A story..

The story goes.. there was this true wizard. Poor, unaware but with an astute brain. He had this ability to guess things with his strong intuitions. The King invited him to see if he was a cheat. Without anyone seeing him, the King slipped a diamond ring in his fist and asked the wizard if he could guess what it was? Wizard thought about it for a bit and said it is something circular. Then he thought more and said it has a hole inside it, you have a stone that is elevated on one side. Then he thought more and then - "Its a Grinder" - the wizard said. Everyone laughed and made fun of him. How could a stone grinder could be inside a fist? Wizard was a cheat and stupid everyone said.
Being poor, Wizard had never seen any Jewellery, far from a diamond ring. What he had seen was a hand-driven stone grinder also called a Chakki. What he lacked was awareness and a sensibility to relate even if true how could a grinder fit in a small fist. What he was right about was how he saw the problem and how close he was to solve it that people who laughed would never have guessed either.

Mounting Windows FS in Ubuntu

Because I am in serious process of fully Ubunticizing myself here is a neat trick to mount a Windows Filesystem onto a Ubuntu directory? Follow the following:

1. sudo fdisk -l (find which FS it is for Windows? On my laptop it was sda1)
   
2. sudo mkdir /XP (Create a directory to mount the FS to)
3. ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid (Copy the UUID of the Windows FS)
4. sudo nano /etc/fstab (Start editing the file)
5. Add UUID= /XP defaults 0 0
6. Save the file and run sudo mount -a
7. Give the right permission: sudo chown -R user:group /XP
   

बहुत दिनों बाद एक शेर

तस्वीर मेरी देख कर जो सब कुछ समझ गए,
फिर क्या ज़रुरत मैं तुमसे कहीं मिलूँ?
गर मूक कागजों में ही मैं रह सकूँ हर वक़्त,
कसम मुझे है जो दर्द मैं अपना तुझे कहूँ।

AT&T covers 97% of Americans - How?

Lets try to calculate how AT&T covers 97% of all Americans?

• Subtract all legal and illegal immigrants - They are not Americans
  
• Take a good percent of Bay Area and Places in Connecticut and NY out where the service sucks.
• Buildings where Americans work and can't make a phone call because of lack of signal. They work 1/4th of the day in these buildings so take 25% of all Americans in these buildings out.

So at any given time I think AT&T may only be covering 50-60% of all Americans instead of 97% as claimed.

Do not touch IIT selection process

For the record I am not an IITian. I wanted to be - a lot but could not be one, neither in Grad or Post Grad. And I do not think folks from the IITs are the only ones smart enough to work on the most complex Engineering problems. A recent panel has proposed to give 70% weightage to 12th grade marks - but I overwhelmingly oppose it. Why?

• There are many students who do not score well in the 12th grade but crack IITs
• There is no common standard for all the 12th grades. ISC is different from CBSC which is different from the state boards.
  
• Do not melt down the brand. IIT is meant to cater only the finest of the brains and is not an institute to produce just Engineers. There will always be plenty of good students who would be successful if they study in IIT but then there are plenty of RECs and State run Engineering Colleges that are not so far behind in their standards.
• IITs do not have resources to handle a huge stream of students and a College in every other city and still keep the same standards it is known for.
  

Mr. Chidambaram - Indian life cannot be this cheap

When a country like India should be working day and night with all its resources in eradicating diseases and spending in Infrastructures that provide safety to life, life of an Indian is getting less and less secure by shear in-action of the current Government. We cannot accept insecurity as part of our daily life as we have accepted corruption in our system. Today anti social organizations like Maoists can blow up tracks and cause massive loss of life and your Government continues to sit idle with no replies to increasing boldness and challenges to our Nation's integrity and the safety of its citizens. And what do we see? Leaders of UPA give statements that "Maoists only kill people who spy on them". Did you dare to ask these Naxal elements in your UPA how many spied who lost their life in yesterday's train sabotage? And why don't you have guts to put these elements in Jail who directly or indirectly support these anti-national elements? Indians today demand your report card on what have you and your Government done to make us more secure? Why an non-combatant's life so insecure? Why terrorists and criminals are allowed to get away so easily? Why has this government become a government of spineless representatives? Don't forget we have always found the alternatives. If you don't believe us ask those who once said we were shining.

Another hot summer in India

This summer it was hot again. I mean real hot which now has become somewhat expected. What have not been expected were plenty:

• Cathay Pacific - One of the worst airlines I have ever boarded. After 15 hours of tiring flight to HongKong the connecting flight to Delhi was delayed because they scheduled a bigger aircraft for Delhi which was supposed to go back to Oakland. WTF! Didn't they know that before hand? It was my first experience to see a Chinese service and they scored zero. And the result was painfully missing my connecting flight at Delhi to my home town that I missed by a few minutes that resulted in a 7hr wait at New Delhi Airport.
  
• Indian Railways - Another bad bad bad experience. Mamta Banarjee sucks as the new Indian Railway Minister. Even though not spectacular but her predecessor Lalu's work was visible on the platform. I was getting used to clean platforms, clean and hygienic toilets, near on-time train departures and arrivals. With Mamta Banarjee the Railways is faltering. This lady is such a disaster that she blamed the "crowd" after a fatal chaos instead of accepting any responsibility for crowd management. We had to wait for 7 hours at the dirty waiting (AC) rooms, smelly toilets and absent attendants.
• Internet - I assumed by now Internet would be flourishing all over India. No. There were no free Internet at Delhi Airport which I was amazed to find out missing at this improved airport. Internet connection at home was flaky too.