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 No access to historical documents - Indians are in general good in world's history but are mostly ignorant of their own.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".