Finally ...

Finally I did it !!! After a lot of hectic job I am able to remove Microsoft Vista from my system. Oh pretty pathetic, I almost tried almost all the combination with vista. Vista- Solaris, Solaris-Vista, Vista-XP, Vista-Linux. At last I get rid of that buggy UI and I am able to install my VPN. Don't know what happened to these big companies like HP or Dell. "We recommend vista for this notebook", who the hell you are to recommend me that which OS i will install and which I will not. From last 3 days I was struggling for drivers. But now the laptop is in OK condition at least I can listen music, do some basic work. Still I am struggling for some drivers.

Thanks to all my office-mates who helped me so much.

Tough life - no its not mine !!

Being a "so called" software engineer, most of my time goes with software engineers. Discussion starts with "screwed up personal life" and ends with some technical discussions. But this time its not the same, because the person speaking in front of me was not a Software Engineer. My school friend Anurag is pursuing PG- Child Specialist. A working hour of 9 AM to 8 PM and then 8 PM -9PM for dinner and then 9PM to 8AM. So 22 hours of business with children.

"Vaibhav, you never see a happy Doctor of age more than 30-35 .... till this age of life we will see everything so horrible, so panic that we cant smile even if we want. If something even happen bad with any child, that face will keep coming in mind and you will feel helpless,restless." Anurag said.

Yes that's why we compare Doctor with God. Life always looks easy in other tray, but its not.

Why we are not innovative ?

"If you see the Indian market, there is no innovation in compare to other part of world. World know us a good guy in quality, testing or little of development. But we are lacking badly in innovation" .... I was just hearing the person sitting near to me.

Yes, I am completely agree with the fact that Indian IT market lags in innovation. My mind said why not lets find the reason for it. There can be many but I got the valid reason.

According to me, Innovation demands capability(my personal opinion). Capability not only in terms of thinking power but in terms of doing power as well. The new guys, the fresh guys have a good amount of thinking power but not a good amount of doing power, off course that comes with age and maturity(not mandatory :) ).Indian IT market are basically handled by some big gaint like Infy, TCS, Wipro, Satyman .. so called the IT giants in india. And if you realize the trend after 5-6 years people here willing to get a position of so called Team Leader or Project Leader. They are not willing, they get as well. And in the consecutive 5-6 years, Project Manager. In this time spam of 8-10 years, they are really building there capabilities, which suddenly go to nowhere becasue they get a good seperate room, 10-20 fellows who works under them and off course a charming salary. Not only that, its a high time to manage people, project and seniors as well.

So, an average life of programmer generally comes down to 10-12 years, where as in other country its around 20-25 years. So, the gray part when we become enough capable to innovate something, we are actually out of business.

A fresh person innovation is like a water bubble, which generally burst with little of trouble. Where as a capable person(not a, but some) innovation leads to a revolution. Innovation is not only about thinking big, its about materializing that big thing.

Extreme Expressions

Extreme Expressions mean to say when you are very happy or very sad or very angry or ... . Most of the time we share such situations. Happiness, we enjoy with friends, family. Sadness, we are looking someone who can share it. Angry ... oh this is the most dangerous one, we literally kill the share-holder(s). But I have a different viewpoint on this. Enjoy these situations alone for sometime and then share it with your be lovers. Feel the happiness, its a symbol of success which you are trying to get. Give yourself a minute and think why I am sad ? how to get rid of it ? and you will get the solution in the next minute. Angry ... ah being alone is very important. Cool down the head and then go for the normal work or directly throw your anger on the person who put you into this situation(dhisum-dhisum).

No Title...

We all are SUPERMAN in self. Ya, not joking. Thinking of high responsibility and about those people who are dependent on us, ah we think so. Listening walkman and not only listening, singing with it and thinking that we are also singing like the real singer. Playing cricket with tennis ball and comparing the shot with Sachin Shot and many more. There is something inside us which always tell our-self that you are doing the best job. I guess I am bit immature but my thinking says everyone get such a feeling. From positive side, its something which makes us happy and from negative side, its something which is far from truth.

The wow ends now ...

Ya its all about new OS released by Bill Gates and the party - Vista with the tag " The Wow starts now" and I can't believe that how such a buggy OS comes into the market. I was just looking where in last 5 yrs MS engineers put their mind. GUI seems to be pretty OK, with lot of unusual features. Running any exe file, going into control panel asks user permission(what the hack this is) with two flashy screen change. And lastly it sucks me when I was trying to install VPN so that I can look some of my office work. VPN didnt get installed, no problem, but it even killed the normal internet connection as well. IE7 which display a big message "FRAUD MONITORING IS ON" gives you a feeling that you are on a secret mission.

I am all set for Widnwos XP or Solaris on my system but just thinking that why I have invested(wasted is a proper word) 5-6K for Vista. Hoping that MS will come with some required updates soon(Please don't charge for that).

Finally Apple decided to go greener !!

Ah so here goes the good news. Apple has declared a phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range, Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) by 2008.

Greenpeace force Apple to take such an action. I am a great fan of apple product but regret to see the e-waste mountains in Asian countries. I guess Indian Market should be one the target markets for products like IPod and MacBook and Steve has to realise this.

Steve said "Today is the first time we have openly discussed our plans to become a greener Apple. It will not be the last." So cheers.

Here it goes ... !

At last it started ... yes RAIN :) Yesterday it was rain in Bangalore and its my first. I guess the first rain of the season. With first rain, I remember two completely different school of talks. Old man's talk( I heard it from my mom) says that first rain is good for skin disease and it has the capability to cure more or less all the skin disease. According to their findings there is a layer in sky which get cleared with first rain and that layer has some composition, good for health. Whereas the second school of science say never avail first rain because it contains all dust and insects. Their findings say with first rain all dust and insects in air get removed.

There are very few concept where our mythology(the true one, not fake one) intersect with science. Whatever be it is ... first rain is always beautiful and more if you waited for it :)

This is how it works ...

Sometime things inspire to move forward. Last weekend Ankur told me to see one news in paper. It was all about a child who lost his one leg in an accident just before a cricket match. Artificial legs cost something around 1.2 lakhs. Via Newspaper Hospital request ppl to come forward and make some donation. With Ankur, I went to hospital, we did what we can ! Just praying things go fine with this little chap. And next day we got this good news, they were able to manage the amount.

Though things are not easy for this little boy, but he has to make it. We never get what we want but still we live a happy life, this is how it works.

Make it possible for 3rd eye !

Yesterday Ankur invited me to read his blog. A blog on "Blind Programmers and Users". Before reading, I depicted a different meaning of Blind Programmer, i thought its someone who codes blindly :). But its something else. It gives a different domain to think how blind people (can)use computer or rather our application. Can they use it ? Can they interpret it into their 3rd eye ? Can they play with some of the computer apps ?

No idea at all ! I never thought for it before and so i decided to spend some of my time to search what applications are developed for them. Some of the software's even I can think of like creating sound pattern with Morse code.

Searching on google, i came across a very nice and i will say a very simple software " Desktop Icon Reader". What this software do is that it attach a song file to every icon on desktop and even giving you the facility to record that sound file, so that you can give it a logical meaning. Mouse movement just play that sound. Nicely written by a 26 yr guy(better to say a computer scientist :) ).

See the baseline is very clear, computer screen is not going to provide something like "touch and feel". So we have to constrain application in the range of listening and speaking. Something we can simulate on listening like this Icon Reader and some other we can simulate on speaking like text generator via sound.

I was thinking of an application where i can provide them the facility to read a web page. Really no idea how to do but I guess languages like JS gives me the facility to read string over mouse by some API's like onMouseMove or onMouseClick and then if we are able to convert that string into a voice form! I guess it should be better fit in a browser property rather than a 3rd party application because the browser code has much more control on web page content. Also, we have one constraint, we can store a finite set of voice corresponding to every word. So, its the browser responsibility to convert a normal web page into a blind-friendly web page where we have a finite(mean to say less) number of words. Don't know how to handle names and all.

Any suggestions :)

11 players, half a billion coach

India is out of the World Cup(news channels are using a sophisticated word "virtually out"). Performance of the team is not very good, but not as bad as covered by most of our News channel. If you put any news channel you will definite heard some words like "Janta ke adalat", "Future of indian team","who is the new captain" and all rubbish.

The problem is old, as said by my friend, in India there are 11 players and half a billion coach. That's true !! Everyone is ready to pass their expert comments... I guess even I :). And most of us like cricketers not cricket(I am not in this list :D).

Hope things will go fine .

You always get things to laugh

I am not anti-Internet Explorer user, but most of time I love to use Mozilla. It gives me the facility to restore the session and so perfect for my "hanging" system. Look at the message on the home page of Mozilla(so funny).


Hey!
Your copy of Mozilla is more than four weeks old. Unless you are using the latest milestone build, bug reports get rapidly less useful the older your copy is.

So if you're not running the latest milestone, we could use your help testing either that or the latest nightly build. (Be warned that nightly builds are development software,and there is no guarantee that they won't fry your processor, insult your mother, or cause you to break out in a nasty rash.)

Congratulations!
You've downloaded (or compiled) a copy of Mozilla. This means that you've volunteered to become part of the Mozilla testing community. (If that doesn't sound like something you meant to do, you might be better off with one of our stable releases.)

I can't stop my laugh !! Can you ?

Back to the creatures ...

Is that not cool ?



And so this !

What you say ?

This is the photo taken by my brother. Looking cool, right :)

Madhubani painting - depict nature !

It was a chat going on at 11.30 night with my office team members. Since the team is dominated with Bihari people in number, often the discussion comes on Bihar and it goes through a cycle of corruption, Laloo. So what's good ?

I don't have too much. But there is something which is related to me, my earth, to my birth-my village. My village is next to Madhubani. Most of us heard the name Madhubani, the literal meaning is forests of honey(madhu-bani) because of its great painting, often called Mithila painting. Mithila is our native language, though i speak less but its the sweetest i ever heard. Mithila painting is one of the splendid paintings ever done in the history of human culture.



Wiki page is telling me, this style of painting originated at the time of the Ramayana, when King Janak commissioned artists to do paintings at the time of marriage of his daughter, Sita, to Hindu God Lord Ram.

And here goes the worst part... We are selling Mithila painting in 20-30 Rs to some local Bihari broker. He in turns sell it to some big brokers into 3000-4000 Rs and finally it is imported to US and other nations costs in lakhs.
Just checking the cost of one simple painting in $$$$'s

Waiting for next visit to my village, I will also make a collection of them :)

My blog cost $$$$$$$$$$

Any one interested in buying my blog :).

My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?

My Last Trip !

From last couple of weeks, didn't get anything to blog about. By the way, Holi week we had a trip of Belur. Its a nice place and the temple is one of the finest examples of Hoysala architecture.

Enjoy with some of the Sculpture @ http://picasaweb.google.com/vaibhav.kumar/Fine_Arts

Else nothing great to say about the trip.

Give me something good !!

Ah, again I need to move my home management system(ghar_ka_hisab). In morning, we are updating our expenses in thinkfree excel sheet(thinkfree.com) and got a critical bug. This bug seems to be in logic part because its not calculating the expenses properly.
(http://www.thinkfree.com/fileview.tfo?method=callFileView&
filemasterno=678659&filekey=lj0jjrlbw0 , The total should be equal and difference should be 0.)

I used to use openoffice for Home Management expenses, but now my system become older and can leave me anytime,so we decided to move on network.Before using thinkfree, I have started using Google spreadsheet, but that was completely a bad product implemented(not designed) by Google. After looking at Abhishek's blog and a great trust shown by Ankur, we decided to move on to ThinkFree. But :(, I am searching for the next, which can handle by complex calculations >>> ANY IDEA !

Diversity in Unity !!!

Baand is over in Karnataka. As covered by Times of India, it was a complete baand. Complete in the sense, all flights get canceled, nothing on the road, all shops shutter down. I never see a baand effective like this. As I am a Bihari and baand is a common thing in Bihar, it touches people's life but it never hinders it. Here it seems, its not hindering, its stopping people's life.

I never had state cohesion and may be this is the reason I am in Bangalore. But its regret to see that local people force you to think it's not your state,never matter it may be your country. Ankur best says" It's not looking Unity in diversity, its looking Diversity in Unity".

Never Ending Debates ….

Some issues in our country are always open for discussion because in short term(2-3 years) it will not get a result(maybe my short term is small):

1. Indo-Pak Relationship
2. Sachin's Batting
3. Performance of Indian Cricket Team
4. Kavari Water Dispute.
5. ............................
6. ............................
7. ............................

and I start finding such issues, believe me the list in long :). Some topics which are in my control, I stopped talking!