Waves

Hi guys, wordpress 2.2.2 has a problem of importing blogger blogs to wordpress. It happens when you get an error saying, “We were not able to gain access to your account. Try starting over.“

This problem can be resolved only in custom wordpress installations i.e. you have your own domain on which you have installed wordpress (downloaded from http://www.wordpress.org/).

After login through FTP (Example FTP client is filezilla) to your web hosting provider, locate the folder where you have installed wordpress. In my case, I have installed it in a folder called “blog”.

Locate the folder “wp-admin”. Inside wp-admin, select a folder called “import”. Open the “import” folder. There’s a file called “blogger.php”. Download the file to your computer. Open the file in any of the popular text editors and go to line number 87. It looks like the first screenshot.

[Click the image for a bigger screenshot]

Line number 87 is highlighted in blue. Change “www2.blogger.com” to “www.blogger.com” (Refer to screenshot below). Save the file and upload it to the same folder from where you downloaded it.

[Click the image for a bigger screenshot]

Have fun! 🙂

Most households (atleast in Chennai) know a dishwash powder called Sabeena. Its rate is just under Rs.5/- and almost everyone can afford it. There is a man living near my house. The first thing you would notice in him is that his teeth is crooked. If you just continue your examination on him, you would notice that his legs are shaped awkwardly. More examination reveals that he cannot talk properly. He doesn’t stammer, but his voice is a blabber to hear. His eyes are squint, hands are also not proper. He wears a torn slipper. If he goes to any other area other than the place he lives in, the street dogs would tear him apart.

Now, there is one thing special about him. He is an entrepreneur :D. He has been running his own telephone booth for more than a decade. These days, he has also started supplying a dishwash powder to nearby homes; including mine. He toils day in and day out to earn a few bucks so that he can sleep peacefully with the satisfaction of earning and eating his own bread. THAT is an awesome attitude… which many of us should follow.

Until today, with the conversations I have had with him, he has never complained of his disabilities. He just doesn’t consider them to be a stopping point in his path forward. There is something to learn from him for many of us.

Hi guys, I just learned that the whole website of gnu.org doesn’t use GIF images. I just read through the reason and was bombed 🙂

Crux of the Reason: Unisys and IBM have patented the LZW compression algorithm which is used in generated GIF images. Read the full article.

Also, the page links to a library called libungif, which uncompresses GIF images written using the LZW algorithm and writes them in uncompressed format. The philosophy section of GNU.org is very interesting. Please go through it.

hmm…

Some days back, I linked to a post on GigaOm which did sound scary. In that post, Om mentions about an article called “A Myth called the Indian Programmer,” on the Times of India newspaper. Fortunately enough, that article came as an email forward and here it is. The issues they have mentioned in the article is worth pondering about.

Here is the article… I mean the email forward. That speaks for itself. The article is long, but its a good read.

Do you know what an Indian software engineer does for a living? T Surendar finds uncomfortable answers.

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore. Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion. But what exactly do they do? That’s a disturbing question.

Last week, during the annual fair of the software industry’s apex body Nasscom, no one uttered a word about India’s programmers. The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies. But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies. Perhaps you imagined wrong. “It is an explosive truth that local software companies won’t accept. Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders ,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it “if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject.” Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap of the software hype and now realise that though their status is glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded. Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

There is nothing new to learn from the job I am doing in Pune. I could have done it with some training even after passing high school, says a 25-yearold who joined Infosys after finishing his engineering course in Nagpur. A Microsoft analyst says, Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for the fact that we still don’t have a domestic software product like Yahoo or Google to use in our daily lives.

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India’s best known companies like Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out. The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, who did not bite Infosys’ offer, says, “The entrance test to join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what the Indian firms are looking for.”

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics. The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late ’70s and early ’80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all kinds of fields. In the mid-’90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of education after high school. “After Y2K, as American companies discovered India’s cheap software professionals, the demand for engineers shot up,” the executive says. Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction of a programme. They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a client’s site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the need for engineers who have four years of education after high school. Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the engineer?s job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects. The CEO of India’s largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had earlier explained, “The core programming still requires technical skills. But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates.” NIIT’s Arvind Thakur says, “We have always maintained that it is the aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact, there are cases where grad uate programmers have done better than the ones from the engineering stream.”

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but cannot find a different kind of ‘break’, given his coding experience. He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don’t know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don’t know that they can eventually fly. Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life. TNN

Thoughts?

This is my first post from my very own k300i. Staying connected is a boon :-D. Im on the way to attend an event called sun tech days at Hyderabad and this low res pic is from central station, ofcourse captured from my mobile :-). Catch you guys when I'm back home.

😉

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I read an article in GigaOm. It’s scary, but its the bare truth. I loved this paragraph 🙂

…… lot of churn at companies like Infosys is a result of dissatisfaction with being just coders and engineers are switching to jobs with bigger challenges. A Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) executive acknowledges that the outlook is gloomy. The question then is that if the top outsourcers cannot attract the best and the brightest, then how are they going to stay competitive?

That was a point well emphasized. Read the full article here.

Hi friends, wishing you all a very happy and prosperous new year 😀

This year, there are lots of challenges that I have to face, which are ofcourse very interesting. Hoping to win all the challenges.

I was chatting with a few of my friends. They are placed in different companies and are doing different things. As usual with any chat after a long time, I happened to ask them, “Hi da.. long time no see, how’s your job? Like it?”. The replies were like, “Umm.. yeah sorta..”, “edho podhu da” (meaning – sort of fine). Some were frank enough to tell that they didn’t like what they were doing, which brings me to the question that why do people don’t do what they like?

The first answer to figuring out a good way is to first find out what you like. It’s possible that you may be in a deadlock situation with the Q and A but if you take enough steps to actually answer that Q, then you know what you want.

The second answer is to get some early hands-on experience on different areas of interest. That way you can always try and fail and find your true love. The best time to do this is when you are in college and parents are always available for support and money.

The third answer is better late than never. Always have the quest for knowledge and one day you have that enlightening.

The fourth answer is to be as practical as possible in your approach to your problems. For e.g. you may not like the work you do now. But you wouldn’t want to go and shout at your boss for the peanuts of silly work you are being given. Instead, be patient and tell them your strengths and why you would be able to do the other job better than the current one.

The fifth answer is to set your goals and work on it. This is actually difficult and takes a lot of mental muscle to do. This article, “How to get any project up and running” by Mark Forster is an excellent motivator.

Why this post? A major part of our life is going to be around the work we do and if we don’t like love the work we do, we are wasting a beautiful life. I have found what I love and since some days, I have been taking steps to do it the first thing every morning, otherwise it keeps getting postponed.

WOW!!! what a speech that was! it was a speech given by Steve Jobs to the new graduates of Stanford University last year. This speech is very very inspiring. I know what I love. All it takes is just that little brave decision. Read this.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Hmm.. here is a lady, who seems to be in her mid 20s. She is seen wearing a torn green blouse along with a blue saree which is torn at various places. She is looking very dirty. Her hair is stuck in an inseparable mass and her face and hands have a dash of something black. At the outsight, she looks so dirty that you would never go near her. She picks rags with a stick from the neighbourhood dustbin, eats shit and drinks sewage.

Does that description sound familiar? How many of us have noticed such people? Have we ever cared for them? Oh! we never even took enough time to even think about them, leave alone care them. What is the fate of these people?

Fortunately, some of these people have a very good future. How? People at Anbalayam, located in the South Indian district of Tiruchirapalli (Trichy) have a dedicated set of persons whose daily job is to scout the areas in and around Trichy to find these wanderers. What’s worse is that most of these wanderers are mentally ill. Anbalayam finds them and brings them to their home, which is located near the Trichy airport. They bath them, cloth them, trim their hair and give them proper treatment for their disability. They even let these people stay with them FOREVER. Until now, they have more than 70 mentally ill people out of which many were found wandering the city. They have even reunited these people with their families after treating them.

This was one small and divine experience I got when I visited Anbalayam during Deepavali festival. The home is being run by Mr. Senthil. Though he is a lawyer by profession, he is taking care of the home he lovingly developed and ran successfully for 16 full years. One astonishing fact is that, one of the caretakers of the home was a mentally retarded man. Did you notice was in the previous line? That man was actually brought back to his good senses by the supportive doctors at Anbalayam and now, he takes care of more than 50 mentally retarded people.

Managing the mentally retarded
… is a damn tough job. Some of them are very violent that they will fight heavily among themselves and settle for a good joke. Managing these violent people is a tough task because they have enormous physical power. They urinate in their own places itself and through their sheer muscle power, they even beat up the cleaners, sometimes. People who do this cleaning job and serving them by bathing them and having lunch with them must be worshipped because of the sacrifice they are doing.

Besides housing mentally ill, Anbalayam also has a home for people affected with HIV positive. They also have an old age home.

Festival of Lights
This Deepavali has been enlightening for me because it showed me another world, with another set of people doing great service to humanity. I know many of us will not be able to dedicate ourselves with such service to humanity. But we can surely contribute what we can, either in cash or in kind, whichever is suitable. If you are interested, please get in touch with Mr.Senthil.

Anbalayam also has a website at http://www.wanderingmentallyill.org. Please take some time to go through the site and have a look at the amazing work they are doing. And if possible, contribute too.