Wish you a happy 2010

Wish all of you a happy 2010

My hopes for the new year.

1. There are some decent movies in this year. 2009 was pathetically hopeless.
2. Movie actors do something meaningful rather than promoting themselves on TV.
3. Quality of TV soaps is at 1 on a rating from 1 to 10 (worst to best). Hope it
comes to 3.
4. Technology adoption in Indian universities improves.
5. Prices of essential commodities come down to 2000 levels.
6. Politicians need to prove they are honest.

Vivek Kalla. The Singer.

Here is a clip that I got from Gopal Ranga. It is the singer Vivek Kalla. I knew that he is an expert Hardware Engineer. Did not know that he sings so well too. I am yet to get information on when and where this was recorded. But it is simply nice.

For those in Malaysia

Any one interested in attending the Geeta Jayanti Celebrations at Geeta Ashram should take advantage of the 18 day celebrations going on in the Geeta Ashram temple.

Please read. Do attend and make it a huge success.

 

GEETA ASHRAM MALAYSIA

Lot. 6 Lorong Utara B, Off Jalan Utara

46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor D.E.

Tel/Fax no: 603 – 79564267 Website: www.geetamalaysia.org

4^th November 2009

TO: ALL DEVOTEES

GEETA JAYANTHI CELEBRATIONS

11^th to 28^th November 2009

We have great pleasure in inviting you to participate in our annual Geeta Jayanthi celebrations at our Ashram. Beginning with the 1^st chapter of the Bhagavad Geeta on 11^th November, one chapter a day (in serial order), will be recited and explained ending with chapter 18 on 28^th November, Geeta Jayanti day.

Our daily program during this period will be as follows:-

7.00p.m. - Bhajans / Aarti

7.30p.m. - Guru Vandana

Recitation of Chapter 12

Recitation of Chapter of the Day

Geeta Aarti

Welcome Address by Host

8.00p.m. - Discourse on Chapter of the day, either

a) In English for 30 minutes followed by

Hindi discourse by Panditji for 15 minutes;

OR b) Full commentary in Hindi for 45 minutes

with simultaneous translation in English

8.45p.m. - Concluding Bhajan, Announcements, Aarti

9.00p.m. - Prashad, Preeti Bhojan (dinner)

Please come with family and friends to participate in this special event. The divine blessings thereof will surely embrace, purify and charge the human spirit from within.

JAI SHRI KRISHNA!

The Management Committee

GEETA ASHRAM MALAYSIA

Happy Diwali

This has been a belated Diwali, but then everything is running late now a days. So are the wishes.

Times Higher Education – Top 100 Universities.

This year 2009’s top 100 universities has been listed.

India finds no mention in the list. Where are we? Why do we not feature in the top 100. Two of Singapore Universities find a place. For a small country like Singapore, this is a huge achievement. None of the other South Asian Countries have a mention.

National University of Singapore is at 30th place.

Nanyang Technological University is at 73. Great work Singapore.

See the full list here.

Floods in Andhra

The floods in Andhra have been massive. Reading news reports gives only a partial glimpse of the scene. I was trying to see some photos of places that I have seen 15-25 years ago. Those were calmer times. I had been in Vijayawada as a small kid during the massive cyclone of 1977.  After that I think this should be the big thing there.

I have posted some photos.

This is Prakasam Barrage. With all gates photos. This is an internet photo download. I am not sure from where.

Gandhi Jayanti

2nd Oct is the birth day of Gandhiji. He was born in the year 1869 in Porbandar. Gujarat has produced a wide array of brilliant people in India. Gandhiji wrote a book called My Experiments with Truth. It can be read from here. All should read it. Gandhiji lived truth. We all think truth as a verb. Something that has to be practiced. What happens when you practice something? Imagine 10+20 operation. We instantly know it is 30. We don't calculate. Because when you do something so many times over and over again, it starts to become natural. Gandhiji practiced truth so much that truth started to follow him. Instead of he telling the truth, what he told became the truth.

Operating Systems

Every time we think of operating systems, Windows, Linux and UNIX quickly come to mind. There are many more out there. I am talking about OS at the desktop level. Mostly home and small business users. Not about the enterprise.

There are two schools of thought. One are ok with Windows, others are not. Those who are not can also be classified to two groups. One who wants everything on Linux. They want the OS and applications all on Linux. This potentially means rewriting applications or finding equivalents. Getting accustomed to the user interface etc.

The other are those who like the windows interface, but are looking for alternative to windows OS. A new OS that looks like windows, can run all windows applications unchanged. ReactOS is one that addresses this category of people. There is FreeDOS as well but that tries to replace MS-DOS. Now some of you might think, MS-DOS? But let me tell you, lots of applications like Cash Registers, Inventory applications still run on MS-DOS. For these people FreeDOS is a boon. Not for the home users. No one will replace his/her XP with FreeDOS. But ReactOS is different. It is aiming to replace XP/2003. Just replace the OS. All applications will just run normally.

Do read more about ReactOS. As mentioned on the site, OS is still in alpha. (there is plenty of time).

Vijayadashmi or Dusserah

Vijayadashmi or Dusserah is a festival celebrated on the 10th day of Ashvin month of the Hindu calendar. There are three days in the Hindu calendar that are termed auspicious. One is Vijayadashmi, other is 1st day of Chaitra and 1st day of Kartika.

During this day large effigies of Ravan, Kumbhakarn and Meghnath are constructed in Ramlila grounds across India. Rama, Sita and Laxman arrive. Rama fires the arrow (with flames). The effigies get burnt. They are filled with crackers. In my childhood we used to wait for this day.

Happy Dusserah to everyone.

Navratri (19-27 Sept 2009)

Wishing all a happy Navratri. Last year at Jodhpur there was a tragedy. Hope this year it goes smooth. Hope the God's are happy. This year their need is more. Economic recession needs to end. Though people are talking of "green shoots", hope they become trees and are not plastic ones.

US Open 2009 - Women - Kim Clijsters

The Belgian as made a record of sorts. She retired, delivered a baby, got a Wild card and then won the tournament. She is humble and talented. Two things that usually don't go together. It is a great news that so many self claimed "Sports Specialists" could not predict this.

Salute you.

Babaji

Many years ago I read the book "Autobiography of a Yogi" written by Paramhansa Yogananda. I read both the English as well as the Hindi version. There is a mention in the book of Shri Mahavtar Babaji.

From the past few days I have got renewed interest in Babaji. So just to make people aware of this creation I am entering this blog.

Hindi Jokes

Thanks to Ayaz.

1. बॉस ग़ुस्से में: तुमने कभी उल्लू देखा है?

कर्मचारी (सर झुकाते हुए): नहीं सर .

बॉस: नीचे क्या देख रहे हो ? मेरी तरफ देखो.

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2. संताः डाक्टर साहब, मैं चश्मा लगाकर पढ़ तो सकुंगा न??

डाक्टरः हां, हां बिल्कुल...

संताः तब तो ठीक है, वर्ना अनपढ़ आदमी की जिंदगी भी कोई जिंदगी है...!

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3.  एक आदमी लायब्रेरियन के पास पंहुचा : "भाई साहब आप मुझे आत्महत्या पर कोई किताब दे सकते है ।

लायब्रेरियन : नहीं दे सकता । आप लौटायेंगे नहीं !

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4. तुनकमिजाज बीवी का मूड अच्छा करने के लिए पति को एक आइडिया सूझा।

उसने अपने बर्थ-डे पर पत्नी के गिफ्ट की गई दो शर्ट में से एक चुनी।

उसने एक शर्ट पहना और अपनी वाइफ के सामने जाकर खड़ा हो गया।

पत्नी जोर से बोली- अच्छा तो वो रेड कलर का शर्ट तुम्हें पसंद नहीं आया, इसलिए नहीं पहना ना...!

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5. संताः क्या तुम बिना खाना खाए जीवित रह सकते हो?

बंताः नहीं।

संताः लेकिन मैं रह सकता हूं।

बंताः कमाल है यार, मगर कैसे?

संताः नाश्ता करके और कैसे!

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Force India Mercedes - First Points

It has been the greatest news for Force India and all Indians in 2009 related to F1. The team gained the pole position and then went on to be at second place in the Belgian GP held today. The pole position itself would have been an achievement, the points today have given double reason to enjoy.

Congrats Force India Mercedes. Hope to see you with more and more points.

See the list of Belgian GP Results here.

Winner : Giancarlo Fisichella

Force India - Mercedes.

The force behind Force India.

Vijay Mallaya.

Happy Indian Independence Day

Flag
National Flower
National Animal
National Bird
National Game
Father of Nation
Current President
Current PM

Wishing a happy Janmashthami.

Happy Birthday Singapore

It is a belated birthday. But then sometimes we are late.

Flag
Size	700 Sq Km
Population	4.86 Million (48.6 lakhs)
Merlion
Esplanade

 

PS.

Mumbai has an area of 640 Sq Km and a Population of 19 Million.

Rajmata Gayatri Devi Passes at 90

Rajmata has been one of the most beautiful women in her times. None of the Indian Bollywood starlets could come anywhere close to her.

In her later years she looked like this.

Read more here.

Passing of a Legend. Gangubai Hangal.

At the age of 97, today morning, Gangubai Hangal left for the heavenly abode. I remember her seeing on Doordarshan National channel during my school days. It was after 9 pm there used to be Classical Sangeet program.

We will surely miss you.

Hasya Kavi.

Hope you enjoy it. It is in Hindi.

Synchronizing

With too much of data, we all have USB storage. So there is a need to synchronize this data. One way is to copy the data. But with sizes increasing to GB, it is not meaningful to do full copy every week.

I found two products on the web. Both have both a free version and a paid version. I want to share this information. Please do use them. Save time and use the saved time to watch you tube videos. :)

1. GoodSync.
2. Allway Sync.

Ghost of MJ

I read this story in the Straits times.

Went to the youtube to search. And yes it shows something. A faint black figure moving. God only know what is it. Is it MJ's ghost or something else.

See the video here and if you are in a hurry move to 8:20 place.

Google OS

Google announced yesterday that it is serious on launching an OS by the middle of next year. It will be called Chrome OS. By the way some facts.

- Chrome is a browser from Google. Available since feb this year.

- Google already has Android, an OS running on Handhelds. But they claim there will no overlapping.

In my opinion, though it looks like a small piece of IT news, but there will be lot of shake up. Seeing GMail, Google Earth, we all know that Google is capable of delivering lightweight, efficient piece of software. To be honest, I am waiting for the OS.

Read more here.

Bandra-Worli Sea Link

Now that is a good news. The much awaited Bandra Worli Sea link is ready and has got inaugurated. For those of us from Mumbai, and who have traveled towards the city via Mahim Causeway, know that this bridge is a blessing.

Some Quick Facts.

Length is 5.6km, Cost at 1600 Crore Indian Rupees. (Divide by 50 to get USD).  Some photos.

Photo from  http://indiabuzz.ne8.in/?pid=1987

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

Sad to read today that Jacko is not there anymore in flesh and body with us. I am no big fan of him, but during my school and college days it was a craze to dance like him. Every year in the school there used to be someone who used to do dance like him.

Anyway he was too young and on second round of reviving his career. This news was really a shock.

T20 World Cup

T20 is over and Pakistan has won, with Sri Lanka as the runners up. I tried asking myself, did we lack in practice, or did we lack in number of players or did we lack in strategy.  We played plenty of cricket in IPL. We also had so many players in the IPL.  That meant we had everything, right from choice of players, strategy as well as experience. Compared to us, the other countries just had handful of players, of-course for Australia.

So after lot of thinking I came to the conclusion that we should not relate IPL to world cup. IPL is IPL and World Cup is World Cup. Just because we have IPL should not give us the comfort of thinking that we have any advantage. So averages of IPL should not be used to determine winning edge in World Cup. IPL has its own merits, ICL has its own merits and so on.

Hope that we win the next T20.

T20 Loss to England

We are over-rated. And all of the team thought that no one could possibly defeat us. The first loss to West Indies should have been an eye opener. It is true that we have played more T20 games than anyone in the world, but slowly the world is catching up.

I think this loss to England is a reminder that we should not be overconfident. Too much of cricket and lack of strategy and we paid the price. Dhoni is similarly overrated, just like when Azhar, Saurav Ganguly or Dravid were winning, we equated them to Cricket greats.

Sometimes it feels that cricketers want to make all the money by playing as much as they can in as short time as possible.

Tennis had burnouts, looks like cricket will soon have the same.

Microsoft Small Basic

There are some fans of BASIC language out there (like me), here is some good news for you. Microsoft has a .Net based small basic.

The syntax is like the BASIC earlier but it is object oriented. Learning is fun. Hobby Programming.

Comes with the interpreter plus IDE.

Visit this site, download, get the docx/pdf learning guide and have fun this summer.

High Availability Manager

In Storage world, data is the driver. The purpose of storage vendors is to keep the data safe. Then innovations started. At the most basic level, RAID was offered to keep the disks (or LUN’s)  assigned to host (OS or clusters) safe. Then came the issue of availability, So there was dual pathing. But then the entire box could be a single point of failure. Here enters High Availability Manager from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). So if for what ever reason either due to regular maintenance, or disaster or disaster testing or any other reason for that matter, if we need a failover from one USPV to other, there is a solution now. Failover always could have been done on the Storage Box, but for hosts to failover, it had to be done manually. Now even this is automated.

So you let the second USPV takeover from the first, all at the back end, front end, everything runs the way it was. I think this is not just an incremental jump. Good news for customers. Better sleep.

Read more here.

My first youtube video.

My daughter is featured here.

Bollywood Movies

This year 2009 till now (Jan-April) almost 70 movies have got released. My numbers are based on the site here. But yet we don’t see a single movie that has become hit.

Have the directors lost the formula for success? Or Are the movies not released well? No advertisement or no pre release promos etc. What ever it does not sound good for viewers.

Probably we need some magic to work in movies. Last year by this time we already had Jodha Akbar declared a major success.

Hindi TV Serials

Just like all of us have identity crisis in our lives some times, so is Hindi TV Serials having now a days. If you watch the serials and compare them to what we had on Doordarshan 20 years back, it makes us sad. Some points.

• even after 20 years the TV industry has failed to reach a maturity in making serials. It is a shame.
• Years back serials used to be made on stories picked from Hindi literature. Today they are written with absolute zero literary value.
• There are so many (hundreds to thousands) so called actors churned from so called acting schools, who don’t mind acting in any role. Commercial interest is the only driver.
• None of the private channels have any time slot for education or programs for children. Just soaps with women fighting with women wearing expensive jewellery, livng in palatial houses and wearing makeup 25 hours a day.
• Sad that we don’t even have original songs. Remix Remix Remix.

Have we reached the pit or is the quality going to fall further. I have no answers. But seems like TV has lost quality. Other than making money nothing seems to work anyone. And reality shows, better to be silent.

Feroz Khan.

Feroz Khan passed Monday early morning in Bangalore.

I remember him for three of his movies. During my school days he came in Safar (with Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore). He had a song there “Jo Tumko Ho Pasand Vahi Baat Kahenge”.

The next movie where I like both the movie and the character he played was Qurbani.

And then for a long time I did not watch any of his movies. Lately saw Welcome and reminded of him again.

A total entertainer.

Rajnigandha

That was the movie that I saw yesterday. It is based on the story by Mannu Bhanari. "Yehi Sach Hai".

 

You can read the story here.

The story is very much valid today. The songs are very melodious. You should go and listen them on you tube.

Main Characters.

Amol Palekar
Vidya Sinha
Dinesh Thakur
Rajnigandha

 

For the un-initiated people, Rajnigandha is a flower.

To see more read here or see the movie.

Songs Lyrics are by Yogesh. More about Yogesh Later.

Kai Baar Yun hi dekha hai (Mukesh)

Rajnigandha Phool Tumhari (Lata Mangeshkar)

Music is by Salil Chaudhary, A genius.

Disks->Tapes and Backup

Backups are integral for the survival of a company. There are times when backups have saved companies. But just like failed relationships are never highlighted during marriages, similarly companies never highlight that they came so close to "close", just that a good backup saved them.

But I think that the amount of data backed up and the proportion of it used actually should be fraction of 1%. So is there any other solution. Should we device technologies that can deliver the safety of a backup but avoid the capacity of storage backups.

 

The volumes of disks, tapes containing backups surpasses the amount of data that we generate for business operations.

IBM305 RAMAC

IBM 305 Ramac (Random Access Method of Accounting and control) was the first computer that had a disk drive. It was released in 1956. A long time back. Its success defined the IT industry that we see today. In all these years, the computers have become an industry and a pillar of cultural change.

There are two schools of thought. One who see a computer as a miracle piece of hardware. Its components and what can make it faster, reliable, secure and long lasting. The others see only the software aspect. The way software has revolutionized the way we do business. The software people also look at reliability, security and long lasting feature, but more of their software. Both are correct and both are wrong.

The non IT people who have no idea on how this computers work either at the hardware or the software level (the end users) see it differently. Some see it as a source of power, some as a threat, some as a friend and companion, some as a research place, some see it as a time pass, some see it as a source of money. Have I left any other categories.

Virtual Box

Innotek created the VirtualBox. It is a virtualization engine. Acquired by Sun, it has gone through a lot of changes. I have installed it on Windows XP and am running Solaris, Ubuntu and Fedora on it. Virtualization that was a distant dream a decade back, has now become a standard. How come?

Thanks to Virtualization instructions now within the CPU, things have simplified. So where are we going now from here? Already we have yesterday's OS becoming Guest OS of today. Will that become a standard for home based PC's and laptops?

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Computer Data Communication.

Since early times effort was put to ensure transmission of data. We all know that the first successful demonstration was by Samuel Morse. He invented the telegraph, and the Morse Code. It was the first time data was transmitted using electric power. This was 1844 when Morse did the first transmission from Washington DC to Baltimore (around 60 Kms).

But all successful models are based on earlier models that were proposed but somehow were not viable. In 1753 there was a proposal printed in a Scottish Magazine. The idea was to have 26 wires (one for each alphabet) run from town to town. A prototype was built. But somehow it never proved to be economical or more clearly, a business model could not be developed.

Scotland has been the land of so many firsts. We have Scots who have had numerous achievements like

- Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations" was a Scot.

- Sir Arthur Conan Dyle, "Sherlock Holmes"

- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Treasure Island"

and now Sir Alex Ferguson of "Manchester United" are just a few names on the top of my head.

So moral of the story is IT Data Communication is not a 30-40 year thing. The ideas have been coming since 400 years.

Windows 7

Yesterday the beta of windows 7 has been released. This has generated lots of interest, gossip, expectations and of course predictions. Since XP, Windows OS are moving seriously. The previous versions whether Me, 98, 95 etc have DOS Kernel based.

10 years back, the requirement of users was not that tough. Computers and OS were still evolving. Today we need everything in the OS, including a coffee maker and microwave. And so are the OS become obese.

Lets us good sense prevails and users become more matured.