Eye and I

So I saw the eye doctor last Friday after I experienced some minor irritation in my eyes leading to fatigue. The doc did a thorough examination and concluded that everything was ok, and that I needed to blink more. Get a load of this! My name "Nirnimesh" translates to "one who does not blink much" and the doc wants me to blink more. I'm standing true to my name. :)

3 Things for which I cannot forgive Congress

It's election in Hyderabad tomorrow. And there are 3 reasons why I cannot vote for congress.

1. OBC Reservations: Nothing severs equality of opportunity more than providing reservations based not on merit but by birth. Congress introduced reservations for OBC in higher education institutions and set a precedent against merit. I remember marching on a rally against this, a few years ago. Arjun Singh, the perennial a$$hole, became an overnight champion and messiah.

2. 26/11: What do you do when a mole steals into your house and breaks your stuff? I hammer it with a broom and throw it out, as soon as I can. A handfull of armed militants attacked Mumbai and threw the country out of gear for 3 days. I repeat -- 3 whole days. For three days, the government didn't have a clue about how to sort out the matter. Instead, we managed to lose 4 top police officers, the likes of whom we can't easily get in police force. This national tragedy became an international shame for the country. A rogue state like Pakistan had demonstrated India's incompetence to protect its soverignity. No wonder then that a third rate failure like Pratibha Patil is the President, the supreme commander of the armed forces.

3. 3G Melodrama: India has the 2nd fastest growing telecommunications industry in the world. Telephones have made their way into the veins of the country in a way that roads haven't. Small-scale farmers, auto-drivers, village shop-keepers not only have cellphones, they use it. India looked ready for continuing its dominant stride in the Information Age. 3G was knocking at the door. We had to let it in. Instead, the 3G auction was delayed, license prices were doubled overnight, and lots of confusion eventually led to it being postponed forever.

These are the three things I feel the strongest about. I haven't even mentioned other things like: daily power cuts in Hyderabad, the national highway project melodrama, the royal lineage of potential PMs, the Gandi-ization of every road, bridge and scheme names, the international shame that the uncertainity over the nuclear deal brought, and Shivraj Patil as home minister.

Advani for PM

I was browsing my usual way a few days ago when I first noticed ads for "Advani for PM". What was interesting was that this ad was on slashdot. After a few days I started seeing these ads at a lot of places -- online discussion forums, blogs, news websites, and so on. These were served through some adsense account, I believe.

Ordinarily I wouldn't bother about these kinds of political blabbers. But since I had already been amused at seeing such ads on a technical website (I was searching for 'assembly language on mac') I wanted to be amused even more so I clicked on the banner labelled "My IT vision" near Advani's face.

The banner linked to a doc detailing Advani's IT strategy. And I must admit there were quite a few very interesting points there. Whether or not they can get implemented will be seen in time but the fact that someone in these scurry circles has actually been thinking not just abstract melodrama but specific numbers and figures is impressive (2 Mbps unlimited broadband for Rs 200 pm!).

I knew that techies like us hardly ever formed a voice in a political arena. We never mattered enough for these politicians. Have things changed recently? Are we a potential votebank target? Are we being noticed?

I also found that Advani has a full-fledged website being updated on a continuous basis with links to the party manifesto, documentaries, question answers, and digs on congress. I couldn't find a similar one for Congress. I'm not saying that it does not exist. I'm just saying that I couldn't find it. All I could find was a link to a .doc, which I hate to click on.

While I kept following the pages, I could imagine the rhetoric Congress has been pulling off for ages in the name of Nehru and Gandhi. I mean come on. Agreed that these people must have done good things at their time, but enough is enough. Live in the present. "Aam aadmi ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath" just gives me a feeling of one guy masturbating. If you think of more than one guy, they're gay and beating each other off. Nothing more. It doesn't tell me anything concrete. It's like an abstract class with pure virtual functions which no one wants (or intends) to inherit.

Anyways, I'm not sure Advani is the right person. But given the political chaos, if I had to choose between Manmohan (aka Sonia with beard), Advani and Mayawati (or the entire breed), I think I'd go with Advani.

Maybe I should have taken the pain to get my voter id card this time.

I See Stupid People

The punchline in The Sixth Sense went by:

I see dead people

 
There's this boy who could see dead people. He was haunted by them to such an extent that he could not make out the difference between the living and dead. He had been taught to fear the dead, so he did, except that he could not separate them from the living.

I see stupid people. They're all around. I don't know what their purpose in life is. Frankly, I don't think they even have a purpose. They breathe, because they'd die otherwise. They go to work, because they'd die otherwise. They marry, because the society wants them to. They breed, because the society would kill them otherwise. There's not one thing that they'd do if not by a force threatening of something more devastating. They're like a paper boat being carried along by the river's current. They don't have a will of their own. They're not alive.

The difference between dead people and stupid people however is that stupid people are easier to identify. Their actions follow no logic. You could identify them with just an imbalanced mathematical equation. It's so mundane that you could almost automate the process, the input being a stream of people and the output being a binary flag associated with each indicating whether or not he's stupid. It's a bit more complicated than that since the classification is not black or white, but a rounding off can be performed.

The problem after classification however is what to do with the stupid people. I would gladly leave them alone but they don't leave me alone. They make life difficult for me. They take my money in the name of law, they haunt me in the name of society and they try to stop me in the name of progress. They run the government, they make the rules, they pass judgments and then they decree punishment.

It's not like they'd understand logic. I don't want them to understand logic, as long as they leave me alone. Just leave me alone. I don't want you, I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to hear you. I don't want to see stupid people. I'd gladly see dead people instead.

The Sad Tale of 3G in India

What does it take for a compelling technology to go down the drains? Answer: let the government regulate it.

3G, poised as a definitive stage for mobile internet, has gone through a similar harassment through the hands of the government in India. I can recall hearing about it as early as 2008. The spectrum war, the auction, the technology and how it would prove a boon for the millions of devices carried around by millions of Indians. Alas!

The service providers geared up for 3G, pulled up their socks, deployed the technology and have just been waiting for the government's permission. The government, on the other hand, delayed the auction indefinitely, created all kinds of controversies around it, and finally let state-owned MTNL and BSNL launch the service. BSNL and MTNL, known for their indifference to customers (have you ever heard of customer service for BSNL/MTNL? have you ever been to a BSNL office? I have. It's a hole where serendipity abounds) and slow head towards new technology, choose to launch 3G in select towns in India, carefully choosing not to launch it where it might be useful. Are you surprised then that there are a mere 3000 3G customers for BSNL? 3000! That's all.

And now it's election time. All business, development, and progress must be set aside as a bunch of retards fist together for a seat in the parliament run by my tax rupees. The fate of real 3G has been put in coma, while I hold in the air my 3G-compatible phone and look up in the sky. Sigh!

The Depravity of the Third Front

Communists are weird people. And not in a good way.

As the country prepares for general elections, all kinds of political weirdos are born. Third Front has been born too. The chief among this is the communists - the same people who vehemently opposed the Nuclear Deal and threw the country in a limbo for a long time, opposed any kind of disinvestment, blocked all labor reforms, discourage education in the country - basically leave everything just as it is so that "social harmony is not rippled".

"I don't see why industry or corporates should feel that this coalition will be less favourable or hostile to them," CPM leader Prakash Karat told CNN-IBN

I mean, how? How on earth do you think that after your Nuclear Deal parable anyone ever would want to support you. Have you been living in dungeons? Mr Prakash Karat, please buy a computer and look out.

Number of States in India

How many states are there in India?

I was watching this episode in Friends where Ross could not name all the 50 states in the US. And that's when I thought, wait a minute! I don't even know how many states are there in India. The last time I read a number in the text books it was 25, and I was twelve years old. Maybe they stopped putting that in text books for fear of getting outdated. I mean creating new states is in a way the piece de resistance of several budding Indian political leaders. There's a saddist who wants Telangana, a few more who want a piece out of Jammu & Kashmir, and I'm pretty sure several leaders are toying with repeating the tactics with other states like Maharashtra, Karnataka.

I think I lost interest in the count when they stopped calling Delhi a state. And whenever you raise the issue half of the people would say that Delhi is still a Union Territory while the other half would think it's a bonafide state. I wonder if I can name all the states. I know I can name the 25 that I learnt when I was twelve.

New York City

I was in New York City on New Year's eve. Yes, I went to Times Square. Yes, I was there when they dropped the ball.

I had known about the greatness of this city, through movies (remember Gotham city from Batman?), news, elsewhere but I had to see it to really believe it. Called the city that never sleeps, New York, aka the big apple, truly is a magnificent place. The mix of people, culture, business, infrastructure I saw there is like nothing I had seen before.

After ~2 months, one thing I can foremost recall is the metro system. It's spellbinding. Not just about the punctuality and infrastructure but the planning, the day to day operations, the details, the ticket booth, everything.

I even went to Wall Street, the financial capital of US, and by extension also for the world (almost). I went there on a holiday. It seemed like any other street but I could imagine the scurry of stock brokers that must be the order of that street on working days.

I went to Madame Tussaud's near Times Square. It houses waxed life-size statues of celebrities. It became extremely difficult inside the hall, within a few minutes, to tell if a person was for real or a statue. The pictures above do not do justice (damn my cheap camera). I gawked a real person and almost touched him only stopping to think for a second before the person moved coz guess what it was not a statue!

Apart from the usual suspects like the statue of liberty, the Empire State building, I also visited the Museum of Sex, which housed this funny board.



I was amused to find a case study on necrophilia in animals.

All in all it was a trip I'll remember for years and whenever greatness is attributed to a place I'll automatically think about the New York City.

My New Toy: Android Dev Phone

I got myself a new toy - Android Developer Phone. It's an unlocked incarnation of HTC's dream phone. And I love it.

My favorite feature? I can reflash it and install the OS from scratch.
Why? Because I can.

The Depravity of our Health Minister

The guy who banned smoking in public places is in the news again. This time he's trying to stop pub-culture.

Starting from the assumption that drinking is against Indian ethics, he somehow concludes that we cannot progress unless India bans pub-culture. Now, wait a minute! What's the rationale? I'm listening - explain me please?

He mentions that 40% of road accidents happen because of alcohol. Even if I believe these numbers, what he does not tell you is that 99% of those accidents would happen because the road was un-even or had spiky speed-breakers or massive pot-holes. For what it's worth, US has more cars, more roads and more alcohol. They use alcohol detectors instead of banning pubs outright.

Reminds me of a SouthPark episode where Cartman toilet-papered his teacher's house to avenge a punishment but the police booked the store who sold the toilet-paper.

I also disagree with the stupid Health Minister when he says that drinking is not in our culture. How exactly? Let's begin from the beginning. It's well known that Kauravas were to drinking as motherboard is to computer. Lord Shiva, we all know, is perennially drunk. All the members of parliament drink (they do more when they're drunk, but let's focus here), most people in villages drink (heard of toddy?) or smoke (heard of beedi or hookah?). Which culture of the Indian society is the doorknob-headed health minister talking about again?

What the government should instead focus on is to improve education and way of life, not banning everything and anything that brings happiness. Mr Health Minister, just because you coughed up the first time you tried drinking coz it was too much for you and your wife pointed and laughed and burnt your wee-wee with her smoking cigarrette does not mean that you should go ban alcohol, cigarrette or laughter.

The Vicious Circle: It all comes back

I committed a sin two years ago.

I had purchased a Sony product - a laptop and that too with M$ Vista. It was for my little brother. I knew Sony couldn't be relied upon, my CD writer from sony had stopped working years ago, but still I went ahead and made the purchase. And don't even get me started about Vista!

It's all coming back now.

The laptop has performed poorly. Throwing a mere 1 GB RAM to a behemoth named Vista was like offering a gaping pig to a ravaging tornado - it can only result in destruction. And no you could not reinstall it with Win XP because several of the hardware features (like touchpad, wireless) would no more work. Why? Sony hasn't bothered to make drivers for XP (aka M$ did not want it so).

And when I say that the laptop had Vista in it, I mean it literally. It did not come with a Vista CD, it never does. All it comes with is a partition with a Vista recovery disk on it. There's a funny key-combination to activate this recovery upon boot, and can be figured out only by serendipity (the laptop didn't come with a manual either).

Anyway, after less than a year's use, Sony timer kicked in. The battery started dissipating in minutes and transitioned to a situation where it could not work at all without AC power. A Japaenese friend had told me earlier about the Sony timer - the law stating that all Sony products expire when their warranty expires. Now that I think of it, that's exactly what happened to my CD writer too.

Moving forward with life, I'm trying to purchase a replacement battery from the Sony store. Bear with me while I tell you that it costs $192.34 (excluding shipping, I think). This is about one-fourth the cost of the laptop itself. A quick Google Search tells me that equivalent batteries are available for much cheaper elsewhere.

So, to hell with Sony. I'm not going to buy anything with "Sony" on it. This includes the playstation.

Damn you, Sony! Die. Go to hell and die. May the economic recession shut you down!

Write in Hindi anywhere

If you've been happily amused by the transliteration feature on Orkut that lets you write scraps in English but transliterate them to Hindi (जैसे: ये और वो), you are going to love this Firefox transliteration extension that lets you do the same thing in practically any textbox on any webpage (well almost). No more do I have to painfully try to map words to strict characters. It even offers dropdown suggestions to choose from.

The extension works for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil.

ये बहुत मज़ेदार है. इंस्टाल कर के देखो. केवल फायरफॉक्स में.

Chandrayaan I

India launched its first mission to the moon, Chandrayaan I, at 6:22 AM today.

The launch has been perfect so far and the launch vehicle has reached the orbit successfully. It'll take around 15 days from now to reach the moon, our nearest heavenly neighbor. With a cost of Rs 380 crores (USD 83 mn), it's going to the cheapest mission to the moon, even cheaper that what China sent. It carries 11 payloads including 2 from NASA.

ISRO's PSLV series of launches have been immensely successful, with this being the latest (and greatest) feat. This will position India as a leader in space programs rubbing shoulders with only a select few nations in the world.

Space-talk aside, what's especially intimidating to me is that it's hardly been 2 hours since the launch but Chandrayaan's wikipedia page has been updated with the exact information, including the launch time. That is, someone somewhere cared enough to make this information accessible and useful to others, despite the fact that Chandrayaan's launch has been celebrated with a lesser fervor amongst the media (and by extension, amongst Indians) than the passion with which rioters have torched Mumbai following the arrest of Raj Thackrey, the latest Indian barking-pimp. This speaks for itself the kind of stories the children of this country are growing up with.

Anyway, I'm thrilled that Chandrayaan's first leg has been perfect despite rains and rough weather at Sriharikota. I hope it reaches the full journey as perfectly.

Go Team. Go India.

Rain Rain, Go Away

Like a true cancerian, I love rains. Actually, I also love waterfalls, brooks, lakes, any water body for that matter. However, of late I've developed a kind of hatred towards rain, especially Hyderabad rain. Not only does it start pouring every time I'm riding my bike, the intensity of the downpour is directly proportional to the lack of shelter-sheds on the road-side. Screw you, Murphy!

To add to the anguish, bad roads cause havoc in rains. Potholes, lack of proper street-lights, stagnated water every here and there on the roads, are a common scene when it rains. There's one thing especially painful about Hyderabad rains - sometimes when it rains, it keeps drizzling for days at a stretch. It's like, it doesn't want to downpour, and at the same time it doesn't want to stop; just the perfect amount to totally drench me on the road.

Last night, my macbook got spoilt as I got trapped in a downpour.

Rain Rain, Go Away!

F.R.I.E.N.D.S One More Time

I finished watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S one more time - all seasons, all episodes. I thought I'd blog every time I finish one round. No matter how many times, it doesn't get old.

Every time around there are jokes and expressions that make me laugh, events that make me sad, dialogues that teaches something more about America, and situations that, well, let's face it, teach about life.

I lied a bit when I said that I watched all the episodes. I conveniently skipped the scenes where Joey and Rachel (attempt to) make out, coz it kinda touches a gray area. No matter what, this scene irritates me. Hey, don't blame me! I have a friend who gave up watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S just coz Rachel & Ross broke up. Things can get emotional, you see. I have my own bias against Rachel. In my opinion, she's too uptight, high-maintenance and it appears conspicuously clear to me that she and Ross were on a break. :P

There are characters everyone loves. But at the same time there are some characters hated unanimously (read, Janice). The feeling on hearing Janice was best described by Joey as "feel like pulling my arm off just so I have something to throw at her".

I'm pretty sure I'll continue watching this series over and over again. So long.

Disable Overlay Advertisement on IBNLive.com

IBNLive.com is a great news website for India. Just one problem - they have this irritating overlay advertisement every time you visit the homepage. Besides, while you check the individual stories, and go back to the homepage, the advertisement comes up again. It's irritating because you should either wait a few seconds before the advertisement auto-closes, or click the close button (which changes position every once in a while).

I wrote a greasemonkey script that disables this advertisement once and for all on the IBNLive.com homepage. It's located here.

If your firefox does not have the greasemonkey ad-on, install that first. If you don't use firefox, see why you should. If you don't know what firefox is, you should go out more often.

Room available in Kendriya Vihar, Gachibowli

One of my roommates discovered that he had spent a long time of his life in Gachibowli, so he decided to shift to Kondapur. Kondapur's not too far away, but I sure need a replacement for him in my aptt now.

Our aptt is a 3 BHK in Kendriya Vihar Phase II, Gachibowli. The place is great. It's clean, no-noise, water 24 hrs, electricity almost 24 hrs, gated community, safe, secure. The place is a 4-min bike-ride from Microsoft, Infosys campus and a 10-min bike-ride from Hi-tech City. A lot of guys and gals from Microsoft and Infosys stay in this aptt.

The room has 2 windows and wooden cupboards. We have a BSNL 256 kbps broadband internet available over wifi. Also, a fridge, well-equipped kitchen and washing machine are at disposal. All this for a room at Rs 3950 p.m. (including maintenance charges).

If you are interested, or you know someone who is interested, leave a note here, or mail me at: nirnimesh-(at)-gmail.com

Google Reader & What I Should be Reading

"Web as a Social platform" You've all heard it, might have even seen it in action.

I realized the power of a social web when I was thinking about my blog reading habits. There was a time when I'd painfully populate my Google Reader's subscriptions. Depending on how ambitious or slacking I was, it'd either drown my reading-list with hundreds of blog posts, a bit too many to handle, or drought it with scanty ones so I'd have to look out for news websites in askance for more. I could never figure out the right set of feeds to subscribe to - the same feed that'd report something as interesting as an iphone launch would sometimes also report something as worthless as Amitabh Bachhan being down with flu. How did this problem get solved? Enter the social web.

What I did was simple. Discounting the bare minimal set of blog feeds that I did have to subscribe myself to keep my Krebs cycle working (say, Slashdot), I left all the others for the people in my friends list to read and share. I began with reading stuff that ALL my friends would share and then cut it down to hide the ones that felt like abusing the 'share' feature. Now I'm down to a much smaller list of friends whose shared blogs I read. The most awesome part now is that what I read has already been screened once by someone whose judgement I tend to agree with. The end result: I'm pretty happy with my reading list these days. I realize that I hardly ever miss something I'd really want to read about and at the same time, I don't get swamped with excess of them either.

It's intimidating how easily a seemingly tough problem of "figuring out what I want to read" could be made more tractable by a social web, even though I myself did not have a clear judgement of what I really wanted.

BSNL Broadband

I recently got a brand new BSNL broadband connection. And it's amazing.

After the initial hiccups of waiting for a about a month to get the phone setup and the router/modem delivered to me, everything else was a charm. I was given a type IV wifi modem. It's a UTStarcom WA3002G4 modem with 4 ethernet ports.

Now, I was terribly pissed off with my previous connection - one from Sify. First, it wouldn't work on my Mac without having to login from a windows machine (Sify has a mac login client but it doesn't work). I had to wait for hours for my windows-loaded roommate to return home so before I could get online. Second, one would need to login using the login client at least once every day, which means that you couldn't leave the internet unattended hoping it to keep downloading stuff. Third, the speed was awful. Fourth, I was charged Rs 1222 per month for the unlimited connection. Fifth, the Sify guys have blocked icmp, so I couldn't ping the outside world.

With my BSNL Dataone connection, I have all the above problems solved, and everything comes for a chick Rs 750 only. It has been only 2 days and so a little premature to comment on reliability and speed, but I have been able to view youtube videos with minimal buffering wait.

Now coming to the modem. The UTStarcom WA3002G4 modem is a beauty. I had a DLink wifi modem earlier, which amongst other problems, didn't allow connection to my company's VPN and had a crappy web interface which was dumb as a door knob. The BSNL modem provides a tidy http interface & slick telnet interface as well. My account information is entered into the modem itself so I need not have a login client on the end system, and so it works on all OS-es all the time. The modem allows me to backup configurations to my machine, and it saved my day a few minutes ago. I love it.

Every thing's worked like a charm so far. Touch wood!

Nobel Prizes, Innovation and India

I came across this article about "What will it take for a Indian Resident to Win a Nobel Prize" (see pdf or converted html), written by CSIR boss, R A Mashelkar, with whom I had the pleasure of shaking hands once during IIIT's R & D Showcase. Little did I know Mr Mashelkar then.

The article talks about how the Indian society acts, in the name of conservation, to not only discourage original out-of-the-box ideas, but in some sense to even penalize them. In the history of science, a mere 7 Nobel prizes have gone to people of Indian origin, which is a shameful number. The Indian Society is so resistant to change that even original and novice ideas get lost very soon. At CSIR, Mashelkar did not have the difficulty of finding funds, but that of finding original fundable ideas. Even today, there's no lack of employment but the lack of employable people.

Nobel prize requires not only original ideas and path breaking work, but also hard work and luck. Considering the amount of investment India makes in research, it's hardly any surprise that all thinkers flee to USA or Germany. Not coincidentally, these are the two countries which have the highest number of Nobel prize winners.

India's answer to this appears to be -- well, we don't get enough Nobel prizes, we deserve more, let's reserve a certain number of them for Indians. That's what has been done with professional education lately. That's what is being done for jobs. At this pace, it's rather stupid to bear the brunt of being an Indian and sing patriotic songs. Fleeing to other countries not only makes sense, it also becomes necessary for survival -- I'm talking about the kind of people who need to think free to survive.