लेखन

It's been several months now that we have been brainstorming about the logo and caption. We all were thinking on lines of both creativity and value offerings. Gautam was continuously thinking on lines of how to communicate imagination and implementation parts simultaneously, the left and right of the brain. Many tag-lines popped up, but always there was something missing. Finally, me and joy took up these two words from Gautam and simply put a dot between them. It sounded so crisp! 'Imagination.Implementation'! Meanwhile, many of us were trying to come up with the design ideas. For me, playing with various shapes of 'K' and using whatever minuscule knowledge of calligraphy/typography I had, became my regular pass-time to keep myself awake in gaseous classrooms. In later stages, I got stuck on the idea of creating a character out of K that can personify the values we worked on so long. Finally emerged the k-man that is so carefree, cheerful, and aesthetic. Joy took t...

[Continuing from previous post ].. Open source and free software community has been growing and preaching its philosophy for over decades. This preaching has also been supported by solid product lines that are freely available, better in performance and are more addictive than any other proprietary software around. Yet the ground realities of the software world are still largely favorable for proprietary model. Comparing market shares, or user base would be futile since open source hardly follows any market mechanism. It is very difficult to keep track of number of open source users. Hence the only method to understand the popularity and usage patterns is to call hundreds of common software users and ask them what software do they have on their home computers. I have been a part of a marketing campaign and fortunate enough to be present in the actual execution at various places, which gave an opportunity of understanding thousands of common computer users. With no exception, all of the...

Freedom of knowledge has always been worshiped across philosophies and religions all over the world. It has been applicable to the most fields of science and technology. This freedom has helped the growth of science, technology, and benefited the human world in every aspect. When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he said "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" He did not try to hide its formula. When you buy a car, nobody stops you from opening its bonnet, fix a few problems, do a few modifications. That, is the freedom of knowledge, applied throughout the branches of science. But when it comes to software, abruptly, everyone starts hiding the source code, the formula behind it. You would be even denied from making similar kind of products, by means of patents. Some of the readers might have already guessed where I am taking this topic to. [Those who know enough about foss, may skip the following paragraph.] When you buy a software, it is most likely that you would...

अक्सर दिल्ली की धूप में 'दोपहर' के १० बजे घरसे निकलो, तो अपनी ही दशा को देखकर सबसे बड़े बच्चनजी की पंक्तियाँ याद आती हैं। यह महान दृश्य है, चल रहा मनुष्य है, अश्रु-स्वेद-रक्त से लथपथ लथपथ लथपथ। अग्निपथ अग्निपथ अग्निपथ... किंतु आज तापमान में गिरावट और धूल-वायू की लहरों के चलते, दिल्ली की सड़कों को अग्निपथ से 'धूलपथ' में परिवर्तित होते पाया गया है। फिरभी देखा जाए, तो इसे उष्मा से मुक्ती का एक तात्कालिक ही सही लेकिन सुखद अनुभव कहा जा सकता है।

On the lines of Baba Ramdev, Mataji Prahlad Jani should also start some kind of training institute to teach his unique art of surviving without food, water and bathroom for last 65 years or so. What is use of going through futile medical observations and creating a buzz on national media. If he is the man of god, better try to pass on this art to millions of Indians and if possible to other 3rd world citizens who have been sleeping without food for centuries, who have been wondering in deserts all their lives and who still have to use public places for all their bathroom activities. One Baba is already bringing back health to these highly malnutrition-ed people of the country. Another should become the Buddha for them by eliminating their sorrows of hunger forever. Jai Mataji!

A very unplanned trip to Agra turned out to be pretty eventful. Having considered lot many people to join in, it actually ended up with only two of us die hard travelers to go on our own. Firstly, not getting on the spot tickets of train to Agra, I got into a tourist bus, that had its entire plan of the Agra-Mathura-Vrindavan trip pre-planned. Here is a short picture story. First encounter is this huge Agra Fort which took three Mughal generations to build up. And we are allowed to see only 1/3rd of it! Right in front of the fort is this hurriedly clicked, statue of Ch. Shivaji Maharaj. Aurangzeb would have never thought that once his prisoner, Shivaji, who made a great escape from this mighty fort would be standing as a proud statue in front of the fort itself! Then there are several huge and beautiful buildings inside the fort. Notice the Taj Mahal in background. This must be the only view for Shah Jahan himself for his last seven years spent imprisoned here :( . Taking the Hot Seats...

The Tamil Nadu state government in its IT policies declared two important points: 1. Unicode would be accepted as a standard for encoding Tamil 2. Tamil glossaries would be made available through Wiktionary I think this is a really good step in a state where there has been a lot of fight and controversy over the encoding standard. As far the glossaries are concerned, Governments should always ensure the public accessibility of the digital resources being created in their institutes, be it glossaries, corpora, fonts or research papers. Just hoping that these stated objectives would be achieved in a timely manner. Read more at: http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050454560400.htm

Yesterday we went second time to a mall bit far from office to complete the earlier failed mission of watching this 3D movie, Clash of the Titans. On ticket counter, we were first told that evening show was house full. Then we asked for a night show, and were told there isn't any show then and the gentleman handed us the pamphlet of all movie schedules. We checked on the nearby digital kiosk and also on the printed schedule to be sure of the show timings. Then went to second counter, and asked the lady for the night show tickets, and without any problem got the tickets for back seats. In fact this show was hardly 20% full, wonder how the evening show became houseful. But the biggest wonder/blunder is yet to come. On the entrance we were stopped for having a laptop bag along with (we had went straight after the office). In spite of having checked the bag, we were not allowed, because laptops were not allowed inside! Then we asked for keeping it at the baggage counter. But then, the...

Reply to this and the kinds.. Its wonderful how the highly literate and even the ones considered to be belonging to the policy making cult, who do rigorous analysis of things and subjects of wide variety, end up coming to such ill-informed (should I say insane?) conclusions and opinions when it comes to simple computer security from viruses, trojans and spywares. Even the computerized CAT could not survive such attacks. Why not just use a system that isn't vulnerable to the viruses and is just simply more secure than anything else in its class? Its a 3 decade old fact that Unix like architecture/systems are highly immune to virus attacks. And it is not the lesser user spread causing less viruses being created but the simple architectural design that prevents the harmful program's actions. Let it be any of the Gnu/Linux distributions, Mac OS(again unix like) or any Unix, they are all immune to most of the security problems and many of them are very much desktop user friendly. B...