2008 Archives

Was reading through a forward when I noticed this quote. This is a just in time reminder for me, to do things right myself instead of preaching :-)

A man has to learn that he cannot command things, but that he can command himself; that he cannot coerce the wills of others, but that he can mold and master his own will: and things serve him who serves truth; people seek guidance of him who is master of himself.

Ever since I discovered twitter, I have tweeted more than writing here. 140 chars seems more than enough for me to rant about. However, a lot has happened and a lot more is happening and this blog needs update. Like last year, I will be heading out of Bangalore mid next week until the first week of Jan. So the next few posts are going to summarize these before I bid good bye to a fairly successful 2008. Stay tuned.

A hallway conversation:

A1: Coming for the standup?
A2: Will come after running to the loo.
A1: So you have one standup to attend before this one?

A coworker was admitted to a hospital due to food poisoning and dehydration. We went to visit him and were talking to him. The talk turned towards diarrhoea and stomach cleansing. He remarked about people voluntarily taking castor oil to clear their bowels when another coworker jumped into ask "2 Stroke or 4 Stroke". It took more than 5 minutes for everyone to return back to normalcy.

This one comes a bit late but nevertheless before the festival of lights is over. Here is wishing everyone a very Happy Deepavali.

This one has been by the far best Deepavali I have celebrated in the last few years. One of the main reasons being both my parents and my sister being around here. A few dozen phone calls starting from around 5 AM from all relatives, a whole lot of friends, meeting a few important folks in person and some good food. Awesomeness.

The smoke is settling down and it looks as if the whole place is foggy but hope tomorrow is fine. Cheers

Today morning I was trying to withdraw some cash from a SBI ATM. The machine was making a humongous noise counting the cash and taking eons to dispense the money. After almost a couple of minutes, it barfed "Unable to process transaction. Please contact the bank". Thankfully it dispensed a transaction advice which gave details of the ATM et al and that the transaction was a failure. Promptly within a few minutes, I got an SMS from ICICI bank saying that I have been debited the cash. I was shocked and I was thinking what all will I have to do, to fight this one.

I came home, called customer care, registered a complaint. Made sure that the agent had all the information and asked her to repeat everything. The agent also told the transaction id and the ATM details that matched my transaction slip. I was now atleast happy that I had some concrete evidence to fight it. The SLA for the complaint was 8 days and so I decided to wait for sometime. Thankfully a little while ago, I got an SMS saying that the transaction has been reversed and the money credited to my account. A final sigh of relief.

Usually, to save paper, I never ask for a printed transaction advice. But with this fiasco, I think it makes sense to select for a printed transaction advice always. It would be a good idea if the ATM gives out a transaction advice irrespective of the selection, if the transaction is a failure.

I was reading a tribute to Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan last week when a couple of incidents came to my mind.

The first one happened more than 15 years ago. The movie Keladi Kanmanai was just released. DD Tamil was doing a special program for some festival occasion. There was a program by Kunnakudi and someone requested him to play the song "Mannil indha" from that movie. The song was a big hit and was famous for its breathless song by SPB. So, Kunnakudi asked the person, how should he play it. "Moochu vidama padanuma illa Moochu vittu padanuma". (Should it be played without taking a breath as in the original song or otherwise). The compere was stunned for a minute. Kunnakudi laughed and explained. If the bow stays on the strings continuously throughout the song it is called "Moochu vidama" and if the bow loses contact with the string, it is "Moochu vittu padarathu". And then to everyone's astonishment, he played it as he told.

The second incident I remember happened last year at the Sree Ramanavami Concerts at the Rama Seva Mandali. Kunnakudi had finished a song and was getting ready to start the next one. One of the accompanists got up and started walking down the stage, most probably to take a bio-break. When Kunnakudi saw this, he played the tune of "Ponal pogattaum Poda", a famous tamil film song. The entire audience burst into laughter and started clapping. The accompanist must have been embarrassed.

The few times that I have seen him play in concerts live, I have come back dumbstruck, amazed at the way he makes the violin dance to his tune. One of the best violinists of our era is no more. May his soul rest in peace.

PS: Another amusing incident happened at the same concert. He had come to the concert from Delhi after playing for the President and was accompanied by his wife. After the concert was over, I went closer to the stage to get a better look of everyone. I was standing behind his wife, when one Mami approached her and asked:

Mami: Neenga enna Iyera?
Kunnakudi's Wife: ... (with a surprised look)
M: Ungaluku ponnu irruka?
K: ... (Even more surprised)
M: En payanuku pakkalamnu ...
K: Yes, but she is married and has a kid. :-)
M: speechless
(people around start laughing)

Another Gym Joke of the Day(GJOTD):

A1: Hey, Could not come to the gym.
A2: What happened?
A1: Stomach upset. Loose motion.
A1: So only squats. No push-ups. Is it?

An incident at the gym this morning. Someone out of shape comes to the gym and starts running on the treadmill. Seeing him running,

A1: Iska chest sahi hai. Work out karne ke badh sahi ayega?
A2: Oh chest nahi hai. Breast hai.

ROTFLMAO.

It was our group's offsite last week and this week. Since we do on call coverage and operations support, we split the entire group into two and go to the same place in consecutive weeks. We had been to Guhantara off Kanakpura road. The idea was to do some team building sessions in the first half and spend the rest of the day playing games and partying. The sessions in the first half weren't too much fun and was over by around 11:30am. Rest of the day was spent playing volleyball, cricket, swimming, dancing and partying and having fun.

But in the end, I doubt if the goal of the offiste was achieved. The idea of such excercises is to get know people and network with them. I was surprised when I heard people asking if it was compulsory to attend the offsite. It was sad to hear people saying I am on-call, I have work or I am going home. The offsite happens on a work day and we split and do it to avoid such reasons. And even if people get there, they roam around with the same gang as in office. I doubt if people understand the power of networking and knowing new contacts.

The best excuse that I heard today. I am new and the only two people I know are not going to the offiste.

I finally watched this movie last night. And I enjoyed this movie. The movie is an ordinary college love story, repackaged and delivered a little bit differently. Some of the dialogs are amazing. Jai has pulled of nicely. Aditi looks good but she has overacted and the accent she has put up is crap. I liked Shaleen. The rest of the gang is also good. Nasrudeen Shah tries to be funny. Worth a watch, especially when the company is good. /me starts singing "Jaaaaaaane Tu... Ya Jaaaane Naaaa".

The gem:

Aditi - Pata hi nahin chala college ke paanch saal kahan gaye.
Jai's Mom - Phone pe Beta, Phone pe

Jai - Baarah baj gaya, mujhe nikhalna hoga.
His cousin - Kyu, tu cindrella hai?

Last Monday I was trying to pay my Cellone bill via the BSNL portal. Everything went fine, the payment was done at the payment gateway and when I clicked on the confirmation, the BSNL site conked off with a "unique constraint violated error". I was worried since I was thinking that I will now need to run between my credit card provider and BSNL. I checked with Sandip and he said that he had a tough time convincing Airtel when a similar problem occurred to him. The BSNL website said that if an error has occurred after the transaction was completed, they received details via "alternate backup channel" and the site would be updated after a day. I was a bit skeptical and decided to wait a day. I was really surprised when I got an email confirmation the next day saying my payment has been received. While I was wondering the state of online commerce, this is indeed a pleasant experience. And that is one of the reason why Cellone has remained my favourite service provider for the past couple of years. Even though I have had connection issues with Cellone, specifically at office, I am happy with the service. I have also taken a Vodafone subscription last month since my usage is going to increase a lot in the next few months and I have enough gripes with Vodafone already. Cellone rocks :-)

I received a message from Airtel about best way to secure the PC, copied to some 100 other folks. I replied back with a stinker to those morons to stop spamming me and my mail bounced back. So they dont receive /read emails?

Reporting-MTA: dns;spmail03.bharti.com

Final-Recipient: rfc822;Marketing.South@Airtel.in

Action: failed

Status: 5.0.0

Diagnostic-Code: X-Notes; Error delivering to Marketing South/Sales&Mkt

 /Telemedia/Airtel; Router: Database disk quota exceeded

 Subject: Re: Best way to Secure your PCFrom: Balaji Narayanan Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:17:36 +0530To: Airtel Telemedia Services 

I have one other ticket opened with them for issues with their website. Their website does not show up the tariff plan and I think it is most probably because the page is not standards compliant. They have been telling me to check my router and firewall and keep saying it could be a problem with my network. I am pissed off with these jokers. Any tips on dealing with these idiots?

I found sometime to upgrade to Hardy on my home laptop yesterday. I had two different partitions of 4GB each running two versions of Ubuntu and I wanted to do away with it since, over a period of time I run out of space on the root partition. So I moved /home to the end of the disk, deleted all other partitions and created a 7GB one for root. The whole process took almost 4 hours thanks to 250MB odd updates.

Steps done after upgrading to Hardy:

• Fix /home partition.
  

  rm -rf /home/balajin
  
  sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda5
  
  deb73237-6b76-4bb3-ab1a-cf335e034315
  
  
  Add to /etc/fstab
  
  # /dev/sda5
  
  UUID=deb73237-6b76-4bb3-ab1a-cf335e034315 /home  reiserfs  defaults  0  1



• Add user narayanant and add to corresponding groups.


• Run Update manager to sync with latest packages


• Install courier-imap, fetchmail, procmail, msmtp, postfix.


• Restore configurations for postfix, courier-imap and crontab.


• Install vlc, mplayer, mozilla-mplayer, codecs, vim, emacs, thunderbird, xchat

I have been spending most of the day upgrading my laptop from Gutsy to Hardy. When I logged into my blog today, I saw an announcement about MT4.2 and MT4.2 Pro. I have been planning an upgrade for months and I thought why not today. So after about 30 minutes of fiddling with perl modules, this post comes from MT 4.2. :-)

I got my voter identification card done at last. This is the process in gist.

• Fill out Form 6. Submit at your local CMC / BMP office and get an acknowledgment.
• Check newspapers when they are publishing electoral rolls. Check that your name is in the electoral roles published by visiting the CMC office where you submitted the form. Use this link to check the status online. However I have had problems finding my name on the list even though it exists in the rolls. This link used to work sometime back but is no longer working.
• Show up at advertised venue when they call for the issue of photo id cards and get it done.

In short, the time required is about 15 minutes each for the first and the last steps. But you will spend most of the time in following up to see when the rolls are published and when you need to go for the photo session.

Rishi has a more detailed post on the process of submitting the form and the necessary documents. bangalorevoterid.org site has more information including FAQs, forms and the schedule for issuing the id card.

Go and get your voter id card done today!

I first heard about this book when a note appeared in Hindu more than an year ago. Ever since then, I have been thinking about buying this book. Once when I went to a shop to buy this, they did not have a copy. The other time I found this at a bookstore in Chennai but the copy was damaged. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised when someone special gifted me this book. She has been planning to buy a copy for herself but I felt so nice when she gifted this to me. I am very happy to have this one in my bookshelf.

I received a Mac at office a couple of days ago. I have been trying to come in terms with this now. This is a huge cultural shock. Things that I have believed to work the way I know for a long time has changed completely. Need to learn a whole lot of new shortcuts.

If you have any tips and tricks, let me know.

The biggest question is should I swap caps with control or command key? My thumb hurts badly :-(

I finished reading Chetan Bhagat's "The 3 Mistakes of My Life" over the weekend. I was looking for some books to read while browsing through at Sapna Book house in Indiranagar and I picked this one. This is Chetan's 3rd book and I did not find it very different from his first two books. The story line is the same. Friendship, Love and then a happy ending. The only thing I liked in this book is some of his witty / funny statements. Other than that there is nothing much in this book. I will not recommend this book and would think twice before buying his next book. :-(

I am traveling to Kabini over the weekend with a bunch of friends. Will be staying at the Jungle Lodges and Resorts. I am told that there will be one organized trek / safari by them and we are free for the rest of the time. Wanted to check if anyone has any ideas on activities / things to do there?

Sandip posts a screenshot of the SSL certificate error on Visa Billpay site. I however took a step further and wrote to their customer care on Sunday, 15 June 2008, at 10:35 AM IST. This was my email to them.

Hello,

I am a regular user of www.visabillpay.in and I have just discovered (Sun, Jun 15, 2008, 10:33 IST), that the SSL certificate you use for your site expired this morning. Here is the cert details:

Cert:www.visabillpay.in
Not Before: Friday 15 June 2007 05:30:00 (Friday 15 June 2007 00:00:00 GMT)
Not After: Sunday 15 June 2008 05:29:59 (Saturday 14 June 2008 23:59:59 GMT)

This would be useful for paranoid users like that who would like our data to be safe.

Many thanks for listening.
-balaji

I got a prompt reply from them by Wednesday 18 June 2008 06:12 PM. The content of the email follows.

Dear Customer Thank you for writing to Visa Bill Pay. We understand that the security certificate of our web site has expired and your concern regarding the security of your information on our web site. We apologize for any inconvenience caused in this regard.

We are already in the process of renewing our security certificate and it will be done in couple of days. Meanwhile, you can continue to do your transactions as usual. Please be assured that all your details are safe and protected at our end.

Visa Bill Pay is certified by Verisign Inc., one of the leading certifying authorities for web-site security, which reinforces our promise of security.

The security and confidentiality of your personal and financial information is of paramount importance to us. You are provided with best-in-class security standards when it comes to using Visa Bill Pay so that your transactions done through Visa Bill Pay are safe.

Visa Bill Pay uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) data encryption. When you use Visa Bill Pay, your personal and Visa card information is protected by this SSL technology. This ensures that your card numbers and personal data are never sent over the Internet unencrypted. This encryption is done using 128-bit RC4 encryption, the maximum level of encryption possible on the Internet comparable to security levels used by financial institutions. Information sent between Visa Bill Pay and the financial institutions is totally secure.

Please visit the following link for further clarification in this regard:

https://www.visabillpay.in/jsp/privacypolicy_vbp.htm

Thank you for using Visa Bill Pay, we look forward to your next visit.

Yours Sincerely

Customer Care
Visa Bill Pay

Wtf? Can't they put someone with a little bit of clue at their customer care? Aso, can't they give a better reply? So i wrote back to them.

Hello,

Please do not send the canned response after a few days. You seem to give me standard gyan about SSL when your certificate as expired. How would I know if the site is for sure visa bill pay or not and why would I use theSSL when the certificate has expired.

Please have some tech look into replacing the cert at the earliest and see if you can do a good job of monitoring the certs and replacing them next time before expiry.

-balaji

And this time they replied back the next day but the response was the same that I got to my previous mail. I would have thought they would have an autoresponder to respond with such text if it was immediate. Or may be they have built AI into their bot to respond at random intervals. How do these companies survive?

PS: I re-read the email and I see I could have better worded it and corrected a couple of errors in them. Never write in haste :-(

I use a Debian at work and one of the annoying thing I found is nautilus opens up a new window whenever I click on a folder. I rarely use the file browser but when I want to browse either my music or my photo collection, this is what I use. So, a couple of days back i fiddled around with nautilus-file-management-properties and figured out the option. In the Behavior tab, under behavior section, check 'Always open in browser windows'. This would open the folders in a single window and you can go back and forth from the location bar. By the way, this is the default setting on Ubuntu.

me: the subject says the meeting is at 12:15, but your invite is for 12:00. what time is the meeting?
she: the meeting is at 12:15.
me: so why did you schedule it 12:00?
she: coz, i did not know how to send an invite for 12:15

How to live with such folks? There is no drop down selection for timing, but cant they use their uncommon sense to see if the text box is editable?

I am here in Sunnyvale for three weeks. Lot of folks from Bangalore are here for a conference. Landed in this Sunday by Singapore Airlines. SG flights are much better than CX but the quantity of food they serve is very little. I had to get some bread to fill. Also, it is so lame that they don't carry extra pillows. I asked for one on both the legs and I was told since the flight was full, they don't have any left. :-( The paranoia of air travel has gone overboard. When you board at Bangalore, there is a security check and scan your baggages. At Singapore, you don't go out of the airport but still there is another scan. Does this mean, there might be items that can be bought in the airport which might have security concerns? Similar thing at Inchon airport. They spent a lot of time checking the boarding cards and issuing a transfer card / scan for a 50 minutes stopover.

When I reached SFO, Charan was there to pick me up. Checked into the hotel and the first thing I did was to go to Chipotle for lunch. Manoj was around and we went to a bunch of places. And then he lent me his wii. Since then, I have been having so much fun. I spend about 2-3 hours a day playing on it. Boxing and Tennis are my favourite games. If ever I make up my mind to buy a TV, I am going to get a wii the next day.

On Monday, visited my next favourite place, Murphy's Law in Sunnyvale downtown. Nula's is next. Sunnyvale feels home away from home.

PS: Krisworld, the entertainment system on SG, runs on RedHat. They had some issue with the system during the flight and they had to reset the system and it showed the familiar bootup screen. :-)

Am I the only one missing Vasanthi Hariprakash on Radio City. She first moved from Good Morning Bangalore to Joy Ride and now she is no longer on air. I tried asking around a few folks and no one seem to know. I have now switched from Radio City to Fever these days.

Who is your favourite RJ these days?

Further to my post about airtel, Amitha from Airtel reverted to me saying that, Airtel has put process in place to ensure that these kind of stuff does not offer again. Also, she told me that henceforth any new plans that are being offered will be updated on the website as soon as the offer begins. They will also be including fliers in the bills informing about this starting this month.

Let us wait and watch. But I am really happy that they took the complaint seriously and acted upon it, albeit a bit late.

Read on cricbuzz.com chat:

wen da hell is SRT cumin in wats rong wid dat guy!!!
well its the wear and tear of the groins due to adjusting it every ball srt has faced for last 18 years :)

And here is an interesting read on the so called icon's players.

Folks at office have been telling that Airtel has dropped their broadband tariffs for a while. However I dreaded calling their customer care since I spend more than 30 minutes for every complaint talking to a bunch of clueless folks ultimately achieving nothing. Finally I decided to call them on 30th March to check it out. The person who answered the call accepted that Airtel has indeed dropped their 256Kbps unlimited connection from Rs.999/- per month to Rs.750/- per month. When quizzed why did they not inform the customers about the change in rates, she said that it was informed in the previous month's bill. I tried asking her to provide more information on when this was done and she could not answer. So I raised a complaint asking her to provide information on when this was advertised and when can I be migrated. Also, since I was not informed about this new plan, I asked for a prorated rebate on my tariff since the date the plan was announced. She assured me that I would receive a call latest by 1:30pm the next day.

I waited till 1:30pm the next day and did not receive a response. I was in no mood in talking to these morons again and decided to call the Nodal officer, Mr.Prashant Kumar Goswami as listed in the bill. However when I called the number, it was again picked up by another clueless agent who said that Prashant is a busy man and he does not handle all calls :-) Very nice. I said if that is the case they should not bother listing his name in the bill as an escalation. I made the following complaints to her.

• Why was my complaint not resolved as promised by 1:30pm?
• Why was I not informed about the change in plan?
• When can I be migrated to the new plan?
• Since Prashant is busy and does not handle calls, they should not list his name as the Nodal officer and provide a generic name in the bill henceforth.

She promised that she will revert at the earliest. She also provided her name and said that I can call the nodal desk and ask for her. She was also kind enough to provide the name of one Mr.Murali who was the next level of escalation but refused to provide the direct numbers of Prashant / Shamik listed as the escalations on the bill. The next day she responded saying that the customers were informed with a note in the bill announcing of the change in plan and this was also updated on the website. I did check the website and this information was not there. She could not provide more information on which month's bill had the information about the new plans. She also said that the new plans were Rs.750/- for 256Kbps unlimited and Rs.999/- for 384Kbps unlimited and she can migrate me to any of the plans immediately. However these new plans came with a twist. Earlier Airtel offered a rebate of Rs.99 if you owned a modem. She said that this rebate was not applicable on the new plans. I was not satisfied with the response and asked her to provide this in writing. She said that she will ask Customer Care to send that email immediately. I also called up the next level escalation, Murali, about the agent's failure in providing me details about the announcement of the plans. Murali said he will revert shortly but never did.

Almost a couple of weeks passed and I did not receive any response. So I called the agent again on April 14 saying that I did not receive any emails from her. She said that the mails were sent but I could not locate them. Later I discovered that they had sent an email but I had inadvertently marked it as read. I did not believe her then and asked her to forward the original email again to me. Someone else from Customer care sent an email which said

This is to inform that adjustment cannot be provided in the bill if you use your own modem, once you opt for Unlimited 999 @ 384 kbps you will be charged *Rs.999.00/-*. If you would take new modem from company or if you will use your own modem then *Rs.999.00/-* is the rental charged and for new modem you will be charged *Rs.500.00* towards registration fees which is non-refundable.

I felt this was wrong since they earlier encouraged to purchase a modem and now there is no benefit of having your own modem. So I called the agent again and this time she was more than willing to give the numbers of both Prashant and Shamik. I called up Prashant and he took down all the details and promised to call me back by 4:30 on April 14th. But as with all other folks from Airtel, he never did. I then called Shamik and explained him the story. He said he will have someone look into it and revert the next day morning by 10:30AM. Promptly, I got a call the next day from Murali saying he was working on the issue based on the inputs I had given to Shamik. I very nicely explained to him that, had he returned my call as promised, there would not have been a need to call Shamik. He was almost useless and then another one by name Ms.Amitha Mohan called. She said the she was the head of Service Excellence and she was looking into my complaints and she will revert.

After several rounds of conversation with her, the summary is below.

• Airtel has had this plan since Dec (or may be Jan, I forgot) and that this was an acquisition plan and was only for new customers. This was not offered to existing customers and was never advertised. She also said that the plan was supposed to expire on March 31st but has been extended for a couple of weeks. She also said I can be offered the plan since I registered a complaint on March 31. I explained it to her that this is completely contradictory to what I have been told by their CC folks for the past couple of weeks. She said she will check and revert.
• She was more than willing to get me migrated to any plans that I wanted and finally migrated me to Rs.750/ per month for 256Kbps. I will get a rebate of Rs.49/- per month for using my own modem. She did not explain why both her agent / Customer care did not know about this. She again said she will check and revert.
• She also promised that she will look into the complaints to understand why it took so long to resolve and see how it can be improved. She also promised that the agents at the Nodal office will be educated to provide the numbers of the Nodal officer if requested.

It is more than a week now and she still hasn't gotten back to me yet. And I am positive she has completely forgotten this. I will mail her a copy of this post and see what is her response.

A couple of days back I checked Airtel's website and both the plans are listed.

• New Home 750 Residential - 256Kbps for Rs.750/- per month
• Home 999 (Residential) - 384Kpbs for Rs.999/- per month

So Airtel indeed has had their plans from December but they have made it public very lately. They are also not advertising this nor pro-actively migrating their customers to the better plans as they have done in the past. So if you are still paying Rs.999/- for a 256Kbps connection, call customer care and ask to be migrated. Don't listen to the CC agents if you dont get a proper response. They are a bunch of clueless idiots. Keep escalating until you get a resolution.

Also, an FYI. I just discovered from TRAI guidelines that if you escalate it to the Nodal officer, your complaint should be resolved within 3 days if it is with regards to a fault repair, service disruption and disconnection of service and within 10 days for all other grievances. Also, as and when there are any changes in any aspect/item of tariff in the chosen package, they are expected to communicate in writing to the subscribers.

This is a test post via ScribeFire. Every since I moved my blog to MovableType, I never tried any client side blogging tool. I have been happy using the native editor. Let me see how long does this tryst with ScribeFire continues.

This one is for Sandip. Enjoy your cuppa. And don't worry too much when going to Barista, the next time.

This one made my day. Fucking hilarious. Listen to it when you have a few minutes.

Indian teacher explains the word "Fuck"

In an otherwise frustrating week, Dilbert has been spot on. Almost everything that has been happening in the past few weeks is there. Check it out

A little after I wrote my post about the schedule, I noticed that the official site also has the same listed. This looks better than my scanned copy. Enjoy.

I was casually asking the score yesterday and someone said Sehwag was on fire. I spent rest of the day on cricinfo / cricbuzz and lamenting about why isn't Neo sports available in office. In the night I went to a friends place to catch the highlights of the match. Man, Sehwag was really scintillating. He butchered the bowlers and took the initiative away from SA. In the process, he smashed a few records. In another wise dead match, Sehwag made it very interesting. Today morning I saw the few overs and looks like he was very tired. He was struggling and soon got out. And Indians tumbled afterwards. If he stayed or if India had taken the initiative, they could have scored 700+ and could have put SA on pressure. Now it is again going to get boring. But this has been a fantastic match for Sehwag. In the last three test matches, he has played nicely. Let us see how long does he continue.

The schedule for the annual Ramanavami celebrations at Fort High School, Chamarajpet is out. It runs from April 7th till May 14th. I have been having a copy of the schedule for almost month now but I was hoping to find a copy online so I can pass it along. Today, Sashi volunteered to scan the schedule and give it to me as a PDF. So here it is. Check out the schedule and be there.

It is also there on upcoming. Add yourself if you are attending.

This is one of the classic examples of my planning ahead for a weekend going haywire. The plan was to go and spend the long weekend in Pondicherry. Rishi was planning to go there as well and I had decided to tag along. Meanwhile, my sister said she had been planning to go there and she will meet us around Friday noon.

Till about 2pm when I left office, I was thinking that I was leaving for Pondicherry, but suddenly had to change my plans since I was needed in Coimbatore. So I asked Rishi to drop me at Krishnagiri and I took a bus to Salem and from there another bus to Coimbatore. Landed home around 3 in the morning. Rishi seems to have had an ordeal in reaching Pondicherry. And my sister until yesterday noon was saying she did not plan to go anywhere due to the rain, calls up in the night saying she is in Pondicherry. :-)

This is one of the reasons why I think a lot before I plan ahead with a group of people. My plans are always flexible and I decide what to do at the spur of the moment. If I plan ahead, something external changes my plans and this ends up in disappointment.

And doing the usual things when I am in Coimbatore. Eating, Watching TV and Sleeping. Am most probably going to Trichy tonight to attend a friends marriage and then back in Bangalore on Tuesday.

Happy Holi. Interestingly I have seen lot of people celebrating Holi in Podanur and I see colours splashed around this place. This is a change that must have happened in the last 5-6 years. When I used to study about 10 years back, I had never heard of Holi being celebrated this side. The world is shrinking. :-)

Fun link for the Day.

LookaLike

Specifically look at Ponting and Nasser Hussain :-)

After hearing some funny announcements made by the pilot in a heavily accented tone, I asked the air hostess, "Is the pilot a German?". Pat came the reply, "No. He is European.". :-)

I am in Cochin this weekend to do interviews for Yahoo!. I have been planning to visit Cochin for a long time and this trip just happened. Yesterday morning, Jemshad and I took a stroll on the Marine Drive. In the evening a bunch of us went out visiting Bologatty Palace, an ancient church and finally the M.G.Road. This evening Jemshad and I are going to Model Engineering College for an orientation and I plan to spend some more time around the city.

I try to WFH a couple of times every month. Usually in 7-8 hours that I work, I accomplish a lot more than what I usually do in office in 2-3 days, since there is no interrupts. But today was exactly opposite. From 9:30 or so till 6, I hardly accomplished anything, spent 2+ hours on the phone and another 1 hour or so on IM. A very unproductive day, when I wanted to complete some very important tasks. :-(

Busy. That one word summarizes how I have been for the past month or so. The shortest month of the year flew by like a minute. Its just not work but things outside work also has kept me busy. Just now someone called me to say that we haven't met since New year. He is the one whom I hang out with every week :-) March is not going to be better. Two friends visiting, a work related trip to Cochin, a marriage to attend in Trichy and whole lot of PHB work.

Had a coworker travel from Sunnyvale and spent two weekends roaming around with him. After a long time, I met someone who thinks and works very much like me. I guess he is the second person after Mr.H at Honeywell who approaches, thinks and executes just like me. Visited Mysore, dined at half a dozen restaurants in the city and loafed around.

Cricket: Let me also join the bandwagon by writing about it. It was an amazing couple of games. I never that India will drive home the cup with a thumping win. They played very ordinary in the initial stages and I was not even sure if they will qualify for the finals. They finally qualified, without depending on the SL-Aus match result. But in both the finals they played like real champs and made Ponting eat his words (though I have not seen a news article Ponting saying three finals will not be required). In the first game, when we were chasing, I thought we had to play with 10 players thinking Tendulkar was out of the equation. But man, the way he played was awesome. I have never seen him play like this in a long time. It was a mix of caution and aggression. He did the same in the second final as well. In all, India did a great job in Australia. Let us see how this team progresses.

And see this picture of Harbhajan. Man, he is one funny character. And he had his moments in the finals accounting for his friends dismissal.

One of the worst every movies I have watched in recent times. Screwed up my Friday evening watching it. A melodrama, stretches like a rubber band. Background music has some similar scores to Lagaan. After watching the movie for about 4 hour did not understand what the director was trying to portray. A total bakwas. Stay away from this movie.

On Ubuntu, Pidgin is the deault messenger client and Firefox the default browser. A URL-handler for ymsgr exits and is set to purple-url-handler. So for example in Firefox, when you click on a link, like say ymsgr:SendIM?SomEtestY4H00Acc0unt, this should open up a window in Purple. However purple-url-handler is provided by libpurple-bin and this package is not installed by default. So to get this working, you will need to get this package installed. So if you want to Firefox to handle the ymsgr links and open up a window, please get this package installed.

And in the process of writing this post, I see that this configured using gconf2. And here is the specific command that provides this info

$ gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ymsgr/command
purple-url-handler "%s"

I thought this was earlier configured under Firefox by defining the following preferences.

network.protocol-handler.external.ymsgr = true
network.protocol-handler.app.ymsgr = "gaim-remote uri %s"

PS: I did not want to give my Yahoo ID there in the link above and get spammed with messages. So I have given a dummy ID that might or might not exit.

Drove down from Bangalore to Chennai last week citing FOSSConf as a reason. Kushal and Ram accompanied me on the onward and Ram and my parents came back on my return journey. Mid last year, I went to Chennai by a car with a few friends and I was waiting to go by myself. Also I have been wanting to eat at a road side Punjabi Dhaba. Accomplished both and enjoyed the driving. The top speed I hit was 130Kmph but did not feel very comfortable. Was driving comfortably 90+ onward and 100+ return. The road is amazing and I wish I took some more time stopping by and clicking pics. May be next time.

FOSSConf was amazing. One of the reasons why I go to such conferences is to meet people. Most of the important discussions happen outside the conference halls and in the evenings. This one was no different. Spent some time talking to folks outside the exhibition area and then went with a bunch of folks to Thiruvanmayur beach. Also met a few people whom I knew either on IRC or on mailing lists.

I also spent some time talking to the students who exhibited their projects at the expo. The amount of knowledge, exposure these students have in the industry is a welcome change. Their interaction with the industry, communities outside and some projects which were being done for say Revenue department or for Railways was awesome. I have captured some of the exhibits with the description on Flickr. And hats off to ilugc, NRCFOSS and all the folks involved for pulling off an amazing event.

if you love playing with words, here is one for you. Photo Soup, is a word puzzle created with tags from flickr images. Objective is to identify all the tags before the time runs out. Enjoy.
-- via ycoolthing.com

That is it. India has done it. They have have stopped the Australian onslaught, for the second time. This has been one heck of a match. Stuart Clarke and Mitchell Johnson put on a brave fight and caused some concern. But then Indians had the last laugh. Poor Ponting, he did not have Bucknor to help him this time.

Who thought Sehwag would strike in his first over? Kumble has got it spot on. Go on folks. Rock on and choke them. This is amazing cricket.

http://openid.yahoo.com/

http://developer.yahoo.com/openid/

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080117/20080117005332.html?.v=1

Just finished watching The Shawshank Redemption. This is one movie I have heard a lot about and always wanted to watch. Hemant gave me the DVD a couple of weeks back and I sat down this afternoon to watch this movie. Within 10 minutes, was completely engulfed into the movie. Did not know how the 2 hours went. Amazing story telling, memorable quotes, nice sound track. I really loved the ending.

Fear can hold you prisoner... Hope can set you free

It is a pity that Australia needed 13 players to win this test and equal the record of 16 test wins on the trot. It was India who broke their run last time. I hope they turn around and break this one too. And someone wrap Bucknor and Benson on their knuckles.