Author: Gautham Pai

About me

Categories
General Technology

Google Earth now shows Bangalore

Yeah, it's true! Google Earth now shows Bangalore satellite images.

Without any more words, let's get to business (I didn't want to mark the images):

Golden Towers – The place where I work currently:

(Landmark: Just in front of the X shaped building is a L building, which is Golden Enclave. To the right is Golden Tower. It is a small building. To the front is empty space, which is the parking space.)

Embassy Golf Links:

(Landmark: To the front of EGL is the Golf course, and to the right bottom is the airport runway. The IBM EGL buildings are to the left of the Golf course, to the left top of the picture.)

Embassy Golf Links – IBM:

(Landmark: This clearly shows the IBM EGL buildings.)

How about some other places in Bangalore?

Majestic:

(Description: The railway station to the left and the U shaped bus stand. Looks majestic. )

Chinnaswami stadium:

(Description: Needs none.)

Airport:

(Description: The runway looks good, but the airport is spoiling the city. Too much of pollution. 🙁 )

Experiment with Google Earth Now!!!

Categories
World Wide Web

Web 2.0 – is it the way to go?

Web 2.0 is going to change the way we use the WWW. The entry of social networking tools, blogging etc is just the beginning. There is a lot more to come.

RIA is just coming up. AJAX and AFLAX and similar other technologies are emerging.

We are seeing a total transformation in the way we work. More and more applications are moving on to the web. But the more sensible approach would be to move everything down to the desktop and then provide total interoperability between them.

Some years down the line, browsers will disappear and you will know what I meant. 🙂

Categories
General

Humor? Naah…

Method of swinging on a swing

A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.

Believe it or not, the above paragraph is the abstract of a US patent. 🙂

Here are the details.

And if you want more, here is a list of crazy patents.

Now anyone out there on methods to climb a bus?

Categories
World Wide Web

2 days, 2 experiences

September 2, 2005:

As usual, after my office work, I improve my gyan in my fields of interest. I am trying out the newly discovered Clusty and hit upon something very interesting.

This site is called KurzweilAI.net. It is not something that I can describe, but here are some things it deals with:

* The Singularity.
* Living Forever.
* Will Machines Become Conscious?
* How to Build a Brain.
* Visions of the Future.
…

If you are not already excited, then you better not continue reading this blog. But if you are, then I suggest you start off with this:

Chapter 1: The Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-First Century.

I am tempted to tell you what is in there, but let me not, or else you will criticize me for curbing your interests after you read it.

September 3, 2005:

Early morning, I find myself attending a workshop in Le Meridian hotel, Sankey Road. This seminar is about:
Model Driven and Service Oriented Development using Eclipse, J2EE and Web Services.

The workshop was lead by Shridhar Iyengar, a distinguished engineer from IBM. It was one of the best workshops I had ever attended. It was jointly organized by Rotary Bangalore West, IBM and OMG.

Why I specially liked is that, this workshop dealt with upcoming trends in Software development. It talked about concepts like Modeling, Metadata, Service Oriented Development, Model Driven Architecture, Reverse Engineering, Reusable Assets etc.

I come to office today and find more interesting stuff:
Microsoft suing Google and Ballmer using offensive words against Google, making comments like Google will disappear within 5 years etc! (Is this more because of desperation?!)

Categories
World Wide Web

Clusty – Not Just Yet Another Clustering Meta Search Engine

It has been a long time since I did any khoj on the Internet. So here is one good one:

Clusty is a meta search engine. As the name suggests, Clusty clusters the search results. The best part of Clusty is that it is integrated with Wikipedia. So, you can just search for words in this search engine, see what the related categories are. In fact, it is not even necessary to open the pages. The results (especially in Wikipedia) itself give you what you are searching for.

If that is not enough, you have customization features, preview etc. There is also a Firefox toolbar for Clusty.

Categories
World Wide Web

What is your Googlenym?

A Googlenym is a word or a set of words (phrase) that you enter to go to a particular page.

It's now a common strategy to remember the Googlenym rather than the entire URL to a website. Just remember what is the set of words that will uniquely lead you to a particular site. Enter it, and you are done.

Do you have a Googlenym? Mine is ““buzypi“.

There are many such words based on Google. The wikipedia link given above has a list of these.

Now don't “Google bomb” my site. 🙂

Categories
Technology

Orkut is screwing my mailbox

I had heard that the Orkut server is bad.

But I didn't know it could be so deadly.

Orkut sent me a friend request approval mail atleast 20 times (as of writing this blog entry)! 🙁 Server spamming eh?! And there comes another…

Categories
My Updates

What a vacation!!!

(This blog is subject to change and refinement. All irrelevant details have been suppressed.)
Our final exams ended on June 10th, 2005. It was a satisfying end to a great journey.

What happened after that was more exciting. Wanna know what happened? Read on… It's not a secret anymore.

I have this tendency. My mind works the most, during exams.

It so happened that this concept of Ananyeah hit upon me during the exams. And I was waiting for exams to end. Once the exams ended, I started working on it full time. Me and were quite excited about it.

Now nothing comes easily and for some vague reasons I had to try for other job options. (How bad, I am not allowed to work on my idea even in vacations 🙁 ). I found myself in Bangalore, the IT hub. That week, I talked to many people in Bangalore. (Company directors, managers etc).

Suddenly, Mr. sent me a message:

“Got placed in a cool startup. They want you to be director. Come online soon.”

What?! What?! What?!

I was already excited about all the developments (or rather the events) that were occurring and then this one.

I messaged him back and you know right? He does not answer properly. So I had to go to the browsing center to find out.

Now this is what it turned out to be:

An offer from a US company to start their India operations! They wanted us to start a “Private Limited” in India and they were ready to fund it. We were allowed to continue working in the companies that we were placed in and once we felt this company that we started is able to sustain itself, we could quit our jobs and continue working on it full-time. Sounds reasonable. Worth trying. That's what I felt.

So we started working on this for the next one week in home lab. The main problem that concerned us was, “How can we work in another company when we are already placed in another? Will it help us achieve our dream? We are not after money, so is this worth it?” The person who made this offer (hereafter referred to as Mr. CTO) didn't know how tough it is to start a pvt ltd in India. He wanted us to start it in 2 days and start work immediately. Also, he was probably unaware that in India nothing works without under-hand transactions. So we told Mr. CTO that since we have these problems, we won't start this pvt ltd immediately, but start working on the project. (It would violate BCG of our company, but let's see what can be done about it…)

We had read about the starting of a company in “Management in Engineering” and now we were looking at the practical aspects of it.

Mr. CTO, was not aware that we were placed in IBM. When he did, he was shocked. He knew it was impossible for us to work on this offer. So he made another offer:

Work on an open source project for the next 3 months and at the end of it, I'll give you the entire salary what IBM pays you in one year. You then quit IBM and join us full time.

Reasonable again. Remember that I had not -joined- IBM and so I didn't know what IBM allows and what it does not. But when I read the BCG, I knew that even this would not be possible according to the BCG.

Meanwhile, Mr. CTO, who was not even aware of our problems, was in full-zoom. He sent us the “First assignment”. We found that the “First Assignment” clashes with the interests of Ananyeah. It was clear that, if at all we were working on this idea, we had to make sure that we also own it. So we told Mr. CTO about this. Mr. CTO changed the offer. We soon felt, he was trying to “utilize” us. We could not see any advantages of working with him or his company. So we declined the offer.

In the meantime, we had joined our jobs. And you know how my IBM offer mail began,

“Hope you are having a nice vacation, free from worries since your examinations are complete and you have an offer from an excellent company in hand.”

Well said!!!

(All people relevant to this blog, may write comments putting in their own experiences or blog about it in their own blogs. There is no point in hiding it.)

Categories
Technology

Open “source” – is it enough?

* This blog entry is not meant to harm the sentiments of any. *
What is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about “Open source”? Well, for me, it's not something exciting. The reason as I see it is pretty clear: It is just not enough if the “source” is open.

It is a known fact that any product development goes through a number of phases. Starting with requirements and design, it goes on till testing and maintenance (or support). Coding (writing the actual code) hardly constitutes 20% (or is it less) of the actual software development process.

If this is the case, then what is the use if I just give you my code? What sense does it make to you, by just looking at the code? Probably it does, but that is not the point. The point is, how easy is it for people to make sense of what the code does, without having proper documentation in place. Are design documents also open? (I don't think so!)

This thought made me delve into the very definition of “Open source”. And I came across this link: The Open Source Definition. This entire page does not make a single mention of the word “design” or “documentation”. Further in clause 2, it seems to be made clear that, “all that needs to be distributed freely is the source code”.

Here's that clause for your reference:


The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Where some form of a product is not distributed with source code, there must be a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code for no more than a reasonable reproduction cost preferably, downloading via the Internet without charge. The source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.

Now, me noting this problem does not mean I am the only to have done so. Here is some proof that I am not alone.

Ok, all this does not mean that I don't believe in open source. What I actually feel is that it is just not enough. We need something more! Open source can just be an enabler to this.

In fact, the ThinkCycle initiative of MIT seems to be a solution that I am looking for.

Was my interpretation of Open source wrong? Any takers?

Categories
My Updates

IBM is the place you need to work!!!

The more I work in IBM, the more I learn about the system here, the more it makes me wonder “IS THERE ANY OTHER BETTER PLACE IN THE WORLD TO WORK? OR IS IT THE 'FROG IN THE WELL' KINDA STORY?”