A family in the train cabin

While traveling in the train, a family got into our cabin. The silence got down. The man came for a send off of his wife, wife's parents. He was getting in and out of the train. Once the train moved, the two kids took turn in getting the attention. Even deciding the dinner time took its own time and discussion. I just reflected if any one of them travelled alone, they would have had dinner without a word and slept by now.

The girl and her mom had lot of things to catch up, hence the light was turned on for a longer time in the night. We had to remind them to switch it off. The small child woke up once in a while and cried with a rhythmic voice. The lady tried to put it back to sleep by threatening in a irritating mood. Her mom tried to pacify the child with an lullabic attempt.

Overall it was a difficult journey.

Drag and Drop class hierarchy

While working with gwt-ext library, I found difficult to understand the available set of classes related to drag and drop functionality. In order to demystify, I took a notes for myself and drew a flow chart. Sharing with others.

Also, if you are looking for useful info on the drag n drop classes, yui seem to have good documents.

Which college to go? None.

Couple of my relatives were sharing their dilemma about the colleges their kids should choose. I suggest them not to send to any college, particularly if the student is talented. Many couldn't digest this suggestion and repel away.

Off late colleges are open at every corner. Businessmen fund these college and their view will be obviously business oriented -- reduce the expense, increase the income. After paying heavy amount as capitation, what we get is poor quality education from incompetent staff.

Is there any alternate? I suggest talented kids to learn skills over net. This is by assuming computer job is what one aims for, which 95% of students aspire towards. The 5% should go to a very good college of their dream fields. Surely those seats will be available without competition and prosperity rate ought to be better.

Will students without world experience, job experience gain technical skills over net? Can they settle comfortably in say, over a year? I feel some kind of collaboration, guidance is needed - which need not be a college. If a college can provide such guidance, it is good.

In such skill acquisition mode for 2 years, I believe the person should be able to solve problems to an extend of matching the expenses to income. With 3+ years, real money should be pumping in. Believe me, there are so much work that needs to be done outside.

Any evidence that this is feasible? Yes, think about the top companies in the country hiring non-computer science students for their software development projects. They see the talented pool to learn things and start working in real projects. They give a 6 month training for them.

If 6 months is all the training one needs, y not we start that when we are out of school?
Many have the secure feeling with having a degree. Correspondence course is the answer.

PS: I went through colleges. My comments above are relevant to the current scenario where colleges focus on minting money in contrast to industry looking for quality engineers.

The other road

While travelling in the bus, I used to see some small village roads bifurcating from the main way. Many times I was curious to know about those unknown roads. Where are they going? Are there interesting things in those roads that I am missing .. like a beautiful scenic spot, or a massive bridge or a village trade show etc. Is that road dry n dull or pleasant n cool? Will there be many passer-by or very few activities?

Is that an old road or introduced in modern days? May be this could be the village road missed by a village boy gone very far, may be attracted by the glamourous city lights (sure the boy wants to come back to this road).

What are the people doing in those villages? Are they missing the village boy or happy with the money he sends?

adding a background grid

Ever wondered how to get a grid background like in some designer tools? Here is a simple way.

Decide on the cell size you want. You may choose 20*30 pixel. Create a image of that size in paint. Draw a line in the last row and last column. You should get a image like this :

Include this image as a background in your canvas. Allow the image to be repeated horizontaly and vertically.

In case of html+css, you may specify as :

.grid
{
background-image:url(../images/bluegrid.JPG) !important;
background-repeat: repeat;
opacity:0.1;
filter:alpha(opacity=10);
}


This should give out the desired result :

mono color picture

Never thought a mono color could give striking effect. Color image always brings multi-color to our mind.

Here is the drawing I did recently.

Who needs newspaper?

With all the stuff net provides us, I started wondering if there is a future for newspaper. Manually someone dropping at 5am, then the paper has to withstand rain, wind, dogs etc and reach my table. I will have to read thru carefully to find articles of interest to me. If I am lucky, I will get one or two.

Wait a minute .. these interesting articles seem to be read earlier! Ya, these are 2 days old in the net. The newspaper guys have conveniently searched in the net and cut n pasted the article into their paper moulding machine. What a cheap trick!

I register to different feeds so that articles of my needs arrive at a particular place easy for me to read. They reach my place as soon as they are written at the creation point. Good classification, searchable options, sharing facilities, preserving them for future use are few points I prefer net way of reading news.

Some people may argue about 'local news'. I feel net is faster n better in that aspect also. There are thousands of social network groups, blogs which actively propagate local happenings. For professional touch of journalism, there are site like citizen matters come in. They cover the local news and keep the readers informed.

Do you think newspaper publication will roll out for long time? May be till rural folks plug in their laptops.

closing ceremony

While strolling in the neighbourhood, a small hardware shop caught my attention. The owner was closing the shop for the day. He had to pick the paint buckets kept in front of the store for display. The buckets ought to be packed inside the small shop. There were other assorted tools and equipments placed outside. His job is to bring them to safe and put down the shutter.

I was thinking about the way I wind up the work. All I have to do is press the shutdown button. At times I complain the machine is too slow while shutting down!

A gaze into future

Looking into the future is always a fun; we had been quite curious to know things will be as the time pass. If we watch early Science fiction movies, we could see what that era expected to happen around 2000+. It is funny to see that and compare with the surroundings now. We had out-pared most of the scientific expectations expressed by those futurists. Some of their imagination never occurred .. (in fact, many are still carried forward). When we think about future, we do have an image of people in bright colored cloth, wearing a electrical wired helmet, also that florescent drink.

Here are few of my thoughts on future:

• Unique identification number for people, at global level
• Tight security, surveillance and low crime rate
• High concentrated urban life style. Mega apartments and narrow path.
• People hardly need to go out as all facilities and work environment are available at their living room.
• Improved medical care but collapses once in a while with massive out burst of unknown illness which claims millions.
• Heavy amount spent on upgrading military, thou war never happens. (Everyone aware of the fatal blow to the planet)
• inferior leadership
  

Let us see if we reach there before hitting a total economic break down or a severe loss of population through political conflicts.

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.