January 2005 Archives

CNET reports:
Microsoft has agreed to rename the new slimmed-down version of Windows it's preparing to release in Europe, after antitrust regulators there balked at the title.

Microsoft announced last month that it intended to use the name "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition" for the program, which has, by order of the European Commission, been stripped of the Media Player that's usually included.
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My heart goes out for the devs/test/PMs who have to work on this product. How exciting can it be to create a product that does less than what its predecessor did? How inspiring can it be to know that no informed consumers are ever going to buy a reduced version of Windows, especially when it costs the same as the original version (not sure on this though...) And that too, at a time when the rest of the company is working on shipping a super cool, much anticipated, long awaited Longhorn?

The front page of today's Times Of India was completely devoted to tennis. Serena Williams, who WON the Australian Open, got about 20% of that space while Sania Mirza, who LOST to Serena in the 3rd round, got the remaining real estate. I turned to the last page (sports...) and there was a set of 5 photos of Sania in a variety of moods. The
magazine section had an interview with Sania where she said she
wanted to be a "youth icon", not a "sex symbol".

What a great way to mess up the career of a budding tennis star. Sure, she has achieved something remarkable by Indian (rather mediocre) sporting standards. She reached the 3rd round of a grand slam. That, by any stretch of imagination, is not a big deal in the international circuit. So, please TOI, HT, Rediff, Star News et al- please leave the kid alone! Let her work on her tennis! Don't tell her she is already a star. Don't narrow her horizons for God's sake! Don't put her on top of the world already! She has probably spent all of last week giving interviews, posing for photographs and talking about how it feels to be a youth icon (whatever happened to Mallika
Sherawat?). She should have been practicing her serve all this time!

So my message to Sania Mirza -- great going kid. Now tell the media to f*** off! Tell them to come back when you make it to the top 10 on the rankings! All the best!

The readme says " MT-Blacklist v2.04b WILL NOT WORK ON WINDOWS SERVERS". So I am still stuck with comment spam!

A few days back, I had to go to the Passport office to get my address updated in my passport. Just a few years back, the passport office had a notorious reputation for being inefficient and corrupt. It was a symbol of all that was wrong with the government institutions at that time.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to find that the passport office no longer lives upto its past reputation. All routine requests like address updation and ECNR are taken care of on the same day. I submitted my application in the morning and was able to collect my passport in the evening. What's more, if you dont collect the passport, they promptly courier it to you! At the time you submit your application, you get a receipt with a number on it. You can use that number to get the status of your application via sms!

This is a great example of the new India that we hear about so often. Things like these make me bullish on India inspite of all its problems. Technology is being used to bring transparency and efficiency. The attitude of the government "babus" seems to be changing. When I submitted my application, I had attached my ICICI bank statement as proof of residence. The official told me that normally they only accept statements from government banks. However, he was still willing to consider my application. Flashback a few years back, and my application would have been summarily rejected.

Things are changing, at least here in Delhi. I can't speak for the smaller towns and villages. But here in New Delhi, times are a changing!

My webhost (http://www.webhost4life.com) provides very comprehensive usage statistics. One of the things that they provide is the list of search keywords that people typed into a search engine to reach my site. It is an interesting list and I am surprised that my blog should even show up for some of those phrases.

Couple of weeks back when the DPS MMS scandal was at its peak, people reached my blog searching for "dps sex scandal", "dps mms clip", "delhi sex places", "avnish bajaj" et al.

A lot of people come here searching for information on President Kalam ("apj abul kalam s presidential speech", "vision 2020 of a.p.j.abul kalam", "vision india 2020 with power point presentation").

Bollywood sends its share of hits to my blog as well ("mohan bhargava true story", "naach- movie review", "mohan bhargava", "search for adnan sami s song", "adnan sami s address", "bollywood movie making", "munnabhai mbbs-bollywood movie", "ashutosh gowarikar kids charity", "mahatma gandhi phrase in swades", "how much does shahrukh khan earn per movie in 2005", "adnan sami s insurance", "amrita rao kids charity", "mahatma gandhi ridicule progress swades", "ashutosh gowarikar phone no").

Finally, there are those looking to return to India who reach my blog through a search engine ("r2iclub", "return2india", "r2iclub shipping", "r2i kids education", "checklist for r2i", "us nris reasons for returning to india", "why return to india"). This was my real reason for starting this blog. Glad to see its been of some use to fellow R2Iers!

Sometime back I posted about the matchmaking service that Wipro had introduced for its employees. I guess things must be really out of control because Wipro's new measure seems really drastic.

Rediff is reporting that Wipro is asking fresh graduates to shell out Rs. 75,000 as security deposit to make sure they don't quit soon after finishing their training.

HR departments in the software industry in India have an unenviable job. The number of openings far exceed the number of *good* applicants. Most people have already been through 5-6 job within 2-3 years of graduation.

I think this excessive job hopping is going to hurt the industry in the long run. Few in the industry go through an entire product cycle. And if they do, they dont stay long enough to use their learning in the next release. If the industry has to move up the vaue chain and get serious about product development, then we need lots of people who have spent enough time shipping products. Companies like Intel, Microsoft, and Oracle provide valuable oppurtunities right here in India to learn about developing, shipping, marketing software products. Now if only we can take those learnings and take the domestic industry to the next level.

NewdDelhiTimes.org now has a google page rank of 3. Page rank is Google's way of determining the importance of a URL. Sites like Google, MSN, Yahoo have a page rank of 9 or 10 (on a scale of 10). So a page rank of 3 means that New Delhi Times is a relatively insignificant entity on the world wide web :) However, till a few days back, my page rank was 0. So we have made infinite progress since then!

If you have the google toolbar installed on your system, then you can enable the "Pagerank display" option to view the pagerank of any URL.

I didn't realize that my blogroll didn't show up on my blog until Marc mentioned it. Well, now my blogroll is available in the sidebar on the right. I use bloglines.com to manage my blogroll. Apparently there used to be a MT plugin for displaying blogroll but it doesn't seem to exist anymore. I am surprised MT doesn't natively support blogrolls!

From CNET:
For those who stare at the clock, waiting for the 5 o'clock whistle to blow, there is a Web site that makes watching the minutes tick by much more enjoyable.

The Human Clock shows a different photograph representing each minute of the day. While many photos come from the site operator's hometown of Portland, Ore., the majority appear to be submissions made by fans from all corners of Earth.

(via Dina Mehta) So finally the Indian media is getting a whiff of blogging. Indian Express is running an article on Indian bloggers. I sometimes wonder how journalists view blogging - in many ways its similar to journalism - only easier since you don't have to be accountable and you can write about what you want to. It would be great if more Indian journalists start blogging. It will be interesting to see how their employers react to it.

I got 12 more pieces of comment spam today. So clearly the spam plugin isn't working for me. As with email spammers, comment spammers are obviously one step ahead of the game. So it is likely they will find a workaround for any widely deployed spam solution. Looks like I need something home grown now!

Click here to see a satellite image of the building in Redmond campus where I used to work. Terraserver is one of the world's largest online databases, providing free public access to a vast data store of maps and aerial photographs of the United States. You can find satellite images and aerial photographs of almost any US address. Here is a view of the Space Needle in Seattle. If this isn't cool, then what is?

Much to my delight, my blog has been nominated in the "Best New Indiblog" category of the IndiBloggies!! Well that was the good news. The not so good news is that my blog is languishing at the last place with a grand total of 1 vote (no, that's NOT my own vote!). So, if you like my blog, please vote for it here. Its embarassing to be last ;)

The comment spam is really getting out of hand now. So I just installed the MT-DSBL plugin to handle comment spam. Any comments being posted from IP addresses listed at http://dsbl.org/main will be sent for moderation and will not appear on the blog. If I get no false positives then I will simply configure the plugin to simply prevent of comments from blacklisted IP addresses.

I was fortunate that in all the years I was in US, never once did i get a feeling of being discriminated against. I heard stories but I never saw that face of America. However, a call center worker sitting right here in India wasn't so fortunate. A couple of RJs for a popular radio station thought it would be funny to get abusive with a custmer service rep just because she was taking the call from India. Read more here.

My office here is surrounded by BPO companies. These call centers work around the clock and you can see plenty of activity even at 2 in the night. Most call center workers start their day late in the evening and work all night. They live with a perennial jet lag. They have to live with an assumed name and practice a fake accent. Talk about identity crises! And while they make decent money by Indian standards, an American kid working just one hour a day in Mc Donald makes more.

What I am getting at is that BPO workers don't deserve the flak they are getting in America. These are people working very hard to make a living. Nothing wrong with that. They are not stealing anybody's jobs. They are definitely not making easy money. America is a great country because there is dignity of labor (something we still don't have in India). An engineer, a doctor, a carpenter or a truck driver all get equal respect. All work is considered equal. So please give the same respect to these guys too. They deserve it.

An interesting interview with Bill Gates where he calls copyright reformists communists (and rakes up a storm in the blogosphere). He also talks about blogging:

"Now, with blogs, you always have to be careful. The decay rate of "I started and I stopped" or "I started and nobody visited" is fairly high, but as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gotten more sophisticated and value-added search capabilities have come along, this thing is really maturing."

Last week, one of the testers on my project filed an interesting bug. Apparently, loading one of the asp.net pages was taking too long. What's more, after a minute or so, the CPU would heat up so much that the fan would start whirring! Even though it wasn't assigned to me, the bug description was interesting enough to get me curious. The first step was to obviously break into the debugger. Since the page was taking very long to load, I suspected that a thread was blocking on something. It turned out that the main render thread was blocking in a "Array.Copy" operation. Looking at the call stack, it turned out that hundereds of deserialization operations were taking place. That gave me a clue. ASP.NET was trying to deserialize the Viewstate. A quick look at the code revealed that we were saving off a huge dataset in the Viewstate. Serialization and deserialzation are expensive operations and more so for a complex data type like datasets. We removed the dataset from the Viewstate and things cooled off considerably after that ;)

I have started getting way too much comment spam in the last few days. While I am honored that online casinos, mortgage companies and viagra peddlers want to post comments on my website, I would prefer to be left alone. I don't want to turn off comments completely since then I will lose lot of valuable feedback as well. Does anybody know of a good solution to curb comment spam on MovableType?

I attended the Pan-IIT meet last weekend. Around 2000 IITians from around the world had assembled to discuss on the theme of "IITians empowering India". The high point of the meet was President APJ Abul Kalam's speech. The President came to know about this meet just that day and being a technologist himself, decided to address the gathering inspite of the short notice. However, he did not give a speech. He gave a powerpoint presentation.

The President started off by saying that his presentation was also available on his website http://presidentofindia.nic.in. Wow! How many Presidents before him had their own websites? The topic of Kalam's presentation was "What Can I Do For India". He went on to present his vision of a developed India by year 2020. We have heard so many of our politicians talk about a developed India so that was nothing new. But what was different was that Kalam presented a detailed and well thought out action plan to attain that vision. It was clear that he has spent lot of time thinking about the problem. And he has actively worked with different people and organisations to get the process rolling. He has kept abreast of technology and realized the role that technology can play in realizing the dream of a developed India. Kalam spoke with passion and conviction. He talked about achievable targets, not lofty goals. I will not go into the details of what he spoke about since the presentation is available on his website for all to see. However, it was truly inspiring to hear the great man. His scientific approach touched a chord amongst the largely technincal audience. Kalam dispelled the long held notion that the President is merely a symbolic figurehead. This could well have been a CEO of a large corporation presenting his business plan
and urging his employees to take the company to greater heights!