Just completed reading The Davinci Code by Dan Brown. An excellent and well reasearched novel, and the author has managed to retain the suspense till almost the very end.

Taiwan has rejected the theory that Subhash Chandra Bose died in a plane crash in the country on 18th August 1945, saying that there was no plane crash at Taipei between 14 August and 20 September 1945. Will the Bose mystery ever get solved?

History of Computer Languages - From 1954 to 2005.

Check out Telecom Italia's ad featuring Mahatma Gandhi. :)

Stumbled upon Learning Curves - A blog by someone teaching and doing math. Interesting!

20040098536. This number has a significance for me. Lets see if anyone can guess it correctly!

Tim Oren writes about New Model Software Startups: Two Stage Ventures

Iam off to Chennai for a couple of days, and then to Trichi for another coupe of days. This will be my first visit to Trichi, so looking forward to it. I will be driving down to Chennai, but on a different route this time. Everyone seems to be discouraging me from going the Chitoor route, because of the violence in Andhra. So am planning to go via Hosur, even though its going to be a crowded route, because of all those overloaded trucks going at their own slow and steady pace. So mostly no blogging till Tuesday, unless i get some time with a internet-enabled PC.

Well, So Much for *That* Drive: The Story of Hard Drive Failure and Data Recovery

Folklore.org - Stories about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer, and the people who created it.

An inspiring essay by Azim Premji. Iam not sure whether this was given as a talk, or written as an article. But i surely found it inspiring.

--------
These are changing times. Yet in the middle of all the changes there is one thing that constantly determines success. Some call it leadership. But to my mind, it is the single-minded pursuit of excellence.

Excellence endures and sustains. It goes beyond motivation into the realms of inspiration. Excellence can be as strong a uniting force as solid vision.

Excellence does not happen in a vacuum. It needs a collective obsession as I have experienced the benefits of excellence in my own life. Excellence is a great starting point for any new organisation but also an unending journey. What is excellence? It is about going a little beyond what we expect from ourselves. Part of the need for excellence is imposed on us externally by our customers. Our competition keeps us on our toes, especially when it is global in nature.

But the other driver of excellence is internal. I have found that excellence is not so much a battle you fight with others, but a battle you fight with yourself, by constantly raising the bar and stretching yourself and your team. This is the best and the most satisfying and challenging part about excellence.

*How does one create excellence in an organisation?*

*First*, we create an obsession with excellence. We must dream of it not only because it delivers better results but because we truly believe in it and find it intrinsically satisfying to us. We must think of excellence not only with our mind but also with our heart and soul. Let us look outside, at the global standards of excellence in quality, cost and delivery and let us not rest till we surpass them.

*Second*, we need to build a collective self-confidence. Organisations and people who pursue excellence are self-confident. This is because excellence requires tremendous faith in one's ability to do more and in a better way. Unless, we believe we can do better, we cannot.

*Third*, we must understand the difference between perfection for its own sake and excellence. Time is of essence. Globalisation has made the customer only more impatient. This may seem like a paradox: should we aim for excellence or should we aim for speed?
Excellence is about doing the best we can and speed lies in doing it quickly. These two concepts are not opposed to each other; in fact, speed and timeliness are important elements of quality and excellence.

*Fourth*, we must realise that we cannot be the best in everything we do. We must define what we are or would like to be best at and what someone else can do better. Excellence is no longer about being the best in India. It is about being the best in the world. We have to define what our own core competencies are and what we can outsource to other leaders. Headaches shared are headaches divided.

*Fifth*, we must create processes that enable excellence. Today, there are a number of global methods and processes available whether it is Six Sigma, CMM or ISO. Use them because they are based on distilled wisdom collected from the best companies in the world. Also, we must build a strong foundation of information technology, because in this complex, dynamic world, it is imperative that we use the most modern tools to keep processes updated.

*Sixth*, we must create a culture of teaming. I have found that while great individuals are important, one cannot have pockets of excellence. Quality gives ample opportunities to build a culture of teaming. Cross-functional teams that are customer facing can cut through an amazing amount of bureaucracy, personal empire building and silos and deliver savings that one would not have imagined possible. The other advantage of building teams focussed on quality is that the teaming culture eventually spreads to the rest of the organisation and teaming becomes a way of life.

*Seventh*, invest in excellence for the future. Future always seems to be at a distance. But it comes upon you so suddenly that it catches you by surprise, if not shock. What constitutes excellence in the future will be significantly different from what it is today. In these days of severe market pressures, there is big temptation to sacrifice the future to look good in the present. We must certainly trim our discretionary expenses, but we must ensure that our investments in strategic areas that lead to excellence in the future are protected.

*Finally*, excellence requires humility. This is especially needed when we feel we have reached the peak of excellence and there is nothing further we can do. We need an open mind to look at things in a different way and allow new inputs to come in. Otherwise, there is a real danger of becoming complacent or even downright arrogant. I would like to end my talk with a story that
illustrates this very well.

A brilliant young professor went to meet a famous Zen master to have a discussion with him on Zen. He found himself in front of a modest house. He rang the doorbell and waited. A while later, he heard shuffling footsteps and the door was opened by the Zen master. He invited the professor to sit with him on the dining table. The professor was a little disappointed with the shabby appearance of the Zen master. He started quizzing him immediately on comparative
philosophies and the Zen master gave some brief answers.
When the professor began to debate with him on those answers, the Zen master stopped speaking and kept smiling at him. Finally, the professor got angry. He said, "I have come from a long distance just to understand the relevance of Zenism. But apparently you have nothing to say. I have not learnt anything from you at all."

At this point, the Zen master asked the professor to have some tea. When the professor held the cup, the Zen master started pouring tea into it. After some time, the tea started spilling and the professor shouted, "Stop! The cup can contain no more."

The Zen Master stopped and then, once again smiling, he said, "A mind, full of itself can receive nothing. How can I speak to you of Zenism until you empty your mind to learn." The professor understood and apologized to the Zen master. He parted from him, the Zen master -- a wiser man.
----------

MoonEdit - A multi-platform collaborative text editor :)

Tried out MSN Web Messenger. This is excellent. You get to use the entire interface as you see using the MSN messenger executable on PC. Its fast. And what i liked the most, is that you dont seem to need a hotmail account to login and use MSN messenger. I created a passport account using my gmail account, and iam able to use msn messenger. That, was a pleasent surprise for me.

Circuit city is planning to introduce wireless headsets which can act as sales reps at its stores. An innovative idea indeed. As the article explains
"When the customer stops in a certain area, the headset can explain items, present audio from a TV demonstration and potentially even connect the customer live with a centralized sales assistant. In theory, that sales assistant might be 2,000 miles away—assuming no one in that store is available."

Did anyone notice this fineprint on Apple's iPod Shuffle webpage?

1. Music capacity is based on 4 minutes per song and 128Kbps AAC encoding.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
3. Rechargeable batteries have a limited number of charge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced. Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. See www.apple.com/batteries for more information.
4. Some computers require either the optional iPod shuffle Dock or a USB cable extender (sold separately).

Note point 2. :)

I use Firefox almost 95% of the time (the other 5% for those crazy sites which seem to work only on IE. This includes a few of our intranet webpages). And i find the following extensions simply hard to live without.

Livelines - This helps me add a RSS feed directly into Bloglines
BlogThis - This is to post a blog entry in Blogger
IEView - View the current page in IE (for those 5% sites i was talking about)

Do you have any such 'hard to live without' Firefox extensions?

Linux for Embedded Systems?. This is an interesting article by David N. Kleidermacher. His views: Linux is a desktop OS, and so using it for embedded systems carried its own risks.
And the disclaimer : David works for Green Hills Software, which makes Integrity, an Embedded OS which is in direct competition with Linux for the Embedded market. But the article is a very good read, even though its a bit old.

Google begins recruiting in India. Does anyone know of someone who has appeared for a Google Bangalore interview? Should be interesting to hear their experience.

Wish you all a very happy Pongal. Its always nice when holidays fall on Fridays or Mondays!

A day with MSN Search Beta

I have been a Google search user for a few years now. I do almost 100% of my search using Google. Given all the hype around MSN search, i decided to use ot for a day and figure out whether it in anyway enhances my search experience. I logged every important search i made today and have given reasons why i feel one engine is better than the other as far as helpful search results go.

1) I use Firefox for my daily work, and it provides a Google search box by default. So i decided to get a similar msn search box. So searched both MSN and Google. Google's first result pointed me to Ryanware blog which contained an installation for the msn search plugin, while MSN didn't get this result anywhere in the first page. Google - 1, MSN - 0
2) For writing a new windows based tools, i often refer to MSDN for getting the API definitions and other MFC class related info. I dont search normally MSDN, but i use Google and search for example, "msdn+CCommandLineinfo''. In this specific example search, Google gave the class definition from MSDN as the first result., while MSN didnt show the class definition page anywhere in the first page. Google - 2, MSN - 0
3) I use QNX as my embedded OS at work. So similar to the search 2 above, i use the QNX webpage for help on API functions. So here is an example search on MSN and Google. Google as usual gets me the right page as the first result. MSN doesn't have the exact page as the first result, and it has links to the right page in a few results, so iam not that disappointed with this result. So i give equal points to both Google and MSN. Google - 2.5 MSN-0.5
4) Searching for BSNL broadband on Google gave the BSNL's broadband application form as the first result, which is pretty impressive. MSN pointed to the BSNL homepage as the 5th result. OK, but not up to the mark. Also in this search case, having the news items pointing to the launch of BSNL broadband on top of the page on Google was very helpful. Google - 3.5 MSN - 0.5
5) Searching for Bangalore Habba, MSN managed to find the homepage, while Google was just pointing to some news items about the Habba. Google 3.5 MSN 1.5
6) Searching for the PGSM course at IIM, Bangalore . Google has the best results. MSN not up to the mark. Google 4.5 MSN 1.5

Most other searches Google and MSN were mostly close. But still given that Google consistently gives better results, looks like MSN folks have a lot more work to do.

Just downloaded and installed Lektora Beta. Lektora is a new browser-based RSS aggregator.
I have been using Bloglines for a while now, and pretty satisfied with it. The main reason i like Bloglines is the fact that it lets me read blogs on any computer i use, without the need for installing any new software. Yet, as Lektora is also a browser-based aggregator, i decided to give this a try. Here is my initial impression.

Positives:
1) This has a very nice and polished look.
2) Available for both IE and Firefox.

Negatives:
1) Lektora requires you to download a 1.7 MB software to your machine.
2) Every time i try to read the blogs, Lektora takes time aggregating the feeds. This seems to take more time that i would like. With bloglines, this is really a snap.
3) Bloglines has a really nice feature in which it shows only the updated feeds since i last read a blog. Somehow i couldn't figure out how to do a similar thing in this tool.
4) There is no way for me to selectively delete a few blogs that i have added to the tool. Its painful when you try and delete the default blogs one by one.

Overall, Lektora beta doesn't have enough to cause a switch from Bloglines. Once they iron out the initial usability issues, may be this is worth a look.

Update: As the author of Lektora commented in the comments section, Item 3 is actually the default in which Lektora is installed. And Item 4 : Deleting a set of blogs is actually possible in Lektora.

Using Opaque pointers in C/C++. Basic stuff, but still a neat writeup.

BSNL announces Broadband tariffs. I guess iam going for the Home 500 scheme which has 1GB upload/download limit, and 256 kbps bandwidth.

TheOpenCD. A collection of open source applications for Windows. (via jeremy)

A site redesign at last. I have been toying with this idea of simplifying the looks of my blog for a long time. And finally over the weekend, with my brother's help, i have managed this design. The picture you see on the banner was taken a few months back at Kumarakom in Kerala. Still one thing left is to find a nice name for my blog. All ideas are welcome.

Innovative embedded solutions has a very cool wireless device called Vaayu, that you can use to connect your laptop to a dail-up connection. Its priced at Rs 3800/- and is available from Bazee

CNET has published its list of Top 10 cell phones of 2004.

Marketing Software When You Are a Small Company

Bill Gates at the CES 2005 - Video of the Keynote speech

Innovation Inc. - Pixar Animation Studios' approach to creativity

Full Video of Google on the CBS show '60 Minutes'.

India's Odd Couple: Cops and Tech

Six Apart to buy Live Journal. Are we starting to see weblog service consolidation?

Zaptophone has introduced Tsunami Aid Ringtones, which are basically national anthems of the Tsunami affected countries. The proceeds from selling this goes towards the US fund for UNICEF Tsunami relief efforts. National anthems of Thailand, Srilanka, India and Indonesia are available.

Adobe Reader 7.0 is available for download. This version seems to be much faster in startup time when compared to 6.0.

Finally got time to read Camels and Rubber Duckies - Joel's essay on product pricing. Interesting read.

Will Google stay as hot as its lava lamps?

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year 2005.

It's the 'pure entrepreneur' who often leads the way

If some of you have been wondering the infrequent(or lack of) posts for the last week or so, here's the reason: I underwent the LASIK procedure for my eyes to correct my myopia. I had this procedure done at Shankara Netralaya, Chennai. It was just a half-an-hour procedure, and now i no longer need to wear my beloved glasses, which i have been wearing for a little over 18 years now. I still see a slight halo around bright objects, which is supposed to persist for a week or so after the procedure. Other than that iam able to read books and browse the web as ever before. Will be resting for a week more before i head back again to work.

IRCTC has allowed train reservations online starting 4am to 11:30 pm on all days including Sundays. Initially the timings were only during actual booking counter hours. Thats a good start. Iam waiting for the day, when i can just go online, book my tickets, and print out my e-ticket as well.
Update: The new timings are valid from Jan 1, 2005 onwards. I missed mentioning that! Thanks Sudhir, for pointing out the mistake,

What you think is logical, just need not be. Iwas coding this little snippet in C++, in which i was reopening a ifstream. Now however hard i tried, any operations on the reopened stream just wouldn't work. After a good amount of googling, figured out that this is an FAQ!! Now who would have thought that a close after an open wouldn't clear all internal flags, and that we would have to call a clear() on the stream as well?

What's next for Google. A must read for anyone interested in Google.

Microsoft has published this FAQ, in which Bill Gates talks about the secrets for his success.

Snapped the Thiruvalluvar statue at Kanyakumari when i had been there a few months back.

‘‘... there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer makes enemies of all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order...’’
— Nicollo Machiavelli in 'The Prince'

The Science of Second-Guessing. A very interesting interview with Stephen Hawking.

The top 10 software innovations of 2004. I dont agree exactly to the ordering, but its a good list.

Scoble gives an explanation on why WinFS is getting delayed and delayed.
Update: Adam Barr counters Scoble's argument for the delaying schedule. Now this is getting interesting!

The Shlemiel way of software - Salon has done an interview with Joel Spolsky

Unable to reform their wayward son, these parents killed him. Very sad indeed!

Finding the Best Programmer's Font

I seem to be getting lots of spam phone calls at office these days. Mostly from Citibank, StanChartered, and other banks trying to sell you credit cards promising you all sorts of goodies from alarm clocks to life-time free credit card schemes. Initially it used to be just the private banks, but now i constantly get calls from executives of nationalized banks as well. If its not credit cards, then its about home loans. After getting disturbed quite often i have decided to not pick up the phone unless i can recognize the phone number on my phone's display. I have tried this for a week now, but iam still concerned that i might miss some genuine calls. US has a do-not-call registry. I dont think India has such a scheme. Even if they have, iam not sure how many potential spammers will respect such a do-not-call request. And we cannot even install spam filters for phones! Is there no way around this spamming?

Nandan Nilekeni's Guide to sounder sleep.

Yin and Yang - A nice article on desktop security.

Google suggest is damn cool! You just start typing what you want to search. It offers to complete your query. This sure saves a few extra keystrokes, and also avoids typos. Google IS God!
Update: Zef Hemel has a interesting discussion on why web appliation that we write normally suck, and that Google is able to come up with very rich client applications like Gmail and Google Suggest. He also proposes that an opensource community could develop all needed widgets necessary for developing rich web apps. Sounds a very interesting idea.

Laptop Usage Can Lead to Low Sperm Count and Infertility. Now, thats scary!

ZefHemel has collected some good Python Links

What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean - Estimating How Many Books Sold by Amazon

128MB Secure Digital (SD) Card for $1.95!!

My Toshiba 2410 laptop modem(or modem settings) seems to have a problem. I have dual boot on this machine, and the modem works like a charm on Linux. But on WinXP Pro, it just seems to get a busy signal al the time. The modem on this laptop is a software modem(I guess from Agere). As the modem works fine with Linux, i assume that nothings wrong with the modem as such. Have i messed up some setting? Any of you Windows/Modem Gurus out there can help me out on this. Just for Info, i use the Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official distribution.
Update: Finally was able to fix this problem. But had to take my laptop to my Toshiba dealer. He figured out that the audio driver was conflicting with the modem driver. Iam thinking why Windows couldn't figure this out by itself and alert me on how to solve this problem!

Now you can buy a 400GB Seagate hard-disk for your PC. I actually find it difficult to even fill up my 20GB hard disk! (link via Ashesh)

Sun proposes a new open source license, under which Solaris will be opened up. Linus feels it will be tough for Sun to build a open source community based on such a license, as open source developers will never like to play second fiddle to Sun.

Singapore airlines to offer high speed internet on board its long haul flights. Pricing is not cheap though!

Check out this ad for Google's Bangalore office. Looks like it was on Times of India, but i seem to have missed it!

An cybercrime awareness post by Kiruba. If you are a blogger, please read it. And Kiruba has also removed the controversialsensational "video" post from his blog!

Secrets of Firefox 1.0. A nice list of tips for speeding up Firefox and for making it look better.

Microsoft Research to open lab in Bangalore

Is our distaste for Bush misplaced? - An Indian viewpoint

Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs

Designing Real-Time Systems with UML

If you use WinXP on your day-2-day work, here is a good list of tweaks that can help you make your machine faster.

Businessworld India has released this year's list of Great places to work in India. We are second in the list. Fedex tops the list.

QNX: The Unexpected Surprise. An article that looks at how good QNX is for the desktop. I have been using QNX as the desktop on one of my office machines for a few months now, and i find it really fun to use.

26,500 Magazines and Newspapers from 200 Countries at allyoucanread.com (via Anil)

Togadia wants the Kanchi seer case shifted out of Tamil Nadu. Mr. Togadia wants the case to be transferred to Gujarat, where he feels there can be a fair trial! He can't get more funnier than this, can he?

You can use this online tool to tune the cleartype font settings for your XP machine. Being a Microsoft website, this tool works only with IE, and not with Firefox!

Things that can happen to your office when you are on vacation!

A huge set of programming contest problems

Here is a cool tip when using MSN search. You can use it to solve algebraic equations, and even higher order polynomials.

Going to Chennai today. Will be there for a day and then to Trivandrum. Its always nice to go home after 5 long months, and that too on a 7 day vacation!

The war between free email services is getting more interesting. Yahoo has rolled out email search, address auto-complete, and a few other enhancements to Yahoo! mail. Gmail already has a very useful search mechanism on archived mails, so this feature addition was expected of Yahoo. Now what will Hotmail do? Anyway great time for end users. Now one question creeps in my mind. Why would anyone want to pay money for email services, when you get all these great features for free?

Howard Stern has listed down the 50 states by their average IQ and how the states voted for the 2004 Presidential election. Out of the top 25 states in average IQ, only 6 states voted for Bush, while the all 25 states at the bottom of the average IQ list voted for Bush. See the trend?

Noticed this while using Firefox 1.0 on Windows and Linux. In the Windows version, browser preferences are under the 'Tools' drop down menu with the name 'Options'. While the Linux version, its called 'Preferences' and is in the 'Edit' Menu. Dont they use the same codebase for Windows and Linux? Or is the GUI code alone totally different? So Firefox on Windows follows where IE places its Options, while Firefox on Linux follows where Netscape/Mozilla used to place the 'Preferences'. Interesting!

Finally was able to try out MSN Beta Search, after a full day after it was announced. It was just spewing out errors yesterday, but now it looks all the initial hiccups have been fixed. Lots of reviews have already flooded the internet. Most seem to a little biased against Microsoft.
Personally i felt it interesting. Most of my searches were spot on, and gave me what i was looking for. The $100 million invested on this looks like well spent. But how much this will be a competition for Google remains to be seen.
Forrester Research has a positive review: MSN Search--just good enough.

Wish you all a happy Diwali. And have a nice and entertaining long weekend too!

Moved to Firefox 1.0 on my linux box as well my windows machine. Both installations rock. One major annoyance i had with each and every firefox upgrade is that my themes just stop working. I had to download the theme again every time i installed a new version. I had guessed that issue would go off with 1.0 , but the problem still persists. This problem is present in both my Linux and Windows machines, so what i doubt whether its my configuration thats the root cause of the problem. May be its just my favourite themes, but still its pretty nasty when i end up everytime having to search and download my favourite theme.

Turn On, Tune In, Pay Up. MIT Technology Review on how XM and Sirius persuaded millions that paying to listen to a cool technology beats listening to a boring one for free.

The Real THR34T KR3W: The Story of Hacker Connor Hansen

The ten secrets of embedded debugging

Speegle. Search results read out for you. Search results seem to be exactly Google's results, even though the site doesn't mention anything about Google on their webpage.

How to interview a programmer

Twenty Reasons Why You Shouldn't Post Your Picture On The Internet. Absolutely hilarious!

LinuxDevices.com has published the proceedings from the Sixth Real-Time Linux Workshop held in Asia for the first time, November 3-5, 2004, at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Pdf versions of all papers available.

Kerry has lost!
The blogosphere in general, is in a highly depressed mood with the Bush win. Some weblogs are drawing solace on the fact Nixon also got reelected a second term, but he was impeached during that term. I genuinely and honestly hope that would happen soon. One thing that strikes me most though, is the fact while the 70-80% of the blog world wanted Kerry to win, while more than 50% of the American public thought otherwise. God bless America.
The main issue with the Bush win is that, Bush might consider this as an acceptance of his foriegn and domestic policies by the American public, which i believe is far from the truth. This is more of the Democratic party's inability to utilise the momentum against Bush to its advantage. Lets just hope Bush returns to more civilised ways, wins back support of the rest of the world, stop thinking about more invasions, gets Osama, cleans up his Iraq act, revs up the economy, gives better health care to Americans, revitalizes the intelligence community, and starts thinking more about the environment. I know thats a tall ask given Bush's reputation during the last 4 years, but whats wrong in hoping? Its hope that has and will save this world!

Techcentral runs this story about people in Malaysia buying pre-loaded linux boxes from the vendor, only to run pirated versions of Windows when they get home. Same is true here in India, where i have seen multiple instances where people bought a preloaded linux box, which costs less by about Rs 3000 (~$60), when compared to a windows box, and then quickly installing WinXP as soon as they got home. As long as piracy rules and linux does not give a similar out-of-the-box experience as Windows, most of the linux desktop adoption numbers will not make much sense.

Samsung has announced a 6 megapixel camera at 300$. Impressive enough. Two years back, i bought my Canon powershot A40 2 megapixel camera at 300$.

Microsoft's new security initiatives seems to be showing a lot of promise. In a html mangling test conducted by Micheal Zalewski, IE that ships with Windows XP Service Pack 2 was the only one to withstand the test, well..., not completely, but that was the best of the lot!. Coverage at Newsforge.

The story of the creation of the new Ford Escape hybrid car.

GM has a home for blogs , and Ed Koerner has a blog on small block engines. (via Scoble)