All that is important is being happy !

Half moon bay

Being Free !

Few years ago in KL, Malaysia, I used to dine daily from a small South Indian Restaurant, where I enjoyed talking to this guy from my home town who worked as a waiter there. He was probably 35 then, he doesn't know where he was born. What he knew was that, he was always in a Lodge in the city (Trivandrum), where he worked as a janitor then a room boy, later as caretaker and was very near and dear to the owner of the Lodge. He was having best days of his life, with zero tensions and most of his needs were taken care by his boss. Although I am not sure if he was educated enough, although he seems to have done at least middle school. He should have made a lot of friends over there, but many of them would have felt bad about his life and how his manager would be underpaying him. And with help of trade unions, his friends urged his boss to give him compensation (bigger and better one time amount) to account for all the work he has been doing till then. That probably happened when he was 18 years old . He had to leave work (only thing he knew ) and after years of protest he got his money (probably Rs 200,000 ), he moved to Chennai where he got married . And then somebody fooled him taking almost all the money and promising him a job in Singapore. Now he ended up in Malaysia, getting payed less than what he would have been getting when in Trivandrum . I always made sure I put few Ringgits more as his tip, but he never took it . He dreams about going back to India , living with his kid and wife and may be visiting back Trivandrum. I am sure, his life would be far lot better now :)

Role play as solution to mental problems ?

Psychology brings in another dimension to movies, some of these "Psychology motivated" movies makes to box office hits where as some gets vanished .

After watching Martin Scorsese film Shutter Island and impressed by the details of how he puts across the venture by psychiatrist's to treat Delusional Disorder faced by the hero (Di Carpio).

This movies is very good, and I usually give this rating to a movie if I keep remembering about the movie even when I come out of the theater. After reading clinical psychologist's review (from psychology today), I went out of words .

This is not the first time I have seen a movie made on similar grounds, on the use of role play to solve mental problems . The Malayalam movie Manichitrathazhu was blockbuster in Kerala, running in theaters for more than 300 days, and lately this move was re made (not dubbed) in 5 other Indian languages. But in here, the patient was suffering from split personality, and hero (the doctor) tries to find a solution by using role play .

They say Drugs had brought in lot of relief for mental patients as end of the day these diseases are resultant of some or the other biochemical reaction happening in our body . This so called solution sounds far better than the surgical procedures in 1930's (This is again one of the suspenses in "Shutter Island").

I wonder how often and how elaborate would these role playing solutions be if somebody would be doing so to treat mental problems. Though the climax of "Shutter Island" was disappointing compared to that of "Manichitrathazhu" suggesting the probability of success for these procedures is not 100%. Does doctors have time to formulate such acting ventures to bring back the "actual world" to these patients ?

California

Silicon Valley, US101, IBM, Google, NASA, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, San Hose, Highway-1, Caltrain, DT, VTA, Madras Cafe, Sharks are the words coming into my mind when I start thinking where I am now.
A new world, far diffrent culture, and very experienced crowd has always kept me busy wondering where and what new to learn.

The German schooling

We live in a small flat world, but people in different countries was brought up in different ways. My German friend was telling me how the education system was works in Germany. Its really different from what we see in India, if we had German system in India I would not have got my degree yet. As after primary school(the first 4 years), the Germans have 4 entirely different secondary schools. And how you go there is totally dependent on the children's ability as understood by their teachers. The brightest in primary end up in Gymansium , and they get trained for a university degree. The average performers end up in realschule, where they would take apprenticeship. And those who got really bad marks would end up in Hauptschule, where they get lots of practical training. The germans do have Gesamtschule , were pupils can shift bettween diffrent schools and every since its introduction in 60's this was controversial.
But if you could do good marks in Hauptschule you can go to a Gymansium but would take more number of years to do your university degree. If I were a german, probably I would have ended up in Hauptschule as I was doing pathetic in primary school, I was avery in secondary, and above average in higher secondary. So I would be still studying my degree course. Its been said that british destroyed our traditional education system based on temples and mosques, but its now doing good to millions of Indians.

Aura

How Ben Bernanke affect our Life's ?

Ben, who is chairman of United States Federal Reserve is hottest man in all financial news at present as he brought down .5% of Fed's, interest rate for lending as reason he quoted as "global financial losses have far exceeded even the most pessimistic estimates of the credit losses on these loans". And the loans what he meant was sub prime crisis, it was all about not letting the housing bubble burst. The real estate prices in US was ever high, and banks started lending money to people with out looking at their credit history at a high interest rate. And banks became short of money or for some other reason they started pulling money from other funds and banks around the world. And soon there was a turbulence in the market about if the money lend ed would come back as customers are finding really difficult to pay it back. This uncertainty troubled almost all of the financial institutions as nobody had an idea of how much money has gone into these loans. And also, because people are paying a lot of their earning to these loans, the consumer confidence came down affecting the whole economy. This added to the turbulence, and people started pulling out their money from shares and started investing on blue chips. And also because of these intrest rate cuts, the fears are more about weakening of dollar and inflation. And currency carry trade on boom, dollar value is still decreasing.

With US still topping as single largest importer of the world, and the value of Dollar coming down. Those businesses which are depended on US is getting affected. I am sure this years hike, is not going to like last year.

Is it going to affect us over in India ?. I am sure its not, as we have the fourth largest GDP by purchasing power parity and growing at above 9% figures. Money coming more from Banking,Aviation, Telecom, Automotive and growing about 30 % compared to what people think is IT which is growing at slower pace. But those in IT, watch out, if we are slow in going up the value pyramid we are are soon going to be pulled down.

Aura

What it takes to manage transport ?

What if one day, you could use a smart card and travel around India. You use multiple modes, be it Rail, Bus, Air, Taxi or even an Autorickshaw. Huh...Is that possible ? We have 1.136 billion people. Yes smart card is smart enough to store all details about the person including how much credit he has in his card and every time he swipes it, he credit comes down .
But will it be viable enough to leave it that loose ?. Somebody needs to centrally manage it. Who is going to do it ?. Now if you ask why really we need it, its because we have multiple vendors catering from the most spread of autorickshaw drives till the most organized like Airlines or Rail. And if somebody doesnt keep track of all those transactions, the fraud is knocking the door. Dont ever dream any central organization can track transactions even if a percent of our population travels every day.
But what if we could track it. What are the returns out of that ?
Yes ease of use for customer. But for what ?. All are happy with Cash or Credit cards.
We mean business here. Its savings for the transport company. Its the costly fuel which is saved. Its intelligent means to allocate more mechanisms of travel in routes where we see lots of traffic, its how we should reduce Jams. Its about understanding people's need of how they want to commute. Its about fleet management.
So let says somebody comes forward in 2020 to do this kind of business. Probably then all autorickshaw would have some kind of handheld devices which get tracked by GPS and passes on the trasaction details to central server. And somebody is tracking where you are travelling. You cannot afford to hide.

Aura

A Web Portal

These days, I am understanding the world of portals, deluged by the technology involved, from load balancing, authorization, authentication, presentation, business logic, content store and integration. I have always loved the hardware part micropartitioning, symmetrical multithreading, IP spraying, virtualization, storage arrays. Oh my god, I am diving into many things and I am lovin it :)

Aura

Read and Rate my article.

Singapore

Singapore Album

Malaysia Pictures

Check out my album with malaysia pictures.

More photos in this album

Sambal udang, sotong ..Otak Otak

Ever wonder how I could understand that text ??
This is what I eat every day and Malaya Bahasa(Malaysian Language) is written in English alphabets.

And what is Sambal ? Its kind of chili paste or something, Xtra hot material and udang should be Prawns and sotong would be Squid ( Thanks to the hotel breakfast every day I have which has pointers). Its all about fish here. Yea Nasi Lemak (Malaysian coconut rice) is basic food you can have in here.
I would say most of malay food is the perfect, well experimented or well thought about combination of Indian and chineese food.
Aura

KL

For getting to eat what I like, getting to see lot of greenary around, getting the sunrays direct to my face I wake up every day in KL .
This city boasts of lots of things from the fastest train in south east Asia to the talled twin towers in the world. I was lucky to experiance both. It has the best roads I have seen in this world and one of the best public transport systems.

I love this country for the kind of food that people eat here. Its a perfect blend of indian and chinese food. And the abundance of sea food make it the best for me.


Aura

Celebrate Onam when your are abroad and alone ?

Onam is coming near, and this world of professional nomads, many like me could be strangled in some part of world where you find yourself alone, away from others malayali's, not even one online on chat :(.
Yes onam is a festival which should be celebrated along with your family, in your house along with other who share joy in celebrating this festival. Onam is another important reason for malayali to come and meet their family, have couple of days away from work, eat typical mallu food. Onasadya, onakodi, onakali, oonjaal (the swing), athappoo and many more are part and parcel of this festival.

But what should others do, who are away from their family and working in odd timezone.
1.First thing that I would do is to find others like me in the city where I am, I am rest assured that there will be some one like me. Use google or any another social networking site to do so.Try to organize a meeting with all so that we could have dinner or lunch together and share of onam, may be on same day or nearest weekend.
2.Looking into fundamentals of this festival, its all about enjoying the hard work we have done (harvest festival, ofcourse we no more do paddy cultivation) , make sure that you spend enough that we really enjoy the day.
3.Never forget your family this day. Make sure you call your home, close relatives and friends this day. This is a very good reason why you should call them.
4.Make sure that you take atleast one of your colleagues to a nearest indian restaurant, and try sharing your experiences about Onam and Keralam.
5.Try doing something creative, may be you never get some flowers to make attaapoov, may be write a creative happy onam mail and send it across to all your friend.
6.Make this opportunity to do some more shopping, may be a set of new dress :), if Mr maveli comes this way, let him be happy that his praja is always happy.

Eat good food , wear the best dress, play hard and work less on Onam day

Regards,
Aura

I got my license again !!

I remember as if its yesterday, when I bunked classes to take my Driving License. I was happiest person when I got it. I used it about 5 years after which I lost along with my purse, credit card 2 years ago. I filed a complaint in local Regional Transport Office for a duplicate, but I was annoyed to hear that the page with my license entry was missing from the register. Oops ..there is no way out. I rode by new bike almost two years without license (I took that risk as I already have a license as from the number I had). I took a new one last week :) and happy to ride confidently in Bangalore roads .

Regards
Aura

Should software firms block social networking sites ?

In recent past we see lot of activity in social networking using websites. The sites like orkut, hi5 , Yahoo 360, MySpace are few in this sphere. People check less of mails or post less of blogs, but they make it sure that they log in into one of these site and check for new friends or communicate with the old ones often.

1. But is this activity increasing to the level that it needs to be blocked so that the normal buisiness is not affected ?

My opinion would be no. Its managements responsibility that people are connected socially. And when you work a lot and you are mostly near your computer and connected to internet there is no better way that these networking sites.
I use lot of Orkut, it helps me manage my friends, find old/new friends, get to know about people, above all that make best use of extra time.
Hope there is a time when you can find every one in this world in networks like these, the world open and every one is reachable as in case of Orkut.

How Supply Chain software are made ?

Last four months I saw how supply chain software are made as I was working with one of the majors in the domain.
You make click on a website, add the product to cart and click it to buy what you want and it reaches you in days.

1. What really happens under the hood?
2. Where exactly the products come from ?
3. How do they manage all this ?
4. Where do they get the products from ?
5. How do the run the business so efficiently ?
6. How many request comes in a day ?
7. How do the intract with the transportation company ?
8. Do they really have some warehouses or product comes from the company where they manufacture those ?
9. How complex is the software involved ?
10. What on earth is RFID ?
11. To what level things are automated ?
12. How do they handle money ?
13. How do they handle shipments ?

Yea I got a shady picture about these questions . Suppy chain management is really a complex area to venture into.

Aura..

Its Published

Developing PHP Applications for IBM Data Servers

Click here for viewing the abstract

Regards,
Aura

My Book in draft

I never thought I would be a published author. Thanks to IBM :). Do see the draft copy of the book in here
Draft

I had a great team of another 4 authors It was nice working with diverse people . Holger was from Germany, Piotr from Poland, Daniel and Whei-jen from USA . I have snap of the team (we took this picture before Almaden.)

Aura