Waves

Hey friends, lots of people have been asking me why I have two separate blogs (tech and non-tech), while I could have them both in the same place. I would like to answer that in 2 ways:

1. Both the blogs are in the same place. All the posts in the proper order can be viewed at http://www.aswinanand.com/blog.
2. Subdomains such as http://blog.aswinanand.com/ and http://tech.aswinanand.com/ exist for backward compatibility.

Long back, when I started blogging, while many readers enjoyed reading my blog, some of them didn’t like the tech content in between. Hence, I moved the tech content to another blog. Finally, when blogger for domains came in, my tech and non-tech blogs became available at the links mentioned above. Hence, for those users who had subscribed to this blog, I didn’t want them to lose out.

So, the actual blog url is http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and the tech and non-tech blog show contents from the space, just separated by tags. This, along with the magic of htaccess and 1 php file, many things can be changed so that the permalinks will be available in a better fashion. Moreover, when I want to do a post in both the tech and non-tech blogs (like this one), I can just add the 2 tags to this post and they are available in both the blogs. Change the post once and the change is visible in both the blogs (if you visit them separately). Configuring a mobile client for the same is very easy and all this can be done in a single space 😀

When this blog pings certain links after an update is made (like technorati etc.), the blog url goes as http://www.aswinanand.com/blog and not blog.aswinanand.com or tech.aswinanand.com. Therefore, when someone is redirected by search engine results, they will just visit the full blog and not the other ones 😉 How’s that?

When template is changed, the change is visible all throughout 🙂 and looks very uniform. So…. that’s the reason for both the blogs being “virtually separate” hehe…

Friends, I have moved this tech blog to my own domain. You can now read the blog at http://tech.aswinanand.com/ and get your feeds at http://tech.aswinanand.com/atom.xml.

Do stay in touch 🙂

P.S: I posted this message long ago on my non-tech blog and completely forgot about posting it here.

Yep! it’s true. The news is out. I purchased a brand new Nokia E51. The device has not yet been listed on the Nokia Asia site as of 4 days ago. Support activities don’t accept E51 as a model. Even many mobile shops in Chennai do not know about a device called E51. It was first released world wide on September 2007 according to gsmarena.com and its specs arrived on my rss reader just a few days ago 😀 To tell about the device, its truly awesome! Battery life comes close to 2 and a half days, which is pretty good for a smart phone. It is a Series 60 3rd edition phone with feature pack 1, running Symbian OS v9.1. Supports lots of applications and most importantly, supports many of the latest Java ME APIs. This means that, I can now try a whole new range of applications which was not possible using my old phone.

Since E51 is supposedly a “business class” device :P, it supports all modes of connection.. such as bluetooth, infrared, wifi, usb, push-to-talk and the usual sms, ems, email, mms etc. It also supports VoIP over LAN. Therefore, when my office provides wifi, I can use the in-house SIP server to communicate to colleagues directly from my mobile ;-). The screen resolution is very good. It has a light sensor on top left of the phone which adjusts the display on the amount of external light available. The keypad is very comfortable. There are 4 dedicated keys for doing 8 specific operations, 6 of which can be customised. Apart from that, you can configure the 6 quick launch icons available from the phone’s standby mode, not to mention the 2 soft keys. Apart from all this, there is 1 touch access to switch on bluetooth, browser and silent mode. You can therefore, configure 14 icons to suit your needs/interests.

Browser is superb. It’s a port of webkit and displays websites as-they-are on a wifi connection. On normal connections (such as GPRS), the browser s/w tries to tone down the site so that the site is usable. There are zoom features available too 🙂 (please don’t compare with an iPhone here). It has an inbuilt RSS reader which sucks. Supports an unlimited number of contact entries. The phone’s 2.0 megapixel camera is pretty good. It doesn’t have flash, but it still does a decent job in fairly lit places. On open sunlight, the picture clarity is too good.

It has a decent music player. But considering the fact that it runs Symbian, there are tons n tons of music software available.

However, there are a few features that I miss from this E51. These small features are available on almost all Sony Ericsson phones.

1. Intellisense support when typing messages/emails. I’m not kidding. When you switch on to T9 mode and start typing, a small menu pops up – right next to the cursor - with possible words, on K300i. You can select whichever word you want.
2. New Paragraphs. Opening up new paragraphs in my K300i was a breeze. Not possible in E51.
3. When you receive a call, K300i shows a small icon. That icon denotes the number-type. E.g. You have stored 3 numbers for a contact (home, business & mobile). When the caller calls from a mobile, a small mobile icon is shown. The same is applicable with SMS also. But such a number categorisation is not visible at first sight on this E51. Miss this feature very much. Deciding the type of number from the call is not fun because in most cases, we don’t remember the number at all.

One huge advantage of the phone is that, it’s very sleek and handy. Put it in your upocket and you will forget that the phone even exists. For all the bells and whistles, the phone is slightly on the heavier side. But its ok, considering the fact that it has a whole lot of features. Loud speaker clarity is very good. Calendar is on the nicer side. The best part of calendar is that, if you place something on the todo list and don’t get it done, it screams on the standby, making you feel very guilty … heheh!

It comes with a very powerful 369Mhz, ARM 11 CPU, 96 MB of SDRAM and built-in 130 MB of storage. Supports micro-sd based memory cards upto 4GB. Heap size is unlimited, which means, apps can use any amount of memory, only limited by the device specs. Java ME JAR files can also be of unlimited size. It supports HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is all set to invade GSM in less than a couple of years.

All-in-all, it’s a very nice package and comes at a very low rate compared to all other phones having these features. Go, drool over the specs :D and let me know if you want any clarifications on any of the features.

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Anyone who is familiar with Indian temples would know about a practice called “archanai“. Three simple details such as your name, birth star and gothram (family lineage) are necessary to do it. Ofcourse, this practice differs slightly in different places. Legend says it that, each of the gothras that we know of now, started with Rishis (holy saints) thousands of years ago to help spread human inhabitants around the world.

What we are interested in today is about a specific family lineage known as “Athreya” (popularly known as Athreya Gothram). In the very limited Sanskrit that I know, ‘A’ (pronounced as ‘uh’) means “not” & ‘Threya’ means three. Therefore, Athreya means “not three”. The saint named Athreya got such a name because he eschewed three qualities which is predominant in some form or other in most males.

The 3 qualities which he eschewed were kama (material desires including but not limited to sex), krodha (anger) and loba (misery – in the context of not being a miser). Such a man is very difficult to see these days. During one of his meditations, his future wife named Anusuya noticed him and got impressed with his qualities. “Suya” means jealousy on other’s well being. Hence, as you correctly concluded, Anusuya means, someone who has absolutely no jealousy on other’s well being. Such people are satisfied with what they have and they don’t have the greed to look for more. Anusuya marries Athreya.

After a few years into marriage, they didn’t have any children. God, noticing such a thing, thought that, to propel the family lineage, they needed to have a son. So the Lord decided to get himself adopted to such a glorious couple. Adoption in Sanskrit is denoted by the word ‘Dhattha’ (pronounced as Dhat-tha). Since the Lord was adopted by the Rishi named Athreya, the Lord came to be known as DhatthaAthreya (meaning – the son adopted by Athreya Rishi 🙂 ) and preserved the family lineage till date.

Sanskrit is an awesome language. Every alphabet has superb meanings, for many of which there is no equivalent word in English/any other language.

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Good friend and fellow ‘BarCamp’er Bosky is organizing an one day event called PipesCamp. This unconference happens on day after tomorrow (23-Dec-2007) and celebrates about the Yahoo! Pipes. Head on to the PipesCamp site to learn more about this event.

When: 23-Dec-2007
Where: Hotel Shan Royal, Koyambedu, Chennai

🙂

About 1 and a half years ago, before I had begun my day job, there was plenty of time to explore various things. With my joining date at approx. 2 months away, myself and a set of friends thought of spending the available time usefully. That was when we thought we would do software for some of the T.Nagar bigwigs such as Saravana Stores, Jayachandran textiles etc. Ofcourse, we did not get to do software as we were pure amateurs; but then, talking to them was an awesome experience in itself. One such experience was the talk we had with the owner of Jayachandran textiles.

For those who don’t know Jayachandran textiles, it’s a huge textiles showroom located on the famous, ever-crowded Ranganathan Street of T.Nagar.

Four of us – 3 passouts (me, 2 friends) & one of my friend’s dad – went to the textile shop at about 8.30 PM. Through some people that my friend’s dad knew, we got to meet the owner in about 15 minutes. The owner was around 81 years old. Very tall, majestically built & he was in perfect shape at 81 years. The moment the 3 of us stepped in to his cabin, he stood and bowed before us, his palms stuck together as if in a prayer. I was humbled by this act of his. He offered chairs for us and then asked what we wanted.

We explained to him that we were graduates in computer science and engineering and that we wanted to spend the time usefully by doing software. He thought over for sometime. Then, when he spoke, it was crystal clear advice. He told that his son was taking care of software-enabling the huge store. Hence, we had to discuss with him. Secondly, he added that, since we were just graduates, we would not be having much experience and that we also didn’t know the business, which is crucial for developing good software. Thirdly, he also told us that, one of their software contractors were in the next street having about 10 people under them to manage the whole software problems and updates for the store; adding that he would refer us if we were interested in working for them.

All the three points mentioned above were told in crystal clear manner, in a non-hurting way & in a sense that would get us to start learning the business first. With an age difference of 60 years between us and approximately 50 years into the textile business, he could have thrown us out and could have done anything possible to embarass us. But that did not happen. He showed us the culture, the respect that he had for fellow humans. It also means that he had not forgotten his past and did support the persons who were his stepping stones for success.

We have a lot to learn and improve from such people :D. That was one such visit that I can never forget in my lifetime.

Yay! registrations for proto.in 2008 first edition have opened 😀

If you wish to attend the event, do register as soon as possible. There are very limited seats available. And for those who register before 31st December 2007, there is a early bird discount of 50% of the event fees.

 Important links:

• Proto.in website – http://proto.in/
• Registration – http://proto.in/proto2008/registration_form.shtml

Hurry up!!

As said in the previous post, my broadband connection is still down :(. If you happen to know anyone in BSNL who can get things done, please let me know.

Now for the interesting part. Over the past 3 years or so, i.e. every since broadband internet became common place, I was taking internet for granted :). We are connected forever 😀 and there are now tons of ways to communicate. So, with the broadband down, I tried the long forgotten dialup route.

Gmail has been one of my favourite email services. They made some new UI changes and the new UI email can be accessed at http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2. This UI doesn’t load at all. It takes more than 7 minutes on a 40 kbps dialup. This is atrocious. Heck, even the old UI takes more than a minute and a half to load. You can ofcourse tell me about the plain HTML interface. But its barely usable and it sucks.

Yahoo mail is even worse. The new beta UI takes about 5 minutes. To create a new email, I clicked on the “new” button on the left side. Immediately, a small dialog box appeared saying, “Looks like the interface is taking time to load. You may want to try the mail classic until then.” Even, the damn classic interface is very slow. With ajax also disabled on that, you never even get any new mail notifications. Email experience has been the worse since the last 3 days.

Then rediffmail came along :D. Loading of interfaces took a bright turn. The new ajax based interface loads in less than 30 seconds. Rediffmail classic loads in about 10 seconds, which is pretty cool. Imagine people sitting in remote villages. They don’t have access to broadband. Mail experience for them also will be awesome :D. Out of a many small things, I do miss the keyboard shortcuts in rediffmail.

 I was experimenting with the PayPal Instant Payment Notification service (new post on the tech blog coming soon) since yesterday. All the pages are secure and each pages takes an average of 3 to 5 minutes to load. You wouldn’t believe me if I said that, I had brushed my teeth in that gap of page loads and even had bath when waiting for a manual to load :).

Hmmm… is there a way to detect the connection speed of the client during a web page request? If so, we can build better UIs for the even the worse affected.

Update: After a lot of shouting & fighting, my broadband problem got resolved.

Well.. broadband connection has been down for almost 5 days. This blog post is coming up on a boring dialup connection. Now I know why mobile internet cannot come anywhere close to a desktop computer with broadband. But despite the connectionless days, the 5 days have been happier because I have had a few realizations.

On day-2 of the internetless day, I got up as usual & turned on gmail.com to check for any new mails. I had completely forgotten the fact that net has been down. After hitting on the fact that net was really down… I was wondering on how to spend the next 2 to 3 hours usefully. Incidentally, one of my friends had sent me an computer algorithms book a few days back. So, I’m back to a nice revision of the basics along with brushing up of the awesome ruby on rails framework.

Second thing is that, I have started developing a purely non-computer related skill. This has been on the cards for a sufficiently long time and the interest in it had not died down a single bit. I’m quite pleased to have started it whole-heartedly (along with a guide ofcourse 🙂 ). Now, a few minutes (read 30 to 45) in the morning will be spent for this. More details on the new skill later.

Third thing is that, I visited HigginBothams book store on Sunday & found a superb book titled “Secrets of the world’s inspirational women” by Zerbanoo Gifford. While browsing the book, I came across a line that said, “Professional success is excellent. But when it starts taking a toll on your life, then success becomes a failure”. That is awesome 😀 isn’t it? That single line conveys a lot of things.

That’s about it for now… will be back soon.

Oh yes! Starting from around 2nd week of December, I will be cycling to work ;-). Most probably, I may be the first one in my office to go by cycle. But I do not know as of now. I’m pushing this to 3 weeks down the line for 2 reasons… 1) last day of month = salary day 😀 and 2) giving myself enough time to let this idea sink in.

So, after I start cycling to office & if things go as planned, I should be cycling around 25 – 26 kilometres … which I believe is pretty cool for starters. This is one of the biggest advantages of having an office within city limits. You can move between places with a breeze and at a max, 2 places are just 10km apart within the city. Hence, when I want to go out from office for something & when it requires me to get the bike, I will cycle to home, get the bike & whizzzzzzz off 🙂

Even from the health perspective, it will help. For the most part, it will prevent backpain and it will exercise your legs; which means, getting a pot belly is very very difficult.

What do you say?? Suggestions please…