Metroblogging

Metroblogging is a phenomenon that has been gaining good popularity in the blogosphere recently. Bloggers from a city or town come together to write about the latest happenings and the specialities of their places. The Chennai metro blog was started this week and there has been quite a lot of activity so far. Mumbai is the only other city in India to have a metro blog. Surprisingly the IT capital of India is yet to have one.

But what is interesting is that three cities in Pakistan - Islamabad , Lahore and Karachi - have metroblogs and there has been a lot of activities seen in these blogs. To get a brief idea about the rate of activity, here’s a small list of metroblogs and the number of posts in each of them…

Mumbai - 127

Karachi - 1400
Lahore - 800
Islamabad - 300

Washington DC - 2200
Chicago - 1900
New York – 1200

Notice that Karachi has more posts than the commercial capital of the world, New York. No idea about the quality of the posts. What could be the reason for this stunning performance from the Pakistani bloggers….

Is it because there are a lot of tech savvy youngsters, or is it that these Pakistani cities have a very good internet penetration, or is it just that there are a lot of jobless people in these cities (just kidding).

Though these numbers do not have much significance, one thing which is certain that the Internet revolution (which includes internet tools like email, blogs, e-auction, e-shopping, web search etc) will have a major effect on the life of every man on earth and only countries that are able to quickly adapt to the Internet culture will be able to sustain decent growth rates and establish themselves as the super powers in the 21st century.

Metrobloggers are also involved in social activities. During the Hurricane Katrina, the metrobloggers of New Orleans gave first hand information (before any of the media channels) about the extend of the disaster and reported about the terrible state and the immediate needs of the people stuck up there.

The metrobloggers from Karachi and Lahore contributed to the relief operations during the earth quake in Kashmir.

Good Luck to the Metroblogging initiative and hoping to see Bangalore on the map soon.

Cheers,
Agent Pal

Count the Laptops!!!

Who said only Googlers can work with 10 systems at the same time???
Agent Pal and his colleague in a secret clustering laboratory 200 metres in front of the Infosys Headquarters in Electronics City.  

Linux Kernel Programming for Dummies

Some simple steps to make yourself a true Linux Kernel Programmer.

1. Work only in windows when no one is around. When somebody enters in, immediately open the command prompt and type
Grep –asdfg “My Computer”
Grep – Bad command or file name
Have an annoyed expression and say, “No grep command!!! Windows Sucks. I better switch to Linux” and reboot in linux.

2. As linux boots up, read whatever flashes on the screen and frame sentences by adding some jargon like runlevel, init.d, daemon etc.
“Have you ever seen the apache daemon? Its really scary…”
“aahhh…Why is this loopback interface driver loading at this runlevel…I better reconfigure the init.d”

3. Learn all the shortcuts in vi. You can proclaim yourself to be a linux guru if you know how to copy and paste using vi.

4. Any program that you write should have atleast 10 # includes, even if it is a two line “Hello World” program.

5. Whenever you write any program, dedicate your little finger to keep pressing the caps lock at regular intervals. THIS will MAKE sure THAT your code HAS an equal DISTRIBUTION of caps AND SMALL letters. Be very lavish in using the _ symbol WHEREVER __POSSIBLE.

6. If someone troubles you by peeping too much into your screen or asking too many questions, just start compiling the kernel. Catch him off guard by asking him
“Hey is this processor IA412 architecture or AIR DECCAN 345 architecture?”
Chances are that he will leave immediately.

7. If he still refuses to leave you alone, just open any kernel source code file (Important: In read Only Mode), and start practicing some typing lessons. Expert programmers can write just 1s and 0s (Machine Language eh…)

8. Whenever the system becomes slow or doesn’t respond properly, gently pat the monitor and say “Don’t panic my dear kernel….Mein Hoon Na!!!”.

Any additions to the above list can be posted as comments and will be updated.

Cheers,
Agent Pal

YAHWP

21st March, 1983 9am, In a remote location on the matrix, the Tuticorin Express from Bangalore zooms past the railway gate with a loud siren noise paaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmm….The sound of the siren might have overshadowed the low voice of a new born infant at a hospital nearby, but it was heard loud and clear somewhere else!!!

Aboard the space ship Nebracanaza, Morpheus and his men are keenly observing the happenings in the matrix on the monitor which is beaming continuous streams of 1s and 0s. Suddenly the screen goes blank and the following letters start flashing on the screen…

>>AGENT PAL HAS ARRIVED_

Yes…This is the day when the new process called Agent Pal was spawned. Till now Agent Pal has remained a silent process in the matrix. Of course all deadly viruses remain totally unnoticed, like a tiger waiting for its prey, and wait silently for the time when they can attack and conquer the world.

So will Agent Pal wake up one day and conquer the matrix or will it just be a YAHWP (Yet Another Hello World Program) forever???

Still Sleeping,
Agent Pal

Therindho Theriamalo

I have to do some justice to the title of this blog. So here goes the matrix style dialogue

Oracle : So why are you here?
Neo : I thought you know it.
Oracle : Yes I know. But the question is do you know it.
Neo : Of course I know it and I know that you know it.
Oracle : So what do you want to know?
Neo : You know it.
Oracle : Why should I know?
Neo : Because it is your purpose.
Oracle : How do you know that? (my purpose)
Neo : Because it is my purpose to know.
Oracle : So what is my purpose?
Neo : Your purpose is to know what I don’t know and make sure I know that I don’t know it.

Agent Pal: Shut the f*** up…
(With a gun in hand). Hope you know that the purpose of this gun is to make sure that you both are know(no)more.

Bang….Bang….

Yours knowingly,
Agent Pal

The title stands for “Knowingly or unknowingly” in tamil.

Bengaluru Metro

Yesterday as I was roaming around in MG road (Bangalore) along with my friends, we noticed a roadblock with the sign Bangalore Metro work. Had the metro work already started? (It has just been a couple of days since the central ministers gave a green signal to the state govt) My friend quipped “This CM is not a man of words, he is a man of action”. Going by his performance in the past 1 month, I think I have to agree with my friend.

The CM stepped in amid controversy and no big expectations from him. But so far he has done a fairly good job. Redeeming the PPP initiative and announcing more institutes of higher education like IISc are good signs. By declining to meet any of the leaders of his alliance partners BJP stating that he had lot of official business to take care of, he proved that he is not just another politician.

Well, hoping that the CM faces the challenges in his political career and helps Bangalore regain its title as the Garden City and not the Pothole city.

Cheers,
Agent Pal

Innovation Personified

In 1996 one man made the whole world turn around and ask in a highly surprised tone “What!! Four Hundred Million…Really???”. The man was none other than our own Sabeer Bhatia, the man who made Microsoft yield $400 million from its cash coffers for his email service Hotmail.

Since then tons of Indian web portals have been making money on the net. A notable few are naukri, jobs ahead (Job portals) rediff, sify (news portals), shaadi, India matrimony (self explanatory), bazee (auction). But still none of them has actually fully utilized the major advantage that the web provides, the whole world is your market place and every person on this earth (who knows may even include aliens in other planets) is a potential customer. All these portals are targeted towards Indian users only.

A couple of days back, Sabeer Bhatia launched www.blogeverywhere.com , the latest brainchild of his innovative ideas. This is one idea that had not struck any of the engineers (atleast not till today) at the web giants google, yahoo or msn. It is a toolbar added to your browser that allows you to write comments about any web page you visit and also allows you to read what others have said about that page. It is a free software and Sabeer plans to make money out of advertisements.

The search giant Google made billions from web advertising by knowing what people were looking for on the web (using its revolutionary text based ads and adsense technology). Today blogeverywhere databases will contain tons and tons of information about what people like and don’t like. Whenever any product is released, here’s a small list of the information that Sabeer Bhatia will know within a matter of hours

-what do they like about the product

- what extra features would they like to have

- what is the section of people (based on geographic location, age, sex, interests) who actually like the product

- how does the product fare against the competitors

- what it is that they hate about the product

Well as the saying goes, Information is Wealth, the databases at blogeverywhere will be a treasure. Now all that Sabeer needs to do is pull in as many users as possible, develop tools to extract information from the tons of data and cleverly sell the information to make billions of dollars. Hoping to see an Indian take on the web giants on their own turf.

A word of caution from Agent Pal to Sabeer is to make sure that the servers are able to handle the terabytes of data that will be flowing in each day.

Sabeer has made every Indian IT professional proud.

Cheers,

Agent Pal

Me, my Ship and the Beach - Part 2

So with a feeling of pride that my quick action had actually saved many lives, I mounted one of the security vehicles standing there. They dropped me at the city bus stand. Upon enquiry, I found that I was in Tuticorin. Got onto a bus to my home town and soon after fell asleep.

Tee Tee Tee (pause) Tee Tee Tee (pause) Tee Tee Tee…I woke up and hurriedly looked around to see if the bus had crossed my home town. But I was sleeping cuddled on my bed in my room. So was it all a dream!!. Could’t believe it, so immediately logged onto the net to see if there really was a high tide in tuticorin and if eye witnesses were praising a mystery man who had saved a lot of lives and vanished. Nothing like that had happened but still my joints were all aching as though I had been in the midst of all the action.

So decided to take the day off and went back to sleep!!!

Cheers,

Agent Pal

This is the first time I could remember a dream so vividly after waking up. So could not resist blogging it.

Me, My Ship and the Beach - Part 1

Water all around me and the clear blue sky over my head. Yes, I was in the sea, commanding my ship, only the ship since I was the only person on board. It was like the ships that you see in pirate movies with huge sails and the captain at the wheels (steering wheel) guiding the ship by looking into his magnetic needle for the directions. The wind was pleasant and my ship was smoothly gliding through the waters (Of course there were dolphins also gleefully swimming along with the speed of the ship…Titanic effect!!!).

Suddenly my speed picked up tremendous speed, the sails very fluttering violently due to the strong winds and I lost my control over the ship. But still I enjoyed the high speed, it was like traveling on a bullet train, with water splashing onto the ship and the strong winds almost throwing me off the deck. Though I was shouting at the dolphins to try and catch my ship, the fear was always there in my mind “Where am I heading to??”

I saw some huge ships anchored and swaying wildly due to the wind. Luckily my ship did not crash with any of those and soon I saw land, a beach. I decided to jump off the ship as it was about to reach the sandy beach. It was no ordinary jump, it was a really long and high jump. I landed nearly a hundred feet in front of the ship. The ship had struck some stone and come to a sudden halt and this coupled with the strong winds had thrown me to quite some distance.

I knew I had landed in some port city but no idea where…Anyway decided to take some rest on the beach. But suddenly the tides in the ocean started growing in size and made me run for my life. It was not a tsunami but the high tide was enough to engulf all the fishermen huts that were present along the shores. People were panicking and a lot of people were being dragged by the sea waters. But humans would not let nature take them by surprise again. Immediately there were security people trying to take the people to high lands and helicopters were rescuing people who were caught in the waters. As people were fighting to hold on to the rope ladder thrown down by one of the helicopters, it suddenly broke and fell into the water with half a dozen people hanging to it. One end of the ladder fell close to me and in a flash, I took the ladder and tied it up to the coconut tree nearby so that people could hang on to it till help arrived.

Since this story is dragging on like a mega serial, will write it as two separate posts.

Cheers,

Agent Pal

India Unleashed

Here's an excerpt of what the International delegates at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum 2006 held at Mumbai said about India.

"When we looked for the best practices in the world, we found it was India." - Ronan D McGrath, CIO of Rogers Communications, Canada's largest wireless and cable television provider

"India can provide industrial strength development capability required to support our challenging reform agenda," - Richard Granger, director-general of IT for the British NHS (National Health Service serves 52 million customers and has 1.2 million staff)

"When I came here, STD stood for Subscriber Trying & Dying. Today, it's one of the best in the world." And on IT, "Give Indians a process and they will perfect it." "Others are catching up, so move quickly. Look at areas like knowledge services, engineering design and the like" - Les Dawson, Southern Water CEO. He also complimented the world-beating education system that India has.

Interestingly there was no mention about the infrastructure problem in India which of late has been severely criticized by the IT bigwigs of India. As Sunil Mehta of Nasscom said “India is undoing its success by focusing unduly on its problems”.

Well my take on India’s growing IT industry is, “True, We have the best processes and the best talent pool in the world. But are we making full use of the available talent, or are we just helping others grow? It is high time Indian companies start hunting for Intellectual property within their organizations and start making money by licensing their IP rights”. As Les Dawson has said, we need to move up the value chain and establish our dominance in Knowledge Services, Engineering design and the software product space”.

Agent Pal’s quote : “We haven’t traveled this far to suddenly apply the brakes and watch others take the lead from us. Let the world know that we are on track and will soon establish our dominance in every sphere of IT just like we did in the Services sector.”

Cheers,
Agent Pal.

Note: Will write about the infrastructure issue in a separate post.

Agent Smith 

GMail -> Fmail

Agent Pal recently made a time travel and here’s something interesting he has seen about Gmail.

The web mail from Google Gmail which was launched in 2005 with a mind boggling 1GB inbox kept increasing its inbox size ever since. The counter kept ticking and Gmail also adviced its users not to delete any mails from their inbox. The counter finally stopped when it reached infinity and there was nothing beyond. So finally Gmail had a fixed size inbox.

Soon users started complaining about messages bouncing due to filled inboxes. Users were unable to clear up the zillions of messages accumulated in their inboxes and started switching to other services like Hotmail which offered a full 2 MB inbox. Gmail was heading towards bankruptcy and in came the Indian Giant Mindtree.

They bought Gmail and renamed it as Fmail (No its not what you think !!!). Fmail stands for Flush Mail and Mindtree had designed the Page Flush algorithm to clear out the mails from the GMail inboxes and free up the space. Mindtree has deployed a mega cluster of thousands of PCs to perform this mammoth operation.

Once you log into fmail.com, you see a counter ticking 19029494934839489398575923989487924724977938423230348984 mails have so far been deleted from the Gmail servers. Your account is still in the queue, Please wait patiently till the Page Flush algorithm picks your inbox to be flushed out. Thank You.

So folks who are using Gmail without any idea of where the delete mail button is, please find it out and start clearing up your mails today itself.

Cheers,
Agent Pal

Household names……Really!!!!

These days TCS, Infosys and Wipro have become household names in the US. Even housewives know them and talk about them. Well do they talk about the features that Infy has added to its product Finacle, or do they talk about the joint initiative that TCS has launched along with CMU.

NO!!! Here’s what they talk about “Hey, our neighbour Philip lost his job in “Electric Shock Corp” because they had decided to outsource their projects to Infosys and last week 1000 people were laid off from Pattibank because of their deal with TCS. So is this what we call Household names!!!

Let’s ask Agent Pal what a real household name is?

Enter into the kitchen in the morning and it says “Good Morning agent pal, your milk is hot and the toaster is almost done with your toast. Wipro Smart Kitchen Manager has detected 1 kg tomatoes and ½ kilo onion to be downloaded from www.wipro.com. Please maintain your bank balance to pay for these updates. Smart Kitchen Manager designed and deployed by Wipro “Cooking Thoughts”.

You enter into the garage, start your car and “TCS Windscreen Loading…”. Suddenly a blue screen flashes with the message “An unexpected exception occurred….Windscreen has detected a bug in the engine. Please remove the bug and press the Accelerator, brake and clutch together to restart Windscreen”.

You log into the internet and “Welcome to the Infy web 5.0. What do you want to browse today???”. You ask for today’s news and it pops up with “Sorry No Dosa for you. We are unable to serve your requests due to a server crash and our engineers are caught up on the traffic in Hosur Road. Please pray for the traffic to be cleared soon so that our engineers fix up the servers and your dosas are served.”

Now that’s what I call Real Household names.

Cheers,
Agent Pal

Why India??????????

In the past 10-15 years, India has seen a tremendous growth in the software services sector. Indian MNCs like TCS (my ex), Infy, Wipro, HCL have been giving the global leaders like IBM, EDS, CSC a run for their money. These global majors have also shifted a lot of their operations to India. But WHY???

India had been a mute spectator to the manufacturing and hardware movements where China, Korea, Japan, Honk kong had grabbed the major share of the pie. But when it came to software services, India was there with a bang(alore). What is it that has made India the final destination for IT Services? Is it the Infrastructure, Cheap labour, government policies, educational system…..

“BULLSHIT” says Agent Pal. He takes a dive into the Indian history to find a logical solution to the question WHY INDIA? And here’s what he has come up with….

India is a country where joint family system has been practiced for ages. The family has a strict power hierarchy, established procedures for doing things and the family comes before the individual. The kids are brought up to live within the framework, and live as one single family. And as they grow up in age and the power hierarchy, they get to manage the family and lead the family.

So does this all sound very similar to a software company where there is a well documented process for everything, power hierarchy and team work counts more than individual skills. It has been the inherent nature of Indians to stick to the process and work as a team. This is what has enabled Indian companies to implement huge projects worth billions of dollars and involving hundreds of employees and establish the India Inc brand on the global arena.

Hope this sounds like a logical solution!!!

Cheers,
Agent Pal