Who will you marry?

Yes that was the question put to me by my juniors at my college farewell night - a tradition when seniors were judged by some random questions. And the question was: If you have to marry C, Fortran, Pascal or Basic who would you marry? "I'll change my religion and marry all the four" was my innocuous reply. It is better to be safe than sorry. I am revisiting my reply. HTML is one such language too. I am using HTML to correspond to a family of UI technologies. Simple as it can be and still so powerful. This is one meta language which keeps transforming itself . With a combination of Javascript, DOM and XML do you see the end of standalone apps? You need to give a serious consideration back to the HTML(web) interface when designing your application. HTML? I do!

Gung ho about India?

CNN recently covered an article on India and how it is transforming itself and changing the world. With every visit to India people find how much it has changed, for good. How Chennai has changed, how unrecognizable Hyderabad has become, or gosh Pune is coming up to the scene or how Delhi is much cleaner than it was not too long ago. Besides some not too good stories too - how Bangalore is losing its edge or how Mumbai's expansion has staled or, how Gujarat lost its' way. Overall pockets of economic regions help the development of the country. But don't get blind by the new lights which has appeared. India is still a developing nation and has a very long way to go. And I mean a very long way. Social evils still persists - Dowry, casteism, communal forces, and terrorism are the biggest threats India is facing today and a very little has been done to eradicate them. I read another article about India in one of the news sites - "10 things I hate about India". I was moved. The ten points mentioned in the article are not the only ones but does cover a broad perspective. I am reproducing its' salient points:
1. Power cuts - India needs energy and a lot of it soon.
2. Indian babus - Running the world's most corrupt bureaucracy. They are the biggest threat to the country.
3. No access to historical documents - Indians are in general good in world's history but are mostly ignorant of their own. They know what the successive governments have told them.
4. Discrimination against the white tourists - They are still considered to be potential targets to make some quick bucks.
5. Paranoia about maps - Indian programmers may be capable to build another google earth but there is very little geographical data available to public. The compass is still the most popular GPS to find your way out.
6. And the photographs - Specially of the places under the archeological survey of India.
7. Politicians - Lesser said the better. If the statistics show lower crime rate it means all of them are in parliament.
8. Neglect of the environment - India is a beautiful country. It has all the possible environments - rain forests, desert, mountains, Snow, Ocean, long beaches, dense forests or open spaces - you name it. Maintenance? Almost zero. Spitting beatle leaves and littering is not even considered an offence.
9. Trafic - No concept of lane driving. Lack of super highways are pressurizing the cities and is one reason why Bangalore has lost its' edge it once had.
10. Corruption - In every aspect of life. Things which are no show in west can entangle you forever in India.

Still, you feel good about the changes happening on the surface. Hope that these changes will eventually trickle down in the life of the middle class. Hope - the biggest asset Indians have.

A tale of two guys...

Best of friends or so appeared on court. Two awesome players. One who transformed himself to a great individual player, and the other who transformed a team. You know who I am talking about. Players don't win - the team wins. Hats off to Shaq for his outstanding fourth and for how he transformed a young gun Dwyane to a winner.

Do I even know you?

This what likes of Bill Joy, Whitfield Diffie, James Gosling and others would say if asked them to endorse my work. And what if they said otherwise? ;-)

Ghana changed the perception..

..of the African footballers. The game against Czechs was a treat to watch simply a stunning win.

What if Vista fails?

Windows Vista is not coming out soon. Now Redhat being the serious threat atleast at the server side, Vista's success is a little doubtful. Why will companies be willing to migrate to Vista is a question to ask. If it fails who will it be good for? Ubuntu is a cadidate to watch. No, no one will use Ubuntu on the server side atleast for now but with Vista failing, its highly likely people with change in their mind will change to other operating systems. Ubuntu is in that position. Why Ubuntu? Redhat is too heavy for desktops. Suse? Its useability is an issue. JDS? Do you even remember what it was? Solaris x86? Let the military use it. Other Linux flavors have more literary importance than anything else. Ubuntu tops the list in its' ease of use, useability, being wireless ready or just the patch updates. I don't want any big companies to buy Ubuntu. An independent community driven Ubuntu is stronger than IBM's, HP's, Novel's or Oracle's Ubuntu. And did I mention it has the coolest name?

A day in the life

1. Waking up at 5AM to catch a flight.
2. Finding a far distant place to park and then a long walk to the check-in counter.
3. Long line in the security check.
4. Middle seat in the plane.
5. Next to a loud arabic family. Two hours of painful listening to some meaningless conversation (atleast to me).
6. Sending a hello message to an old friend without getting his reply back.
7. Finding that a friend is joining my old company in a group I was part of.
8. Getting a call at 11AM in the middle of a serious session with the ring style of my cell phone set to loud music.
9. Finding I am the only person in the group with no rental car, why?
10. Trying to fix a badly written code with no available javadocs.
11. Being suggested by a "functional lead" to start working on a task so that we can get ahead and finish the tasks sooner, when already three weeks ahead.
12. IM with a friend technical manager who was as pissed off at quality of some products as I was.
13. Dinner with a friend who talked how easy it was to get the greencard in his time.
14. To the hotel and getting a smoking room with a promise to get it changed tomorrow.
15. Seinfeld on TV and clicking "Publish the post".

Did Iran trade Zarqawi?

Thanks to bollywood its another dramatic product of my mind. Any political analyst would tell you that its all about the position of strength and give and takes which has shaped our history. In the Mumbai underworld and as is so depicted in countless bollywood movies its very often that for political mileage leaders are known to give away their foot soldiers. So here is the scenario in middle east - Instability in Iraq is in favor of many of it's neighboring countries. The countries who do not like a democratic state to exist in that region. Even though Zarqawi the most wanted terrorist in Iraq was working to create civil war and against Shiities, he was indeed indirectly helping Iran to foment trouble in Iraq. And then came the bombshell - Iran's own nuclear ambitions. Who knows if Iranian agents were already on trails of zarqawi and to take him out at their own convenience? No question Zarqawi was a thorn in the heart of American forces too and could be of greater risk in future. Then a few weeks ago the most surprising news came. US toning down its' rhetorics against Iran on its' nuclear ambitions. Could this be possible if Iran and US came to an understanding of a give and take which would work in favor of both? A nuclear deal in return of Zarqawi? Whatever it is but two more to go and this world will be a much better place to live in.

Increasing unpopularity of my blogs

I am an avid blogger and have a freaky craze of looking who and from where the readers are visiting me. The mania has grown so much that the google banned me on their adsense thinking I was generating fake hits. No I was not!! BTW, I've added a few regulars but have lost so many too who were the frequents till a few months ago. Then I thank a few who are the real regulars - I mean regulars who visit me atleast once a week. Then there are a few who keep tab on me from other sources but rarely visit my thoughts. Dude(s)! I am right here in my blogs. And there are those who deliberately don't come thinking as if I will win some war. Mixed feelings and mixed reactions. Passion comes in many colors: do you see any on ezsaid?

The Huj I have been missing

I am a Java developer - good, bad or ugly I do not know but have been doing this for quite sometime. Its a dream to go to the JavaOne one day, a mela of the contrarian minds. The bad part is for the years I worked for Sun Microsystems I was never sent to one. The closest I came when my small work was part of two of the tech kiosk/booth(s) but no it was not meant to be. Reading Gosling's blogs soothes me but also increases my cravings for the taste I have always missed. Seems like my tech Huj who very lucky go to.

What makes me uncomfortable when I am not driving

This is for those folks who feel uncomfortable while not in the driver's seat. This is a list which makes me one when the driver does any of these:
1. Controlling car speed with breaks. Don't apply breaks unless it is needed. Control the speed with your car's gas pedal, it makes the ride smooth.
2. First lane on highway and driving @40mph
3. Changing lane and applying breaks.
4. Changing lane and turning your steering wheel wide - Don't do it, it exposes the turning side. Just give a direction, your wheels are very intelligent.
5. Merging at a slow speed.
6. At a junction going slow and thinking whether to turn left or right.
7. Driving in two lanes.
8. Driving slow and try to go fast on yellow.
9. Driving slow and applying sudden breaks on yellow.
10. Telling how uncomfortable you are on a road doing something - at high speed or parallel parking or with those bikers. Believe me you make other folks in the car nervous.

AJAXing your site

It was never a big thing but it was not done. This what branding does - people jump in and start doing it. AJAX is one such brand. Even the hardcore netscape fans knew that its rendering engine was not good and thats why it lost the mighty war. Its not only important how fast your browser renders the page but also how your application does it. The new browsers have invested so much to give you the best possible rendering speed. Thanks to relentless effort by the Microsoft' IE team and then Opera and Mozilla foundation. Now comes your own application's turn and the AJAX gives you that way out. What I like about it is the way it encourages to keep the data separate from its' presentation. So if you are rendering an XML document think of using AJAX. Either its a transactional data or content stored in static XML files (Interwoven teamsite?) AJAX(?) can beautifully read it and give you a perfect user experience. I wish the AJAX was around 5 years ago when most of the web based applications tanked for the lack of it.