Our view of the surroundings

Other day a pizza delivery scooter entered my street. Being a blind street with just four houses, we rarely get outside vehicles. The pizza guy couldn't see the blindness as the street is too slope and the other side is an open field instead of a wall. He had to reach the end and take a U. Definitely he would have been cursing whoever designed the layout. It is haphazard, we can expect it in such hilly area.

I was wondering what kind of feelings, expression, frustration he would have had about this street. This is his first time in this street, may be in this area too. He might have registered this mistake and try out other paths. Or he might have been too time stressed with his pizza delivery and he may not have observed the street into his internal system.

While thinking about this, I recollected the first time I was in this street. It was different. I was very much relaxed. Being new to the town, I was curious to learn the surroundings, people, buildings etc. We saw the house from outside. I observed the neighborhood. It looked fresh, calm and nice.

After staying here for months, the views and the feelings about the house, street had changed. What a difference can acclimatization can bring in!

gwtExt panel to fill the page

While using gwtExt tools, I wanted the panel to occupy the entire screen. Found that Viewport is the component to use. However I didnt see the required effect in spite of using the Viewport as per the guide. I just got a small, shrinked panel as it used to be. After couple of trial and error, the culprit turned out to be an auto-height method called by the main panel. Commenting this statement cured the problem.

// panel.setAutoHeight(true);

Phone sex

Let us learn kamasutra positions throuh mobile.

Circles and squares

Most convenient structure for nature is to spin out a circle. The spherical planets, stars, galaxies, and tubular-cylindrical body cells, and the beautiful circular pot-holes .. the list is end less. What makes these forms prominent? Two things comes to mind: one is fluid dynamics which forms the pebble, pot-holes, to certain extend the moon and the planets. Second means is the central attraction force. This is the force that bring the atoms into spherical, a planet, star also as spherical.

My wife pointed out a natural square structure. When the body cells are tightly placed in a tissue or somewhere, they tend to form cubical and called cubic cells. There are rare incidents of such sharp shapes. Other area I could think of is, the cliffs and edges formed in mountain ranges when the mountains torn off due to violent quakes or other means.


When it comes to artificial shapes, man made structures are predominantly squares. The house we live, the computer screen, newspaper, this blog template .. goes on. The circular pattern is adapted either out of absolute necessity (wheel, motor coil) or for aesthetic reason (like a big arch in the hall, curvy furniture,)

Looks like it is easy for human to work with squares than circles. There are exception to this rule, like home made dosa :-)

Beauty and the reaction

What is beauty? Sure, we all have many definitions. Why do we react in certain manner towards something beautiful, as per our defn?

There is some kind of appreciation, excitement in our mind, upliftment of our mood. We also get an inclination to possess the object of beauty. Or leave out a sigh if we understand the object is beyond our current reach. What is this need for possessing? Is it owner's pride to show-off or some kind of attachment with the beauty?

As said in Selfish Gene, could beauty imply sound health? May be we opt or try to pick like wise. If that be true, our evolution path should take us to more and more beautiful surroundings, beautiful people, beautiful experience and events. Of course, that will happen only when we stop our self destructive operations.

Burn the IIT

Here is a view contradicting the Save the IIT post.

There will be a divide between the rich and the poor, one in power and commoners, the performers and non-performers. The performers join together to form a group and enhance their productivity. They start benefiting out of such a network. The more successful it is, more it attracts the outsiders. Pressure builds up on to the closed system and slowly they will have to join in more people. This starts diluting the system and this particular branded group will loose its charm and name.

Probably the core performers or similar set of people will start again from scratch and get into a new brand name. This will last till the next burst.

In a way, it is good for the performing good themselves. This mechanism provides a good cleansing means. A stagnant group will become stale and that itself will lead to destruction. Anything that can start fresh and build with new ideas will be more sophisticated and useful to the society as a whole.

Post your comments if you have different views.

Save the IIT

Today the court had agreed for quota in creamy colleges. There are pros and cons.

To me, it looks like this is not the way to bring social equality. For eg, let us say we want to bridge the gap between rich and poor, one yard stick could be to see that poor are able to enjoy the luxury of five star hotels. If a politician sees an opportunity in this whole deal, and he forces the hotel to open the door for the poor ... he may put hundreds of poor in the building but it is a short term benefit for all (except for the politician). It is a degradation to the hotel. In long run, the poor are going to end up in similar poor-ness state like they were before, just that now they are inside the building.

Here the point is not against getting the poor inside the hotel. It is about the process. Instead it has to be cultivated at the root level. See that there are abundance, prosperity, skill usage etc so that people can climb up on their own to excel. That would be a way to bring people up and match with the rich. A tedious, abstract, theoretical process, but that is the way to go.

Coming back to quota for education, it is nothing different from the above scenario. Weaker strata needs more infra structure to build their basic knowledge. Upon stepping onto the fundamental level, they will have to climb up and compete with all others. The purpose of creamy college is to provide environment to nurture supreme intelligence. That ought to be honored.

Check out Burn the IIT.

A day in the hotel

I got this from the comments section of http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/article3681312.ece

“WHILE WE were docked in Monaco, a guest left her hat in a taxi. She had no idea which taxi she had used. All she knew was that the driver had been listening to a football match on the radio. I contacted the radio station and asked them to make an appeal, in the hope that the driver was still listening. He was - and the hat was returned.” Gabor Szarvas, chief concierge, Crystal Cruises

Compare two properties files

I had two properties files and the parameter names were almost same in those two files. I had to go through them to find difference in the values. Searching for any utility didnt get a positive result. So, implemented the following logic.

Load both the file data into a hash map

(the param will be the key; we will end up having two hash maps)

for loop into sorted keys of first map

{

if (key exist in second map)
{

if
(firstMap.valueof(key) == secondMap.valueof(key))

{

key = firstMap.valueof(key) in both maps

}
else

{

key differs in the maps with firstMap.valueof(key)

and secondMap.valueof(key)

}

}

else

{

key exist only in first map

}

}

for loop into sorted keys of second map

{

if (key not exist in first map)

{

key exist only in second map

}

}

Food on-demand

This idea occurred while having lunch in a restaurant. What if I want a dish made out of a particular recipe? It would be nice if a restaurant promotes that idea. Food on-demand could work like this :

• I go to their website and place a recipe. I could give a url to a recipe or type in my own recipe.
• Restaurant reviews it and does a feasibility study. Return back to the requester with the cost estimate, date of availability etc
• Both the parties decide on a suitable date and time, may be an advance is paid to the restaurant for planning the work
• The person happily munches on the meal he wanted to have (probably the recipe out of his/her childhood memory). Optionally the person can leave a comment on the dish and level of satisfying his/her expectations.

Here is my list of items I would like to get it done in that way :

• There are so many tasty dishes made out of plantain flower. My wife avoids them due to the complexity involved in preparing them. Very rarely we get in restaurants. If we have 'On-demand food', I could pass a recipe like this.
• In Foster city area, I had tasted a potato pizza. (I think the restaurant name is Lake View). They did not use the potato wedges. Instead cut them into small cubes and slightly fried. It was very nice. From then on, whenever I have to order, I use to check for that pizza; unlucky me .. never ate that again. Few times, I tried convincing pizza restaurants to try that toppings and none dare to. They wanted to follow the direction they know.
• There are many dishes I had in my childhood. Today I don't have them, may be I don't get those materials around. Or I don't know where to get. Food on demand would address them.

Why did cave men draw?

Upon pondering about cave painting, questions arises on the purpose of such paintings.

Did they want to show case their bravery and valor?
Were they preparing a draft plan for their upcoming hunting season?
Or a dad teaching archery at the board room?
Just a bored guy scribbled something on the wall?
May be a lady showing off her man's capability ..
an encrypted message for the future gen???

Interesting thou.

LIC, wake up

Why are public service sucks? Is it for all or specially designed torture technics for me alone?
I had a loan from lic. After facing difficulty in managing the EMI and payment, I decided to close the loan. With lot of effort, I managed to pay lump sum in two batches. After that they mentioned that a request to close the loan ought to be raised and they would tell me the final settlement. I did the same and paid the last payment of 2k+. Relaxed a bit of closing a hefty loan. Next month came a surprise from lic; they were trying to use the cheques to collect further money. Upon failing to encash, they started adding up penalties.

Sick folks. Will definitely consider settling the issue thru consumer court.

Unidentifiable error

Came across an interesting error while starting with script.aculo.us A test code was working fine. I moved the same script to the real project code. Then the script started throwing error, 'undefined object'. Spent lot of time in comparing the test code and actual one. Couldn't find any issue.

Then placed few alert statements and narrowed down the issue by applying divide n conquer. What caught was this function :
function $(id){return document.getElementById(id)}

Seems like scriptaculous.js is using prototype.js and the later is defining a function with the same signature as above. After going thru the function defined in prototype.js, I found that to be sophisticated and served my requirement too. I commented my definition and the page flies through without error.

Moral : don't duplicate function names, it is going to be lot difficult to debug.

Languages and dialects

I was wondering why we have so many languages in the world. Some ancient, dead and few started recently, growing; some have written form and some dont ..

It is understandable if different languages spurn out at isolated geographical locations. However we see that many languages and dialects co-exist at a close region. One possibility could be that the people migrated and carried their language to an area where people had their own language.

There seems to be more to the story. Looks like socio-economic-political motives might have driven people to create languages. For eg, in a business environment, it is a great advantage for the salesperson to use some secret code words to discuss in front of the customer. Also, a language and a dialect could establish an identity of the customer and hence favor discounts.

Around the world, we are politically charged by emotions. We create artificial borders. These emotions are mainly based on faith or language.

In order to demark the dividing factors among human being, I would love to drop all languages and adapt a single universal language. When people start seeing language as a tool to communicate and not an emotional toy, then we may achieve this idealistic world.

Ladies finger fry

Here is my recipe for preparing deep fried ladies finger.



My wife had cut the vegetable, onions. She started with the initial ceremony of frying mustard and cummin seed in oil. Added onion and stirred them for some time. Once the onion turns light golden color, she put the pieces of ladies finger into the pan. She kept stirring and added little bit of salt, chili powder and garam masala. After mixing these, she stopped at this point.



I took over the control. Kept stirring further. Added some more garam masala for extra taste. While I was stirring this, my wife started shouting that I am spoiling the vegetable. You need to focus on the stove and the preparation. The vegetable and onion combination will become red (just like her face). Go little more so that it is light brownish green and tastes slightly crispy.



Ah, it is an wonderful dish. If you can get it right, your wife would envy about your culinary skills.

When matrimonial sites go down

We know that the successful matrimonial sites are minting money through all means. What happens to sites that are not so successful? Still they manage to pull enough traffic to their site. May be the same type of users may not login. The sites are creative to utilize their resources and spin off a totally new pages that amuses the new customers. What resources they have and how do they use? They got a bunch of photos from matrimonial profiles. Since the site doesn't need them anymore, they allow users to vote on those photos! Sample this

Seller's view

When the customers' needs are like this, salesperson perspective are very much aligned. While I was living in the city, I thought of preserving the cloth from insects and dampness. Had to buy some naphthalene for placing in the closet. The near by general store was handy and I approached the shopkeeper. He was in his twenties. He was not the owner, should be a relative of the owner.

I asked him for the naphthalene balls and he showed some local branded one. The white balls were neatly arranged in a plastic sheet and tightly wrapped. A piece of paper announced the local brand name. He was trying to push this piece to me. However, I wanted to compare the price of this packed one and loosely kept naphthalenes. They were placed inside a bottle and he had to weigh any amount I would like to get. That was 50% cheaper than the packed one. I am sure he will get a better deal by selling the packed one than the loose one.

He was trying his sales pitch for the packed one. He commented on the quality, intactness etc. However, I was not convinced that I should spend more money for providing better repellents for the insects. Finally I asked him to weigh the loose ones. He did that, put them into a small paper bag. He liked the smell of the naphthalene. While handling the bag to me, he asked, "what is the purpose of these?"!!!

Gadget for the railways

There is a nice neon board displayed inside the train compartments. The location of the train is constantly displayed. It is very useful to know the approaching station, the distance and the time etc.

It would be nice to extend this facility. How about having a personal alarm when desired station approaches? Like, we set our mobile phone with the city code. The display board keeps sending mobile recognizable signals for each approaching stations. If the station code is same as the one I had set in my mobile, my mobile will wake me with an alarm.

This system needs a download to install in the mobile and the announcement signal to reach the mobiles.

Just a thought occurred in between the sleeps.

Mil and dil

Had a chance to know a little bit about the mil and dil equilibrium. My wife prepared potato curry and while having it, she asked what is the better way of preparing the dish. As I know only my mom's way of making it, I suggested my wife to check with my mom.

Ah .. that was the trigger for 30 mins rainfall. All the incidents, events, discussions, dialogs that happened from prior marriage upto now .. that is about 2 yrs of packed drama replayed again at our living room. My wife gave her interpretation of the whole sequence and also as a complimentary, highlighted what could have been others' motive in the game.

That was quite an experience. Not that everything was bad in the 30 mins time. I gained something value. First is patience. And the other is a discovery of a hot button that shouldn't be pressed.

Bad dreams

It was a lazy, fine Sunday morning. One could feel the freshness, the slow change in color & hue, the chirping of the birds, silence of the morning. It was a nice morning, except for a bad dream I had minutes ago. Still didn't come out the dream+sleep state. I looked at my wife who was still at sleep and about to get up. Slowly I woke her up.

It is our habit of narrating each other's dream. I started telling about the dream where I was chased by a man. While running, I saw my wife shopping on the road side. I pulled her and started running with her.

While talking about this dream, suddenly my wife's face turned pale. She was frightened to the core. I asked her if she is fine; she still couldn't speak. I got a glass of water for her (rare moments). After sipping it she slowly gained herself and with a shaky voice asked, if that was a fruit stall where she was standing by. It was a shock for me! Yes, indeed it was. The dream was etched into my mind and quite clear to play back.

Now she continued the narration. We both ran couple of streets and found ourself surrounded by goons. Yeap, just like movie style. They were pulling out weapons and that is the time I woke up. My wife also got the same dream and woke up at the same point.

What a coincidence! Can there be a meaning to it? Is this a prophecy? To be on a safer side, we thought of not going out for few days, particularly towards the market area. Even then we couldn't come out of spooky incident. Googling gave few cases reported by people but none was authenticate.

Luckily we have a neighbor who is a psychoanalyst. She is our family friend and we move along well. We checked when she will be free and thought of talking out with her. Once we met, we both explained our experience and sounded our concern with such freaky dream. We could see a smile coming out of her. She apologized for what she was trying out. As part of her research, she was working on a alpha ray generator. The project aims at studying the ray's influence on dream. Seems like she can play a particular frequency through the player she has and expect people to react within the range. As the concept is still under study, she didn't reveal more. I asked about the side-effects and health hazards. So far no complains ...

While coming back, I requested her to play some romantic frequencies here after.

PS: this is my first attempt on a short story :-)