Mukul's Gibber

Lets see if google crawls MarkEngg.com

2006-03-29T19:53:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to Mark Engineers. Also here is a link to My DBLP entry BTW google mentions this blog on the first page when you search for my name. So let me atleast try to put a hook to the site for Google to crawl it.

Wanna make money?

2006-03-10T01:10:00.000-08:00

Not happy with adsense? Try these

Terrorists on Orkut???

2006-03-10T01:06:00.000-08:00

Terrorist s on Orkut?... Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

Is this blog dead?

2006-02-15T01:01:00.000-08:00

"A blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day—hell, every few minutes—even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience."

tahaan

2005-12-02T05:02:00.000-08:00

Vidamban

2005-11-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

Shaap

2005-10-23T00:56:00.000-07:00

Savai-Gandharva

2005-10-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

Read in the papers today that this year's Savai will be held during 8-12 December. 4.00 p.m. - 10.00 p.m for 3 days and a day long session on the last day. Time to apply for leave :-)

Monkeys with type-writers

2005-10-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. :-)

Try this

2005-10-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

Before Google fixes(manipulates) it.
- Search google for failure
- Click I am feeling lucky

Got Tagged .. True Answers

2005-10-04T05:58:00.000-07:00

I got tagged by Mahesh.

Here are the answers.

5 Favourite toys:
- My flute and harmonium
- My computer
- My car
- My thoughts
- Soap bubbles

5 Greatest Joys:
- Wine and dine with Shilpa (my Wife) (This has to be here, she reads
my blog :-p)
- Playing with Gargi (my daughter)
- Listening to favorite music while reading a good book
- Sleeping to satisfaction
- Salary hikes

5 favourite TV shows(*):
- F.R.I.E.N.D.s
- NDTV Big Fight
- Apprentice
- Sarabhai Vs. Sarabhai
- Samvaad (ETV Marathi)

5 things I would never wear in public(*):
- Bow-tie
- Sleeveless T-shirts
- Transparent shirts
- Bandana
- Any super-tight fitting

5 places I would run away to:
- Hindustani classical music concert
- Any good theatre play
- A good elocution
- Any beach or hillstation
- HOME

5 things I would do with $100 million(*):
- Make world tour(s)
- Buy a fleet of small good companies that will constantly earn me
good money
- Keep thinking about what I can do with all this money :-)

5 Snacks:
- Pav Bhaji
- PaNi Puri
- Pohe
- Sabudana Khichadi
- Pithala-bhakari

5 Bands I know all the words to:
????????????????????????????????

Yesterday:
Decided that I will get up at 5.00 a.m. (And managed it today :-))
Started reading "Pawana-kaThacha DhonDi" (Go. Ni. DanDekar)
Listened to Shankara-BharaNam

One year ago:
Was excited about the new-one soon going to enter the family

Five years ago:
Fresh pass out, working at Persistent Systems. Bought my first house.

Ten years ago:
First year, Engineering. Shifted from Mumbai to Pune for studies. Was
very happy about the move. Was making new friends almost every day.

नाती-गोती

2005-10-01T02:07:00.000-07:00

ही विचित्र नाती-गोती
दो क्षणां पुरत्या भेटी
वळणावर निरोप द्याया
प्रवास सुरू हे होती

सगळ्यांची अपुलीच धुन्दी
सगळ्यांची अपुलीच मस्ती
ना उत्तर कोणा देती
ना प्रश्नही कोण पुसती
सगळ्यांचे ओठ नी कण्ठ
गाणि स्वत:चीच गाती
ही विचित्र नाती-गोती

जरी हात हातातून फ़िरती
तरी स्पर्श कसे ना होती?
जरी रक्त नी रंग जुळती
तरी मने कशी ना मिळती?
ते सुतक नि सोयर केवळ
निरर्थक रीती ठरती
ही विचित्र नाती-गोती

कोणास ठाऊक कसा

2005-09-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

कोणास ठाऊक कसा
पण Bar मधे त गेला ससा
सशाने घेतली गिरकी
विसरून गेला फ़िरकी
तरन्नूम म्हणाली करूया fix
ससा म्हणला किती देऊ six?

कोणास ठाऊक कसा
पण Studio त गेला ससा
सशाने दाखवले ढुंगण
शक्तीने लावले वंगण
प्रोड्युसर म्हणाला मी कधी?
ससा म्हणला Contract आधी

कोणास ठाऊक कसा
पण मेला नी सुटला ससा
दोन दारं स्वर्ग नी नरक
ससा म्हणला काय फ़रक?
चित्रगुप्त म्हणला बात अंदरवाली
दार फ़क्त दोन आतून एकच खोली

~ मुकुल

Two good quotes I read

2005-09-29T01:34:00.000-07:00

You know your children are growing up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they're going

Life is just like prime numbers. Its logical but one can never find the rules.

Cosmo-GruhaShobhika-Saheli-NewWoman dept.

2005-09-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read New-Woman. Hema Malini is the editor of this
magazine. I think I read the July issue. How does it matter anyway?
:-) Well, don't misinterpret this statement and think that I just
"see" the pages and don't read. Thats not the case. In fact I like to
read such magazines once in while. Its a lot of fun.

All of them are so typical in nature. They will have some
consulting/advise for family issues as well as physical/sexual
problems. I always think that editors pay some people to write such
letters. Very typical letters you will find in this section (mostly
named like "Pushpataincha/Gruhashobhikecha salla"). "I am a young,
slim, good looking girl of age 23. I have crush on my neighbor who is
married and having 2 kids. I don't even know if he likes me, but he
has always been good to me....." WTH! And Pushpatai says "forget
him".

Why don't I ever get such neighbor (Not married men, the slim
good-looking girl) falling for a married man? God is very cruel to
me. I don't want to talk about the sexual problems column. I get
afraid to read those so I always skip it :-) Trust me.

Another column is where people post their personal letters or love
experiences etc. See "Dhai akshar prem ke" in Gruh-Shobhika. You will
find letters like these - "Mi lagna-nantar pahilyandach maaheri gele
hote. AaNi hyancha kahich patra/phone nahi. Mi atishay kaLajit hote ki
hyanna mi avadate ki nahi. PaN titakyat ek patra aala jyat lihila hota
ki RaaNi tu gelyapasun mazi tahan-bhuk haravali aahe. Mazi kaLi ekdam
khulali aaNi sagaLa raag kuthachya kuthe nighun gela"! If you find
this funny, never ever miss this section. However, these letters are
always sane when compared to those published on the site by
Sumeet and Subarna.(May god bless them!)

Then there is some questionnaire. With 10 objective questions and each
option with some score. Finally you sum up your score to find out "if
you are possessive or if you are a trust-worthy partner" and some
secret about yourself which you would have never known had you not
gone through this magazine issue revealing the fact to you! Who are
you to judge how good lover you are btw? You will feel happy that you
have got the best score as a nice partner when your girlfriend might
instead be looking at a first opportunity to dump you.

Also there are some nice tips. And some people win prizes for giving
these tips. These tips range from any home-made medicinal solutions to
any cost-cutting methods. I am not lying but once I had read a tip
where a woman said "Don't throw away your husband's old pajamas, you
can cut those and make pillow covers"!!! What the **** ! What a
re-use. See you will come to know how practically object-oriented
people are.

Sometimes things like "25 ways/things to" are good. But once I had
read that "having sex in a waterfall" is one of the 35 things to do
before you die. I think people in India will die of thinking about how
they can do this.

I sometimes feel that all these magazines may have a collaboration for
exchanging articles or they might even be writing those together. You
will just get surprised with the similarity. Any article like "how not
to loose your guy" will have a positive and negative case-study :-)
Sushama did this and lost her guy. And there will be one Manisha who
would have done the things as per the advise and would have got her
guy with her till his death. If the magazine is English, just that
Sushma changes to Ria. Everything else would be same. Not even that,
depending upon the time of the year, some magazines release special
issues. Best example, "Sarabat aaNi Ice-cream visheshank"! Last year
they would have asked you to mix pulp with sugar this year it is sugar
with pulp. But still they make a huge sale. And why won't they when
they are so entertaining(?)

I remember I subscribed to Cosmopolitan when I was in 9th or
10th. Yeah. :-) I had also got two lip-sticks free which I gave to my
cousin sister. I had no one else to gift those to. How sad! But I told
you God has always been cruel to me with such matters. I did not/could
not renew it after the year. But I had managed to treasure those
issues for quite a long time. My mom finally got so frust of asking me
to give those to raddi-wala that she herself did it one day. Tell me
how can a teenage boy give away those front-page bimbos? But how will
any mom understand that.

However now I am happy that even if I get new-woman from library, she
doesn't say a word. :-p

May God bless them

2005-09-27T03:29:00.000-07:00

I am very delighted. You know why? Because Sumeet and Suparna are
getting married in December. Have a look at
their site.

You would ask how do I know/relate to them? Well, I don't know them
personally. But I am just impressed by this "Dedication and Expression
of their Love for each other" as they say in the believe it or not
section.

They say :
Too Many of you will LIKE this Website,
Many of you will LOVE this Website,
Few of you will be INSPIRED with this Website
AND Believe it or Not Very Few of you will be SARCASTIC toward this
Website. Its not the TIME but PASSION which is required to do
something of this sort. This WebSite is a Tribute to all those who Believe in Love.

So why would I not relate to them? I truly believe in love,
listen all you sarcastic readers of my blog!

In fact I am so impressed that if I decide to turn a film producer
ever, I will make another great epic out of this love story and
dedicate a Veer-Zara like film to these two. And I am sure I will also
win a national award. (Why wouldn't I if some crap like Veer Zara can
win?)

Show me other couples that do breakfast, lunch and dinner
together. Have you seen any? Show me people who think dance is not
complete without their partner. Have you seen any? Show me those who
are ready to publish their love-letters for their relatives and
friends to ponder over. Anyone firmly believes in God's ideas in
making you meet someone? I say, look at these innocent
love-birds. (How innocent they looked in their young age! Not just
these two but also Sapana Didi, in fact the whole Chawlas)

And after you are done reading through all sections please don't
forget to take this
poll and quiz. If you don't have time, visit again and go through
this. I know you will definitely have such beautiful, lovely site
bookmarked in your browser.

So here are some questions

- Where should Sumeet and Subarna go on their Honeymoon ?
- How many Kids should Sumeet and Subarna have ?

How sweet! They are taking your opinion. Has your brother or sister
ever taken?

I think they should add some more questions here .. like
- Who all should they take along with them on their Honeymoon?
- Should they pay a visit to a medical practitioner before that? If
yes, jointly or individually? Or first individually and then jointly?
- What contracep.........

S & S : MUKUL, stop being corny.
Mukul : Who started it but?

Four booties

2005-09-27T02:40:00.000-07:00

If you have seen the latest Lux ad. Who do you think looks the most beautiful? If your answer is Shahrukh then I am not of your types. Go away from this post.

Kareena?? - To me she looks man-hungry.
Sridevi?? - She looks pretty dumb.
Juhi?? - Well, she is good. I like her looks. (BTW, if you are Puneri and you have listened to Shrish Kanekar, in his fillambazi, you know the answer to Tumhala Juhi Avadate ka?)
I think that Hema Malini looks the best.

And now some of you may start the maturewoman[dot]com Crap. I don't care :-)

What (a s)crap!

2005-09-27T00:52:00.000-07:00

I found this is someone's scrapbook. Got reminded of Question-Mark hair-styled Paresh Rawal in JUDAEE.(Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Urmila, Comedy King(???) Johny Lever and his abba-dabba-chabba girl-friend. You are lucky if you haven't watched it.)

Aap kaha hai?
Apka ghar hai?
Tv hai Kya?
what brand ?
Kon se channel aate hai?
Table hai?
Chair bhi hogi?
Apke ghar me chipakali hai?
Billi hai?
Kutta hei ya nai?
Audio hai k cd k dvd?
Home theater hei ya nai?
nal hai?
Pani aata hai?
Fridge hai?
Bada hai k chota?
Pani Thanda karta hai?
ice banata hai?
Kon c company ka hai?
To dusri Co. ka kyo nai hai?
Fan hai k AC?
Cooler kyo nai hai?
Phone nai hai?
Cell Phone hei kya?
ACHHA NET HAI?
Chalta hai kya ?
toh yaar scrap keroo na

Victim of orthodox rituals

2005-09-26T02:58:00.000-07:00

I said more about Viththals in the previous post. Just while
mentioning their name, I got reminded of something, which is no good
to write about also no good to skip writing about :-)

So this was another Gult family in my colony. Obnoxiously orthodox the
were. Mine was the only Brahmin Maharashtrian family. And I was the
only boy who had got his threading ceremony done.

These Viththals had three daughters. Elder one I don't remember her
name, other was Madhu and third was Shriwalli. She was of my age, but
was pretty huge in size. So I never paid much attention to her ;-) I
had watched Honey I shrunk the kids with these three girls. :-) Fond
memories make you deviate a lot from the subject!

So the point is I had to perform some yearly Puja at their house. And
I did it for 3 years. The family was not at all considerate toward
me though. They used to make me take bath with a cold water and do
the puja with all-wet towel around me. I had to finish all the
"naivedya" that they used to prepare. I know that a great great
mathematician Ramanujan died of pneumonia, due to same habits that he
continued in U.K. winter.

This is insane, I tell you. If I see this family again I will make
them sit on a ice slab till they catch cold.

Brahma-Year Calculations

2005-09-26T02:34:00.000-07:00

This weekend I read a book called "Ved aaNi PuraNe : Samalochan". The
author Y.K.Deodhar has said that its not that Vedas were written around 5000
years B.C. but thats the time when they started getting known. He says
that Lord Brahma did a "tapa" for 12 Brahma-years after the birth of
Vedas. And then he has calculated that period. A Brahma-year is
calculated in the following way.

Here is a table of different "Yugas" and the corresponding god-years
they lasted for.

Yuga God-Years Sandhi-Kaal(extra time)
--------------------------------------------
Satya 4000 800
Dwapar 3000 600
Treta 2000 400
Kali 1000 200

Total of these is 12000 God years.
One God-day is 1 human year.
So this is 12000 * 360 human years.
This period is called 1-chaukadi.
And then such 1000 chaukadis make half Brahma-day
So one Brahma day is 1000 * 12000 * 360 * 2 human years.
So Brahma did "tapa" for this figure into 360 * 12 years.
And before that Veda was born. (It was one initially and then got
split into 4 for easy study and maintenance. Modularity :-))

I just wonder, who got these calculations in place? How do people know
these multiplication factors? I want to know.

Naming System

2005-09-26T01:55:00.000-07:00

I have been curious about the Surnames of people speaking drawiDian
languages. (I think its more accurate than saying South Indians.) I
tried to ask some and I always got more confused with the answers they
gave. Here are some cases

1. I had a friend who was Tamil, and his name was BalajiKumar
Venkatramani. So that should mean his name was Balaji and his dad's
was Venkatramani. But he used to write his name as Venkatramani
Balajikumar and used to have one of the last roll numbers. What does
name A B mean? A is the person's name and B father's name? Or
otherwise? Or anything will do?

2. Same with another guy who told me that his surname was Iyengar. Now
if that is his surname, why doesn't he use it? Why is it called as
surname if it is not by the family?

3. Another friend, Suraj, used to speak Kannada. His dad's name was Narayan
XYZ Shetty. What would you now expect his name to be? Suraj Narayan
Shetty? But his name was Suraj Narayan Todur. I asked him why Todur?
He said because its a name of the village in which he was
born. Fine. But then shouldn't there be a same system in the family?
Shetty is not any village AFAIK.

4. One of our neighbors in Mumbai were Gults. The girl's name was
K. Vijaya and her bro's was K. Vijay. Their dad's name was Krishna
Murthy. Now it seems that everyone is following his/her name and dad's
name as a system. But no their mom use to call his dad as Murthy!

5. Same case with other family called Viththals. (More about them
later :-p)

So in short I could never understand how this works. Were these people
exceptions? Is it never supposed to have a standard system?

I think I am back to blogging

2005-09-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

I think so.

KhasBodh

2005-02-17T03:17:00.000-08:00

Samarthya aahe baDabaDiche
Jo jo karil tayache
Parantu tyas adhikarache
AdhishthhaN pahije

One wild thought

2005-02-15T21:36:00.000-08:00

Why the fuel carriers don't have an option of taking the fuel for the engine from the tank itself, when possible?

"P"atishayokti

2005-02-15T21:31:00.000-08:00

Adhich tarkaT,
tashatachi madya pyala,
tyapashchat ghari ushira gela,
vyatha patichya kaay varNu tumhala? :-)

Devrai

2005-02-13T21:17:00.000-08:00

A nice movie, I should say. Its about schizophrenia. Atul Kulkarni and Sonali Kulkarni have cracked it.

Devrai is produced by schizophrenia awareness trust and has been directed by Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhtankar. Atul Kulkarni plays "Shesh", neglected victim of schizophrenia. A sharp young character from a small village in Konkan gets slowly captured into the decease. We feel it as his past unfolds in the movie. He starts linking characters in his life to "Devrai" (flora-fauna) and day by day his world starts becoming a broken and shuffled reality. Devrai is a metaphor for mind. Its all beautiful when things are nice but just a small disorder disturbs it completely. Same happens with Shesh. Sonali Kulkarni plays a role of his sister "Seena", Tushar Dalvi plays role of her scientist husband, Mohan Agashe is psychologist and another character "Kalyani" whome Shesh loves a lot.

Sonali has player role of care-taking sister who has to also balance it with her role of a house-wife. She has very well shown the frustration and depression that any close family member of such a person has to go through. Salute to the acting of Atul and Sonali. Tushar Dalvi has also acted well as a husband who initially finds shesh as a burden on his family but lately realizes his problem and helps him. The movie is positive about its message at the same time realistic. The struggle of Shesh and his caregivers to help him give the meaning to his life and fight his schizophrenia has shown with no extra dramatization.

Don't miss it, if you are not a typical stereotype movie fan.

Vachakancha patravyavahar

2005-02-10T04:09:00.000-08:00

I don't know how many of you read this sadar from SakaL. It is quite entertaining. Sometimes it has got genuine stuff but most of the times it is a true reflection of puNeri nature. Once I had read something like this .. Roj ghatalelya telamuLe pandharpurachya deepmaLa kharab hot aahet hya kaDe pune vidyapeethachya sthapatya shastra vibhagatil lok laksha detil kaay? So the deepmaL.. some structure where one can light hundreds of oil-lights at a time, in Pandharpur is getting hampered due to the oil being put everyday. And the man wanted someone from Structural department of Pune University to pay an attention to it. So there is a problem, happening somewhere, this guy doesn't have any solution for it and he is asking some third person to look into it. Its very usual in "Vachakancha Patravyavahar" BTW.
I am also thinking of sending a letter to sakaL. A genuine one though. Everyone feels his request is genuine. Anyway. Once I had written one letter to alpha marathi for their sub-standard skills of comments between the songs being played in "Sur-Taal". I got no reply. Lets see if this letter gets due respect. :-)

Apan hyanna pahilat ka?

2005-02-02T23:19:00.000-08:00

Day before, I was roaming through the TV channels. I generally spend most of my time in front of the TV with this activity. (Like many other people). I came across DD and it was showing "Apan hyanna pahilat ka". High percentage of the young generation must be unaware of this program.
I suddenly felt how crazy we have gone behind "entertainment". This program has no entertainment value but has tremendous utility and social help-age value. But who watches and who cares!

Long time no blog

2005-02-02T22:56:00.000-08:00

Muddled mind is back to the place where it used to muse regularly. Why such a gap some people asked. True reason, I wasn't getting time. Seriously. I attended Swami Ramdev's yoga and pranayam shibir for 8 days. I used to wake up at 3.45 everyday. I don't remember seeing the rising sun last year or even in 2003. And I managed it for a week for one week. Personally I consider it to be a big achievement. Also had frequent trips to Bombay for different reasons. Never I felt like sitting at peace and writing something. Don't know why though. In fact, it relaxes me a lot. Anyway enough of it. So people, I am back.

Back

2005-01-10T20:23:00.000-08:00

Last week, I had been pretty low on adrenaline. Didn't do much beyond normal routine things apart from my music classes. Yes, I have found a good class and I have started learning Yaman. I haven't been practicing much but I think I will start it soon. I have been recording my classes.

I have figured out that
- Jab Deep Jale Aaana
- Chandan Sa Badan
- Zara Si Aahat Hoti Hai
- TaL Bole ChipaLila
- Maage Ubha Mangesh
- Pratham Tula Vandito
are all based on Yaman.

What will change with 2005

2004-12-30T22:33:00.000-08:00

Everyone is asking me today whats my plan for the night. A few years back no one used to. Not that because I wasn't having right age for this question. But during those times the concept of "celebrating" days wasn't so popular and hadn't penetrated so deeply in the society. I am not doing anything special today.
I am just thinking what will change in my life with the changing calendar. I am not talking about the events that will happen the next calendar year. I am really talking about the change any new year brings. Practical things.. no new hopes, new relations etc. business. The first thing that comes to my mind is more holidays in balance. And the next thing is .. is .. is .. I have no words or thoughts. Seriously. What the new year is going to change that I couldn't have done this year anytime if I wished too? Apart from entierly new things that will happen what the mark of year is giving me? I don't know. People please help me find out..

And BTW wish you a happy new year.

On Swades

2004-12-26T23:09:00.000-08:00

I am back from my vacation. I watched Swadesh and had decided to blog about it. But before that I read a real nice anti-review written by Ramanand Covers most of what I wanted to write. Although in a much much better style. Putting it verbatim below.

Indigenous commentary

Local maal is never good. Another example is this absolutely pathetic film called Swades. Here's a list of grouses as to why the movie is so awful:

# "Emoshun, I want more emoshun in the frame!". How do I know what the actors really mean unless the emotion drips off their face into the bucket kept by their feet?
# "Dermatological reasons". The only skin on offer was during a wrestling match between pahalwaans and when SRK is having a bath. Women are all wearing saris. Unbelievable!
# "Where is the intense drama at airport?". There is no chase down the highway, with the hero deciding to not board the plane 3 seconds after lift-off. The only nail-biting moment is during the NASA shuttle launch. Honestly, I thought SRK would dive to abort mission by pressing a button when there was just 1 sec remaining.
# "'I' se hota hai Item!" The only item song in the film is the heroine playing Sita in a Ram liila song. Aisa kaise chalega? According to the a.nguur-wine, there was to be a sizzling number by a former Miss Antartica.
# "K-K-K Kaun?" What happened to SRK? Was his back hurting too much? They did not let him act at all. The guy can run, cry, sing and leap - all without lifting a finger. Heck, they didn't even let him recite a poem or two. Instead he's selling books, funda-maaroing on electricity generation and typing into Apple laptops. And not once did they let him say "K-K-Kaveriamma!!!"
# "Yeh Kahaa.n aa gaye ghum?". Who were all these actors no one had seen earlier? This film must have had such a low-budget for what else explains the absence of Anupam Kher, Amitabh in a special appearance, Celina Jaitley, Vinod Kambli, Alok Nath, Amrish Puri and Joginder? There was not even a college-quad-60sprom-pompom dance by Farah Khan on Sharmistha Roy sets. And I paid Rs. 100/- for this!
# "Itna sannaaTa kyu.n hai bhai?". My ears proudly ring with tinnitus whenever I see a Sunny paaji - Anil Sharma blackbuster (sic) (with Sunil Shetty in a special inspirational appearance). But here, hardly anyone raises their voice. Why should I pay for such low decibel dialogue delivery?
# "Cut to cut". Were the censors sleeping? Don't they know that their main function is to ensure a minimum level of nudity and strong language in our films? How can they let this film pass without insisting on a few inserts? Sharmila Tagore should be sacked.
# "Naach na jaane". Where were the trees? How will the hero-heroin (sic) express their undying love for each other. I was very confused when SRK flashes headlights into Gayatri Joshi's eyes. Was it because he likes her or because he wants to blind her into not complaining about his smoking? There was only one corn field in the entire film. And please, I don't want to see a Raasta-haired Mendicant Deshpande getting jiggy with it. Shabbo ko try kiya hai kya?
# "Samajhdhar ko ishaara kaafi hai". Dude, tell me: who will go to a village with no broadband, no multiplex with pool table, no Indian Idol, no Coke, no Pizza Hut. Flawed, mate, totally flawed.

All in all, I was disappointed. By the very fact that I had to think about all this in the theatre shows you how entertaining the film was.

On vacation

2004-12-20T06:28:00.000-08:00

This week I am on vacation. Plan to make it a peaceful event. Will be having a short one day trip to IIT Bombay. Have to manage a big backlog of books, movies, albums. I don't think I will blog this week. Lets see. Started the vacation by attending "Rang Suranche-Ek anokhi mehfil". It was a mixed-bag concert. Sanjeev Abhyankar, Savani Shende, Shreedhar Phadke, Ramdas Kamat were nice. Ajit Kadkade bored people to death. More on that in later weeks. Watched Guns of Naverone, Johny English and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. Read GoLaberij and HitchHiker's guide to galaxy. Did some pending coding for half a day. Plan for the remaining 5 days include searching a good music class.

See you all readers, next Monday.

Smart Page (and Brin)

2004-12-15T23:04:00.000-08:00

I hit www.gppgle.com by mistake. But I still found that I was looking for. Very smart ! Then I tried www.gkkgle.com Have a look. The idea is equally dumb.

Do you know why Infosys hires outsiders?

2004-12-15T19:44:00.000-08:00

One disadvantage of always staying in the company of intellectual people is you miss understanding what the common and below-average-intellect people think about various issues. You have arguments with people around you and some or many a times conflicts and altercations arise. You may not accept their thinking, but they have there reasons behind them and there opinions derived from these reasons seem fine to you though you don't agree to them. But thats not the case when you speak with people who are not from your world. You just can't relate to them many a times. Its very interesting though. And the serious part is that it is a need to understand what and how this class of people thinks since they cover a large percentage of population. Nuff of Preface...

Last Sunday, I spent around 3 hours xeroxing some important legal documents, agreement, loan papers etc. I was very finicky about leaving the papers and collecting them later. Also the papers were clustered among various groups and subgroups, so I was standing by the side of xerox-wala and organizing and stapling them. We had a long chat about several topics. About Mangeshkar hospital fraud, Sharad Pawar, 49-99, Quality of gift articles, Abdul Rehman Street, Real Estate prices, Private banks and their service, Filling up gas in the lighter and on and on... Only at the end I told him that I work for a software company and the car standing out his shop was mine :-) So I don't know what he thought of me during the discussion.

The most interesting thing he told me was about Infosys. After that I didn't feel like telling him that my wife works for Infosys. I was explaining him why banks need several documents for sanctioning the housing loan. How different frauds can take place etc. He then said, "You are the only maharashtrian person whose agreement papers I am xeroxing. All the others were outsiders. These outsiders are coming here and taking all the jobs and now they have started settling and buying real estate." Infosys, he said wants to take only outsiders :-) Tumhi gela aahe ka kadhi infosys madhe? Gela na, tumacha doka out hoil. "They don't want local people to join. Why do you know?" I didn't have the answer but he continued, "if outsiders come here and infosys closes tomorrow, they won't be able to do any hulla-gulla. They just don't have local support. But if Infosys recruits local people, they will just do hungama if the company closes. They know the local "gunda"s very well!"

Mr. Murthi and Mr. Nilekani, are you reading my blog? Could you please confirm this? :-)

Mi aaNi "Idli, Orchid aaNi mi"

2004-12-15T02:50:00.000-08:00

I read a nice book yesterday. I went home a bit early around 7.00 or so. And found it lying around the table. "Idli, orchid aaNi mi" by Vitthal Kamat. (Of Kamat Hotels) The book is a short career-o-graphy.

Vitthal Kamat has made it sweet with just enough details about various incidents in his career. All ups and downs he faced and how finally he built his award winning 5 star ecotel Orchid.

It doesn't take more than 2 hours to finish, if you are a voracious marathi reader. The book is a good read because of interesting incidents. But the other major reason is the focus maintained throughout. It doesn't go into glory details of parts of Vitthal Kamat's life not related to his career.

I don't know if its available in English too. But the ghati fellas(including non-ghatis understanding ghati) should read it.

I am going to be RICH !

2004-12-13T19:19:00.000-08:00

I am so excited ! I opened my mailbox and found this. WoW ! Time for me to plan my retirement.

Dear friend,
How are you? I have a profiling amount in an excess of US$423M, which I seek your partnership in accommodating for me. You will be rewarded with 4% of the total sum for your partnership. Can you be my partner on this?

INTRODUCTION OF MY SELF:
I am .Mr Yuriy Lagutin from Ukraine, THE personal secretary to Mikhail Khodorkovsky the richest man in Russia and owner of the following companies:

Chairman CEO: YUKOS OIL (Russian Most Largest Oil Company)
Chairman CEO: Menatep SBP Bank (A well reputable financial institution with its branches all over the world)

SOURCE OF FUNDS:
The documents of the above funds in question was handed over to me to be used in payment of an American oil merchant for his last oil deal with my boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Already the funds have been deposited with Bank Menatep Russia where the final crediting is expected to be carried out. While I was on the process, My Boss got arrested for his involvement on politics in financing the leading and opposing political parties (the Union of Right Forces, led by Boris Nemtsov, and Yabloko, a liberal/social democratic party led by Gregor Yavlinsky) which poses treat to President Vladimir Putin second tenure as Russian president. You can catch more of the story on this news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3213505.stm - 37k - 21 Sep 2004

YOUR ROLE:
All I need from you is to stand as the beneficiary of the above quoted sum and I will arrange for the documentation, which will enable Bank Menatep Russia transfer, the sum to you. I have decided to use this sum to relocate to American continent and never to be connected to any of Mikhail Khodorkovsky conglomerates. The transaction has to be concluded in 2 weeks before Mikhail Khodorkovsky is out on bail.

Thank you very much. Please further correspondence to me, should be sent to my private and confidential Email Address lagutinyuri@netscape.net I await your reply soonest.
Regards
Mr. Yuriy Lagutin

SUCKERS !

Savai Gandhrva

2004-12-13T05:16:00.000-08:00

Bliss was the weekend because of Savai Gandharva. I attended almost 80% of it. I couldn't attend it last 3 years because of being out of Pune. But this year I had my fun.

It started at 4.p.m. on Friday. Since I had a meeting at office I reached a bit late, around 7. I missed Vibhavari Bandhavkar. (And yes shehanai by KhaLadkar. But he plays every year.) I read a lot of appreciation of her in Datta Marulkar's article. But the performance by Pt. Shivkumar Sharma was superb. He was accompanied by Ustad Shafaat Ahmed on Tabla. The jugalbandi was a good fun. What I like in Shafaat Ahmed apart from his art is his style to play tabla. He sits still and just his hands move (unlike some other Tabla mastros).

After him were Balmurali Krishna and Pt. Jasraj. Both I couldn't enjoy. This was the first time, I was listening Balmurali Krishna live. I mostly listen to Hindustani classical sangeet and not karnataki. That may be one reason why I couldn't appreciate it much. But I found it like a music tuition going on. And I was surprised to see the next day's newspapers calling this vocal performance as the specialty of the day! Pt. Jasraj, I like to listen to his cassettes but not him in live performance. So I actually left when he started. When he enters he gives "Aashirvad" to people :-) I find it pretty funny. He then starts behaving like a prophet. He explains how he feels the same while singing allah and raam. I personally find it pretty dramatic. And the worst I have observed is not letting others sing and get appreciation. It many times happen that the "shishya"s accompanying the "guru" on tanpura, help him in background during laykari or taan. Whenever such shishyas sing a good piece, Jasraj always cuts them. This I have observed atleast during his last 3 concerts. Even during savai he started making fuss about mike and sound system and all. I left in 10 minutes after his stage arrival.

The next day I reached an hour late. Padma Talwalkar sang very nicely. Then it was Ayaan Ali Bangash on Sarod. He played raaga "ZinzoTi". Vijay Ghate was on Tabla. It was a typical nice jugalbandi. BTW Ayaan ali has grown his hair and looks really nice. As usual the "nivedak" didn't do a good job and got confused between Santoor and Sarod. :-) The best performer of the day was Girija Devi. She sang khyal, thumari and dadara. After that she was requested to sing a Tappa which she didn't. But she sang a similar chaiti, followed by Jhoola. Her shishya Urvashi Jha also performed very well. Both of them "based the shadja" in awesome manner. The icing on the cake was the bhairvai-"babul mora naihar chuto jaye". This song has two meanings. It can be looked upon and a song by "atma that is leaving its body" and a song by "a bride who is leaving her dad's home". Girija Devi showed how differently either one of these can be conveyed. According to me this was perhaps the best performance of this year's savai.

Sunday, I attended complete morning session and left early during night. Couldn't attend Firoz Dastur and Bhimsen. N. Rajam on violin was best as usual. She showed difference between Gajkari and Gayaki style by playing just one "taan". Though "Payo ji maine" and "Naravar Krishna-samaan" are her favorites, which I had heard twice before, I could enjoy it again with the same pleasure. Next was Ulhash Kashalkar. His bhairavi was a feast for ardent classical music fans. Shaunak Abhisheki performed nice during evening. He sang "He suranno chandra vha", which is one of my favorite songs. But I still like it in Archana Kanhere's voice. Sujat Khan played sitar well. I haven't listened to him a lot. I can still remember Ravi Shankar's sitar that I had heard some 5 years back.

Anyway, Savai was nice. Had a great weekend. I have decided to buy the "chair" tickets next time.

Mulagi vayat ali ki

2004-12-09T21:37:00.000-08:00

This is entirely my personal opinion. Well, the whole blog is that so if you feel its brain dead its your problem and not mine.

Anyway, I know some girls who are quite older in their age and are still unmarried. The haven't crossed thirty but they should have got married by now as per normal trends and traditions. And I have observed some common problems with them.

Basically these are women who have no specific reason to delay getting married, its not that they don't want to get married, its just that they haven't got yet. And day by day the chances are getting grim.

My observations about them are as follows:

* They have completely screwed up life outside office.
* They hardly have good friends, most of those are getting married or have already gotten married and they don't have time for these ppl. Also these females start feeling bad when they see these friends and hence avoid them.
* They earn a lot and have no bindings on spending the money, they have full time on weekend but don't know how to spend it. So they are always looking for a full time companion.
* They go out of their way to do anything for this companion because of the fear of losing someone who listens to them.
* They start posing their possessiveness on this person, and get completely frustrated when it doesn't get respected.
* They generally start developing interests in short-time fun activities.
* They develop "I don't care about the world" kind-of attitude and hence cross most of the social limits.
* Hence gradually end up being cynical and obnoxious for others.

And I feel the root of all these is into not having a good companion.

Its an old saying that "Mulagi vayat ali ki ticha lagna karun takava". With the time this definition of "yogya vay" (correct age) might change but the saying is still true.

Blog : Most searched word of the year

2004-12-05T23:47:00.000-08:00

CNN has a story that is a great validation for the growing popularity of blogs. Merriam Webster, a famous dictionary publisher, claims that the word "blog" is their top word of the year, based on total number of web searches. As a result, the word BLOG will be added to the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.

A good article on outsourcing

2004-12-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000556.html

Savai Gandharva Schedule

2004-11-30T22:27:00.000-08:00

Dates : 10, 11 and 12 Dec 2004
Place : New English School, RamaN-baug, Shanivar Peth, Pune.

Tickets are available at :
Alurkhar Music House (Kothrud)
Behre Ambevale (Shanipar)
Dinshaw and Co. (Laxmi Road)
Navadikar Musicals (Sadashiv Peth)

Rates:
Rs. 1200 for chair
Rs. 250 for bharatiya baithak

Program details :
---------------------------
Friday : 10th Dec. 4.00 pm.
---------------------------
Shehanai : SharadKumar KhaLadkar
Santur : Shivkumar Sharma
Vocal : Vibhavari Bandhavkar (First-timer)
    Balamurali KrishNa
        Satyasheel Deshpande
        Pt. Jasraj

-----------------------------
Saturday : 11th Dec. 4.00 pm.
-----------------------------
Vocal : Girish Sanzgiri (First-timer)
        Padma TaLvalkar
        Malini Rajurkar
        Girija Devi
Sarod : Aman Ali Bangash (Ustad Amjad Ali Khan's son)

---------------------------
Sunday : 12th Dec. 8.00 am.
---------------------------
Vocal : Raghunandan PaNashikar
        GaNapati Bhat
        Ulhas KashaLkar
Violin : M.Rajam (Sangeeta Shankar's daughter)

---------------------------
Sunday : 12th Dec. 4.00 pm.
---------------------------
Sundri : Chidanand Jadhav
Vocal : Shaunak Abhisheki
Sitar : Sujat Khan
Dance : Birjoo Maharaj
Vocal : Firoz Dastur

Mahotsav will end with Pt. Bhimasenji's performance, as usual.

Programs are supposed to end at 10 pm. But a special request has been
sent to C.M. Vilasrao Deshmukh for extending the time.

Haveli ki Umar Saath Saal.

2004-11-29T23:31:00.000-08:00

This is some old saying from north. It means that no empire lasts long. The explanation they have is this. The first generation may be one or two ppl. create the empire by sheer hard-work, brain and dedication. The second generation rules it but these people are always behind the power and they cause the cracks at several places. The third generation turns out to be completely ignorant with all these, perhaps they just don't want this life and they find interests in Arts/Music and spend their life in peace. And the Haveli dies in 60 yrs.

I don't know what the third generation of Ambanis will do. But at least to some extent this is turning out true with them. Though I don't know much about business and financial sector, even I had thought initially that this would be some game to get the share prices down, buy them and sell in future to get huge money. But its not that. This is a serious battle. And it seems it has a lot many links behind it. One to BJP's failure other to Sahara Group and many others. Lets see what happens.

May be Dhirubhai's sons are finding Duniya to be a bit big to hold in one mutthi, so now they will try it with two.

Some paradoxes

2004-11-23T20:43:00.000-08:00

* If a person doesn't miss any opportunity of missing any opportunity then is he opportunistic?

* Is the difference between the matter of fact and a matter of opinion, a matter of fact or matter of opinion?

Going deeper in financial sector

2004-11-18T21:22:00.000-08:00

My understanding of financial sector, investments, tax-rules etc is really very bad. I think my usual ways of "learning" don't fit here. When I try to go in details I get bogged down by a lot of rules/terms-conditions and details. For example, I just read that KMart and Sears are going to merge. And I also knew that KMart had filed bankruptcy. Now my question is how can then KMart buy other company. On more search I found that this is possible with Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Which is for the purpose of reorganization !

So I searched on Chapter 11 bankruptcy to understand what it is. And I find that there are Chapter 7,11,13 and many different kinds of them. And when I read about that I am totally lost. No doubt these consultants are paid so well.

Remix (F)art !

2004-11-18T20:47:00.000-08:00

A lot has been said about the recent remix pop albums. I have nothing new to add. And anyway my knowledge of them is really poor. Please don't get surprised. I don't like to watch them and whenever I have tried I have found them sick. Also being a old music lover, I don't enjoy the remix pieces that screw up the original melody and mood. My luck is so bad though that when I am browsing through various channels, bitter-half drops in when the channel showing these albums is on, and I am in process of going ahead but she feels I am changing it because she appeared.

Anyway, today I happened to see one such song, "Jadugar saiiyya." Song from a movie Nagin, lyrics by Shailendra, sung by Lata and Hemant Kumar. This album shows the girl with some atrocious clothes, total cloth used for whatever she wears must be less than half a meter. What does "chhodo meri baiyya" mean here? There isn't any baiyya at all. And forget that, the two piece she wears is so tight that no one will be able to hold any part of the cloth unless there is some elastic there. Its hard to imagine that such girl will say "ho gayi aadhi raat, ab ghar jaane do". Beats me what these video makers are upto.

Want a pet dog?

2004-11-16T22:03:00.000-08:00

I always wanted to have a pet dog. But my mom never let me have one. Now the wife has joined her and it is perhaps impossible for me to have a dog at home. But now there is aibo for people in the same situation of mine. I am damn sure they are not going to buy it. I feel this is a product for weirdos or socially outcast geeks. Check out the link for photos. The page has severals links to such gadgets. Swiss knife with USB drive, keyboard with built-in memory reader and what not. Watch out the hot babe too. And now about the doggie..

Would you like a dog without the hassle of buying food and cleaning poop? The next generation Aibo has a sleeker look and some interesting tricks. If you can afford it, the Aibo is a cool pet that attracts a great deal of attention (especially from women!)

The new Aibo has 22 joints and a pressure sensitive back and head, so it can sense you petting it and tickling its neck. The on/off switch is on the back of the neck and is very satisfying to push when the robot dog goes on a rampage. I call it the Commander Data kill switch, as the dog immediately goes slack and crumples to the ground when you push the switch.

Aibo charges himself by sitting down in a charging station, which has a black-and-white pattern that the robot recognizes. Special action cards can make the Aibo do tricks and dance (yes - it dances). Simply hold the card up to Aibo's face and the camera will recognize the pattern and perform the programmed action.

The new Aibo does some cool tricks with the included pink bone and ball. When you put either toy in front of the Aibo, he will become "happy" and start wagging his tail. He will try to pick up the bone with his mouth. During the puppy stage, he isn't very accurate and will often miss the bone or drop it.

Watching the robot dog play with the pink ball is something else. At first, he just knocks it around with his head and feet. Later, as the dog matures, he will roll the ball onto its back, let it fall and kick it in mid-air. Leave it up to Sony to program in these cool tricks.

The new Aibo has built-in 802.11 Wifi. You set the SSID and WEP key on the Sony MemoryStick, and pop it into the bottom of the Aibo. With special Sony software, you can control Aibo remotely, and even snap pictures with his face-mounted webcam.

The Aibo ERS-7M2 comes in either black or white for a cool $1,900. You can order it from the Sony Aibo website, or purchase it at the nearest Sony store.

Cool ad.

2004-11-16T21:16:00.000-08:00

Just saw a coolest advertisement. It says "HAPPY FATHER's DAY ... to all who used our competitor's products ........ Durex" Hats off!

Is Indian Idol supposed to dance well?

2004-11-08T23:25:00.000-08:00

Saw the current popular show on Sony. Indian Idol, desi version of American Idol. Annu Malik plays a bad man there, and Sonu Nigam plays a kind heart. But I don't understand why Farah Khan is the third judge. No doubt she is a a good choreographer. But is Indian Idol supposed to be a dancer. Even though one has to perform a bit in the live shows, these singers are not supposed to dance like Hritik Roshan. And even if their dance is pathetic (for example "main-koi-ainsa-geet-gaaon" fame Takalu Abhijeet), people accept them if they do a sane job at singing. I feel, it would have been better to have anyone of Kavita Krishnamurthy or Sadhana Sargam or Alka Yagnik or even Hema Sardesai (Yuckkkkkkkkkkkk).

Encyclopedia of Mythology

2004-11-08T23:13:00.000-08:00

Found the encyclopedia of mythology on the net.
It explains many Indian Mythological Terms.
Examples of some new terms I found

Abarimon
The people of Abarimon were said to have their feet turned backward. One might think they could not get around very well, but, according to legend, they were such fast runners that no one else could keep up with them.

Ammavaru
An ancient goddess of India who existed before the beginning of time. She laid an egg that hatched into the divine trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva

Bombay Kamayan (?)
A Hindu local disease goddess of Gaya

Dyaus Pita
Dyaus or Dyaus Pita was the Sky Father of Indian myth. His counterpart was Prthivi, the Earth Goddess, and the two of them were originally one entity called Dyavaprthivi. He was the father of Indra. In one form, he is seen as a bull, reddish in color, and whose bellowing is the thunder. He is also seen as a black steed covered in pearls. In the latter representation he is the night, with the pearls as the stars.

Vishal Patel rocks

2004-11-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

Have a look at Vishal Patel's home page. I was pointed to Giant Robot article on this site by a mail. The article made me feel nostalgic about the serial I loved in my early school days. When I happened to look at the other articles, I couldn't refrain from reading all of them. Quite unusual thing about the articles is the number of images used. I have hardly seen any site like this. Enjoy !

Smoking Bimbos on Marathi Small Screen

2004-11-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

Those who are hit by a misfortune of their moms watching the 8 to 10 p.m. serials on Marathi Channel must have realized what I am going to talk about. Bandhan-Avantika-vadaLwaT and now a new kid on the block, Adhuri-ek-kahaNi. These two hours almost suck you out.

Recently, smoking bimbos have started appearing in these serials. No, I am not talking about smoking hot bimbos, marathi screen is yet to "mature" for that. I am talking about showing sane females smoking. Yes, we are not behind in the race!

Avantika has started showing Sumukhi Pendse smoking. One can easily understand the director's standpoint here. Avantika the heroine is going to marry Sumukhi's ex-husband. Sumukhi is shown to be furious with this. But a point in her favor is her daughter not being happy about "Avantika Aunty" being her mom. Now the audience may also feel that it is valid. So the director *has to* project Sumukhi as a Vamp. And how does he do that? He puts a cigarette in her mouth. Quite usual I feel. But watch Adhuri Ek KahaNi. The heroine, one of the central characters, sane girl, not at all vampish, smokes. Smokes because its part of her life. Hummm. Ab aayega maza. Aage aage dekhate hai hota hai kya.

I spent almost 2 years in Delhi, and I was staying in Greater Kailash 2. One of the richest areas of South Delhi. My mom saw a female from a "good house"(?) smoking and she was very shocked. I tried to convince her that she may see this in Pune too, but she wasn't ready to accept. Marathi serial makers are making my job easier. I am quite sure, my mom will be able to recognize the brands of liquor in few years from now.

World Class features of IITB

2004-10-31T23:31:00.000-08:00

Some days back, IITB Alumni Association formally kicked off its Pune Chapter. There was a meet, panel discussion and dinner at Chandrasekhar Auditorium, Pune. A lot of Bigwigs and Honchos appeared there and in general it turned out to be a good function.

IITB director did his speech with a nice presentation. But the most painful part I found there was the start. He started his speech showing H-12 and H-13, IITB's new hostels and spent at least 5-6 minutes in explaining their various features and attributes making them world class. Saint-Gobain adv types glasses, elevators, top class architecture and what not. But why should people care about world class hostels? And that too just 2 in the campus? Is IIT an institute to build world class buildings? It is supposed to be a world class education and research institute. Show me those things first! Why should I care about how the hostels look? Why should the diro have such wrong priorities? Beats me.

My Poem

2004-10-29T01:12:00.000-07:00

I had written it some 2-3 years back. Somebody sent to me by mail today. Perhaps he didn't know I was the creator. He tells me that the poet has same name as mine :-) View it here

Has Joel run out of topics?

2004-10-25T05:33:00.001-07:00

I am a fan of Joel Spolsky. I have read some of the archives from his blog at least 4-5 times. I like his writing style. I like the logically put matter too. I remember my college days when I hated reading about Software Engineering the most. But Mythincal Man Months changed my views after I started my job. This is a second article collection that has taught me many good things about my daily job. It also pointed me to some good sites, books. (Yes, I got the reference of "Curious Incident ..." from this site. I want to read pragmatic programmer and peopleware after reading about their reviews)

But for last few months, I have started feeling that Joel has done his job. Its finished ! He is now running out of subjects and topics. And blog has started deviating from its old quality of matter.

There have been attempts to launch public discussions, in order to get topics to write. Which I find a bit sad. Joel my dear, sher agar ghas khaye to achcha nahi lagta!

Pe. Ru. Cha. Pa. Pa.

2004-10-25T05:23:00.000-07:00

Some of you (especially absent minded ghaTi fellas) may recognize that this is to remind yourself of what you need to take with you before leaving your house. Pen, Rumal(Hanky), Chavi(Keys), Pass, Pakit(Billfold). In Marathi Perucha Papa literally means, Kiss of Guava. Life has not remained so simple though. See my list

Pen
Hanky
Home Keys
Car Keys
Gate Keys
Billfold
Cell-phone
Digital Diary
USB Drive
Car stereo
Watch
Company I-Card
Driving License
Debit Card
Medical Insurance Card

And I need to ensure that I have these with me when I leave my home as well as office. And I many times forget some of these. Now some of these I can keep together at one place but I am very much afraid of loosing too many things at the same time. So I am thinking of putting a reminder on my cell phone twice a day with this list. Lets see how it works.

Back from Vacation

2004-10-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

I was on leave for a week. Had a nice break. I am getting a feeling that I should take atleast one-month break every two years. Lets see how well do I succeed.

Got the car

2004-10-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

I have got my car. Brand-new black WagonR. And in two days I drove it for 230 kms. Took it to all the corners of the city. It was needed to raise the confidence of my family in me. I haven't yet finished all my driving lessons. So its quite natural that they feel, I shouldn't be much adventurous. But I was really really confident & I wanted them to realize this. And I am successful in my mission. Generally the truth table for knowing any skill goes like this,

You know that you know
You know that you don't know
You don't know that you know
You don't know that you don't know.
And I proved that mine was the first case.

Getting a car is dream coming true for me. I was very excited on the day when I took the delivery. Now I am feeling much normal, as if I had it for days. Finding much sense in the "Alchemist"!

Yuhoooooooooooo

2004-10-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

I am all excited. I am getting my car tomorrow !

Fashion for weirdos!

2004-10-14T23:50:00.000-07:00

Satya Paul has launched a Jassi Collection and the minimum cost of dress is 1500Rs. Look here. Don't come to my home if you are wearing these.

Measuring house-wife skills

2004-10-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

Sahyadri channel hosts a program called "Hello Sakhi" where some personality gets interviewed and people ask their questions by phone. Typical "hello hello, haan haan, bola bola" program. Yesterday's personality was Seema Dev. Ramesh Dev's wife and Ajinkya Dev's mom. One of the successful heroines of Marathi Cinema.

One female called up and asked her, what do you say about Seema Dev as house-wife? Do you think you have done justice to that role. Her answer was yes(as expected). To convince it she said, in fact I have always been more untidy than full time house-wives.

Hello? Hello, Hello?? Is untidiness a scale to measure how good one is as house-wife??? Beats me! Bola bola Seema Dev.

Indian Diaspora

2004-10-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

I glanced through a paper "India s Transformation to Knowledge-based Economy Evolving Role of the Indian Diaspora". Its quite interesting. It gives some reasons why it will be difficult for other diaspora communities to duplicate the Indian experience, one of it is

- Persons of Indian Origin in the US, UK and Canada have always had enough friends and colleagues who studied with them in the same schools and colleges in India but who decided to stay in India. Hence the US-Indian stage has always been well primed for proper nurturing and mentoring . In other words, if some PIOs have innovative ideas and want to do some thing in India and they can persuade their age-old friends and colleagues to execute it. Many countries will suffer in this regard because most good professionals in these countries have migrated to developed countries andthere simply aren't enough professionals in these countries to take such ideas forward.

Hummmmmmmmmm.

Hame to luT liya accesories walon ne

2004-10-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

Music System
+ Front power Windows
+ Central locking with remote
+ Coating
+ Sun films
+ Seat Covers
+ Lighter
+ Reverse horn
+ All other crap
-------------------------------
35K+
:-O

Dates Vs. Days

2004-10-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

I have a problem with talking in terms of days. I get confused very quickly because, I always go with dates instead of days. And when someone asks me why don't we meet next Saturday, I can't say yes or no immediately because I need to convert this Saturday into its date and then decide.

Now when I think if this is only the problem with me, sometimes I get the answer as yes. But recently I have observed that people who refer to both dates and days arbitrarily, generally mess up with them a lot. So I am at least better than them since I stick to single reference method.

I find it pretty easy to go with dates for a very simple reason. I can anytime convert them to days. Some books or sites will tell you how to identify day for any given date. Those methods are fairly complex. And you hardly need them in your life. What you need to deal with, for most of the times are dates from the previous, current and next year only. Let me tell you how I deal with them.

I just remember the first Sunday of every month of current year. So till 31st Dec. I will be remembering 4,1,7,4,2,6,4,1,5,3,7,5. Now I can find day for any date in the current year very easily. If you want to find the day for some date in the next year, find the day for the same date in the current year. And add one day to it, if you not crossing leap year boundary. Or add two days if you are crossing the leap year boundary. Thats it! This is because 365 modulo 7 is 1.

For those who have read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I may sound a bit like Christopher Boone. But believe me, I am much much saner character.

Advertising M.N.L.N.

2004-10-14T02:45:00.000-07:00

Advertising is a creative art. Everybody agrees. But blind copy of known formulas just doesn't work here. This is what the post is about. I call it M.N.L.N in advertising. M.N.L.N stands for "mor nachala landor nachali". Its a proverb in Marathi which one can literally translate to English as "Peacock danced (and hence) peahen danced".

One of the techniques used by good advertisements is "shock treatment" or "twist at the end". When you are watching the add, you don't get much clue about the product, and just at the end it comes as a pleasant surprise to you. Here are some examples

* You see a man doing all kind of wrong things in a flight. He doesn't know how to pull back the chair, he doesn't know where to keep the served lunch, etc. A kid sitting next to him is showing him these things and has an expression "What a fool, he doesn't know these basic things!". Finally the kid goes to sleep and the man orders a blanket. He is a pilot of Indian Airlines plane in which the kid travels.

* A couple is standing in a balcony in night-time, singing a song meaning even moon has spots on it. They look behind and the spots of the moon are gone, they are looking at the reflection of the moon in IFB washing machine.

* A guy is having jogging exercise and he meets his regular visitors on the road. You come to know that these sequences happen everyday in his life. A newspaper boy throws the newspaper at him, just as it happens every day and the guy jumps to catch it. His jump goes a bit higher and he misses the paper. The boy says "Oh! New shoes!" And then the camera shows you the shoes for just some seconds.

Its a pleasure watching such art work. Now see how M.N.L.N adds screw up this technique.

A girl is carrying a cell phone. A guy is talking from some distance to her on cell. You feel that some cupid arrow exchange will take place. Then he asks her about lightness of her mobile. She says 73.some grams by weighing it on "Phoenix weighing machine". You got the shock, there was a twist! Wasn't it there? If you talk IIT lingo you say "Dayaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"!

More about recursion

2004-10-14T01:28:00.000-07:00

I used to teach a course on Algorithms in an institute called Quantum. They were offering MS in computer science in collaboration with UIUC. Most of it was by distance learning. But it wasn't enough, hence they had some visiting lecturers like me. (Suckers paid me just one third and closed their shop)

The class had students from varied background. 2-3 fresh B.Com.s, One marine engineer with 6yrs exp. , 2 BTechs from IIT with around 10+ yrs of non-cs exp., One electrical engg. with 20 yrs of exp., One fresh B.E in cs and some others. You can visualize a class like Jaban-Sambhalake! Teaching Algorithms to them was a nightmare.

I found it very difficult to teach recursion to them. The course designer from UIUC was a big fan of recursion and in all his solutions he used to call the method as "blessings from recursion fairy". I tried all sorts of things. But it just didn't work out for some of them. I don't know why. This made me think (or rather realize) that one needs the ability of "thinking in recursion". And it is not something that you can teach.

One very senior person at HCL Perot Systems, asks a guy to write a function to get factorial of a number. If the guy doesn't get it right and he has experience of more than 3 years, he gets rejected. Otherwise the interview continues. And believe me, it wasn't much of a surprise for me. I am sure one can find a lot of people messing around basic recursion techniques, because they can't "think in recursion".

This is the reason why Bruce Eckel has his book titles as Thinking in Python, Thinking in Java, Thinking in Patterns and Thinking in C++. It is simple to do programming in Python, but its not simple to "think" in Python. Its simple to do programming in Java, but its not simple to "think" in Java.

Is there any book about thinking in recursion?

Watching Right Channels

2004-10-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

Hobbes : "It says here that by the age of 6, most children have seen a million muders on television."
Calvin: "I find that very disturbing...it means I've been watching all the wrong channels."

Khubsoorat : What I don't like

2004-10-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

When watching T.V. I spend most of the time switching between channels. I guess this is true with many of us. So just saw Khubsoorat being showed on some channel. I am talking about Rishikesh Mukherjee's Khubsoorat, not the one by Sanjay Chhel (Sanju baba and Urmila's). I like this movie. And I don't want to talk about why, because most of the readers will have more than 70% of intersection between their views and mine.

The part of this movie which I don't like is the song Kayda Kayda. I can't stand watching it. Seriously. Lyrics by Gulzar is nice, and so is the music. What I can't stand is the character who has these questions being Ranjeet Chowdhary.(One who wants to be like Sunil Gawaskar in Khatta-Meetha). Ranjeet plays Rekha's brother-in-law in movie. He is shown to be at least 15 years old in Khubsoorat. I am saying at least. And when I think about this, suddenly the questions asked in the song by him appear idiotic to me! I can't expect a guy of this age asking those. And then the song sucks and I change the channel.

BTW, Ranjeet Chowdhary was seen in Kaante after a long time.(At least I was him after a long time in the movies.) Kaante was released in 1st week of July. So what? Well, action movies that are released in the first week of July stand high probability to make a good business! This is what data mining says. This fact was a news to me when Dr. Jayant Haritsa mentioned it in ETDT.

TV-t-TV

2004-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

I was watching Avantika (a.k.a Ravanthika). sumukhi pendse was shown to be watching T.V. So there was T.V. inside my T.V. showing something else. I used to like this a lot when I was a kid. I used to call it TV-t-TV. I used to think what would happen if this inner T.V. is also showing the same serial and then I will have (countably) infinite T.V. s inside T.V. And I used to enjoy that thought a lot. I had no idea at that point that I will get introduced to this kind of thinking in future under the name of recursion.

Then started WadaL-WaaT. Characters Aba Chaudhari(ShwAs fame aruN nalawaDe) and his wife sulakshaNa were talking about their lost daughter-in-law. The dialog went like this

Aba: Do you believe she will come back?
sulakshaNa : Yes, I strongly believe so. What about you?
Aba : I have a strong belief in your belief.

So this was recursive call no. 1. And I again thought that what if sulakshaNa says that I have a belief in your belief in my belief !

With some superstition I was looking for the similar phenomenon being telecasted the third time. But it didn't happen. Or may be I was not watching the right channel at the right time.

At the end of the first blogging day

2004-10-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

Me : So Mukul, how do you feel at the end of your first day of blogging?

Myself : Well, I feel this is going to be another addiction for me in near future.

Me : What all things addict you?

Myself : Everything that gives me a kick !

Me : Does this mean you are addicted to your wife?

Myself : X-( No more questions please.

First Voting Experience

2004-10-13T01:26:00.000-07:00

Not so great. Not bad as well. They were asking for some photo ID. Bitter half showed its passport. One of the officers in the booth asked if that was a new type of Election Card! I can understand if he couldn't differentiate pan card from identity card. But passport???

Musical Moods

2004-10-13T01:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I listened to a song "Mora saiya mose bole na .." on Zee Music. This song comes from a fusion category. Making a good fusion music is not a very easy job. There are many small factors which when go wrong take the "mazaa" out of the creation. (Quite analogous to the making of "Sabudanyachi Khichadi") But Mora saiya is really a nice creation.

So I went to my music shop to get this album. Unfortunately it wasn't available. It was almost 10 in the night and I was the only customer present there. So I got a peaceful time to look at various sections and I brought some 10-12 cassettes back home. (No need to say that the two females at home found it quite erratic. Two females : Always-on-you mom and the bitter half)

Surprisingly, I managed to listen to 5 of those in the night and the morning and here are my findings

Piya Bawari : Fusion by Abhijit (Abhijit Pohankar and not the Takalu, high conceited, 50 year young, main-koi-aisa-geet-gaun fame Abhijit). Singers : Ajay Pohankar and Arati Ankalikar. A real nice album. 2-3 compositions seem to be similar, but still a great job, raising the expectations from Abhijit in future. I am waiting for my car to get delivered, and I am sure this is going to be one of the most frequently played albums in my car in the initial driving days.

Abstract : By Adnan Sami. This goes well with the name. The music is really abstract. Not a common man's taste. But it was okay for me. (I am a bit commonly uncommon U Know!) He is known as the fastest keyboard player. Looking at him its quite hard to believe that the his movements on the keyboard can't be seen sometimes.

Natyasangeet by Asha Khadilkar : One of fountain music collection set. Again okay. Nothing much to say.

Prabhatkalin Geete : I was waken up by these. This has collection of BhoopaLis which are songs to wake up Gods! Bitter half played it to wake up her pati-parameshwar. A good collection. But sometimes I don't understand these cassette companies. They introduce some songs which don't fit the concept of the collection. For example, "Rama Raghunandana".. this is not a morning song. Not also composed in Raga BhoopaLi.(On a related note, in the morning I realised that it is based on the same Raga that Zoothe naina bole from Lekin is composed in). Readers please correct me if I am wrong to identify its not BhoopaLi.

Kahen : By Satyasheel Deshpande. Collection of some of the "Bandish"s. I slept when this was turned on. Don't read the earlier sentence with a satirical perception. I am not commenting about the album here. I will let you know if it is a good medicine on insomnia.

ETDT Review

2004-10-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

I attended National Symposium on Emerging Trends in Database Technologies on this weekend. I wrote a report of this event for GS-Lab. Find it here.

Report On National Symposium on Emerging Trends in Database Technology

The Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Alumni Association of COEP and CSI, Pune jointly conducted a National Symposium on 9th and 10th October 2004 on the topic Emerging Trend In Database Technology. This has been one of the major events that COEP has organized to celebrate its 150th year of completion. It was sponsored by TCS, Sybase, IBM, Infosys and PSPL.

This is a summary document briefing the various sessions that took place during the symposium.

--------------------------
Day 1 : 9th October.
--------------------------

9.00 - 11.00 : Inaugural Session
--------------------------------

Inaugural Address :

Dr. Vishwas Mahajan, CEO of Compulink was a chief guest and he gave the inaugural address. His address was very short. But during it, he made a really important point where he said that till now technology has been given 80% of importance and content has been given only 20% of it. Quoting Gartner Research, he said that this is going to get flipped in the future.

Keynote Address :

Keynote address was given by Dr. D.B. Phatak, Head of IT dept, I.I.T. Bombay. DBP talked about the emerging trends and his vision about the future research needs for Database Technologies. It was a magnetizing speech by DBP (as usual). Unfortunately he couldn't
prepare slides for his presentation, otherwise it would have become even more interesting.

His talk was divided into three parts. Evolution of Database Technologies, Current challenges and Future. In the evolution part he mentioned how Database Technologies had a drastic change when industry moved from Tapes to Disk. This part was something that all the people who have done a course in Databases know about.

The current challenges he mentioned are

* Proliferation of available technologies from research arena not matching hardware speeds : Hardware technologies get decided based on two major factors, affordability and availability. With both of these being improved drastically, there is a scope to exploit new
technologies at hardware level. But the DB research has always been behind in this race. Hence the solutions that are available from research which get used don't exploit the hardware. We need to minimize this mismatch.

* Lack of activity in Embedded Databases : To quote DBP - "Embedded Systems are going to be the pioneer of the next wave of IT Proliferation in humanity". There is not much activity happening in this area. We need to do more work here.

* Lack of good techniques for integration of structured and unstructured information.

* SQL being used too heavily, almost the only mechanism used in BI world : We are being a lot more conventional than needed, with our BI approach. Derived values are always being derived instead of being stored. Solutions always worry a lot on consistency. To handle the
real-time BI requirements, one needs to think beyond conventional ways. DBP explained this point using the Market Trend Analysis systems.

* Affordable Database Technology needs to be promoted : Especially for countries like India, Database Technology needs to be available at affordable price with a compromise on performance (Since many solutions that don't need to handle humongous data are right now not
using DBs due to high pricing.)

* Open Source technologies have arcane licensing schemes : We need to have technologies in open source without such complex legal matters.

* Lack of localization support : For India, we need to have Database Technologies providing a good localization support.

* Integrated Application Building : Technology researchers need to get close to business solution. Solutions in search of a problem don't help at all. For India where every penny earned counts, developers and applied researchers need to think of customer problems, always !

* Lack of good generic Workflow and Rule engines : No one is paying much attention to these. And every time the Rules appear ending in application logic partly. This also needs to be made a part of course work for students.

Regarding the vision for future technologies he said

* The next big transition the industry will see, is from disks to memory. Hence all the technologies need to be changed to exploit high memory availability.

* Ascii interface between the humans and machines will change. The most natural interface is voice and gestures. Applications will need to handle it. And this will also be part of Data to be handled.

Apart from these DBP made the following general points

* We need to learn to tackle hard problems. We most of the times end up solving simple problems that don't teach us much.

* Quality of articulation needs to be improved

11.30 - 12.30 : Session 1 - Presentation 1
------------------------------------------

Topic : Cause and Effect of Data Volume Growth in Today's Business
Intelligence World.

Speaker : Chase Hacker,
Sales Directory, Business Intelligence
Sybase Worldwide field of Operations,
Asia-Pacific

Chair : Dr. Shridhar Shukla,
GS-Lab

Chase talked about information overload, today's emerging trend. He gave some charts and citations to stress his point. Then he talked about typical reporting approaches where he introduced Data Warehousing and compared the pros and cons of OLTP, replicated and
Warehouse based reporting. He then made further predictions about how this overloading problem will scale in future.

Next he talked about the historical approach of choosing row-based data storage for Database Tables that is optimized for write performance. For a different world where readers are more than writers he characterized the reader processes. He then explained how a completely opposite way of storing the tables column-wise can handle various issues needed for read intensive operations. He made a point that sometimes a totally different thinking method can help solving a problem.

He then discussed Sybase solution that uses grid computing to deal with this data explosion issue. Finally he talked about the RDBMS/OLAP marriage.

After that he gave a sales-marketing talk about Sybase and especially its newly launched Pune center. This covered 40% of presentation slides ! Which made pretty clear why he was there in the
conference. Seems that Sybase is pretty aggressive with recruitment these days. The presentation was a good mix of technology and sales talk and was good to attend.

12.30 - 1.30 : Session 1 - Presentation 2
-----------------------------------------

Topic : Evolving Technologies in BI Landscape

Speaker : Alok Kumar
Senior Software Engg.
IBM Software Lab

Chair : Dr. Shridhar Shukla,
GS-Lab

I really have no technical data to report about this presentation. This was the most boring talk during the symposium. The speaker didn't have good oratory skills, and hence the slides appeared to be created by someone else. I really felt bad for IBM. In spite of
having some real good talent in Database Technologies, they sent a person who made them look bad in comparison with other competitors like Oracle or Sybase.

2.30 - 3.30 : Session 2 - Presentation 1
----------------------------------------

Topic : Privacy-Preserving Data Mining

Speaker : Dr. Jayant Haritsa
Supercomputing Research Center,
IISC, Bangalore.

Chair : Dr. Pradeep Sinha
Chief Co-ordinator(R&D),
CDAC

Jayant had a good grasp of common understanding level of audience and hence instead of directly jumping to details, he took a bit of time to explain data mining, association rules and role of privacy in data mining. This turned out to be a real good investment in time, to make
the talk interesting for the audience. He gave some very simple examples from real life and routine internet usage of a general user to motivate the problem.

The second half of the presentation was about the work done by Jayant and his Slaves (as he calls his master students) in privacy preserving association rule mining. The argument here is, association rules give you trend and to get a trend you don't need exact "values" to go as
they are. Generally market-basket data is sparse and contains very few 1s. The data before giving to association rule miner is flipped with some probability. The miner is aware of this probability and it then reconstructs the values with loss of some accuracy and gets the rules
out. Flipping the bits and adding a lot of 1's to actual data assures the privacy of original data. The method is simple but the difficult game is to play with three dimensions privacy, accuracy and performance. Jayant had a nice explanation for this, backed up by
experimental results and theoretical proofs. Without going into glory details of theory he presented the approach well.

Details and references for the talk are available from his IISC page.

I had attended a few talks by Jayant before, and therefore knew that this would be a really interesting and enjoyable presentation and it really turned out to be. Jayant always gives analogies from world of Cricket and his talk always includes some nice witty comments with
which he almost always steals the show.

3.30 - 4.30 : Session 2 - Presentation 2
----------------------------------------

Topic : Email - The world's most killer app is yet to happen

Speaker : Dr. Anand Deshpande,
PSPL

Chair : Dr. Pradeep Sinha

Anand's talk was about managing email overload. He had divided his talk into 3 parts, history of email, overload & current techniques and Persistent's approach toward email management.

In the history part, Anand talked about the evolution of email and various protocols and standards. This was a short part as expected. Then he talked about spams, viruses, phishing etc. Anand had a lot of statistics gathered to stress his points. Then he talked
about some of the methods for controlling these issues.

The main part of his talk was about handling email overload *after* the above mentioned issues get taken care of. The crux of the approach he mentioned is to realize that context is more important than content. He described the various scenarios where email is used and
then proved his point regarding how context plays an important role to organize and search this information. His view was to make the organization automatic based on the discovered context. He then explained how Gmail or Ximian are not complete toward handling the
needs. Using all these he put forward a point that a killer app is needed to make email as a desktop for the executive.

Then he showed some screen shots of Persistent's solution where context is being considered to organize and search the email information. He talked about how header information can be sufficient to grasp some part of context and using it alone one can do much better than
the current applications. Anand ended his talk giving some example uses of context based organization of email.

This is the project for which I was one of the two people working full time. I was happy to see 5-6 slides which I had created for presentation to Anand, being used verbatim in his talk. Example screen shots also had a message addressed to me being showed as on the
big screen :-) Anand didn't mention any implementation related details which I feel is the core of our work. This must be be due to IP issues. He told me after the talk that with Sheshadri now being in Yahoo, he is going to sell this to Shesh and get Yahoo's attention
toward this.

5.00 - 6.00 Day 1 - Session 3
-----------------------------

Panel discussion : Research Opportunities in Database Technology

Chair : Dr. Anand Deshpande,
PSPL

During this session initially three researches gave their views on
this discussion topic.

Speaker 1: Dr. Srinath Srinivasa
IIIT Bangalore.

Dr. Srinath said that conventional DB approach looks at the domain, designs relational model and then puts data into it. But currently we are having a lot of data, which has a schema of its own. There isn't a data model that you can fit all sorts of data into. For example all the data available in unstructured form on net. There isn't a schema or model. The only standard way this data supports is a search by keyword.

There is a lot of research opportunity where one will grasp the model from data, or fit a model onto data. One should be looking at things as a Database instead of extracting information out of it and putting it into Database. For example, ad-hoc network itself should be
considered as Database, and then it should support the DB operations. I couldn't digest this concept !

Speaker 2: Dr. Pradeep Sinha
Chief Co-ordinator(R&D)
CDAC

Dr. Sinha comes from parallel processing background. And he mentioned the research opportunities in this area related to Databases. He said that a lot many opportunities are there to make Databases work on SMP systems, parallel architectures where operator level parallelization
can be exploited.

Speaker 3: Dr. Sachin Lodha
TRDDC

Dr. Sachin, is a theoretician and has recently started looking at Data Mining applications. He said that a lot of work is being done in this area without considering basic theoretical issues like complexity. He mentioned running apriori on 34 attribute transactional data for 100
transactions that couldn't finish in 3 days. He said that people are just coming up with algorithms that are very impractical in real world and work only with synthetic data sets. He sees a lot of research opportunity where well performing algorithms need to be designed for
various tasks in Data Mining.

Then the audience asked some questions to Panel. A good percentage of it was students and faculty members, which didn't really have much idea of the recent technology. They asked very basic questions and sometimes some senseless questions too. There wasn't any interesting
discussion that took place.

Since Anand had mentioned phishing, I asked him about callerId and anti-phishing and he said he is not aware of caller id specification.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Day 2 : 10th October.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

9.30 - 10.30 : Session 1 - Presentation 2
-----------------------------------------

Topic : Trends in Graph Data Management and Mining

Speaker : Dr. Srinath Srinivasa,
IIIT Bangalore

Chair : Dr. Sachin Lodha,
TRDDC

Dr. Srinath Srinivasa presented some state of art work in Graph data mining including his own research work. He mentioned some real life graph data examples like UML Diagrams, Ontologies, Protein Structures and then motivated the problem of graph mining. During this he talked
about various issues regarding representation of graphs in Database, and querying and indexing them. He discussed pros and cons of various representations. GraphML was one of those, the other was a dfs with nodes and edges labeled uniquely.

Then he took a particular sub-problem of finding frequent subgraphs in the graph DB (similar to finding frequent item-sets). He mentioned an approach gSpan that is similar to apriori which builds item-sets of large sizes from those of a smaller size. Then he talked about his
approach FBT which is top-down instead of bottom up. FBT stands for Filteration Based Techniques where nodes and edges are pruned down during subsequent iterations and frequent subgraphs are identified. He compared this with gSpan and gave some anecdotes.

In all it was a good talk and gave a good overview of graph data and its mining.

10.30 - 11.30 : Session 1 - Presentation 2
------------------------------------------

Topic : Open Source Platforms and On Demand Database Applications

Speaker : Dr. Gautam Shroff
Vice President - Technology Programs,
TCS

This was one of very informative talks. Most of the faculty and students would have benefited a lot by this.

Dr. Shroff started the talk by explaining some jargon and licensing issues from Open Source community. He described how different licensing schemes differ. (It was just an overview though, not details)

Then he briefly described why some big companies would also like to promote open source activity. I have read an article by Joel Spolsky which talks exactly the same things but in more detail. Please visit it here http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

Dr. Shroff then described various layers in application software solution and then described the products available from open source community to build the stack. In application servers he seemed to be a big fan of Zope and also of python. On a related note, growing popularity of Python was evident in the symposium. 3-4 speakers appreciated Python (And nobody talked about Perl :-)) which made me a bit happier.

He then praised the LAMP Architecture and gave some examples from industry that has build products using this architecture. It stands for Linux / Apache / Mysql or Postgress and Python/Perl/PHP.

Next he talked about MySQL and PostgressSQL features. He discussed about ISAM and heap tables and how mysql has facility to tune it for performance. (Exactly the same things that Reconnex project does).
To summarize : Mysql is very good for read intensive operations, for write intensive ones, it needs to be tuned. It has a poor locking support though. Postgress is good with row level locking and isolation levels. Also if heavy SQL usage is needed Mysql is a bad choice.

The next comparison he made was among Application servers. On TPC-w benchmark Zope does considerably okay when compared to Weblogic. It has very good horizontal scalability but has a poor vertical scalability.

The final part of the talk was about on demand solutions or utility computing. This is a similar concept to that of ASP but on demand solutions talk about providing easy customization for applications which was not available with ASP. Dr. Shroff said that on-demand will pickup in the next 2-3 years and then providers that provide these business will have to be highly technical. He said these providers will not believe in "Closed" software since they don't give hooks and
ability to check the code for various cases and safety. Hence for utility computing only "Open Software" and "Appliances" will be used.

11.30 - 12.30 : Session 2 - Presentation 1
------------------------------------------

Topic : Database Technologies for Biology

Speaker : Dr. Rajgopal Srinivasan
Advanced Technology Center
TCS, Hyderabad.

This talk made the audience aware of basic challenges and issues in Bioinformatics. Dr. Rajgopal explained basic theory of genes, proteins and microarrays. He talked about publicly available genome databases. The challenges he mentioned in this area are supporting complex data types such as protein structure, efficient and effective integration across them, sophisticated analytical tools and finally very simple interfaces for Biologists.

He talked about some of the possible approaches to handle a few of these issues. The approaches included wrappers for various data. (IBM Discovery Link approach) and warehousing. Finally he said that the product which surprisingly no one is designing is BioInformatics appliance that will have many of these thing built in.

Dr. Rajgopal has PhD in Chemistry. His knowledge of Biology was also very nice. But most impressive thing was his knowledge of Computer Science and Technology. He was talking about NP-Completeness, DNA Computing, Bio-Python and had a good knowledge of those. Overall the
talk was very nice.

12.30 - 1.30 : Session 2 - Presentation 2
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Topic : Information on Demand : Managing Information with DB2

Speaker : Rajesh Shewani
IT Specialist, IBM

This was the second most boring talk. Again from IBM. Full of buzz words without any content. The guy who was talking perhaps just knew IBM products and didn't have much clue of the underlying technical details. He talked about all the products of IBM DB2 family, content manager, Information integrator, spatial extender, XML extender, eXperanto, without giving any details of any one of these. You just name it, and you could find it somewhere in his slides. One can go
to ibm.com and spend 15 minutes around various technologies to get the contents of this presentations. IBMers did a disheartening job !

2.45 - 3.45 : Session 3 - Presentation 1
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Topic : Grid Computing

Speaker : Krishna Mohan IV
Senior Development Manager,
Oracle

This talk covered an introduction to Grid computing and Oracle's product offering in this area. It included a couple of interesting issues like Automatic storage management and transportable
tablespaces. But the talk didn't cover any details about those. Again it was more of Oracle talk rather than Grid Computing talk.

3.45 - 4.45 : Session 3 - Presentation 2
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Topic : Object Oriented Database Systems

Speaker : Alok Mahajan,
Infosys

This was a last presentation of the symposium . And I didn't attend it since from the slides I felt I knew most of it. It was a very basic introduction to object oriented databases. Also IBM and Oracle ppl had managed to make me feel sleepy.

Overall this was a very nice event. It could have been managed a bit well, but perhaps it was the first of its kind experience for many organizers involved. The registration amount was very nominal for the talks. In all it was a paisa-vasool event.

My first post

2004-10-12T22:52:00.000-07:00

I wanted to start writing a blog since long. Why? I don't know. Just felt like it. But since I couldn't find a strong reason to do so, I kept delaying it. Today, for some weird reason I felt like giving a shot to it. Lets see how long does this continue.

~ Mukul