Why work life is important?

These days, I have started interacting a lot with my team mates. This has helped me learn about things around me in a different perspective.. Last week we had gone for a team movie.. The most interesting part was the hot discussions that we had, rather than the movie itself. Our discussions mainly revolved around companies, our work, managers and many more.

One of my team mate, A genius I say, shared his thoughts about,"why he considers his work life in Y! important.."
He had worked for many big names.. such as Intel R&D,Microsoft and Oracle!! He was not quite satisfied with the work in all these places and finally landed up in my team!! I am sure, he would have got a really heavy pay cheque and good benefits in all these companies.. Curious to know what might have disappointed him
I started a conversation with him.. His reply was really intersting.. " Life is not all about pay cheque.. Draw a simple gantt chart for ur life.. Color all the time you sleep in a day, say 8 hours a day thats about 1/3rd of a day. Another 3 to 5 hours for travel and food. With 12 hrs or so remaining 8hrs to 10hrs we spend in office which is major part of the time, we usefully spend in a day. I want this time to be challenging, real value adding and interesting. I really enjoy when I write code that incorporate rich algorithms and those which are revenue impacting."

During this tough period of Y!, I was worrying about my job security.. I was questioning myself about why I should I have to put my heart and soul into a project,which will be scrapped soon.. I thought all my work was in vain!!.. But now I realize, I am taking home lot of experiences.. Technical expertise, how to handle a crisis and lot of other stuff.. His thoughts were really inspiring.. It gave a lot of meaning to the work I do. His thoughts motivates me to work harder and bring meaning to the time I spend in office. Happy to work with him!! Cheers to u man!! U changed my life in a short drive!!

Are all KPN Buses safe to travel?

Recently I happened to travel from Karaikudi, Tamilnadu to Bangalore in KPN travels. The bus started from karaikudi around 8:30 pm. The journey looked smooth in the beginning. But around 12:15 am the bus stopped in the middle of some deserted place. The engine was still on. There was nothing around except few trees. The only thing we could see is a railway gate far away. To start with I felt that it was OK because stopping in the middle was common in KPN buses. 45 mins had passed away but the bus was still there. I felt something was wrong and told my friend Vignesh to check what was happening. He went and tried to open the cabin door, It was locked. He banged twice on the door but nothing was happening. Then, he came back to his seat. We decided to wait for another 15 mins. Most of the people in the bus were sleeping only few thought something was wrong but were still hesitant to find out what it was? Only one lady in the front got up and started banging the cabin door from where there was no reply. Looking at this me and Vignesh felt something is really wrong. We started banging the door hard. At last the cleaner guy opened the door. He looked so tired and sleepy, he dint even know that the bus was on a halt. Further to our surprise we found the driver sleeping on the seat. We tried to wake him but failed. We realized that the driver and the cleaner were drunk. We dint know what to do for a while. Then we called up the KPN customer care. They wanted to talk to the driver who we could not even wake up.
Meanwhile 2 people on a bike where passing by. We stopped them to find out the place where we were. We were shaken when they told that they saw the driver in a bar in Karaikudi. The 2 people woke up the driver. The first thing the driver said was
"This is not my bus and I dont know who you people are".
We were shocked to hear this. Then, people told to switch the engine off, for which the driver replied its off only. We pour water on the drivers face. The KPN customer care told to somehow manage till Salem with the drunken driver and then we will provide an alternate driver. It was a 3hrs journey from that place to Salem. We had no choice, we decided to keep an eye on the driver while he was driving. We reached Salem safely. The KPN authorities denied an alternate driver as they stated the drunk driver has brought us safely till Salem. We were not in a position to argue as many people wanted to reach Bangalore soon. Then we traveled with so much fear. The bus stopped in Adayar Anandha Bhavan near Krishnagiri. We got another driver there. Then, at last we reached Bangalore safe around 9:45am. The bus was late by 3 hours. It was a dramatic experience. The only thing the KPN authorities did was to call every 2hours asking where the bus was.

August - Month of Birthdays

This is August and the month of Birthdays has already begun. There are 9 birthdays from my class, 2 seniors as far as I know and a school friend celebrating their birthdays in this very month. And putting a little mathematics into it its 1 birthday every 3 days. There will be bunch of mail threads flooding into my mail box. Hope there will be few parties too. Gonna have a exciting month..

My Life @ Present

How technology solves

Recently I traveled from Erode to my home which is a small village after Dharapuram. I went in a government bus. The conductor had an electronic ticketing machine. I was watching the conductor so closely as I was quite surprised that even these buses that don't connect big cities have such technologies. As I was thinking so, I noticed the conductor checking the machine after every stop and counting the number of heads in the bus. Then, suddenly in the middle of the journey the conductor said that two people have not taken the tickets and asked them to get the tickets immediately. Nobody responded to it. Then, he asked the driver to stop the bus and asked everyone to show their tickets.And very soon, the conductor was able to track down the two people who did not purchase the tickets. It was the machine that was able to track and tell the conductor how many people were inside the bus between two stops. Traveling without a ticket has become impossible now. Thanks to the simple technology thats able to solve everyday problem.

A small story

Lord Buddha used to travel to many villages preaching his philosophy along with his disciples. During their journey, they don't carry any food with them. They usually beg for food on their way and eat it. Once he and his disciple where on their way to a small village. As usual Lord Buddha asked for some food to a lady outside the village. The lady got very angry and started scolding at Buddha very badly. But Lord Buddha did not utter even a single word. He silently left the place. The disciple was very much surprised by the behavior of Buddha. He immediately asked Buddha, why he dint react and told that he should have shouted back on the lady. Now Buddha wanted to teach a lesson to his disciple. So he put his hand into his bag and took a handful of rice and gave it to the disciple. The disciple immediately received the rice in his hands. Now Buddha asked him to return the handful of rice back. The disciple gave the rice, but Buddha never lifted his hand to receive it. The disciple told Buddha to lift his and receive the rice. But Buddha did not move. Then, slowly Buddha enlightened the disciple saying "I never put anything into my heart that makes me angry or unhappy. Its always under my control to take things into my heart. I did not take into my heart what the lady scolded. And that's why I did not react". That day, the disciple learnt a beautiful lesson.

Sunfeast Majja Run 2009

The twitter is so fast... as gmail goes down...

Today being a friday afternoon I wanted to relax apart from my usual work at office. I wanted to check my inbox in gmail. I was logging into my account but unfortunately it showed a server error. I tried 3 or 4 times but my efforts were in vain. Immediately i wanted to find out whether gmail is down or there is some problem with my account. Now twitter was my only hope. Opened twitter searched for gmail down and to OMG i found more than 20 tweets saying gmail is down.. below is the snapshot from twitter

CAPTCHA

Whats CAPTCHA? Whenever you fill an online form you come across a small image which is very not easy to read and you have to recognize and type them in the form to successfully submit the form. This is actually a CAPTCHA. The wikipedia definition says captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. This is done mostly to prevent crackers to automatically run scripts to submit the online forms, thereby bring down the resources of the host. It is a kind od security service. Captchas are most common in email registration, blogs when you post comments, banking applications and other sigin features. But this is sometimes horrifying to many users because they have to recognise the text and enter them everytime. Also in some sites such as banking captchas are too difficult to read. Though they are hard to crack by text recogniton software, they frustrate the users. The user need to refresh to get another image. I have even seen images which has to be typed case sensitive and it becomes even more difficult. Arent there any other way to prevent these issues. Lets wait n watch.

Power of CSS

CSS stands for cascading stylesheets. In a normal web document the HTML gives structure to the web page, Javascripts adds behaviour and CSS gives the presentation. All the three are considered to be the tri-God of the web. All the 3 together gives a powerful and amazing user experience on the web. Here is an interesting page which has the same content but different presentations. Its an wonderful example how we can seperate data from presentation.

The following is the link to the site http://www.csszengarden.com/

Something I found interesting

I attended a web front end training programme recently. The trainer gave many interesting information about front end tools. During his speech he gave some interesting links. One of them was http://www.archive.org/index.php. This site which is called wayback machine was interesting because it had the snapshot of all the websites in varying time frames. Out of curiosity I tried the Yahoo! homepage. I was surprised to see the page with just hyperlinks in the year 2000. Really web 2.0 has changed the internet a lot and is changing more rapidly than anything in this world.

Welcoming Onboard

There are three new comers into the entertainment club of our house. One is a home-made bowling kit, Funskool Monopoly game board and a wooden top(Pumbarum). The bowling kit is made from Tropicana twister bottles and a ball purchased from sapphire toys. We had excellent bowling time from 11pm to 12am yesterday. I had very tough competition in which i somehow managed to finish third place. Then we had a game on the monopoly board. We started the game at 12am. The game was really interesting. We never felt bored or sleepy during the course of the game. But unfortunately I had to file a bankruptcy at 3am with no money to pay rent and leave the game :( The game is real fun but you need to have some luck on the dice too.. This morning we started experimenting with the pumbarum. We were experts in the past. We showed technical expertise by dipping the rope in water to gain grip over the rope. Even though we had lack of practice in the recent past we were able to spin the top upside down :p. Hope we regain over our expertise and become professional pumbarum players by spinning it right on our palm.

To see pictures of this click here.

Flash Update: The pumbarum has started to spin awesomely in the right posture

Random Surfer

In my last post i mentioned a word Random Surfer. It was purely under my subconscious mind. When I just started reading that post again, my concentration suddenly turned towards this word. Who is this Random Surfer?? It was a very familiar word to me and decided to write about it. Its gonna be a bit technical kindly excuse. Last semester in my semantic web course I had to implement a paper titled "Ranking Knowledge in Semantic Web". It was very interesting paper where i came to know about the concept behind Search Engines and the way they rank the result pages. The famous page rank algorithm used in search engines like Google is based on the Random Surfer Model. The code of the surfer is very simple. Whenever a surfer views a page he has certain probability to click a link in that page or to jump to a some other page. This is usually the famous 90-10 rule where the probability to click a link on the page is 0.9 and to jump to a random page is 0.1. The page rank will be a summation of all this probability. To sum up if a page has lot of inbound links it has the greater probability to be visited and hence has a higher page rank. In the real web this is more complex because the actual page rank will also depend upon the page rank of the page from which it has a inbound link. This will seem too complex and it is complex reallly. Imagine the graph or matrix the search engines has to maintain to establish the relationship between these pages(Thats awesome Isn't it?). They achieve this type of computing power very easily using grid computing.
Now if you are really curious and want to know the number of inbound links you have just click here and enter your blog or website and findout. To get more information on Random Surfer Model and Page Rank Calculation Click here

Random Surfing

I am a Random Surfer on the net. I search on some irrelevant keywords and end up finding something else. Doing so i suddenly came across two blogs which was quite interesting to me. These two bloggers are actually singers. The first one was by Chinamayee, the singer, CEO, Blogger,Translator,TV anchor and RJ. Her Blog had lot of information about music and her careers. The next blog was from Blaaze, the rapper. It was nice reading his blog where he gives lot of information about his early life. His latest song is dedicated to the victims of Mumbai Terror Attacks. He has done this along with Prince Ali & Raqueeb Alam. The message he tells through the songs is really wonderful. I salute this person for he has used his talents in the right direction. Not many do that. To download the song Click here. Hear it and pass the message to your friends.

A Tribute to ARR

Right from the days i began to listen to music, I admired AR Rahman so much. I could feel the freshness in each and every song that he has composed. He had been one of my inspiration right from my early college not for the musical talent he has but for the person he is. His early life was a tragedy, poor boy had to play keyboard for his living. But today he is on each and every part of the media around the world. He is actually the true slumdog millionaire. I am happy and glad that I gave a speech titled "From Napier Bridge to London Bridge" throwing light on the biography of this maestro in my English Skills Class in the first year of my college. I admire him for his love for the motherland and his humility "Ella pughazalum Iraivanukay". When i first heard slumdog millionaire it didnt sound that great comparing his earlier projects. Slumdog millionaire earned him 2 Oscars. But according to me 2 oscars for slumdog millionaire means he should have got more than 50 oscars for his earlier works. Rite from Roja, Lagaan, Vande Mataram, Swadesh, Range De Basanthi, Taal, Yuva and Jodha Akbar should have been given oscars. I congratulate him for the winning 2 oscars and wish him to spread love towards mankind through his music

Yahoo Search Enhancements

Always I used to compare search results from google and yahoo. These are my little findings and i am not sure how many of you agree with me. When you search for some technical stuffs google seems to be more accurate in what you want. But when it comes to non-technical stuffs Yahoo tops the result. And moreover yahoo search results have many enhancements which are really useful and awesome. Many would have not be aware of this. Next time you want to get some information probably from say wikipedia, then use Yahoo search. You will get a nice cool looking preview as below.
Like this there are lot of enhancements for imdb, wikitionary, PHP tutorials and lot more. Few are enabled by default but you can add lot more from the search gallery These enhancements will be very useful and a guide to get the right information quickly. These enhancements are result of open source developement called SearchMonkey scripts. Even you can write one and it has very easy steps. Enjoy Yahoo!...

1234567890 Day

Seeing the topic you might be wondering what the post is gonna be about. Everyone might be knowing that Friday the 13 is very unlucky. But this friday is a day to celebrate for another reason. On this Friday, Feb 13 at exactly 3:31:30 (PST), Unix time will equal '1234567890'. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity! It's amazing isnt it?

Open Hack Day in India

Yahoo! conducts Hack Day for Hackers around the globe and now it is going to be in India for the second time. The last open hack day was conducted in 2007. Open hack day is for non-Yahoos! It is been conducted on 14th and 15th Feb at Taj Residency Hotel, Bangalore. During the Hack day you need to develop applications using Y! Services in 24hrs. Interested hackers can register here. There are also various technical talk to be held at the venue.

My Recent Chennai Trip

Last weekend i had gone to Chennai to attend one of my senior Venkat's engagement with seniors, my roomie and Classmates. It was after a long time i got a chance to visit some places in Chennai. The whole two days was filled with fun and excitement. It reminded me of my old days in Chennai. The engagement was on Sunday. So, I decided to do a little bit of shopping on Saturday with my classmates. I reached Adayar where my classmates Suba and Deepthi stayed. Then, we did some shopping in Adayar. We planned to have lunch in Sanjeevani - a Ayurvedic Kerala Style Restaurant, but unfortunately we ended up being late and also due to the crowd we ended up in a ordinary restaurant nearby. We were fortunate to meet one of our senior Sethu. It was nice talking with him after a long time. Then, along with Pavi and Suba proceeded to T Nagar for a second round of shopping. The place was the same old with heavily crowded streets. We went to Saravana Stores and Pothys. We bought couple of clothes for each of us and returned home. The next day we had to get up early by 4 am since the engagement was at a place called Perambakkam 40 km away from the City. It was a very pleasant experience. Most of the time we spent pulling each other legs with special target as me. Then we played UNO with much fun. The journey was awesome with greenaries on both sides of the roads. Once we reached there we had a wonderful village style hospitality. We were given a great hospitality there only the red carpet was missing. The engagement went on well. Thanks to our photography experts Satyendra, Ragu and Satish who had been clicking all the time. Then myself, suba and Pavi went back to Adayar. There we joined Deepthi and left to Besant Nagar Beach. It was really exciting experience there. The beach sand, lot of ppl, kites flying, ballon shooting, beach volley ball etc every scene was filled with beauty. We played in the Sea waves for sometime. The large golden sun on one side and the rising moon on the other side was a awsome scene to watch. We ate fried fish at the beach which tasted heaven. Each and every moment in the beach was amazing. Then we had tasty idly, dosa and paniyaram at murugun idly shop. Since Pavi was new to the city we decided her to take her in the metro train. We also met our old friend Paul at the railway station. It was nice meeting him after a long time. Then we enjoyed the short ride in the metro train to park station. We were tight on schedule and reached the Central Railway Station on time. All together we had a small Chennai Class get together but missed Raji. We were left with nostalgic feelings of college life and missed our beloved friends. Meeting friends and sharing things after a long time is really a pleasant experience and these fun and sentiment filled moments will be cherished forever.

Dubai - A Magical City

Most of them would have heard lot about the city Dubai. The word is so common that we come across it more frequently. People can never forget the Vadivelu Jokes such as Hello!! Dubaaai ah? and Vivekananda theyru. Recently I happened to visit this place. It was about 14 long years I had been to this place. Though I was too young to remember, It was obviously clear that the growth the city has undergone is unbelievable.
Dubai as a city has very scarce resource of oil. The Ruler of the city has realized this and started transforming the city into a wonderful tourist destination. Unlike other Arab countries Dubai does not have a very strict Muslim culture. The expats contribute about 80% of the population and are from different parts of the world. Rich people around the globe such as tennis players, football players, actor, actress and business people own a apartments with a private beach. They spend their holidays there. The city has a really become a center for real estates.
My days in Dubai was really memorable so i would like to share the must see places in Dubai. Touring Dubai is relatively cheaper. The following are some of the best places to see.
The Beaches and Creekside
Dubai is known for its beaches. Despite having a minimum strip of beaches they have made artificial Islands and cut lands for beaches. The Jumeirah beach is a public beach with a view of the world famous 7 star Hotel Burj Al Arab. Opposite to that there are parks which are good place for relaxation.

Dubai is divided into two sides by a artificial sea water channel as Bur Dubai and Dubai. On the bank of this channel is the creekside where there are lot of cruises. You can sail in the cruise along withdinner, dance and rocking arabian music. There are lot of boat service to cross the channel which poor people use even today.Jumeirah Beach

Creekside

Shopping Malls.
There are lot of huge shopping malls in dubai. Mostly suited for window shopping. The most famous is the Mall of the Emirates. It has the largest artificial skiing arena which has a height of a three storey building. The next is the Dubai Mall. It is the largest mall in the world. The world tallest building, Burj Dubai is a part of this mall. Once finished people can freely visit to the 144th floor and be at the tallest manmade structure in the world. There is a very big aquarium in the center of the mall. There are lot of rare fishes ranging from big size sharks and small fishes. You can see Shark Feeding by divers twice a day.
Never miss Ibanbatuta Mall. I liked it very much for its architecture. It features different cultures of the world lije chinese, egyptians etc. Actually Iban batuta is a traveller and this mall features the places he visited. There are large boats and ancient market place like structures inside. The other malls in Dubai include Outlet Mall and Dragon Mart. You get only chinese products in Dragon mart.

Mall Of the Emirates (backdrop : Skii Dubai)

Artificial Islands
Palm Jumierah is the largest man made Island in the shape of a Palm tree. The Island is fully self contained with schools, apartments, hotels and recreation center. There is a underwater tunnel to connect to the cresent of the Island. Once you reach there. You can see the magnificent Atlantis Hotel. Lulu Island is another man made Island situated in Abu Dhabi. It has rafting on speed boats, desert scooters and fresh water pools. Never miss these Islands if u go to Dubai.
Shiekh Zayed Road
All the skyscrapers in Dubai is strictly concentrated in and around the Shiekh Zayed Road so never miss this road. I fortunately was able to be at level 79 of a building and snapped few pics of this road. Adjacent to this building was the Burj Dubai, The tallest building in the world. When you come along the road you can see lot of car showrooms all ranging from Ferari, Mercedes,Volskwagon,Bentley,GT, BMW to Toyoto, Hyundai and Nissan.
Desert Safari.
You must never miss desert safari if you go to Dubai. Its a event which starts in the evening and ends with the dinner. They take you through a muddy desert which would be very thrilling. They stop for the view of the sunset in the evening and then halt at a camp at the center of the desert. There you can go for camel ride, wear traditional Arab dresses and apply mehandi. They have traditional pipe for smoking called See-Shaw. Liquor is also supplied and heavy non vegetarian dinner with Barbeque, Kabab and Deserts. The highlight of the event is the famous belly dance for about 30 mins.


Apart from all this places you can see lot of high-end cars. There the minimum speed ois 80 km/hr. Even i experienced a speed of 180km/hr and cars overtaking our car in that speed. All together it was a pleasant experience.

Resuscitation of my Blog

I started writing blog during my 7th semester internship at Intel. But coming back to college after the the internship I could not continue my blogging. Now coming back to the corporate life. I decided to give a restart to my blogging. Also i would like to thank my senior Vijesh for encouraging me to start over again through his posts. As i was in a deep thought of what to write, I decided to start with my sweet memories of last year. So, I would begin with those in my coming posts. Leaving you all with a tag "Coming Soon"