REFLECTIONS

Joberix.com

2010-09-04T12:52:00.005+05:30

One of friends showed me this website long time back - Joberix.com - a job search engine. Wait, I am not trying to market this website or review this website, that is not my interest either!.

Just like any other search engine, this site simply searches based on keywords and when I searched for "Sales Executive" ( I am not a sales executive though ;-)) it took me to a conventional results page like this.

What is interesting here is what happens when I search for a string like "<style>body {background: red;}</style>Gotcha! Now this is how you do client side code injection!!" the results page changes like this. Or when I search for something like "<script>var x=document.cookie;alert("Arun Ragh now have access to your Joberix cookies - " + x);</script>" it take me to a very vulnerable page like this. I can basically read all your Joberix related cookies which I can always use it to fake requests from your joberix account.

It is a simple but a very critical client-side code injection mechanism in websites to get access to your password protected data, but I am still wondering why Joberix.com is not bothered to fix this issue. :-)

As I published this post I realized that blogspot.com also has this vulnerability. :-P

New Pet

2010-05-30T20:51:00.016+05:30

Sunday, 30th May 2010 - 11:15AM at Anna Salai, Chennai.

Chennai heat was sucking all our energy and water from our bodies. We were in the streets of Chennai on a mid-day inspite of knowing the intensity of summer, all just for one reason.

I was thinking about it for quite a long time, it got intensified after meeting Deepak at Yahoo!. It got more intensified when we decided to go for a photo-trip to Ooty sometime during August. Maybe it is a coincidence, last week Vijesh bought the same camera I was planning to buy and after feeling the cam I couldn't really resist it. Based on my study and few good suggestions from Deepak and Vijesh, I decided to go ahead with these two :$

1. Nikon D90

2. Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II Lens

I had to postpone my purchase till sunday for the sake of 16-85mm lens and in the meantime I found a great read called "Complete Guide to the Nikon D90 - by Thom Hogan" via Deepak again. I spent my whole saturday reading this book and believe me it is a great resource for anyone buying a DSLR. It is not just a D90 guide, it gives you in-depth information on DSLRs, how each and every feature of the camera is designed and engineered. If you are planning to buy a DSLR sometime, do read Thom Hogan before jumping into the store.

Unlike a saree purchase, our purchase was quick and I had my D90 with the lens in my hand. Vijesh after getting approvals from his supervisor :-P, had the permission to buy a 50mm prime lens which is yet another great gadget for a photo-enthu.

With all the stuff loaded in our bags we roamed in Mount road for few hours simply waiting for a NRI to join for lunch. NRI Vijayaragavan enjoyed his weekend in Mahabalipuram and was happily returning in a AC car to meet us who were already like "Half-Grilled Chickens". Before we were fully grilled Vijay reached Spencers and we had a refreshing time there. Our cameras got a little work there and soon we were on our way back to home.

Note: I am still wondering why all US-returns prefer 3/4th pants and hawaii slippers. ;) Explanations appreciated.

Flashback and Updates

2010-05-23T11:05:00.016+05:30

2nd May 2010 - "Good evening passengers, this is your flight captain. We will be landing in Chennai shortly, please fasten your seat beats", an announcement was made while I just opened the potato sandwich pack and was wondering about all the happy moments, friends and fun that I left back at Bangalore.

Just after landing I was very reluctant to come out of the aircraft, of course Kingfisher air-hostesses being one reason for it :-), the main reason is simple - I was afraid of jumping into a furnace. With no other choice, I came out as the last passenger out of the flight and minutes later I was out of airport waiting for my guest house cab all wet.

New employee orientation, team intro, project intro, blah-blah-blah.. all started well right from the 1st day at Amazon and things are so good, so far. It is a real geeky place, where ever you go you will find ex-Trilogy, IITians and ex-Yahoos. Technically my transition into Amazon went on smooth and I am getting used to the environment and people around me.

Non-technically, I had quite a lot of tasks to-do. Rent a flat, buy an AC and get it installed, move my things from Bangalore, get internet connection, get cable connection, get a new mobile connection, update bank records with your new address, etc. All these things kept me very busy for the last few weeks. The most adventurous from the above list was to rent a flat, after doing that I felt Bangalore was a easy place to rent for the rupees that you spell.

Being a newbie at Chennai, I had to go through a real-estate broker. Initially I started with a budget of 10K, my first agent Mr. A showed me few 1BHKs in slum areas and I started demanding for better locality, after few more houses Mr. A finally took me to a furnished house for 12,000 which he claimed to be the best house that he had. After getting into that small 1BHK I realized the definition of the word "furnished" that day - "house with a 3 legged broken chair, a 4th or some Nth hand washing machine and a completely rusted stove". I asked the agent a simple question,

"Do you think this house is worth 12000?"

the answer he gave was also very simple,

"Pakathula Actor Sarath Kumar veedu iruku sir." (Actor Sarath kumar's house is nearby).

Why the hell do people increase the rent just because some popular personality is nearby? The only advantage one can have by taking this house is they can directly go and talk to actress Radika about her oscar winning mega serials and get updates of her roles. I am no where near to serials so I had to say good-bye to Mr. A and went in search of Mr. B.

Mr. B was worse than Mr. A, so I had to go for Mr. C, Mr. D, Mr. E and Mr. F. The number of houses I rejected was steadily increasing. While I dealt with Mr. E, he recommended a very active real-estate agent with great houses in-hand and he took me to meet him. I just laughed after seeing him because he is none other than Mr. A again :-) and I just assumed that I exhausted all the real-estate agents. It was true in one sense, people started showing me the houses which I already rejected and I was quite frustrated. Finally, Mr. F came to my rescue and showed me the one I was looking for.

Thats a heads up for people who are planning to rent a house in areas close to IT parks in Chennai. Other things went on pretty smooth and I am getting used to this new place. Chennai is a very big city, traveling to city bus terminus takes more than an hour even without any traffic. The traffic sense here is just awesome, you can easily learn how not to drive in a city road easily here.

I am all alone at home, so I might start blogging frequently from now on.

Farewell

2010-04-23T22:11:00.006+05:30

Most of you who read this blog might also know the person I am talking about.

He joined as an intern in a company almost 7 years back and continued working as an employee in the same company till today. I and my friends always wonder how he continues to work with the same enthusiasm and energy as that of a fresher. In spite of working in the same team and company from day 1 of his career he never under performed. He starts to office at 7.30AM every day and comes back home at 10PM, do you think that makes him tired? You are wrong, he attends meetings till 11.30PM atleast 3 times a week. Weekends are also almost similar to working days for him. Working like this for 6 years is not at all easy, I know most of you will agree with me on this.

It is 10.30PM when I am writing this and today is his last day with his company and he is still at his office. Now this is what I call it as 'devoted to work'.

He never speaks a angry word, never complaints when we pull his legs, shave off his mustache ;-) . He is one of the best and humble person I know. He has been my roommate for the last 2.5 years, but I am going to miss him soon. He is moving to Singapore for his new job. At last he has achieved what he wanted to.

Peeps, all the best for your new job, new country and all the future endeavors. Don't forget us. :)

Top 5 Tweets that I hate

2010-04-17T16:50:00.009+05:30

Twitter is of course the most simplest and powerful micro-blogging medium I know. But I completely dislike and ignore few kind of tweets, the Top 5 kind of tweets that I hate are listed here

#5 - Fighting/Arguing through Tweets

"@XYZ, using the same infrastructure, why not? I also think you shouldn't hurry. What say?"

Why don't you take your nasty fights offline? It irritates me more when I don't know who @XYZ is. :)

#4 - The number of followers you have

"Yipee.. Will have 250 followers soon!!"

Don't brag.. You may soon end up with 200 followers..

#3 - The conference/event you are at

"In CodingFreaks-2010, totally impressed by @someone who spoke about Cosmic energy coupled with Java Beans!"

Please don't do this, because no one outside the conference bothers about it. I realized this the hard way. :)

#2 - Completely abstract, weird and out of context Tweets

"It worries me.. I will try to be quiet"

Err... What the heck are you taking about??

and at #1 - Test Tweets

"Testing..", "Test tweet after replacing my laptop charger"..

Stop doing QA, someone has already done that for you. Just use it.

I don't know how many of you will agree with me, but this is completely my personal opinion. No hard feelings. :)

A Big Leap

2010-04-14T14:14:00.011+05:30

Weekend movies, legendary saturdays & lazy sundays, Mafia, Literature, Paintball game, short trips to near by places, Krishna Cafe, China Pearl, commercial street, brigade road, late night discussions about AR Rahman Vs Illayaraja, Vijay fans Vs Vijay anti-fans and of course all my friends in Bangalore. I am going to miss them all.

1242 days, 25 sprints, 400 bugs fixed, 8 hack days, 1 outside India trip, 3 laptops, 2 desktops, 73 new contacts, countless T-shirts, free Flickr pro account, post-lunch walk, Gym & Aerobics sessions, occasional foosball, too many stupid tea break arguments and many more unlisted things at Yahoo!. It is now time for me to put them all in my memory lane and ponder about it.

Yes, I will be moving out of Bangalore by the end of this month.

A quote by Napoleon that I completely agree with "Ability is of little account without opportunity". A better opportunity and a new life awaits for me in Chennai and I hope things to go well on this move. Being a person brought up in a cold place, Chennai is a quite scary city for me and all the tweets from Chennai folks confirms that fear :) . Everything comes with a price tag, I have to bare this price of Chennai weather for a better opportunity and I am getting ready for this adventure. :)

Let's see what the future has in store for me.

Treasure

2010-03-18T17:55:00.008+05:30

I went home to my native last week and unearthed a treasure. It is something taken with a very old film based camera, developed and preserved for more than 20 years. No pictures from a digital camera with the costliest lens in the market can be better than these for me.

It is always nice to look at yourself few decades back and wonder why didn't the time machine freeze. I am wondering it now. :)

Time for me to scan them and preserve it in digital form.

Are you Safe??

2010-02-23T16:41:00.009+05:30

Last week I got a call from one of my school friend Kishore, with surprise I picked up his call. He said his mail account has been hacked for almost 3 times in last two months and the hacker has been sending mails to all his contacts stating that he is in a big trouble and in urgent need of £2000. I redirected him to customer care and after getting his problem resolved through customer care, he was curious to know what is happening here and how the hacker is able to get his password in spite of changing it.

Kishore: Tell me what is happening with my account? This is the 3rd time da, I don't want it to happen again.

Me: Did you try to open any spam messages and click the links in that Spam?

Kishore: Nope. I didn't.

Me: Hmm.. Did you download any software which asked for your email id & password?

Kishore: No..

Me: Were do you browse from? Personal laptop or Office computer?

Kishore: I check my mails only from a near by browsing centers. Mail clients are blocked in my office.

Me: Do you know anyone else facing similar issues?

Kishore: Hmm.. ya.. one of my friend had a similar issue, but he was using hotmail.

Me: Even he used the same browsing center?

Kishore: Yes.. Thats the only one with good connection speed and close to our house.

Me: Gotcha! Stop using that browsing center. What happened to you sounds like a Trojan horse attack.

Kishore: Ah.. What kind of horse is that?

Me: It is a type of malware, something like a virus. By mistake, someone might have downloaded a software that is infected with Trojan and installed it. That software will not have show any visual clue for running but they can keep track of what you type. There are some password trojans which steal passwords and account ids of common email providers and banks.

Kishore: Oh!!

Me: The trojan horse will mail these stolen passwords to its owner. These owners will use it to send mails or transfer money. It is a very risky one. Be safe in the future.

Kishore: But how to be safe?

Me: Try to avoid browsing centers, even if you use browsing center choose a one which has up-to-date anti virus up and running.

Kishore: Okie

Me: To be extra safe, check the list of processes in task manager before browsing. If you have some suspicion look for some other machine.

Kishore: I will try that. Any other tips for safe browsing?

Me: Hmm.. There is another common internet attack called "Phishing". It is again all about stealing username & password.

Kishore: Err.. What is that now?

Me: Phishing is a very simple way to steal passwords. You may get a email with a nice message like "Click here to upgrade your email storage limit to 500GB" or like "Click here to see your friends photo in picasa", etc. You will click on the link and it will open a google login page again. You will enter your credentials there but after that nothing will happen. You will be wondering why your email storage is still not 500GB? But your email accounts password will be changed in a day or so and you will not be able to login. Guess where did you go wrong?

Kishore: Hmm.. Not sure.. Everything sounds fine.. Are you sure this can happen?

Me: Yep, it can. When you click the link in that email it opened your login page, right?

Kishore: Yes

Me: That page is not actually the genuine login page, it is a fake login page hosted by some hackers. It will look exactly like your usual login page, you will assume it to be true and enter you password there. When you click on "Sign-in" the password will be sent to the hacker who will use it further.

Kishore: OMG.. How to avoid this now?

Me: Every time you enter any password or pin of any internet application make sure you are safe. Check the URL before entering the password. Any login to a Google account can happen only through a URL like "https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?...." and to a Yahoo account can happen only via "https://login.yahoo.com/....", for Citibank it is "https://citibank.co.in/..." etc. If you see anything else in the URL then don't enter any details there. Some phishing sites don't have any domain and it will be hosted like "https://172.83.64.101/..." etc, don't ever think of entering details there.

Kishore: Tricky.. I have to make this has a habit from now on.

Me: Ya.. Be safe, there are lot of rogues out there.. :)

Life of an........

2010-02-17T18:57:00.009+05:30

Sitting in a 5x5 foot cubicle, with a LCD screen and a sophisticated computer; being happy with the fact that coffee and snacks are for free; being enthusiastic about team-outings or star hotel dinner/lunch or office parties; feeling proud for owning a Nike/Adidas; feeling lucky for buying a T-shirt for Rs.700 that actually costs Rs.200 elsewhere; always assuming that your salary is the primary factor for happiness in life; running behind perks; planning to buy a new house that will cost your whole carrier; getting excited about performance reviews and salary hikes.

You always think these things will make you happy. But are you truly happy?

You run like a horse for bread crumbs. You are faithful to your company in spite of knowing the fact that your company might turns its back at you anytime. You burn mid-night oil for moving your project leaving behind your family and personal life.

Why do you run behind money and these silly things when you very well know that your happiness is elsewhere?

You are a Software Engineer. I am one too.

Is it worth the Buzz??

2010-02-11T16:21:00.009+05:30

Had my hands on Google Buzz today. To be frank, I don't see anything innovative here that is worth the attention it has got. A simple search on twitter shows how people are crazy about this copycat. This feature is exactly the same as what Facebook calls as "Status Updates"(or Am I missing something here??) . Everyone of us use the facebook status update feature almost everyday, but still why do we see so much of excitement around the Google's version of the same??

In my opinion, Social networking concepts can never fit in a e-mail client. E-mails are mainly for one-on-one communication or one-on-few communication, whereas social networking status updates are about one-on-many communication. You cannot bring one-on-many into a one-on-few application (but the reverse is always easy, remember Chat inside GMail??).

It is not so comfortable for me to do networking over mail because of three reasons:

I go to gmail, to check/send my mails, nothing else (not to do know what my friends are doing).
Using e-mail client to do networking is like using screw-driver to dig a well. It doesn't do justice, I need the right tools.
As long as gmail is just a email client it will be sweet and simple. Buzz is going it make it more cluttered.

Yahoo introduced the same feature in its mail a year back(it is called Yahoo Profiles), but it didn't reach even the day-to-day Yahoo mail users. Infact, the Yahoo version had much more features than Google Buzz. Personally I am not comfortable with both Google Buzz and Yahoo profiles because of the reasons I quoted above.

Facebook is growing like water hyacinth, lot of internet players including Google is facing a big threat because of facebook. Google Wave was the first initiative from Google to fight back, but it didn't do justice to the company (I liked the demo of Google Wave very much tough). For an end-user, making his e-mail a part of social networking is a easier task than making his social networking as a part of e-mail. Knowing this fact, Facebook would soon bring in e-mail into their product, that would definitely bring everything under one roof for its users.

The usual "Google" factor is driving this feature as of now, it might be yet another Google Wave (or possibly orkut???). Let us wait and see.

P.S: What I have expressed above is only my personal view and I don't represent any company in anyway

HDR Photography

2010-02-09T15:49:00.015+05:30

After I posted the temple picture in my previous post and flickr stream, many people came back to me asking this question "What is HDR?". In this post I am going to answer that question and explain how to create one.

HDR Photography stands for High Dynamic Range Photography, it is basically a heavy post-processing technique that allows you to take complete control over the tone of a picture which cannot be achieved by normal means.

Lets take an example, you take any normal picture (JPEG/GIF/PNG, etc..) and try to adjust the brightness or contrast of the image using Photoshop or GIMP. You will soon notice that if one part of the picture gets the desired brightness, some other part of the picture will become very bright(overexposed) or very dark(underexposed), because of this you cannot modify the tone of any image to a great extent. HDR targets this problem and tries to give you better control over the tone of your image.

The idea behind HDR photography is to combine multiple pictures of a particular scene into a single image. Each of the source pictures are supposed to have different exposure settings, most of the HDR photos use 3 source images, one underexposed, one overexposed and one with normal exposure. When you combine multiple exposures into a single image, the post-processing software now has a range of exposure to work with (unlike a normal photo which has a fixed exposure value). This will allow the software to adjust the tone in a very different manner with complete control on every part of the image.

Let me take the following images

Underexposed Image

Normal exposure

Overexposed Image

All the 3 images represents exactly the same scene.

Now you need a software like PhotoMatix (proprietary) or QtPfsGui (open-source) to chew these images and create a intermediate .HDR file. Now this HDR can be toned with various algorithms in the software and you can produce a variety of tones of the HDR which can be saved as a normal JPEG or PNG. One such tone that I achieved with the above images is

Just look at the details of the temple sculptures and at the same time observe the tone of the clouds, none of the source images can show both of them. When we combine multiple images, we merge the "best" part of every photo which yields a very pleasant image.

You can see lot of good HDR pictures here.

Ponniyin Selvan - A Masterpiece

2010-02-08T12:01:00.007+05:30

Few days back when I was in my friends house in Koramangala I noticed this book "Ponniyin Selvan" lying somewhere in a table. The novel belongs to Santy which he has brought from Chennai. Since no one was reading it I decided to give a try and started read the first few pages immediately, the first impression was good as any other novel. I always have this habit of losing interest after reading few chapters of any novel but surprisingly it didn't happen to me with this novel. I don't know what magic the author (Thiru. Kalki R Krishnamoorthy) has done with this novel, I was reading it without any boredom in any of the chapters.

The novel runs around 1000 AD when the Chola dynasty started growing big everyday and how they overcome internal politics and external threat from Pandyas. All the characters in this novel are true and the high level story-line is also true. The author talks about Chola culture, their majesty, traditions, kings, people, literature and country so beautifully that no one would decide to stop reading it. As I started reading this novel, my hunger to know about Cholas and their history increased which forced me to visit this wiki page often. Last week when I visited Thanjavur Temple, I really felt the temple so close to my heart because of this novel and it made me to dedicate this photo that I took for this novel.

I am just done with one part of this novel and I have 4 more to go.

If you interested in reading it online, the full novel is available here.

You can also download the PDF version from here (for free, no piracy).

Vijesh weds Abirami

2010-02-05T08:53:00.007+05:30

It was a short and sweet trip to Tanjavur to see the wedding of Vijesh & Abirami. The wedding ceremony was very unique, all the mantras were chanted in Tamil which everyone including the marriage couple can understand. Adding to the beauty, few ancient songs were also sung (which I think is from Thiruppavai)

Wish them a very happy and prosperous married life!!

This time we also prepared a special card for the couple and here it is

More wedding snaps here.

After the wedding we made a visit to the Tanjavur Temple and I will pen about it soon.

Tamizh Padam

2010-02-01T09:54:00.004+05:30

"Tamizh Padam" is a first of its kind in Indian Cinema. An Indian version of the "Scary Movie". Mirchi Shiva is a perfect fit for a movie like this and has done justice as a hero. There is no special story-line for the movie but still entertains the viewers till the end.

Indian Cinema has a lot of things that can be very easily spoofed and the movie taken advantage of that. The movie starts with a spoof of "Karuthama" in a village and then it moves to Chennai spoofing many other common things like

1. A 10 year old boy begins to pedal a bicycle and immediately becomes a youth hero - A over used concept in many movies.
2. Hero Intro and fight scene - A must in all Indian Movies
3. Poor hero challenging a rich guy and becomes a Crorepathi in one small song.
4. Actors aged more than 35 portrayed as college students and hero's friends - Another common thing done by Vivek for a long time. In this movie Veniraadai Moorthy, Manobala are hero's friend and they call each other a "machi", "maams".. lol..
5. Songs with weird lyrics which belongs to no language. There is a must watch song for Harris Jayaraj in this movie.

and many more.

Few other spoofs that impressed me were, Shiva attempting a "Anniyan" style murder using Buffalos, "Kandaswamy" threatening Basha's Raguvaran, "Thalapathi" spoof in the beginning, "Pokkiri" and "Kakka Kakka" spoofs in second half.

Overall, it is good entertainer if you are a tamil movie freak with humor sense for spoofs. :)

Will this ever change?

2010-01-25T16:31:00.009+05:30

Getting your work done from a government office has been a PITA for most of us. My recent funny/painful experiences were to get a Learners License followed by Driving License.

My first experience was quite funny and hectic, but there is nothing much to complain about. Six months back, to apply for a LL I went to the Indranagar RTO on a Saturday and shocked to see a queue with more than 250 people before me. After 3 hours of waiting in the queue, I got my documents verified by the officer there. Lucky I was the second last person to get it signed that day, others were asked to come on Monday. Assuming the same luck would help me, I went into the LL Test room. All that I expected in the test was road signs, hand signals and the basic traffic rules, it is quite easy isn't it? But my head started to spin when I saw the questions, all the questions were tough and very ambiguous too. Some sample questions here

What is the allowed decibel limit of horn after 10PM in some NH-XX type of roads?

Which motoract law talks about hit and run cases?

A mad dog is chasing you while driving your bike, what will you do? (Options were really crazy for this question, one such option was "Kick the dog".. :))

etc...

For a moment I thought I am in the wrong exam hall, maybe this is some exam for the post of some traffic inspector. I cross checked the same with a neighbor candidate, just the look of his face confirmed he is also sailing in the same boat (some relief here) and it is definitely the LL test :). Hardly 10% of the candidates passed these tests. My luck didn't work here and was failed by just one mark. All my friends who got their license from Tamilnadu were laughing at me because in Tamilnadu failing in LL test is like failing in Kinder Garden. Somehow I managed to pass the test after multiple attempts standing in a similar queue and writing similar tests.

After 5 months with no other option left, I went for applying my Driving License. Before hand, my driving school person said there are two bribe schemes, I was told without bribe it is very tough to get the DL. Coming to the two schemes, the first one is a Rs. 300 scheme where the test is of decent difficulty and second one is for Rs. 450 and it is a very easy test. Since my LL was about to expire I don't want to risk so I chose the Rs.450 scheme and I handed over this money and other fees to the driving school. The next day after doing the formalities I had to wait from morning 10AM to noon 3PM to take the driving test, at last the inspector came to my car and asked me to move. He gave some real simple instructions like take left, reverse left, etc. It was easy and I did it confidently. After the test he started complaining that I drove very badly so he is not going to sign my papers. After much of argument, he asked me to talk to my driving school contact for further information. (Phew! some relief again)

A day later my driving school person said the inspector is expecting another Rs.150 for signing the papers. This is cruel, already Rs.450 given to conduct the test and now another 150 to sign the paper. Not everyone can give so much amount!! If I want to go for another test then I have to pay Rs.450 bribe again and also I don't want to waste another day and again start from the scratch, even if I do he will fail me again for no real reason. So finally paid another Rs.150 and they mailed me the driving license almost 20 days after taking the test. I feel as if I have climbed Mt. Everest.. :)

To try my luck, I also wrote to the RTO officials about the same in the form of an e-mail, but as expected no response till now. :)

Is there any real life Anniyan or Ramana? Will this situation ever change?

Whatz up??

2010-01-21T17:03:00.000+05:30

Well, this week and the next few weeks are very happening for us folks in Bangalore. Yes, there are lot of changes that is going to happen.

Starting with Vijesh, this champ is going to get married so he just moved out of Bangalore on Monday. We partied heavily with him for the last one month because this could bring all the 8+ years of fun we had together to an end. I hope he gets some chance to visit Bangalore after his wedding on Feb 4th (This is a special day for me, its my parents wedding day too).

Next is Junior Santy, this guy also moved to Chennai last weekend. He is now happily settled with ebay.

Gethu Karthik, he will be leaving to UK soon and will be visiting Bangalore occasionally. He is looking forward to get transferred there permanently and I hope he gets it.

Coming to our local Guitarist Santy, he is leaving to California on next friday and will return after a month. This is his first foreign trip and it would be good if he can carry his Guitar with him (just like Surya in Vaarnam Aayiram). I wish, you perform in a stage rock music show in the US. Bon Voyage, be safe.. ;-)

Tom has already left for a spiritual trip to Egypt, Israel, etc. I hope he doesn't come back as a Saint.

Finally me, still waiting for my Driving License to be delivered... :)

Restart

2010-01-21T11:53:00.000+05:30

Damn! I was lazy enough to pen down so many things that happened between my last post and this one. Maybe it has happened to many other people too, but yesterday when I was chatting with two of my colleagues (you can call us "3 Idiots"), we got enlightened that all 3 of us started a blog sometime or the other but never updated it in the past few months and we have to do something about it. So we decided to fix up things and do a restart on our blogs.

I always wonder how this guy keeps writing lively blogs every now and then. Even if it not going to be of that scale, I should write something.

Toll fee Balancer

2009-05-09T13:10:00.000+05:30

Came across an interesting Graph based problem. Try solving the problem, I will post my solution soon

In city to travel from a point A to B there are multiple routes, there can be direct route from A->B and there can few other routes with one or more intermediate nodes like A->C->B or A->C->D->B etc. Each road connecting two points have a cost, so any vehicle using that road should pay that cost to the authorities. This now implies that traveling from A to B will have different costs based on the route that you take.

Let me take an example

In the above figure Node '1' is the starting point and '4' is the ending point and there are 3 different routes to connect 1 and 4, each road has a original cost marked in BLUE. So the cost taking the direct road from 1-4 is 10, whereas taking the path 1-3-4 is just 8 (because 1-3 is 5 and 3-4 is 3), similarly the cost of taking the 3rd route 1-3-2-4 is 12.

Now the problem is to reassign the cost of individual roads so that the cost of all possible routes remains the same. You cannot reduce the cost of a road, but you can increase it. In the above example the cost of road 1->4 and 3->4 is reassigned and the extra cost for these roads are marked in RED. Now taking any of the routes will cost the same amount 12.

Note: There can be few cases with no solution too.

Solution >>>

Here is my solution to the problem

The main objective is to change the cost of the all the routes to the costliest route's cost. In the above example the costliest route is 1-3-2-4 with cost 12. For every other than 1-3-2-4, traverse from the end and try to adjust the fees of the current road. You can do this only if this road is connected by one road, in other words the IN-DEGREE of this road has to be 1. If this road has in-degree more than 1 then traverse back to the previous road in this route and repeat the check. If you cannot find any road with in degree 1 then exit with no solution.

Adjusting the fee of a road is simply done by adding the {cost difference between the costliest route & this route} to this road's fee.

Algorithm


1. Find the costliest route available with us and lets call it as X;
2. Y = ROUTE_COST(X);
3. For (every route other than X) as A
  Begin
4.    R = the last road in this route A;
5.    while (R<>NULL && IN_DEGREE(R) > 1)
     Begin
6.        N = the Previous road connecting to the road R in this route A;
7.        R = N;
     End;

8.    if (R===NULL) then exit with "No Solution";

9.    C = ROUTE_COST(A);
10.  ROAD_FEES(R) = ROAD_FEES(R) + (Y-C);
  End;

Let me know if you see any issues.

Avoid using Fur

2009-04-09T12:03:00.000+05:30

The cruelty behind the Fur industry is painful.
See what is happening inside chinese Fur Farms (Warning: Please don't watch this video if you are sensitive)

Pledge to go fur-free at PETA.org.

Let us save them by avoiding Fur.

New members

2009-03-28T12:06:00.000+05:30

Yesterday we added two new members to our house. They are just meant for entertaining us and nothing else.

Member 1:
Name: Tropicana Bowling Kit
Origin: Pins from Vinayaka Bakery and Ball from Sapphire

Member 2:
Name: Monopoly
Origin: Sapphire (a Toy shop near Garuda Mall)

The fun has just begun.. :)

The Truth

2009-02-25T13:45:00.000+05:30

I came across this video titled "The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes". Its a video from one of the UN meetings and this girl addressed the audience on the world's environment related issues.

I know she would definitely make you silent for a while!!

Open Hack Day - 2009

2009-02-15T11:35:00.000+05:30

It is back again this year.. Yahoo! Open Hack day 2009 being organized at Taj Residency, Bangalore. The second day of the event has begun and the hackers just have 2 hours, 45 minutes left out to complete their ideas. Bangalore has always been very responsive to technical events, this year around 300 people have turned out for this event which included some college students. Yesterday was a eventful day with loads of technical talks, discussions, idea sharing sessions, dance, beer, red-bull, XBOX, PS2, party and of-course HACKING.. I had a chance to make my first external presentation/training yesterday, a memorable one for me.

This time I can really feel the high security at The Taj after the Mumbai attacks, the security was so alert that made few security guards to stop Yahoo!'s founder Filo and asked for his ID.. lol..

With hackers all around me trying to do final integration and presentation of their hacks which they developed through out the night even without taking a small nap (and of course there were few people who played XBOX all the night without any sleep :-P ) I am really eager to know the results..

All the best Hacker!!!

More pics at http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=hackdayindia&ss=2&ct=6

Bangalored

2009-01-16T16:03:00.000+05:30

Recently I came across the term "Bangalored". Before going to a dictionary and figuring out what it is, I started making few wild guesses. Could that be a synonym for "struck in traffic" or "costly" or "high tech"? But I was totally wrong, this term means "losing a job just because the project is outsourced". The outsourced place need not be Bangalore it can be any place in the world, still the term remains the same. More info @ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bangalored

Thanks to all Indian consultancy companies who is responsible for this new term :-). And I hope we Bangalorians are not bangalored anytime.

The World's most popular web browser

2008-12-06T12:32:00.000+05:30

The worlds most popular operating system "Windows" comes with the most popular web browser in this globe. The introduction to the almighty "Internet Explorer" is totally unnecessary. Statistics show that more than 65% of the Internet traffic is from Internet explorer, the remaining shared by Firefox, opera, safari, etc. What really made it to be so popular?? Yes, it is Windows, since Windows comes with built-in Internet explorer many people don't even think about installing an alternate browser. But is this Internet Explorer (a.k.a. IE) really worth this popularity?? I would say a big "NOOOO" and I really feel it be the worst piece of software one can ever write. Next time you get a chance just look how smoothly other browsers render the page and how IE does it, you will realize what I mean.

I have been developing web based applications for the past 2 years and writing a piece of code that would work in IE is always a PITA (Pain in the A**). When a organization called W3C is defining standards that the web browsers should follow for rendering the content, what would it cost for M$ to follow them? Every time you write a code one has to do special checks for IE and handle it specially. So at the end of day the code looks like

if (Internet Explorer) {
do something big and complicated to achieve something small
} else if (any other browser) {
write a simple code that work on all browsers.
}

Alright, I write this code and the next step is debugging. Browsers like Firefox provide so much facilities to add 3rd party plug-ins into the browser. Many of these plugins are for developers to help them in debugging HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Network traffic, load time, etc. But unfortunetly the most popular web browser doesn't have any of these abilities and it just dumps with the most idiotic error messages in the world. Some of them i encountered are

'null' is null or not an object
Unspecified Error.
'undefined' is null
Syntax error

and the list goes on. How would a developer know what went wrong when a stupid message like this pops-up without any other info like proper line number or statement? In most of the cases the issue is not with our application but with IE. So we are forced to hide the IE's bugs by adding fixes in our code because M$ will never fix it and we cann't do a release with these bugs showing up. There are so many versions of IE that was released IE-5, IE-5.5, IE-6, IE-7 and soon IE-8. But to me they just mean this

IE-5 = (Some functionality + Bugs)
IE-5.5 = (IE-5 + Some more Bugs)
IE-6 = (IE-5.5 + Some more Bugs)
IE-7 = (IE-6 + Some more Bugs)
IE-8 = (IE-7 + Some more Bugs)

and none of them shows any improvements in its functionality and this is not acceptable.

Long live Internet explorer!!!

P.S: This post just contains my personal view about the mentioned products and in no way represents my employer or colleagues

Life under the Knife

2008-11-11T08:59:00.000+05:30

Having a medical condition is not a uncommon scenario and almost everyone of us would have been under some medication, the reason for it could be a simple cold or it could be a disease with a weird name which can be pronounced only by doctors. But not everyone has undergone a surgery, I had a chance to undergo one few days back and my Grey cells gave me a idea to write that experience in my "new" blog and here it is. Let me try keeping it minimal.

Stomach pain was not something new to me and I had been experiencing it right from my childhood. I used to get this pain 2-3 times a year during my schooling and the frequency was increased during my college days. In fact, this pain came in the form of Jaundice few years back. All these days the doctors diagnosed it as Acidity, Heat problem, Indigestion, etc. But when I got this severe pain on 27th August'08 for the 3rd consecutive day I didn't knew it would turn this big. I was forced to push myself along with my roommate Peeps at 9.30 PM to a famous hospital near by my house and I was made to rest among few others patients suffering with different form of pain. A general physician attended me and gave a injection, after half-an-hour the Doc came back and was surprised that the pain is still not relived, the dose was repeated again and still no relief. The Doc did some examination and I was sent for a Ultrasound scan, after the scan I was asked to come back the next day to meet a specialist. It was 3AM when we came back home and the pain continued till the next day morning. The next few days we were bounced between Doctors, blood tests and scans. Finally on the third day a senior doctor confirmed that I suffer from a problem called "Choledochal cysts" a disorder right from birth and he suggested surgery as the only solution, if left untreated it would lead to liver cancer. I was not really shocked about it, in fact I was happy about the fact that someone has diagonalized the reason for my 23 year old stomach pain. But it was tough for my parents to accept that their only child has to undergo a major surgery. Somehow my parents were convinced and they rushed to Bangalore the next day.

The next few days were spent on fixing the surgery date, insurance coverage, simple formalities in my office, etc. I got myself admitted to the hospital on September 4th after a nice yummy dinner, preparations for the surgery started right away. The next day I was happily sleeping till 7.15 AM knowing that my surgery is at 7.30 AM. I was taken to the operation theater at the right time and some 7-8 doctors surrounded me to fix my errors. They told the surgery is expected to last a maximum of 4 hours and I was given my anesthesia, within seconds my vision started to pixelate, voices started to fade away and I was entering a dark state leaving my senses behind. I knew that my beloved ones are waiting outside with their fingers crossed.

I woke up at 4.30 PM with a lot of people surrounding me and I was told that 4 hour surgery was extended to almost 8 hours creating panic among my parents and relatives. I couldn't feel any big pain because of anesthesia but I saw a lot of tubes and valves attached in my nose, neck, abdomen and hip. My next 3 days were hectic with pulse rate almost doubling, high temperature, 5 injections a day and extra tubes connecting my stomach and nose, this made me feel as if I am a computer program put in debug mode with lot of breakpoints and watch variables . My recovery was quite fast after that and I started off with some slow walking. I am a guy who loves walking and used to walk miles happily, but at this stage walking a few meters made me tired and I realized just being healthy itself is a big gift from God. Even after 5 days after surgery I was not given any food or not even a sip of water and I was just living with drips. This diet along with the blood loss during surgery made me loss more than 12 kg of weight. After 7 days they first gave me half a sip of water for that day, on the next day it was some liquid food and day by day they increased my diet and I was also getting rid of all my tubes. Finally on the 10th day I was back at home continuing my recovery process for the next 1 month.

Homemade food from my mother along with little medicines was giving me the required calories to pass my days. TV and books were my weapons to kill my time, I started watching all the movies including the dubbed ones in KTV, Sun, Vijay and what not. It was tough for me to get sleep when my body was in full rest, so books and music were my sleeping pills. I visited the hospital for dressing and review once in a week, after 4 weeks the doctors gave me green signal for regular activities and office.

As a token of memory for all these things I now own a big 'L' mark on my abdomen and will be carrying it throughout the journey of my life.

"My First Blog" or "Hello World"

2008-11-07T22:17:00.000+05:30

This topic is not something new to the era of Internet. Everyone of us would have received tons of mails marketing their new blogs, messenger status messages notifing their blog updates.

When I first came across the concept "Blog" I had wondered what so interesting about it? After all, a blog is going to be just another HTML page decorated with colors, photos, videos, etc. among the billions of pages in the ever growing web. But looking at my friends and collegues I realized that its not just another chunk of HTML polluting the web, its something more than that, but what is it? After a long delay I decided to explore/experience it myself and here I am to write my own version of the trendy "My First Blog". But before penning this I went out researching the net trying to find out answers for many of my curious (may be stupid) questions like, Why write a blog? How to write a blog? What not to write in a blog? What makes a very good blog different from a good blog? Where to blog? and a lot more. For my first question "Why Blog?", I found the following reasons very acceptable

It's a place to express "yourself" and it's where I can think, plan and reflect my thoughts
It’s a method of communication
Network and relationships with other bloggers
Know yourself from your fellow bloggers point of view
Learning from others blog
And of course, gain a little popularity

With these factors in my mind I am now writing my first blog and I hope this is not my last blog like the many others I have seen. I am hoping to learn a lot here and shape myself.

Let the journey begin.