Mallu Thoughts...

Bangalore Traffic Police and bikers...

2008-01-19T21:48:00.001-08:00

This is something I have found really strange with Bangalore city traffic police...

Everytime I take my Pulsar out to drive in Bangalore, I ensure that I have all the "book and papers" with me, whereas I am not that particular when I take out my Innova... Reason...? 9 out of 10 times you get stopped by a traffic policeman asking for the documents if you drive a bike and almost never, if you drive a four wheeler, especially a bigger one.

Yes, you are supposed to carry all the documents relevant for the vehicle you are driving. If you don't, it is an offense under the Indian traffic rules. I agree 100%. No doubt about it. You deserve to get caught and pay a fine if you don't obey the rule. So that is not my gripe.. What is it, then.?

Now, look around when you are on the road...

Do you see the rash driving sumo/qualis driver cutting off everyone on the way.?
Do you fail to see the random vehicles coming against you, in the wrong way, against the rule.?
Do you see a traffic block wherever the traffic policeman is "controlling" the traffic.? And do you fail to see that invariably, the traffic block is due to someone not obeying the rule.? And the traffic policeman is not taking any action against the law breaker.
Do you see how the BMTC bus just went by.? crossing the red signal.? And the traffic police man simply watching that without doing anything..?
...
...

The list can go on and on..

My gripe is this..

In one case, with the bikers, the police is keen on enforcing the rule and ensure that you are compliant with the law, even though that may not be a direct threat to anyone's security. On the other hand, they are turning a blind eye to the the more visible issues which are potential threat for people's lives.

I have heard that Bangalore City Traffic Police force is under staffed and don't have enough people to control the traffic problem. If so, how come, I see three to four groups of traffic policemen at different points trying to catch bikers on my drive from Sarjapur Road to Whitefield.

Isn't this a bit ironical.?

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Low profile..

2007-09-16T09:55:00.001-07:00

So much for downloading Qmana.. I didn't even open it after that.. Slowly, I am realizing that active blogging is not in my blood.. I might scribble a few notes here and there, but I am not going to be that active..

It has been raining a lot in Bangalore.. I haven't been able to go out on a drive in rain this time..

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From Qumana...

2007-07-25T08:03:00.001-07:00

It has been quite a while since I did any blogging.. Maybe this is not my cup of tea.. I pride myself to be techno-savvy... So I can't give up so fast.. So I have taken another resolution to restart blogging.. Let's see where I get.. ;-)

This time, I downloaded a new tool.. Qumana.. This is my first post using this tool.

Powered by Qumana

Orkut..

2006-11-28T07:55:00.000-08:00

Ok.. I created an account in orkut.. and tried to write something about me.. here it is..

Check it out. Do write a message to me if you like it..

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Flock again.. Orkut, Yahoo 360 & My Space

2006-10-31T20:15:00.000-08:00

For a while I didn't have flock on my laptop.. This happened after the IT folks decided that I need to "upgrade" to windows xp... Nothing changed with the said upgrade.. Except that my applications started running a bit slower... Well, life is like that.. Happy to say that I downloaded it again..

Meanwhile, I became member of a couple of internet communities.. orkut, yahoo 360^o & my space... follow the link if you are interested to know a bit more about me...

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Some thoughts on Reservation...

2006-05-26T09:34:00.000-07:00

Reservation for backward communities has again become the hot topic for discussion, thanks to some polititians who are trying to take political mileage out of it. Here are my thoughts on it...

Reservation is not the answer to our country's problems. I want to abolish reservation. We, as a country, is competing in a global environment, and by lowering the bar for a few, we are doing injustice to them. We are not preparing them to compete in a global environment.

The students from the backward communities are actually not previlaged in the quota system. Even though some will disagree with me, a majority of them don't get benefited by this. They gets into the colleges and schools with this guilt that they didn't get there because they deserve it - even if they have the capability within to achieve more, had the background and situation be different. And everyone will look at them through this colored viewpoint, that they are somehow "lower" than the rest of the folks, ignoring the fact that this person had to fight his way all through, and there is a real possibility that this person is more capable than any of them. And we are not giving them a chance to compete in a fair playground. Even if he is meritorious, the society will brand him as "backward" and try to degrade his achievements. There is no bigger disgrace than this, to a human as an individual.

We have to work on creating that level playground for every citizen of India. To create that level playing field, we should start at the grassroots level to provide education to every child in the country. There should be initiatives from Governments and NGOs to spread the awareness on the need for education. This is has to be a continuous process and not a one time activity. Education should be made free to everyone till they reach 12th Std. Schemes should be deviced to attract children from all sections of the society to get their basic education. If we can get all the children in the current generation to attend at least the primary school, we can assume that they will ensure that their next generation will go till high school, at least a step ahead of the current generation. If that happens, we have succeeded in our mission to spread the awareness. The next generation will take it even further, and so on...

We are witnessing a "hate campaign" against the backward community. Many of the images which appear in the media are biased. After all these, how many of us, the so called forward community, will look at someone from the other section without a bias..? It's a sad, but true.

An working example to look in this regard is the "Affirmative Action" in US. There are umpteen web resources available to explain what it is. So I am not going into the details here. But in a nutshell, it is about "Employment programs required by federal statutes and regulations designed to remedy discriminatory practices in hiring minority group members; i.e. positive steps designed to eliminate existing and continuing discrimination, to remedy lingering effects of past discrimination, and to create systems and procedures to prevent future discrimination; commonly based on population percentages of minority groups in a particular area. Factors considered are race, color, sex, creed, and age." This definition is taken from: http://www.answers.com/affirmative+action?nafid=3

In the Indian context, we have to add caste, sub caste, regional differences etc.

Thinking of the fallouts of todays reservations... If the goal is to uplift backward classes, there has to be a day this upliftment is complete, and they have to stop all reservations.... Like that is ever going to happen.... right...? All sarcasms apart, did you see the point..? It's un-thinkable that there is one day when reservations will go away... The corollary to that is... the backward classes will always be backward, and this reservation is really not helping....

It is going to take a lot of courage from the administration to remove reservation and suggest and implement something like this. Imagine the kind of scenes our streets are going to witness if they decide to withdraw reservation to everyone. It will be a lot worse than what we witnessed in Bangalore streets following the death of Rajkumar. So the government should be thinking twice before increasing the coverage of reservation. Obviously our government is not thinking. And it is a sad situation that they are making it difficult for the future governments and the people of this country as well.

I am hoping that someone with sense will prevail over the polititians and open their eyes to the reality before it is too late...

Bangalore Public and Rajkumar...

2006-04-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

Rajkumar died. I am not a big fan of any movie star. Being a mallu, Rajkumar is totally alien to me. So when my friend warned me of public sentiments which could boil over, I took it lightly. I thought that she was exaggerating. Two days later, I am not sure of what to make out from what happened during his funeral.

Public and private property worth crores of rupees destroyed. Will that make Rajkumar happy?

Was it public outrage? If so, outrage against what? His death? It was not a wrongful death. He died of his illness. So I don't know what is there to complain against?

Rajkumar was a person who helped a lot of Kannadigas. From what I know, he had no inclination towards politics. He was supposed to be a good man. So when a good man dies, the people who loves him goes around, destroy property and create a scene of terror all around Bangalore. Is that how Bangaloreans or Kannadigas pay tribute to their beloved Rajkumar..?

New Flock downloaded..

2006-04-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

v 0.5.13.2.. This looks much better... Let me see if I can use this browser on a regular basis...

Celebrating Diversity...

2005-12-28T21:47:00.000-08:00

Found this in a discussion...

"America is not great because we "celebrate our diversity." America is great because ordinary people take the decision every day to get up and go to work and raise their children as they see fit. We pull together to face a common threat (or we used to) and do our own thing when no threat is perceived."

I have always wondered about what makes (or made) America a great country... or a country which everyone want to "go to". This could be one reason...

What are we doing in India nowadays..??

Another day with flock...

2005-12-06T02:27:00.000-08:00

Except for the one crash while I was trying to do something crazy, Flock has been working fine for me... Did my usual browsing, googling etc, and it seem to respond pretty quickly... I liked the similarity with Firefox - probably because of same code base... So far so good.. Haven't tried the online bookmarks yet... I am a bit shy to try out something new the very first day after installing the app... I need to get a bit familiar with flock before throwing my stuff online... Plus there was the usual "lack of time" excuse... Anyway, so far so good...

Flock...

2005-12-05T05:07:00.000-08:00

Ok... I accept.. I am not a great blogger... I could blame it on the non availability of an easy way to blog from my computer... Now, with flock, I shouldn't have any complaints... So, let me start with my first blog from Flock...
--

Corruption - Bangalore is a lot worse than I thought...

2005-07-04T21:55:00.000-07:00

We Mallus are very critical of our home state... We tend to see the negative side of everything...
But are we doing so with an impartial mind... ?

Read the incident below - this is my own story- and decide for yourself...

I live in Bangalore, off Sarjapur Main Road. This comes around the South East corner of Bangalore, just outside the Bangalore city limits. The area is under a village panchayath named "Kasavanahalli".

The road which leads to my house is owned by the Village Panchayath. It used to be a road a couple of years ago. Over the last few years, due to the increased traffic, the road ceased to exist, and now nobody will believe that there existed a tarred road there. During rains, the road gets filled with water, almost knee deep in some areas. I manage to ride through the road simply because I know the exact location of all the potholes on the road.

There are a few new constructions coming up in that area. To market those, they need to improve the roads. They joined hands with the developer of the other plots nearby, and placed an offer to the village panchayath saying that they will build the road, to the panchayath's specifications, free of cost to the village panchayath.

The village panchayath officials rejected the proposal!!!

They wanted the money to be handed over to them, and the project executed by them!!! It's anybody's guess as to what that means. Executing the project by the builders means that the village will get a road, with 100% of the budget going into construction. No cuts, no kickbacks, no bribes, and no money going into the village panchayath officials, because they are not handling the money.

I can't imaging such a thing happening in Kerala. If something like this happens, all the village panchayath officials will be crucified by the media. They will be all over in "Aniyara" and "Sakshi"...

So I guess, even though I criticise the corruption and polititians in Kerala, the situation is much better over there...

Credit card "offers"...

2005-06-09T22:11:00.000-07:00

I was never a fan of the modus operandi of the credit card companies. Be it here in India, where they are let loose by the law, or in US where there are strict laws on what they can and cannot do, they seem to find ways to trick users into believing this new "offer" is the best thing in the world.

Today, I received a statement from my credit card company. Usually, I just do a cursory scan through the statement, and doesn't look much into the detail. I belong to that category of credit card holders, who pay the full amount due every month, and pay "no interest" to the credit card companies. So they are trying to find new ways to extract money out of me. I think what I saw in my credit card was one such attempt. There was one line saying "Safety Net EMI 01 of 12 - Rs 79.00".

I started wondering, what in the world is this safety net. I don't remember buying any such thing. To top that, I don't buy anything with EMIs. When I looked further, there was this line, somewhere in the bottom of the card, saying "PRINCIPAL BALANCE ON EASY PAY - Rs 869.00". I got a bigger shock then. So I decided to call the credit card company to find out what this is all about.

Calling credit card customer care is not something I enjoy doing. They have a telephonic menu hierarchy built so complex, that you will never find how to really talk to a customer service (or no-service?) agent. It went "press 1 for the list of your last 5 transactions", "press 2 for..." etc. till "press 6 for.." No "press for" to talk to a customer service agent. So I started pressing numbers which were not listed. By intution I pressed "0", and I believe I got lucky this time. The information I got was that "this is an offer to the customers"!!! An offer which charges me for Rs 950!!! And that too without my knowledge. I immediately asked the individual to cancel that "offer". I am going to write a formal letter to the credit card company about this.

I used to this radio talk show by the person named "Clark Howard", when I used to live in Milwaukee. I liked his advices on credit/debit card usages. Interested, you can click here to see Clark's tips on credit cards.

Recently, there was an article in Readers Digest about credit card fraud. What they found was shocking. I would recommend everyone to read that article. After reading that article, I started noticing that in majority of the places I went, the person who swipe the card never verify the signature on the card vs the signature you put on the slip. So anyone can purchase anything using a stolen card, and you are liable to pay for it - unless you call the credit card company before the actual charge has occurred...

Dan Brown Books

2005-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

I finished reading the third Dan Brown book - "Digital Fortress".

Only recently I started reading english books. Until now, I thought that I was a slow reader, when it came to reading story books. But I amazed myself by finishing the entire book over a weekend - with all the distractions with kids, grocery list and other errands.

The first one I read was "Da Vinci Code". I picked that because I saw many people reading it. Some, in our office, some during my last trip to Milwaukee and back. I did not have the courage to ask any of them about the book, because of my own ignorence about english novels. I had seen a bunch of english movies based on John Grisham. I realized it only after watching those movies, that they originally were books published, etc. Then on, I had this burning desire within me to read at least one book, before it became a movie. So when I saw many people reading "Da Vincy Code", I felt this book might become a movie sometime. That's how I ended up picking up "Da Vinci Code".

I was fascinated by the story, and liked his simple language, that I decided to buy "Angels and Deamons". This one too, was really good. I liked the Dan's way of explaining seemingly complex technical stuff like particle physics. I took around a couple of weeks to finish each book.

Then recently I found an sale going on in eBay, for the remaining two books Dan Brown had authored. So I didn't hesitate to place the order, and witihin the next couple days, I found myself reading one of the two - "Digital Fortress". Even though the story is not as interesting as the earlier two, I kept reading, mainly because it was a story about the field which I am working on - computers. I enjoyed this book as well.

I finished reading that book yesterday. Got one more to go - Deception Point. I will read that during my trip to Kerala next week.

Make it a better place...

2005-06-05T21:36:00.000-07:00

Whlie driving to office today morning, I was listening to Michael Jackson's famous song - "Man in the Mirror"... The theme of the song is stated in the lines: "If you wanna make the world a better place, Take a look at yourself, and then make a Change"

How many times do we think about others not doing the right thing, while assuming that we are perfect, and we do everything right. This comes from our own self righteousness and selfish mind. We ignore alltogether that there re so many blemishes in our own thoughts and actions, and go on trying to correct others.

Just a thought...

Eclipsed!

2005-06-02T01:33:00.000-07:00

It has been a few months since I downloaded and started using NetBeans and Eclipse for java development. At the end of six months, I have become a big fan of ECLIPSE.

The following are the biggest contributors in turning me into an eclipse fan.

Look and feel: I think this has a lot to do with the default font and color selection. Whatever it is, I prefer the look and feel of eclipse compared to NetBeans or JBuilder.

Responsiveness of the application: One of my biggest gripes about java IDEs was about the responsiveness of the application. I type fast. And after Microsoft Visual C++ IDE, eclipse is the IDE which I used so far, that could match my speed. (I am not denying the fact that there could be other Java IDEs which I haven't tried yet.)

Clearcase Integration: Works well with the clearcase plugin. So you don't have to switch back and forth between the browser and IDE when you have to edit a file that is checked in.

Refactoring support: I never took automatic refactoring seriously until I experimented with the refactoring features available with eclipse. Now, I realize that refactoring code is not at all a headache, especially when you have to handle renaming and re-packaging of classes. The clearcase integration makes it a breeze.

Perspectives - debug, development & java browsing: This is another cool feature. Depending on what you are doing - coding, just browsing the code or debugging - eclipse offers different perspectives, which are nothing but screen layouts whcih display the relavent sub windows. The debug perspecitve provides a debug window with the list of active threads, Variables window which show the currently active variables, an Expression window to evaluate expressions, console, etc.

My job require me to do a lot of code review. The java browsing perspective is ideal for that. Another nice feature I use extensively while reviewing code is the task tags. I define a tag named "CODEREVIEW", and add my code review comment in the code itself at the location I want it. One rebuild will give me a list of these tags in the Tasks list. Copy paste that to another document and code review comments are ready. The person responsible for code review fixes can open it up in eclipse, click through the auto-generated list in eclipse and take care of them.

Remote debugging: This is the feature that helped me a lot. I have to debug applications running on a target, but it is not practical for me to install an IDE and sources on it. I haven't explored this feature in NetBeans. JBuilder gives this feature in the developer version which is highly overpriced.

What is missing in eclipse ? I would say that a UI builder is missing in eclipse. But I don't feel the need for a graphical UI builder even though I have to develop UI based applications.

Why..? I will come to it in my next post...

Indian IT - Is it becoming less competitive in the global market...?

2005-06-02T01:19:00.000-07:00

India and it's IT industry has been the major beneficiaries of the IT outsourcing that happened in the past few years. Lower cost and abundant availability of english speaking technical talent were the biggest plus points for India.

But, are we losing that advantage to countries like China..?

The biggest disadvantage which China had in the past was the lack of enough english speaking talent, and the lack of control over piracy and intellectual property violations. But they are around 50% cheaper than their Indian counterparts. And Chinese government seem to be acting on getting the talent pool and getting their act together in controlling piracy. That seems to be good enough reason for majority of the major players in the IT industry. And China has been doing PR campaign in a large scale to boost their IT industry.

So, you can see that in the next five to ten years, India can lose its competitive advantage over China, w.r.t outsourcing.

What is India's answer to these challenges..? Cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai & Chennai are becoming costlier every day. One answer is in developing other cheaper alternatives to these expensive cities.

We, as Keralites, should look at the development of Smart City as an answer to this challenge. This can in addition to help generate the jobs that is crucial for the states development, will also provide an alternative to the big cities because it can provide the cost advantage compared to them.

Java 5.0 and Netbeans

2004-10-12T22:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I started playing with JDK 1.5 (or Java 5.0) and the latest Netbeans IDE. I downloaded both from the Sun website, since they came bundled together.
My earlier impressions about Netbeans was that it was slow c0mpared to Eclipse or JBuilder. But the latest one seemed better. I am yet to find out more about it. But my first impression is that it has improved a lot from the previous version I had seen.
Java 5.0 has some good features adopted from C++, such as templates, enumerations, printf, varargs etc. Autoboxing is a good one. Nice features. Looks good so far.

Mallu Thoughts

2004-10-11T04:37:00.000-07:00

This is my very first post. As of now, I am not sure where this will go or who will see this. I will be using this site to post my thoughts... No specific subject in mind as of now...

I named it Mallu thoughts, because I am a mallu (short for Malayalee, or Keralite) and my view of the world is centered around Mallus (Keralites) and Mallu-land (Kerala, in other words).