The Pensieve

On the way to Sholinganallur via the IT highway, a flock of Pelicans have made the backwaters their 'in-transit stay' much to the delight of the commuters. Most of the commuters slow down and some (including myself) visited over the weekends to take a snap of the feathered friends.

I had to do some shopping and was lured into a some of these shops by their big bold 'off' posters. But alas, once inside, anything that I touch, the salesman utters "Sorry sir, but that does not have the discount". Not to be out-done, I ask "So what do you have on the discount sale?". He points to a table where there are a 'few' set of shirts that no one would pick up, in violet and pink and fluorescent green. But their prices seems to be barely justifiable even 'after' you apply the discount. Note size of the '50%' and 'Sale' on the poster, where I think the entire wares on discount would comfortably fit in and you will still be able to make out what the poster says. Perhaps there should be some legalization on the size of the '50%' that you can have on the poster to depend upon the number of articles you have on a discount compared to the remaining items. In the end, you end up buying the product at the same price y

Been installing various desktop search tools like the Google Desktop, Copernic (once free), Microsoft Search etc and after a few weeks / months of usage, eventually felt happier to uninstall them. One of the primary reason I need a desktop search was I needed a tool to quickly search for mails. I would seldom search for files on my machine. But one assumption that we need to keep in mind is that, these search engines are not exact. That is, the engines fetch you results, but they may not be comprehensive. The web crawling spiders that scour the web for data and index them, it is possible thet the server's index may be out of sync with respect to the actual web site as new data would have been posted after the spider index the content. In the Internet, sure, if you have a few sites missed out, it does not matter much. But desktop search apps seem to work in very similar lines. If at some time, for want of speed or to free up available memory, you stop indexing your mails or document

With the onset of interactive web pages that update dynamically the moment you move your mouse over a control, development of an AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) based web site adds to the complexity. For one, they mess up with your browser history and limit your ability to bookmark a particular page as almost all contents are loaded "in-page". The other disadvantage I see is the in-ability of custom scripts to access the site and extract information. For example, I can write a perl script that can access the Indian Railways page and query the arrival of a particular train. If the site used AJAX, it's going to be more difficult. Cellphones that bundle with micro-browsers either lack javascripting or access is usually blocked by service providers leaving you grapping with an empty framework with no actual data in it. Development wise, you introduce a sense of uncertainty into your web-page where when your page looks like it has completed loading, more data is still b

The other day, I was thinking of consolidating all my music collection from various machines and burn them into a DVD as a backup. There were various ways that I could have done the transfer: Extract the music back from the disk originals Copy them using a rewritable media like a pen drive or a writable media like a CD Connect over the network and copy the files I can use Samba as some of my machines are Windows based Setup a FTP server to copy files I can setup a ssh server and securely copy the files to my Linux box That was how I discovered ssh, the secure shell. I had originally been looking at setting up Samba on my Linux box, but was frightened with the possibility of it suffering a virus attach as most of the viruses / botnets would be scanning for a windows PC and this would become a backdoor for entry. The other option was ssh which was simple to setup and quite secure. It basically provides a secure way to connect to a computer that enables the ssh service. You are presented

The other day, I saw news item at slashdot where people mentioned that Linux seemed to perform better that Windows on network throughput. Some attributed it to the ISP throttling the bandwidth for the first few minutes where as others mentioned that the Linux network drivers seemed to be configured to maximize network performance where as the Windows settings are sub-par. An indepth article depicting based on actual data is provided which eventually leads to thinking perhaps, you should tweak your windows network settings... Though people had complained that both the machines tested had slightly different specs and hence the performance results could be skewed, I have been browsing on both a windows PC and a linux box and it does look like (no systematic tests conducted!) the throughput that I get on a Linux PC is much higher than as experienced on the windows PC so far. The windows PC or laptop has 512MB RAM and is an Intel Centreno Duo 1.66GHz where as the Linux Box is a older AMD

Aadi Sale, New Year Sale, Year End Clearence Sale and now the Global Meltdown sale! Happened to see this posted at a window of a garment shop at Pondy Bazzar, T-Nager. An innovative approach to woo in customers. Apart from the PR, this shop sells really good (limited collection) and cheap (3 times cheaper) clothes for kids compared to the branded cos like the Levi's or Lee. London Stores, Pondy Bazar, T-Nagar.

It's unfortunate to see such a big corporation fall down in light of the scam announced yesterday. Share prices of the listed script dropped down from Rs.170 to Rs.35 in the NSE in a matter of hours and the entire IT industry was watching the news unfurl dumbstruck. The fate of 52,000 employees and their families hang and hopefully, the company must either build back the trust of the share holders and its employees or the employees should be is a position to secure jobs in other companies. Only time will tell...

One more year has passed by and the time has come to wish all of you a happy, healthy, safe, peaceful and prosperous New Year! This is the time when one looks past on what has happened and makes plans on what to achieve and focus going forward. And the best of luck in making up your New Year resolutions. As one of my mentor mentioned long back, you would usually be bound and emotionally attached to your resolutions if you commit yourself in paper by signing on the paper what you plan to achieve. Though most of my resolutions are broken in the next few days / weeks, I am planning to be different this time and commit my pain points to paper (maybe I can get a bond paper too, to make it really legal ;-)). Give it a try. You might be able to hold on to your resolutions a little bit longer until it becomes a habit. And no... I'm not going to publish my resolutions here ;-)