was having my breakfast. At a moment that was least suspicious, my kid suddenly told me, “Why do always cool up, why don’t you cool down?”. Initially, I didn’t notice it, since I was busy reading the newspaper . But, then I stepped out aside a bit and asked him what he meant by that question? What he said was really amazing, while also giving all of us again a good laughter. He said, “I asked you, why are always angry with me, why don’t you cool down”? It wasn’t really unimportant when was the last time I got angry with him (If you’re a parent, you’ll immediately acknowledge that there is never a dearth of opportunity to get angry with one’s kid, so I surmise, I would’ve got angry with him sometime in the recent past), but the fact that he applied his mind and coined up a new phrase from his knowledge about the opposites - ‘up’ being the opposite of ‘down’ - and from two unrelated words was literally thrilling for me. This time also, like during the train incident, everybody laughed, except my kid. This time, he got it closer than during the train incident. I am sure, he will succeed next time with his innovative vocabulary!

Belief drives us...

There are lots of tiny events that happen in all our lives, but we often don’t give them any attention because many of them are too easy to neglect. They are either associated with things that are too tiny to be seen, or can’t be seen at all, or just flashes by in front of your eyes only a few nano-seconds, and costs almost nothing. However, many of the events that belong to this category are of great significance in all our lives. Without them, your lives would be no less than hell or mayn’t even exist. But apart from the reasons I mentioned above, there is one more reason for such negligence. Typically, all the candidates that invite such negligence are either too commonly available, or widely practiced.

It doesn't only happen with events, but with material things as well. Let us look at some such examples. The best example of one such material thing is the air, we breathe. Except for physicists/scientists or those with academic interest, I bet nobody has ever thought about the importance of this gas called oxygen in all of our lives. I read in one scientific journal recently that if the content of oxygen in the atmosphere differed from the present figure even by 0.01%, none of the lives you see around would ever exist. It is still a long way for the scientific community to prove how this precise oxygen content in the atmosphere could be achieved, and how long did it take for this process. Though there are lots of theories for it, all of these are only imaginative works and none are proven.

One other lesser example of such a material is water. We rarely take any notice of a glass of water, while we are eating food at the dining table, be at a restaurant or at home. I don’t know who and at what time during our evolution observed that water is a drinkable liquid and that it helped quench the thirst. But, isn’t amazing to observe a baby who is born out of its mother’s womb knows about this phenomenon without anybody telling it. Science could still not prove why it exactly is the way it is, either.

While all of us are equally bad at realizing the significance of these, we all would catch it easily, when these resources are absent or even little less than normal. While, nobody in this world would’ve experienced low oxygen, unless at great heights like at the top of very high mountains or at one’s death-bed (which nobody would be able to attest afterwards!), experiencing unavailability of water and hence its associated problems is too common nowadays, which makes all those affected realize the significance of this liquid in our lives. We don't need the science to help us here, it is experience that matters here.

Such an argument can very logically be extended to events also. Now, take this. I theorize that all events happen with some purpose. All those events do good to you. Had any slight difference been there in the nature or the timing of the event, your life would be nothing short of hell. Of course, none of what I said has been proven scientifically, but if scientists can be imaginative to tell us about how oxygen level dipped to support life in the earth and the possible window of time it happened during the life of the universe and come up with theories at the drop of a hat to explain a lot more unintuitive and stranger questions than these, why can't us too be imaginative? What is wrong in believing in something, especially when it can sustain human life? I see nothing wrong...do you?

PS: During one of my future posts, let us talk about such beliefs and also about how beliefs sustain human lives...

I bought a new cell phone!

Two days back, I bought a new cell phone - Sony Ericson 800i through one of my friends in Singapore (for this model is yet to be released in India). It is a cool phone with several cool features. Previously, I had an much older model of Nokia - 3310, that I bought some 3.5 years back. I have never used any other phone till now, so everything about this phone seemed quite new and awesome to me. But, notably interesting to me were its camera and organizer. The camera is absolutely fantastic, no doubt, with its 3.2 Mega-pixels, zoom in/out, its inbuilt Xenon flash etc. The model is named cyber-shot, to announce its linkage with the cybershot digital camera from Sony (I'm not quite sure if the technologies are the same). Its organizer supports most things that the MS outlook too supports - appointments, tasks, notes, contacts etc. I am told that most models of existing mobile phones too supported this feature. I am a fan of organizing things digitally, using calendars and so on, and in fact was one of the reasons I even set out to buy a new mobile. In my opinion, the ability to synchronize your MS outlook appointments in your PC with your phone, and getting reminded of them even while on the move, is one of the coolest things that mobile designers ever invented.

There are of course lots of other features also, like video calling (there is a separate VGA camera in the front panel of the phone to help this), video recorder, internet access, music player, radio, games etc, but all these were secondary to me. I am not a great reviewer of technologies and don't know quite a lot about cameras and absolutely nothing about the latest technology available in today's cell phones. May be because of that, I am impressed by what I got. The price of course was a bit high (near to Rs.19000/-). I read through most of the reviews available in the web about this phone, and its comparison with others available in the market, but this one and this one was perhaps the most exhaustive and the best. These reviews really helped me choose the right model...

Hope you find yourselves in the best of health soon...

Today morning, our team received a mail from our onsite (US) manager, of a different kind and set an entirely different mood amongst all of us. It said, she is off this afternoon since she had to undergo scanning at the hospital to find out if she is having a repeated attack from a cancerous growth in her body now, 2 years after the first attack. The mail, sounding a bit gloomy and moving, but very imaginable when it comes from most people, was least expected to come from her, who was otherwise perceived by most of us as the owner of a very strong determination and will power. But, thinking about it again, I realized that it was quite natural that anybody would feel depressed when they hear such news about themselves. I can't even imagine, how I would face it, if such a thing happened with me, ever... So, I decided to write a mail on behalf of the entire team to her, expressing all of our best wishes hoping for her speedy recovery and the best of health. Below here it is, reproduced exactly the same way I sent to her.

Hi,

It is easier to say than actually live it, nevertheless I will tell you what I always believed in and is my philosophy of life – “Everything happens for good”…It doesn’t look exactly relevant in this (even to me, now), but it will prove ultimately to be, in some way. I’ve experienced that in my life, several times.

Over the years, I’ve come to know a little about you. I believe you can and will get over this *trauma* thing soon. Hope for the best, but anticipate the worst and then anything that happens with you will look like a blessing…

I hope I’ve conveyed through this mail what I wanted to, and you took it in the right spirit. But know that all of us here love and respect you a lot and will stand by you always…

Regards…
Anand Iyer

Changing trends...

Yesterday, we had a new joinee to the development team at our company. His manager came by and introduced him to me. Generally, I make it a point to go and talk to the new guys, as soon as they join the team. When I talked with him, I realized that he is already familiar with most of the other members of the team and perhaps knew about them even more than me. This led me to think about how times have changed.

When I started to work, it was a very different feel during the first few days at any new company or a new team. My own experiences with one of the companies I worked with in the past are similar and even mildly daunting. I’d spent days together there, before I realized the guy who was sitting beside me belonged to the same team as mine and was supposedly reporting to me! When I walked in during the first day into that place, my eyes were looking for the guy who talked to me during my interview, because his was the only familiar face to me. All others were strangers. Fortunately I got a cubicle to sit in and a computer to tinker with, within the first few days at work. My manager was on tour abroad and wouldn’t come back for another month or so. Till such time as he came back, I’d to stay alone in my cubicle with virtually no connection with any of my neighborhood. Once he returned, I breathed a sigh of relief, but wouldn’t still know anybody other than himself. Both parties felt a strange sensation while trying to talk to each other and get introduced. Acquaintance with my neighbour happened only because he was the developer for the feature I was assigned to verify, and there was no other way than to get familiar with each other. I guess, in the most cases introductions didn’t happen, unless you were forced to co-operate at a professional level. This was the story 5 years back and I believe, happened with most everybody.

A few years earlier, all this changed. People became bolder and started mingling much more freely even starting from the first day, but with a slight push from somebody. It became customary that the manager (when he is around) takes you around the office during your first day at work, and introduces you to all other members of the team. Consider this to be an ice-breaking session. So, till the time the manager comes by to take you around, most of us will feel uncomfortable sitting in a crowd of strangers. The funny part is these ‘strangers’ know each other well, but you being a stranger to them, they may feel a bit odd to come and talk to you, because both don’t necessarily have any common subject to talk about. So, this ensues in the strangers talking about you in low whispers to each other, and eyeing you with suspicion, because after all you may’ve come in there only to attend an interview – when no other suitable place was available, the manager would’ve asked you to just wait there till a room was available for the interview.

Nowadays, such situations rarely occur, even without the team manager around. Today, most guys in the industry are youngsters, who like to go and push themselves with strangers. Today, when a new guy walks into my team, within no time, they will acquaint themselves each other. One of the managers sitting nearby me, keeps a cricket bat and a ball near him all the time, so that any new guy in his team (and even in others) will be welcomed with a game of cricket! People started discovering ways to hold personalized ice-breaking sessions. People frequent to places outside the company, to participate in team lunches, team building exercises, and even visit to nearby cinema halls. The trend is good and I hope will sustain in the future, for good…

Is it right to ‘Catch them young’?

Over the past two nights, I learnt that my 4 year old son has a philosophical edge. Typically, he doesn’t easily relent when he is asked to get onto his bed and sleep. He makes also sorts of excuses and keeps awake till my wife gets tired and sleeps herself. Most times, his excuses had been to either switch off the light in the bed-room, without which he won’t sleep or to tell him stories. But, during the past two nights, I noticed a difference. He was lying down on his bed and suddenly started asking us questions, which surprisingly turned out to be quite philosophical; I don’t know, if he realized them to be so; I also don’t know, from where he got these ideas? The previous night, he asked point blank, who ‘created’ us? If he asked me the same question slightly differently, I wouldn’t have took much notice and be so shocked. I can understand that kids usually are interested to know about how they came into this world? But, it is slightly unusual for a kid of that age to ask, *who* brought them here?

The night before that, he asked me another more intriguing question. Why does *yesterday* not come back and allow us to live again? I was really shocked and almost equally awed to hear him ask this question. It sounded unbelievable, for it was one of my own favorite questions too. I have delved on such thoughts a lot, because I like to. The answers for those lie in some extremely cryptic science – maybe physics, maybe evolution, maybe mathematics – I don’t quite know and I know also that none of us know. But, these are extremely interesting questions.

I didn’t attempt to answer this question to him. Partly because, it was not the right time to and because, I thought he wouldn’t understand if I explain him my philosophical thoughts behind it. But, I could be wrong. Maybe, he can much more easily inculcate what my mind is straining to reason, because adults are heavily adulterated by certain specific ways of thinking, while kid’s minds are completely open – they are highly receptive, willing to accept anything, without attempts to reason them too much.

Almost all adults are slaves to their thought process and fall flat on realities. Depending on which area you’ve worked most in your life, you are either logical (try to reason everything before you believe them) or you are creative (try to innovate and bring in your own thoughts into the existing ones). Though, there are few people who have both traits enough in their minds, there is probably nobody who has a good balance of both and with the most important element called acceptance, that links these. I believe that kids are much better than adults at both, since they haven’t seen much of either worlds and hence not as polluted as adults are.

So, is it right on our part to ‘catch them young’ as is stylishly put, inject them with our age-old convictions and thoughts and pollute their minds. The truth is, I don’t know…So, the next time my kid asks me any such questions, I will chose to keep quiet and let him think about it on his own and slowly fall asleep…

I just got reborn…

Have you heard anybody telling that they had had a complete makeover over the last few years. If you know them closely enough, you may consider what they said with some seriousness, else you will discard it as just a pompous display of words effecting self-praise. Of course, they only mean to say that some specific incident or their experiences in life, have caused them to change the ways in which they think and act. Even Stephen R. Covey talks about a complete re-scripting of our lives for our own good, in his book titled 7 habits of highly effective people. By the way, this is a wonderful book, with so many ideas that are all pure common-sense, but all too forgotten. We will discuss that later, for that is not the real subject here.

Ok, whatever the speakers of these statements have actually in mind, when they make them, it is actually 100% percent true in the literal sense. Biology has proved this fact beyond doubt, and that it is caused through a mechanism, which happens 24 * 7 * 365 in all our physical bodies called cell division. A few months back, I was reading a book about life after death (I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was one by Srila Prabhupada, the founder acharya of the ISKCON foundation). It talked basically about the cycles of rebirth (fundamental to the Hindu religion in India), the reason it happens, its implications and a lot more spiritual stuff. The author argues that we are reborn every few years, since according to certain biological discovery, all cells that constitute the human body are dying with time, and get replenished with newer ones. This happens at a very steady pace, and by the time we lived around 7 years, our body won’t have any cells that were part of it when the process started. Your physical body is literally entirely new, and your soul is part of an entirely new system. Though, this process is not instantaneous and hence may not really agree with what the author wanted to communicate, the argument is very logical otherwise.

The other day, while listening to the audio book of A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson, I heard this once again in the Chapter 24, titled ‘Cells’. Of course, Bill Bryson didn’t touch upon the spiritual aspect of it, but repeated the same thing. The figure that marks the ‘rebirth’ is also slightly different. He says that ‘you’ are completely new every 9 years. If the average age of a human is 75 years (let us say), he/she would have been reborn nearly 8 times in his lifetime!

Wow! What a wonderful concept! Mind you, it is not just like any other fancy concept, but scientifically proven to be correct…

On Yoga and the ‘stressed’ software engineers – a search for the truth

Today morning, on the way to office, I happened to meet a young lady who introduced herself to me, as a yoga teacher. I am always fascinated when I hear about yoga, since I never could figure out how all those people managed to see the so-called ‘inner-light’ when they meditated. I could never feel the experience, having tried so at least 2 times before. I’d (and still have) a feeling that all this could be just a passing fad. But, looking at the way she talked passionately about yoga, I started to feel that she could, after all, be a little, just a little right. She had been working as a freelance writer for one of the well-known newspapers, till a few months back, when all of a sudden caught of this yoga fever and joined the band-wagon. But, not the band-wagon of those who just only talk about it, and never do anything actually, but as somebody who practices it and also teaches it to other people. Well, that is fascinating! So, may be there is something true with the whole thing. Anyway, I think I should find it out. So, in the new few days, I will find out more details about this thing called yoga and get enlightened…Watch out for my gospel during the coming days!

However, there was one thing that she asked me about my job, that curiously provoked me. Having told her that I work for a software organization for the past 10 years, the immediate next thing she told me was she knew how stressful that job was – she sympathized with me. She said, her brother who works for a software house is out for work at 6 am and comes back home at 8 pm. I agreed with her that it is quite a work! But, the truth is, I could never ever feel such a stress either in my life, or at work. I’d loved this work so much, and even looked forward to every day, with a lot of eagerness. Even now, all this is true. So, I can’t understand how this hype of software engineers being so stressed out actually caught up with the general public. It looks like even the folks working in the software industry consider it a matter of pride to state that they are stressed. So, when I told her this, she did not obviously believe me, but didn’t fortunately try to persuade me in believing herJ Thank goodness for that, but I am afraid, one day people outside of the industry will hype it so much and make all of us the symbols of stress and put up in the pedestals as most stressful living beings who ever walked on this earth. And maybe even many among us, will be happy and proud to accept it so…

Before you travel abroad...

While I travelled to the US last November for a month, I wished somebody had reminded me to carry certain important stuff along with me, for I suffered a lot there due to my ignorance about those. So, immediately after I came back to India, I prepared this checklist for the benefit of all those who may travel in the future to US specifically and anywhere abroad generally, for a short term (< 2-3 months). There are two attachments here.

1. This is the actual list.
2. This is a sample page that you may want to print out and paste on your check-in baggages, before you leave.

NOTE: This is a post, which only Indian readers may find useful...Probably this may help those in other countries too to get to a similar idea, and start writing up a similar checklist.

My kid just grew up…

Yesterday, I spent a considerable amount of time listening to an audio-book on physics. I got immersed into it, and got so much enthused by it. With all the thoughts on physics still fresh in my mind, today morning, I went out in the morning for my usual brisk walk. While leaving home, I noticed that son had just woken up from bed and was involved diligently in some game of his own creation – he barely noticed me go out. I too, never suspected anything, until I came back after ½ hour. I was shocked to see that my 4 year old son has grown up – suddenly, with no warning whatsoever. Hearing my cries of surprise and an equal terror, my wife came out. She also seemed aged to me, with some of her locks already graying up…Oh, my god! Whatever could’ve happened to them? I showed signs of fainting and I don’t know what happened next. When I opened my eyes (presumably, after a few minutes), I noticed my son is playing the same game in the same corner, as he was before I went out for my walk. My wife was busy cooking something in the kitchen and shouting something to my son. Everything seemed normal. What a strange story, right?

What actually happened is this. What I just observed is a direct consequence of the special theory of relativity propounded by Einstein in 1905. But, the theory is not for daily occurrences of events, but for such extraordinary ones that are characterized by extreme speeds of related objects – more than say, 50% of the speed of light. Don’t believe me?

Check this out…

Firefox - the new browser

During one of my previous posts, I talked about how Google videos help millions of people around the world to keep up-to-date. I recently discovered a better method of doing this - live feeds. If you are working in the field of IT, you would've heard about this new technology many times already (I will write more on live feeds in a future post). But, for the time being, just understand that live feeds is a means to automate the delivery of updated and newer information to the readers of host websites. It provides links to articles, audio clips or videos, depending on the type of information.

There are software tools to help keep up with live feeds - like the most popular RSS Reader. I've been using this till recently, before I discovered the new browser, talk of the IT industry - Firefox. Firefox is a browser similar to the Internet Explorer, but much more powerful. Internet Explorer is almost synonymous with the browsing experience, for most PC users. Even being technology savvy and knowing the power of software and knowing how it can change the lives of people involved, I was resistant to change over from my favorite browser. I didn't have an idea then, how powerful Firefox could be and it could change my browsing experience. Firefox is not just about browsing the internet, but about the newer capabilities it adds to a standard browsing experience. It is the browser for the new age, and adapts easily to changes. Firefox is open source technology, which means that programmers all over the world can make their own contributions to it. These changes can be small or big, which decides the impact it can make to be overall browsing experience. Firefox has provided a very convenient way to contribute these changes to it, called extensions (Link to website of extensions)

Another feature of firefox that immediately caught my attention is the concept of bookmarks. The concept is similar to that of Favorites in the Internet Explorer, but are more powerful. Bookmarks can be managed in folders, much like files. It supports live feeds, which is the main subject of my discussion here. However, I won’t discuss much about it here, but just say that to support a live feed inside Firefox, just select 'New live bookmark', specify the URL where the feed is available and you are ready to go. Every day ( or whichever frequecy the feed provides), you will get the updated information at the tip of your fingers.

I have been using Firefox for a couple of months now, and find it enormously useful (the only downside being tremendous hogging of memory - I believe Mozilla is actively on top it to solve the issue). I am still inventing newer and better way of doing things with it. Believe me, Internet Explorer (the next version of IE - IE7.0, not released yet, claims to have all that Firefox can do) seems to be just a toy in front of Firefox. Go get Firefox, this is the in thing now!

World Wide Web – the 8th wonder

While I was reading a news article about the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, one question that kept occurring in my mind was what would’ve happened if he chose to patent his invention. When he created that first ever hyperlinked text in an HTML page and helped setup the first ever web server of the world, little would he have imagined that his discovery would help the world grow leaps and bounds in just over a decade. In fact, it didn’t even take it a decade for the world to benefit from the power of the WWW, that it is virtually impossible today to imagine our lives without it. Today, WWW is synonymous to internet for most of us.

I started a pet project to find out how much Berners-Lee could’ve been richer if he had chosen for the patent and slapped a royalty fees to the usage of WWW. I progressed a bit over the last week, but soon I realized that it is a futile exercise, because the web is often much more than it meets the eyes of all of us. There are too many dark, invisible areas to the web. The information that is accessible to all of us through search engines barely scratches the total amount of info available in the web. It is superficial, while there is the real treasure house, lying dormant and often invisible to the public, deep inside, which run from huge databases with terabytes of information and are dynamically created based on search queries and depending on the context of such queries. I searched on the web, and found this whitepaper about such a thing called deep web. The paper is very lengthy that I didn’t have the patience to go through it completely, and so I am not quite sure if it is same as what I am talking about. But, it definitely looks similar.

http://www.brightplanet.com/technology/deepweb.asp

It estimates that (as of 2003) the deep web outsmarts the info available in surface web by at least 500 times! Though the paper gives all that supports its claims, I believe, the numbers are underestimated (at least as of now). The deep web is probably much more deeper than we all think. And, the fact is it is ever ‘deepening’. With the entire world marching towards process automation, there is more and more information in those deep sea waters…Sadly, you will never be able to unearth all of those, unless you know the contexts well.

So, coming back to the question, how much will all this make Bernes-Lee richer, I would say that it is rather an impossible question to answer. Because, if he had chosen to patent his discovery, the world would’ve been indistinguishably different than today.

This is one of favorite subjects, so I will come back some other day and discuss more on this…I hoped, the mean time, you will have a fun time, doing some research on this aspect…

The festival called ONAM

Yesterday was Thiru-onam, the 4th day and the most significant of all among the ten day celebrations of the Onam, the top cultural festival of Kerala, my native place. Kerala, is the southern most state of India, arguably the most beautiful with a very clean environment and inhabited by people who are among the most educated and lively people in the country. Many times, they are so lively that none of them will allow any industries to come up in the state (that is a different story, but)! But, fortunately because of this very fact that there are no industries, there is very little influx of people from other states into Kerala, like me, who actually belong to the capital city of the state, came to Bangalore in another state, in search of a job and living. We will discuss about all these, in a later post. Right now, we will talk about the myth behind this festival called Onam.

It is a myth and everybody knows that. But, every Keralite believes in it and truly lives up to it. Though Onam was accepted as Kerala's national festival during early 1960's, it has defintely been around in Kerala, observed by one and all of the Keralites, for several years before that, maybe even several centuries earlier. I don't have much affinity to history, to have known the true fact.

Long time back in the history of Kerala, there was an 'asura' king called Mahabali, who was very noble to all his subjects, so noble that his fame started to spread in all the 14 worlds (the universe, is believed to have 14 worlds in the universe according to the Hindu mythology; I don’t know what these ‘worlds’ could signify in modern astronomy – maybe planets, maybe galaxies, or may even be entirely different universes, which is hypothesized by the most modern string theory).

Though regarded as the most noble among all kings who ruled Kerala ever since history, Mahabali was an asura and as all asuras wanted, he too wanted to be on the top of the devas and rule over them. So, he perfomed a great yaga (a practice of prayer conducted in front of a large fireplace), at the end of which he believed to be blessed with the supreme power, that will help him conquer the devas in the heavens.

The news about Mahabali, the asura king, reached Indra too, who is the king of the heavens and the , one of the 14 worlds. He started worrying about his own existence and the inhabitants of his kingdom, and approached Mahavishnu, the almighty, the one who created the universe…Mahavishnu thought hard over this and realizing the greatness of the King Mahabali, decided that he is worth another ‘avatar’ to conquer the King. Thus was born Vamana – the fifth avatar of the GOD.

Vamana was a small boy, when he arrived at the great yaga, performed by Mahabali, It is believed that Vamana asked for some land, only as much as he can measure using his feet 3 times over. Mahabali didn't suspect this little kid and hence readily agreed. Then, Vamana began to grow and grow and grow, till he became as huge as his one foot could measure out the whole of the sky, the other measured the whole of the land and didn't have the place to put him 3rd foot on! Now, the truly benevolant and true to his words Mahabali, lowered himself and asked Vamana to rest his foot on the king's own head. So, Vamana did and lowered the king to the patala (the world below the earth). But, while doing so Vamana was so obvisouly pleased with the king's humbleness and honesty that he allowed the king to have a boon of his choice. The King, so true to his nature, asked if he could visit his kingdom and his subjects he loved so much, once in a year...The request was immediately granted and thus was born the ONAM...

ONAM is celebrated during that time of the year, when the Great King Mahabali is believed to come to his kingdom and visit his subjects for a full 10 days...What a truly noble idea this whole thing is, correct?

For more details on ONAM, visit http://www.onamfestival.org/

In praise of India

Though not an advocate of any religion (in fact, I am just the opposite), I recently visited a blog by Subhamoy Das pertaining to Hinduism, of which one particular post was very interesting to me…It is about the praises that were showered by some of the greatest minds in the world history, upon India over many past years. Doubtless, I was impressed. Read on…

http://hinduism.about.com/od/history/p/indiaquotes.htm

Technical Vs Non-technical writings - Part II

This post is a follow-up of the last one on the same subject.

Now, let us come back and think about the whys of it. Why is technical stuff popular than non-technical stuff in the web? Let us take a specific example. While it is true that there is lots of information about say, surgical methods, it is comparatively smaller than any technology related domain. When considering this specific example, you should take into account of the fact that the surgical methods have been around for the last six centuries or more, but you can’t say the same with any of the technologies related to computers. Computers themselves, as we know today, are no more than 50 years old. What could be reason, then? I think it is basically because the awareness among technical writers about the web itself, its impact, its power and the benefits it will bring into the world and themselves, is much greater than non-techies. Non-techies are fast catching up, but due to the geographically wide-spread practice of surgical methods (in this example), this is not always possible. Technology, on the other hand is uniformly developed and available all over the world. Today, technology rules the world and it is no surprise that the techies are contributing much more greatly through and to its growth, than anybody else. Also, techies are heaviest consumers of the web. As you know, supply always follows demand. It is obvious that more and more information becomes available in the areas that are consumed more. It is a positive spiral.

Secondly, I think it is because of accessibility. For example, for a person who works day in and day out with computers, it is obviously easier to create a write up about anything and publish on the web. Thus, when I find it difficult to comprehend something that would help me achieve certain things at work, I don’t need to go over to any other place, and look for help. I just search for help using google or any other search engine, in my own computer. No worries.

Thirdly, information available over the web is just like any commodity which involves buying and selling. While you publish, you essentially are selling your ideas to millions of people world over, and when you search and obtain information, you are buying those. Of course, not all of such buying and selling involves money. Lot of it is free. However, there needs to be somebody who can control the entire process. Unfortunately, here again the techies excel – because they understand the process better. Simply because, they are the ones who created these processes, in the first place!

Though the web doesn’t restrict any group of people from accessing information from it or contributing to it, the restriction is imposed by the people themselves due to their own limitations, both physical and otherwise. The division between techies and non-techies is somewhat odd, because at least for some people, it will only help to widen the gap among the web users. However I believe, with the increasing popularity of the web, this gap will lessen and eventually become non-existent in a fewer years to come…

Technical Vs Non-technical writings

Technology is improving everyday, and newer ways of performing tasks are being discovered every moment all around the world. In our times, google is considered to be the ultimate authority about anything. Google is theoretically equally powerful to answer your queries on technical as well as non-technical stuff. But, always technical stuff stands apart both in quantity and quality of results. If you doubt it, type it in google and search. Anything, virtually. You will get hundreds of thousands of results for any query you make to google. But, just how popular non-technical stuff is with google in comparison to technical stuff? I decided to find out through a small experiment. The result was very evident – technical stuff was almost 8 (!) times popular than non-technical stuff. We will look at the why’s of it later, but let us look at some factual figures.

How did I conduct my experiment?

I selected a few areas of work, that are comparitively hotter than others, are fairly unique and doesn't have much overlaps with each other. Now, I used google and searched for a set of most frequently used terms in each of these areas using the following simple query.

terms - (Text inside angle brackets replaced with the actual name). I literally typed it in the google search box for each of the areas I considered. For example, in case of physics, I typed 'terms physics' in the google search box and obtained a list of most frequently used terms in physics.

Then, I used these terms and searched using Google and measured the yield Google search provides. To keep things simpler, I just took a count of the results from each search. Now, I averaged all counts that resulted from terms belonging to a specific subject.

I took maximum care to select the most commonly used terms (limited by my knowledge and how I perceive their usage to be common) while searching. It was not easy doing this, because many times I found that the terms are used often in completely differing contexts – for example, galaxy is a term used in astronomy, but there are so many websites which sport the name ‘galaxy’, as well as there are clubs and resorts by this name…In such cases, I ensured that at least the first page of my search results don’t have something totally absurd…

The results were as expected. The Technology domain excelled in all the 10 search terms and averaged around 2 billion, while all others averaged quarter of a billion (Astronomy and Physics being exceptions, averaged a little below ½ a billion each) Here is the ranked list of the subjects.

1. Technology
2. Astronomy
3. Physics
4. Medicine
5. Biology
6. Chemistry
7. Evolution
8. Geography
9. Genetics

For more details, have a look at the attached excel…

countsearch.xls

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I will follow up with another post to look into the why's of this, in a couple of days...