an evening time into the woods

My wife said she was hungry and want to have some evening snacks. Instead of going to traditional joints, I thought of exploring the surroundings. There is a steep road going behind our house. I thought it will lead to some village. We went in that road in the bike. I road was too steep that I was worried about climbing up.

Soon it became scenic. There were many small birds, paddy field etc. We spotted a peacock too. It was a nice environment. As we proceeded, it became more and more dense with trees and cooler. The tar road became mud road. Width of the road was also reducing. At one point we thought the road had ended and we were expecting a cliff. After reaching there, we realized a small bridge connecting other side of a running stream. Quite adventurous ride to cross the narrow bridge.

After a while, we found a temple and few shops near by. Had dosa at one of those village restaurants. Very tasty compared to what we get in the town. The soft drinks were also home made and local branded. Different from our pepsi and coke.

No sooner we left the village spot, we figured the familiar malls and lodges greetings us. We were into the thick and den of the city/town. If we had reached that small restaurant through the main road from the city, we wouldn't have felt the same way as we discovered it from the wood.

The evolution

When I was a kid, I had to go often to near by "pala-sarakku kadai", literarily meaning "multi-material shop". This had the provisionary items, veggies, candies, etc. Massive wooden desk would block you from entering into the shop. All you can do is, stand in the street outside the shop (sometimes along with crowded customers) and try to grab the attention of anyone of the four person serving from inside. Once you get the attention, u shd quickly list out the items you want. The guy would vanish into the dark side of the shop. None of the ordered items will be visible to us. After awhile, he will come out carrying paper bundles. If you had exceeded certain limit in purchase, u will get brown colored free gunny bag to put the bundles. The itemized bill will be a hand scribbled list in a piece of paper. (btw, they do buy old notebooks from you, may be for the billing purpose).

Then things changed. Gunny bags were old fashioned. Paper bundles were barbaric. The in-thing is plastic wrappers and covers. Goods were pre-packed and kept in the showcase. Now the shop is called "Stores". We were allowed inside the shop. The massive desk in the previous shops were bent into a big U-shaped desks and ran in parallel to the show cases. Service folks stood in between the desk and the show case. U could point the items you want and they placed those in the desk. Finally billed with a teleprinter, goods were placed inside a shining, attractive plastic bag with their store name written big.

Today I go to shopping malls and super bazaars. I can reach the goods all by myself. Even if I move without a trolley, someone pushes one into my hand. Now I am able to compare prizes, quality and other factors before buying stuff. After collecting the things, I meet the shopping personal at the billing counter (mostly 'she', as I have option to choose the counter). Thou the things are placed inside plastic bags, they make you feel guilty to do so. Seems like it is no more cool, but cruelty against nature. You are supposed to bring your own bag or buy a bag from them - it is our good old gunny bag, this time it is white.

New home

Currently settling down at the new town. Things are bit different. It is a small town, less populated. Quite calm and nice. My home is in the suburb, not far from the town center; just two turns and within 2km reach. Been a while staying at a walkable distance from the city center :-)

There are less choices to make for various services and restaurants - that is a plus and minus. The town is highly female populated as majority of guys had gone abroad for jobs and this town has medium scale industries promising jobs for girls.

Still waiting for my luggage and articles to arrive. A local lorry strike is holding my stuff from delivery. Hope they will arrive soon in good condition.

Joy of the roadside

Other day I was walking along the street. Found a decent road side food stall. It had around 5 tables to accommodate 20 guests. The hotel was run by a north indian family. I love such joints run by families as we can expect homely food. Whatever money we give in a standard star hotels, we never can get this taste. I guess the quality control and over-hygiene consciousness kills the taste. I believe the hygiene, quality, taste, ambience (if possible), cost should be applied in moderation. Compromising something totally for other factors may not be acceptable by many.

Happen to meet some people how are too conscious about such road side hotels. More than the hygiene part, their social status block their way to enter into such places. They imagine the world is at their back and watch whatever they do (as thou the world has no other job to do). Such ego-maniacal, self centered people will realize what they have been missing when their vanity vanishes ... will they?

how do they rate a magazine article

If we have an article in the web, we can easily find the reader volume. We can attach n number of tools to the page to track the readers and know zillion of info about them. Also we have sophisticated comment section, forums and other means to share idea to know about the topic, people.

On the contrary, how do they rate a particular article in a magazine? How many had read, what age group liked it, do they expect any followup or related articles? Do they do this only based on the snail mail, phone calls they receive? I have been reading articles from childhood and never communicated to the publishers. I guess most of the readers are like me. If that is the case, how can they get a reasonable data?

May be they use the minimal data they get and try to extrapolate for the wider audience.

seeing blank jsf page?

My jsf apps was working fine. I had to include few html tags and guess what .. none of the pages are displayed there after. No error, no display. After debugging and net search, I figured out that the outtext after f:view is the culprit. By removing it, order was restored and citizens lived happily ever after (until they hit upon the next bug).

Dataflow through pages

What is the right way of passing info from one web page to another? When it comes to jsf+adf, things get murky. Upon googling, I stumbled into pageFlowScope. As that was what I looked for, I started using the same. However while accessing the pageFlowScope api from the java code, problems started appearing. First I faced invalid property name exception - this exception, error msg was misleading. Upon tweaking the lib, I got 404.

Now I tried downloading more libs and upgrading the ide version. That didn't help. After some more search in the net, I found processScope whose documents were exactly same as pageFlowScope. Looks like oracle took pageFlowScope code and doc, did a global search n replace to processScope. Anyway things are working after I moved to processScope.

I have a feeling that when I try to simulate GET behavior in jsf+adf, I will have one more sleepless night. Let me try that too.

A day at the bank

Yesterday I was at the bank to deposit money into an account. While entering the bank I was wondering what kind of issue I am going to face on that day - the reason is most of the time I had ended up like a fool or with a quarrel. Definitely not comfortable with the bank procedures. I thought I need to do a wire transfer as the account was in a distant city. Not able to find any suitable form, I approached the staff. He was quite friendly in guiding; that was a surprise.

After that I got a token from the vending machine hanging at the entrance. Bank has placed costly leather sofa sets in front of the counters. I was waiting for a seat to get empty and swiftly occupied it. Then came the waiting period. My token number is 150 and the running number was 48 ... oh! I did some simple maths to time the process. Out of the 3 or 4 counters, it took 30 minutes to handle 25 tokens. This includes missed tokens whose owners didn't turn up when they were called.

I had to wait for 2 hours. Since the bank was close to college, the customers were quite interesting and I was able to pass time easily. Once in a while I checked the running counter to verify my calculation. Thou there were times the tokens moved too slow, ultimately I was served in 2 hours.

This time my transaction went through without any issue. What a luck! otherwise I might have to wait another 2 hours. After coming out, I was wondering about the time spent there. Definitely the system is far better than what it used to be - that is standing in separate queues and seeing other queues moving fast. One approach could be that the customers get their tokens through phone or net. They also get to know the approx time +/- 30mins to be at the bank. This might save lots of time of customers and the workload, stress of the bank. Not sure about the technicality, feasibility and practicality.