Shifting to Wordpress :-)

My dear friends, I'm shifting my blog to wordpress. The blog may be unavailable for a day or two since I'm experimenting a few things. The experiments will definitely be updated on my tech blog.

Just to assure you, my non-tech blog URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com) and its feed URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com/atom.xml) will continue to work as they were :-). Thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite. The same goes with my tech blog also. The existing links http://tech.aswinanand.com and http://tech.aswinanand.com/atom.xml (for feeds) will work as well. That saves you from updating your feed links ;-). In a day or two, I will be updating my feed burner feeds as well.

Shifting my blog to wordpress, writing a wordpress plugin, wildcard domains, htaccess and mod_rewrite... whoa! All that was such a nice learning experience. Will be posting all that over some time on my tech blog.

Thanks a lot to all my readers :)

Update: The shift has been completed. The old non-tech blog is at http://aswinanand.blogspot.com/ and the old tech blog is at http://techlight.blogspot.com/.

Lock your bikes when you park

So, you are out shopping in the busy Tnagar area in Chennai and you don't find a place to park. After struggling for half hour, you come to terms with a small place with enough place only for a rat to sneak in. Somehow managing the difficulty, you park your brand new Bajaj Pulsar 200 cc bike and set off happilly for shopping.

Now, when you return your bike is lost! How come? You start wondering, start crying and even roll on the road. But the bike won't come back. Here's why.

Just a few days back, I went to the mechanic shop to repair my bike horns because they were not functioning properly. The guy who repaired was small... say may be 14 years old. He challenged me by saying that he could kick-start my bike without the keys! Man.. I was shocked. After meddling with something below the handlebar, he told me to remove the keys from bike. May be offered a small prayer or something but as soon as he kicked on the starter, the bike came to life. He was beaming, all this 32 teeth showing. He went for a small round and came back!

Now you know how many (if not all) bikes get stolen. Never ever forgot to side-lock your bike. If at all your bike was side-locked, even though starting it is not a problem, riding it IS definitely a problem.

Get it? :-)

Echo Club

Hi guys, it's been a long time since I made a post on the blog. I will be back in full swing soon.

But before that, a small news :-) I have been writing a few articles on http://thoughts.clubecho.org/. Please do read them and comment on them.

Independence Day Initiative - Fill up Potholes in the city

A few of my good friends have come with this initiative of filling up potholes in the Chennai city. They will be doing it over a period of 2 days, starting yesterday night and resuming again tonight. Please visit the wiki for more information.

I may be joining them tonight :-)

BarCampBangalore 4 - Day 2

As expected, the rooms running the internet, mobile and startup collectives are packed. Will keep this post updated as the day unfolds :D

Yay!! I got into IIM ...

...for BarCampBangalore 4th edition :D. I'm taking part in the Ruby and the Startups collective.

I attended a few sessions on the Internet collective. But they were pretty boring.

The session by the co-founder of Sloka Telecom, one of the selected companies of the Proto.in first edition, gave an awesome pep talk on how he built his own startup. They are 3 years into it and doing a pretty good job. He made the whole thing look so easy that, the next thing that you want to do after getting back home is to form a startup :D

Another guy from PicSquare (sorry, I forgot his name) also shared his experience. I'm with the ruby collective now. Will keep you updated on this.

Very much looking forward to the Startup collective that is going to continue tomorrow morning.
Oh! yah.. met some pretty cool people, including Freeman, who is organizing SkillsCamp in Pune.

Having a nice time! :D

Update: The ruby collective was damn interesting yesterday. The crowd seems more interested in the internet, mobile and startup space. So, hopefully day 2 will be packed of such sessions.

Change in breakfast

Hi guys, Good Morning !

Just to try out a change in the everyday breakfast, I decided to have cornflakes. So, since this Monday, I'm on cornflakes. Here's my preparation for you to try out.

1. Take a nice bowl and put 2 to 3 handful of cornflakes. Spread them out evenly.
2. Take a small cube of jaggery (called vellam in tamil) and crush it well. Add it to the cornflakes and mix it well by hand. Now, sprinkle some raisins (also called kanja draksha in tamil).
3. Get a half litre packet of cold milk and pour half of the "half litre pack" of milk to the mixture of cornflakes, jaggery and raisins. Don't mix it now.
4. If you have honey, add a dash of it :D
5. Get a banana, preferably ones that are big, such as the famous nenthirampazham or the pachai vazhai pazham (the bananas with the green skin). Cut them into small pieces and add them to the bowl.

Take a spoon and mix it well. Let it rest for a few minutes and then devour it :D

Now, since this is mango season, instead of banana, you can use that also. Take a mango, a ripe one preferably. Peel off its skin properly, cut it into small pieces and add them to the bowl of cornflakes. That would make it delicious. Yesterday I tried out a mixture of both banana and mango and the resulting turned out to be awesome!

Try this out and let me know :D

Love at First Sight

What is love at first sight? According to me, it is the emotional surge that you get when you see something so beautiful or interesting (its relative... meaning, what is beautiful for you may not be beautiful for me) that for a brief moment, it captures your heart and holds your attention. During that hypnostic moment, your eyes don't see anything else, your ears don't listen to anything else. All the available body resources are pooled in to enjoy that "love-at-first-sight" moment. When you come out of the trance, you just laugh it away and all body resources come back to normal.

Yep! as if you had not guessed it by now, I got affected by the love-at-first-sight moment yesterday. And yeah! it nearly burned a Rs.1000/- hole in my pocket. I was shopping yesterday and 1 particular shoe's design caught my eye and I couldn't take my eyes off it :D It was breathtakingly superb. Just loved it. Therefore, I bought it heheh!

Anyway, I'm back after a well-deserved month long break from blogging :-). You can see me posting more frequently from now on.

Cheers...

Which file extension are you?

Was just wasting some time on the internet and found this funny test named "Which file extension are you?". Click on the image below to take the test yourself :)


Which File Extension are You?

Spiderman-3 Review

CRAP !

Read more reviews here.

Event Roundup

Hi guys, I should say a hell a lot of exciting things have been happening for quite some time. Here are the list of events which has been keeping me busy.

Proto.in 2007 SE
Proto.in was a good success last time. Proto.in second edition has been fixed for 21st and 22nd July 2007 at Chennai. Exact location will be put up soon at the proto.in website. As usual, I'm taking care of the website along with Siddharta. An interim website for Proto.in 2007 SE is up at http://www.proto.in/proto2007se. You can also go through the old proto website to learn what this event is about.

If you are a product based startup company, you can nominate yourself now. The nomination closes on 5th June 2007. As last time, 30 companies with amazing products will get a chance to present them on the day of the event. Registrations for participants will start after the nominations are over. Read the blog for more information. Subscribe to the ProtoTalk group to keep yourself updated with the latest happenings.

MoMoChennai
MoMo = Mobile Monday. The venue for the first episode has been fixed as IIT and the event is scheduled for 6th May 2007, which is a sunday. Therefore, this event can also be called as MMS (Mobile Monday on a Sunday) :-). More details here and here.

PodWorks
This is a two day event, focussing on podcasts. This event will consist of crisp workshops on podcasting and hey, you will definitely walk away carrying a lot of satisfaction on acquiring your new skill :-). More details coming soon.

BigRace
This is a challenging race in which with just about Rs.1000/- you should to travel to the farthest destination possible and come back in 10 days. You are not encouraged to carry any money and in case you are in want of money, you can do small part time jobs on your trip :-). This should be very very exciting and if I get a 10 day off at work, then you can see me there. More info at bigrace.pbwiki.com.


*Wipes sweat off the forehead*

Exciting times ahead!!!

Mobile Monday in Chennai

Starting this April, Chennai is going to witness a new event called "Mobile Monday". The Chennai version of the event will be spearheaded by Varun Krishnan and interested others can pitch in. The event is supposed to be of 3 to 4 hours duration with talks on various technical and non-technical topics with new product demos etc.

You can get more info at the following places.
1. Wiki.
2. Mailing List.
3. Email Varun.

The first Mobile Monday is scheduled for 22nd April, 2007. Info on the venue and timings will be available soon.

Convocation

Yay! I got the Bachelor of Engineering yesterday. The Chief Guest for the occasion was Mr.Srinivasa Raghavan, Managing Director, Sundaram Finance Ltd. Yesterday was the absolute last day at college. Met all my friends with whom I had an awesome time, all the girls who were crushes etc. After the function was over, all the guys from our class gathered around for a get-together at the Besant Nagar beach after which we headed for a good dinner.

Apart from all this, there was one noteworthy incident that happened at the college yesterday. After we received the degree from the Chief Guest and made some customary snaps, myself and Moyeen were summoned by our college Director, Mr.Marie Wilson. I started a technical club at my college when I was in third year and got Moyeen and some more juniors to assist me in those activities. The club soon got popular with the students and we used to conduct technical sessions at regular intervals. We were sanctioned laptops for the technical sessions... we were given preference over the staffs for usage of the laptop :))

When he summoned us, he still remembered all that and enquired about when we were going to build our own company. I was bit surprised at that question being very direct and told him that we would start off very soon. He also told us that we can come to college anytime to use its resources for the persual of our "future" company. And yes, apart from the amazing encouragement from my parents and friends at college, a small incident happened during my 3rd year at college which triggered all the tech sessions, laptops, Microsoft Student Partner etc., just to prove a point.

Don't know when I will ever get to meet all my classmates again. As one of them said, "Macha, if anybody marries in the near future, please inform all of us." ... Lol !!

Port Redirection for MT880 routers

Hi guys, just made a new post on my tech blog that tells how to configure the MT880 router for port redirection.

Read it here.

The Sabeena Man

Most households (atleast in Chennai) know a dishwash powder called Sabeena. Its rate is just under Rs.5/- and almost everyone can afford it. There is a man living near my house. The first thing you would notice in him is that his teeth is crooked. If you just continue your examination on him, you would notice that his legs are shaped awkwardly. More examination reveals that he cannot talk properly. He doesn't stammer, but his voice is a blabber to hear. His eyes are squint, hands are also not proper. He wears a torn slipper. If he goes to any other area other than the place he lives in, the street dogs would tear him apart.

Now, there is one thing special about him. He is an entrepreneur :D. He has been running his own telephone booth for more than a decade. These days, he has also started supplying a dishwash powder to nearby homes; including mine. He toils day in and day out to earn a few bucks so that he can sleep peacefully with the satisfaction of earning and eating his own bread. THAT is an awesome attitude... which many of us should follow.

Until today, with the conversations I have had with him, he has never complained of his disabilities. He just doesn't consider them to be a stopping point in his path forward. There is something to learn from him for many of us.

proto.in - Second Edition

Following the success of proto.in version 1, The Knowledge Foundation team is gearing up for the second edition called "proto.in Summer Edition". The time ahead is damn exciting. You can get more information from the proto.in website. If you had attended the first edition proto.in and you have feedback to give, please mail us at admin@proto.in.

Sponsorship kit, media kit and other necessary items are on their way. They should be out in a couple of weeks. Preparations have started way ahead this time... Let wait and watch about how this event turns out to be.

GNU & GIFs

Hi guys, I just learned that the whole website of gnu.org doesn't use GIF images. I just read through the reason and was bombed :-)

Crux of the Reason: Unisys and IBM have patented the LZW compression algorithm which is used in generated GIF images. Read the full article.

Also, the page links to a library called libungif, which uncompresses GIF images written using the LZW algorithm and writes them in uncompressed format. The philosophy section of GNU.org is very interesting. Please go through it.


hmm...

A Myth called the Indian Programmer

Some days back, I linked to a post on GigaOm which did sound scary. In that post, Om mentions about an article called "A Myth called the Indian Programmer," on the Times of India newspaper. Fortunately enough, that article came as an email forward and here it is. The issues they have mentioned in the article is worth pondering about.

Here is the article... I mean the email forward. That speaks for itself. The article is long, but its a good read.

Do you know what an Indian software engineer does for a living? T Surendar finds uncomfortable answers.

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore. Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion. But what exactly do they do? That's a disturbing question.

Last week, during the annual fair of the software industry's apex body Nasscom, no one uttered a word about India's programmers. The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies. But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies. Perhaps you imagined wrong. "It is an explosive truth that local software companies won't accept. Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders ," says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it "if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject." Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap of the software hype and now realise that though their status is glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded. Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

There is nothing new to learn from the job I am doing in Pune. I could have done it with some training even after passing high school, says a 25-yearold who joined Infosys after finishing his engineering course in Nagpur. A Microsoft analyst says, Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for the fact that we still don't have a domestic software product like Yahoo or Google to use in our daily lives.

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India's best known companies like Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out. The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, who did not bite Infosys' offer, says, "The entrance test to join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what the Indian firms are looking for."

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics. The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late '70s and early '80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all kinds of fields. In the mid-'90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of education after high school. "After Y2K, as American companies discovered India's cheap software professionals, the demand for engineers shot up," the executive says. Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction of a programme. They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a client's site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the need for engineers who have four years of education after high school. Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the engineer?s job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects. The CEO of India's largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had earlier explained, "The core programming still requires technical skills. But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates." NIIT's Arvind Thakur says, "We have always maintained that it is the aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact, there are cases where grad uate programmers have done better than the ones from the engineering stream."

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but cannot find a different kind of 'break', given his coding experience. He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don't know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don't know that they can eventually fly. Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life. TNN

Thoughts?

Sun Tech Days & Wikicamp

Yay! the last week was easily one of the most exciting weeks for me. Three days at Hyderabad, for Sun Tech Days, was 3 days well spent. Met a lot of cool people from Sun and more importantly, Moyeen and myself provided some tips to some Hyderabad based college students who wanted to do their final semester projects on their own; using java and ofcourse netbeans.

Here are some cool things that happened at the conference:
1. There was a netbeans contest stall on day 1. Moyeen and myself participated and completed the given tasks right on time. We won the contest with full score :D
2. On the second day, right after the keynote and before the java jacket give away, we were called on stage (audience > 4000) and given a small kit that contained an ultra cool netbeans t-shirt, netbeans ide field guide, some dukes (duke is the mascot for java) and some sun bucks that were supposed to be exchanged at the stalls for more goodies.
3. Day 3 had me unexpectedly flying without wings :-). I'm a fan of Geertjan's blog since a long time and yup! I met him and had a short chat.
4. He got my tech blog URL, visited there and made a post on converting this two minute web browser into an app that is integrated into the netbeans platform :)
5. Finally, met some of my own college juniors... was shocked to see a girl in the gang though :D cos' most of the times its an all-guys show. Kudos to the girl who has shown interest in technology.

Wikicamp was an astounding success :D. It went on very well. I loved the way Jimmy Wales moved around with the crowd. Considering the popularity he has, its surprising that he is so unassuming and was always willing to join the fun, which ended up being many of us showcased in this article by The Hindu. I wasted no time in networking with the attendees, which at the end of the day proved very valuable. Photos of wikicamp.

Thus, comes to end, an excellent week. Have fun !

Blogging from mobile :-)

This is my first post from my very own k300i. Staying connected is a boon :-D. Im on the way to attend an event called sun tech days at Hyderabad and this low res pic is from central station, ofcourse captured from my mobile :-). Catch you guys when I'm back home.

;-)

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