Viswanathan K's Thoughts

This friend of mine periodically says he wants a break from work, how he wished the company would allow him to go on a sabbatical but sadly, in India, companies don’t yet do that. The root of his feeling is something most of feel at some point or the other: the job sucks. So if going on a sabbatical is not an option in India, are there any real practical options? Or do we just have to grin and bear it as a way to pay the bills? I found another trail on this topic on Slashdot which seems to confirm what most of us feel. One guy suggested teaching as an alternative career where you could leverage your area of expertise, “ If you have experience on a given subject, coding or otherwise, there is a market for books and teaching. ” A recommendation to teach provoked the inevitable response, “ He's already demonstrated that he "can", which means he's ineligible to teach. ” A pretending-to-be-ignorant wag asked, “ Is that a Star Trek reference? ” Another response trai...

The recent surge of interest in Sherlock Holmes (seen via recent books and movies ) reminded me of my own memories about the star detective. When the TV series came on Doordarshan I was too young to understand any of it. Later when I was older, my dad bought me the entire Holmes collection. Even though half the stories had references to all kinds of ancient British terms that made no sense to me, I read on. The idea that people the victims knew (like their step-father) could put on a wig and some makeup and yet fool them completely seemed very far-fetched (note that such great makeup was a recurring theme in many of the stories) but I thought, hey, if everyone else who read the books considered it believable, maybe makeup could be that good. Looking back, I think back then I was like the crowd in that fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes, you know one of those guys who just like whatever it is that is acclaimed! Or to quote the wise Calvin who told Hobbes, “You know how peopl...

Some time back, I read this article in the Guardian on the pricing of eBooks v/s physical books . The argument was something like this: the value of the book, physical or electronic, is almost entirely because of the content ("text itself"). If you agree with that (and I can’t see who can disagree with it), then the article said that “the delivery method shouldn't matter much”. So, the article argues, the price of an eBook should be the same as the price of the physical book (after all, isn’t the content the same?). The conclusion part, I don’t agree with at all. Because the article confuses 2 different things: value and price. Conventional, prehistoric thinking would suggest the two are the same. But, on the Internet, do you pay for Wikipedia or Google? And since you don’t, does that mean you don’t value those 2 sites?! Then that article goes after Amazon, accusing them of using their monopolistic position to drive down the price of eBooks so that they can promote sa...

How India chooses to handle the bomb attack on the Israeli embassy official’s wife is a very complicated topic. Israel has already blamed Iran for this and similar attacks in Georgia and Indonesia. Are they right? Possibly. On the other hand, would Iran risk staging an attack in a friendly country like India, now its largest oil buyer? Then again, is Iran banking on the fact that India would have no choice but to continue its relations with Iran since it won’t be able to find any alternative source for oil so fast? A farcial investigation would not be acceptable to Israel. Or probably to the Jewish lobby in the US. It would also give a stick to the US sections that never liked India’s relations with Iran. The handling of 26/11 and the fact that Kasab still lives conveys so much to the Israelis as to how this investigation will be conducted. Which is why the Israelis want to be part of the investigation. For the Congress government, the timing of the attack couldn’t be worse. Any in...

Salman Khurshid seems to be copying the kinds of things that Digvijay Singh says. And why not? After all, Digvijay Singh is considered to be the heir-in-waiting’s mentor, so Khurshid may be trying to send out signals that he is of the same mindset as the Prince and his mentor. For future growth prospects. First Khurshid announces he supports reservations for Muslims within the OBC quota while the election code of conduct is in effect . In case you wondered, no, that’s not considered communalism. And no, the election code doesn’t apply to Khurshid because he went on to repeat his reservations statements even after the Election Commission had censured him. Then the man showed how delusional he is by saying he’d continue to stand for the reservation-within-reservation issue even if the EC hanged him. Hanged him? Hey Khurshid, we don’t even hang Ajmal Kasab in this country, but we’re to believe that the EC may hang you for a violation of the code of conduct? Besides, the EC doesn’t h...

I read this Slashdot trail   about this organization, Every Tribe Every Nation , (ETEN) whose aim is to produce and distribute Bibles in readable, mobile-ready formats in hundreds of languages including Norsk, Potawatomie, Bahasa Indonesia, and Hawai'i Pidgin. Never heard of most of these languages? Well, that’s the point: the aim is to spread the Bible among tribes, aka the old missionary impulse. Like most Slashdot discussions, it’s the comments below the article that are hilarious. An old wine in new bottles comment was “ You would think that people would be able to do away with these historic and completely ridiculous ideas by now. Instead they are still stuck in the dark ages, but now with shiny new technology ”. Others commended the effort, not for the missionary aspect, but for the fact the effort might result in some progress in rendering minority languages correctly on phones. Another guy responded to that saying “ Well, yes. But I do not think that is actually a good t...

I remember this part in one of Richard Dawkins’ books where he tried to answer the question as to how gradual evolution can give any survival advantage. Citing the evolution of the eye, someone had asked him what good is a partial eye? Doesn’t it have to be a fully functioning eye or nothing at all? Why would evolution favour a partial eye? Dawkins went on to answer that by stating that a 2% eye is better than no eye (blindness), and a 4% eye is better than a 2% (even a slightly better chance of spotting the prey or predator can make all the difference when it comes to survival) and so on all the way to 100%. I just got another example from a totally different domain recently. My 6 month old baby can roll over and swivel a bit. I was getting impatient and wondering when she would make some progress beyond that. I got my answer when my wife visited a friend with a baby that was a month younger than ours. That baby (being younger) could not yet roll over. So our heroine, when placed ne...

Heard of this ruling by a French court asking Google to pay damages and a fine to a French map making company? “A French court has ruled that Google's free Google Maps application is anti-competitive and has ordered the company to pay €500,000 to Bottin Cartographes, a for-pay map company, as well as a €15,000 fine. Bottin Cartographes argued that Google was only planning to give away the service for free until all the competitors had been driven out of business and then they would start charging.” I don’t even know where to begin. So had only Google charged for its maps, there would have been no problem! Second, I thought justice is about punishing people who committed a crime, not punishing based on opinions about what they might do in future (Like Google first driving all mapmakers bankrupt by giving maps for free and then starting to charge for them). That sounds like a prediction to me. Have the French got some Minority Report style technology to predict crimes of the fut...

After the recent Supreme Court verdict canceling the 2G spectrum allocation, did you hear Kapil Sibal's defense? He claimed the verdict was against the first-come-first-policy used to allocate the spectrum, and not against that his government had done! Based on this “logic”, he then said the judgment was an indictment of the NDA, since they were the ones who had framed the policy. Wow! That's how a lawyer would argue (the “if the law/rule is flawed, don't blame my client” defense), but hey Kapil, you are now a legislator (you know legislators, right? They are the people who frame laws). And so if the NDA rules were flawed, your bunch should have changed them. Or did you not know that you had that power, nay responsibility, once you were in power? Oh wait, you do know that. Like when you started your crusade to censor the Internet to prevent insults to Goddess Sonia. Why didn't you continue with the non-censorship policy of the NDA on that one, you know, the way you ...

I overheard this fresh-out-of-college girl at office telling her friend that her everyone in her team was “so old”. Of how nobody seemed to kid around, of how nobody ever “pranked” each other. Of how she could talk to these people, but couldn’t relate to them at all. That made me think of the time when I started working. Back then, almost everyone in IT was in the 0-3 years experience band. The only vehicle people had was a bike. For celebrations, everyone wanted to go out for dinner, not lunch (it could be a longer affair that way, and you could have drinks too). People looked forward to foreign trips: the longer, the better. Most of us came to office on weekends not necessarily to work but what else was there to do? Besides, in the pre-cell phone era, the office was the only place one could get together and then make plans for the evening/night. Even managers used to be unmarried back then: that was how young a team was. And now? The IT industry has undergone a population inversio...