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If you have been following the last few posts you know how much I am troubled by these books - in a great positive way. "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand is no different like the great books I have read earlier. It puts a twist on individualism by linking it to creativity and how collectivism is crass base and all the bad things it represents. You can read the entire book to appreciate Howard Roark's speech or if you are still curious to know what the ruckus is all about without spending a month or two you can see the speech here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 . Don't worry if you are intending to read this book its not going to take anything away. The book is still sinking in. It kind of justifies some of my actions so far - and kind of makes me feel a little uncomfortable on what I could have / should have done. Instead of mulling over spilt milk this book focuses me like never before - to achieve an objective - can be anything - signing the 1000th autogra...

This book lasted 2 days. Started on a Friday after a colleague of mine managed to steal the book from his wife to keep his promise or to escape from my embarrassing remarks I made about not keeping your promise ( hey Georgie just joking :) ). And I finished it on saturday. I am not bragging - its a simple read and its only 160 pages. The book is full of metaphors and inspiring thoughts. Perhaps I would put it along with Art of the Start by Guy kawasaki. Forget entrepreneuring - its all about thinking through the pathetic mediocre life one is having - and ask oneself - where are you headed. I remember lying on top of the water tank of my second year hostel along with a friend called Musk. We were watching the flights on the landing path right above our head - with their wheels extended before they touch down minutes later at Meenambakkam. We did not know what business we were going to do but we were multi b and were doing quite some serious globe trotting. Fast forward 10 years ahea...

I was in between books. Had a heady read of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and had to unclog my brain !! And what a pick this book is. Totally mindless and riveting. Forget the story - cats talk, stones listen, time stops - it was fun to have a peek at the author's mind. * Archduke trio - Beethoven's last composition I guess. One of the characters goes on and on about how good it is. I am trying to lay my hands on it - and on the way I am discovering Beethoven. Still I do not know what a minor C or D or symphony or sonata whatever means - but the discovery process has started. Also at the same time my son Mr.Prithvi awakened me about the power of classical music. The other day he was wailing uncontrollably and I was making stupid noises to no awail. Then I started singing the basic Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Da Ne and he became quiet. It was a repeatable experiment. Now when I do variations of it as A B C D E F G H in the same tone he listens. Why -I cant fathom but one thing is...

Probably I am the millionth person to read this book and go ga-ga about it. This is my second attempt. First was in 1998 when I was in college a friend of mine ( who later turned out to be my wife :) ) - was reading the book and it piqued my interest - so got hold of it and started reading. Did not survive more than 2 chapters. Now again I gave it a go and what a read it turned out to be. Here is some gist of what I felt reading it. Things in no particular order : * Robert Pirsig, the author, says about " gumption ". What an idea - gumption is kind of an energy cum enthusiasm. You have to earn it by doing things - when you acquire gumption it gives a good feeling - kind of smug and happy feeling. I have felt it lot of times when I fix a problem or do some thing useful. The author says it in the context of fixing a motor bike - but you can feel it at lot of places - installing ubuntu on an old worn out computer. Now the trick is to watch out for the things which will drain ...

So this weekend I went to brand factory to scoop up deals. And guess who I bumped into - Vijay Mallya himself and had a quick guftagoo with him. VM : Hey venkat what are you doing here? VK : Oh recession time in US boss and the hike letters are just not coming. But you tell me what are YOU doing here instead of roaming around with your wife in Louis Vuitton showroom? VM : Louis Vuitton - yes yes my wife wanted to go there. I had to lie to my wife that I have a board room meeting . I heard they are selling Royal Challenger's TShirts 2 for price of 1. Tell me if you find it. You know I have sunk so much money and pride and now I am really struggling to pay these pensioners. Have to cut costs to keep them well fed. VK : Its alright. You have world class players in your team they will turn it around. VM : Really? Tell me do you believe in it? VK : No. hehe VM : Damn you. Anyway - coming back to my team - you know I cannot fire any one. Seems I have to pay 3 years worth of money. Have...

"Wow I am so excited this is my first 20-20. That Dhoni will not let me play one day nor 20-20. Now here is my chance to prove him wrong. Imagine if I hit it big I can do more advertisements. Already I am an icon. Take that you Dhoni fool. Mallya will let me fly one of his kingfisher flights, or let me drive one of his F1 cars and put me bare chested like Fisichella and Sutil in one of the volvos, and I will dominate Bangalore like never before. Perhaps they will rename airport road as rahul dravid road. Then that loser blogger venkat who commutes on airport road every day will have to say my name. Now let me concentrate. In test I have a full day before I hit my zone. But the umpire will say it's stumps and I have to start all over to get into my zone. Here already those Washington red skin cheerleaders have distracted me enough. And this Ishant Sharma is on the other side. Its getting difficult to see the ball nowadays - perhaps I have to see a doctor. Gotto ask Sachin or ...

Last week I got on beach ( in Thoughtwork's parlance - rest of the world calls it the bench for awaiting project allocation ). And I got vista ultimate installed in my Dell 620, 2GB RAM. Had to make some free space - actually lots of it - to install vista. Then once installation began I got an error on step 1 - An installation error has occurred. Restart installation. I did that a few times till my co beacher found that you need not enter the key and click next - thats what I did. Later I found while activating that the key I have is for enterprise - perhaps thats why the installation error? Now I glanced at my harddrive after the installation. It had consumed 10Gigs. Now thats lot of stuff. Is the OS going to predict my next click? Being an ardent Mac fan and an ubuntu fan I had lot of expectations for this contender. However I had to turn off aero's animations because its not smooth. I turn off compiz's goodiness too because it gets in my way. Only in OS X I let the gra...

is hidden here : http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/ls/lsds/?S_TACT=105AGX13&S_CMP=LSDL go kill yourself.

Great many men have walked on my lawns, corridors, steps. The last one who took my abode made me famous like none other. People looked at me with a new found respect. Camels, deers, dogs came to me to be treated. Flowers started blooming with joy. I did not know I had other uses than being a rubber stamp. Alas...those days are over. Now I am going to let criminals walk on my lawns, corridors, steps. Someone who has cheated a poor vegetable vendor's daily savings, a poor clerk's daughter's marriage's savings by using their hard earned money to write off loans taken by her husband,brother,uncle,aunt - by being the director of a bank. Someone who has used her MPLAD funds to help her husband create a mall instead of a housing unit, or a hospital or one of the many useful things 1 Crore a year could have done. Someone who has tied the investigating agency's hands so her husband will not be prosecuted for murder..yes you read it right - murder. Its a shame I have to bear ...

I was always thinking of writing a series in my post-a-month blog - so I will get disciplined to write more frequently for my million audiences...Finally I have broken my procastination shackles and heres the first post in a long ( hopefully ) series of a celebrity I definitely dont want to be this moment...so here you go : And the top rated honour goes to Fernando Alonso , 2 times world champion in Formula 1 currently driving McLaren Mercedes - (always) behind another McLaren Mercedes car driven by one Lewis Hamilton - who is a rookie and supposed number 2 for McLaren - who I heard has stuck Alonso's photo on his rear view mirror ( I just made it up - Hamilton from what I read about him is too humble and a nice guy to do anything like that). I was watching last week's French Grand Prix ( yes I am married..hehe:) ) and Alonso chased Nick Heidfield for 60 laps trying to over take him on one corner which was immediately after the pit lane exit. After the second pit stop Ham...

Today ( Feb 12th ) is the Bangalore Bandh - for protesting against Cauvery tribunal's verdict. Let me observe this objectively. Bandh : Bandhs are illegal in this great nation of ours. We needed Bandhs to eradicate the British - but bandhs are like self goals, inflicting injury on ourselves, setting your own shoe on fire, hit wicket - wish those boneheads understand the negative impact Bandhs create - It makes irreversible damage to the economy, image of India, investments, our work schedule. Now will this Bandh do any good to the cauvery verdict? No. Will it change the opinion of a single soul who has the power to do anything about it? No. What does it achieve other than doing all the damages I mentioned? Nada. Banning Tamil Channels : This is the most ridiculous "protest" I have ever heard. How does "boring" tamilians ( who watches Tamil Channels other than my poor mom and her friends ) achieve the result of pissing Tamilians that they will give back the wa...

I stumbled upon this blog that has unpublished photos of Hiroshima. It is very moving and will make your mouth dry. Still you have to watch it - to know the horrors of nuclear warfare - and think about the morons who are controlling the triggers for such horrors. http://fogonazos.blogspot.com/2007/02/hiroshima-pictures-they-didnt-want-us_05.html

it was smooth sailing on my new amd 64 bit kickass box. And suddenly eclipse failed to start with this error message : java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/104/1/.cp/libswt-pi-gtk-3235.so: eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/bundles/104/1/.cp/libswt-pi-gtk-3235.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Also my jdk was java_1_5_05..so I downloaded jdk_1_5_09 and all was well. Also I remember having some plugins - for web development - perhaps they screwed it up - anyway hope this helps some one.

Here are some of my observations the past year. I got back to India for good during the middle of 06 - after 6 years in US. There was lot that had changed meanwhile. * Any bill gets rounded to 50 paise. No more 5,10,20 and 25 paises. And I see 50 paise rairly too. * Indicas - it was a time when I was working in TCS the GL ( Group leaders ) got a Tata indica free or for some discounted rate I dont remember - and were going gaga about it - now 7 years later Indicas have replaced the black and yellow ambassador taxis. They look good nevertheless - but the mere sight of an Indica brings some anger in me - daily I see thousands on airport road waiting to cut into my lane( lane - something thats in the figment of my imagination ) - and also on the road - parked in the middle - creating a traffic jam. I dont know the GLs still drive aroun d in their indicas or given them away to the taxi wallahs. * Pulsar -somewhere in the middle of 04 or 05 I dont remember - heard about this new pulsar whic...

I went to grab water in the break area and saw the TV spouting news of Sanjay Dutt's impending verdict today. And there was this anchorman telling the news of Sanjay Dutt leaving his house. Should I even honor the word "news" for what the anchorman told? Do we have so much happening that it has to be told as it happens? How is it going to affect me today - will I lose electricity today, will there be a traffic jam in Bangalore? It wont be even a blip in my radar - nor so for the billion people in the country - perhaps for the one or two souls called producers who have invested on Mr.Dutt. Things are rapidly falling the Fox,CNN way - I remember once seeing some thing like this : breaking news : 10.01 PM somecriminal has been escorted by somePD to the airport, 10.08PM : he has been seated in the plane, 10.23 PM : he has been served prawn rice, 10.40 PM : he has been escorted to the loo. What idiocy is this? How do I save myself from the idiot box and the idiots pushing stu...

Today I removed my blog ka link from Thoughtworks profiles site. I had always wanted to do it - because it was kind of inhibiting my writing. I should watch what I say, be politically right - even though TW does not say anything of that sort - I felt I have to be a responsible citizen and not land TW in trouble. Now I can write what I feel about Karnataka Govt, the Indian Govt, Indian cricketers, Airport Road, people who park their cars on the road jamming traffic, the smokers who smoke their and my lungs out, the ridiculous property prices in Bangalore, the sad state of working children, our friendly neighbors P & C and so much more !! I thought I will start another blog - when I am this lazy to write in one blog itself - I will end up not writing on any of them. Later !!

ahh...my 7th grade English teacher would have written a "V.G" for the alliteration in the title. Anyway - last week the nice folks at AirTel set up a DSL modem in our home - and life is at supposedly 256Kbps now. Had hathway cable internet till now - but it was hopeless - net was good for checking emails - sudo apt-get updates will never complete. The list of woes is endless and it all got sorted out after the bandwidth expanded. Anyway here is what I have accomplished at home. A full fledged ubuntu "headless" server. Subversion : This was the first app I installed. You might be wondering why subversion. It keeps some of the files - like an excel sheet of expenses I have - versioned. I am trying to organize lot of stuff - and its time to get disciplined and versioned !! Torrentflux : This is one sweet app. Throws a web interface to the torrent downloads. Wiki : I have installed phpWiki. Why wiki?? I have been using it at work for the past couple of years and I have...

For some reason I have kept this blog impersonal - because I was too lazy to write about myself, or perhaps nothing big happened. Well anyway now I have to - We are moving back to India. Thoughtworks has accepted my request for transfer to Bangalore and we are moving in July 06. Top 10 things I will miss when I am in India : 10. Starbucks 9. Netflix 8. Apple show room 7. Interstates and its gas stations and its restrooms !! 6. Daily show ( thanks youtube!! ) 5. NPR ( thanks podcasts ) 4. 8.00pm sun light, snow ( but I dont like the cold that comes with it) 3. BestBuy window shopping 2. Americans in general - and especially the friends I made whom I might or might not meet again. 1. Hot water anytime and long showers.

I have Ubuntu dapper running on Dell Latitude D610 - with some help and inspiration from my colleague Josh Cronemeyer - a linux whiz. I have tried linux in fits and starts but never covered so much ground as I have in the past 2 months - and now very rarely I boot into Windows world. Pros : Stable. Gnome. Boots up fast, everything is ultra responsive - compared to windows xp on the other side of the laptop. Lotus notes on wine works surprisingly ok. ( damn you IBM for lotus notes ) Cisco VPN !! Java compilation time - 20% less time than windows apt-get install Multi desktops, desktop spanning. Wireless support much better from Dapper onwards. Hard drive never starts threading - uses virtual memory the way it is supposed to be. I run lot of stuff all the time and the OS never twitches. Cons : No TextPad No TortoiseSVN Lotus notes ( damn damn you IBM ) Colibri - perhaps there is an equivalent - havent researched Lot to catch up with OS X - but far ahead than that thing called windows.

Who is this post for? Anyone trying to switch careers ( I was in mainframes, asp then php developer then a swing developer before I switched to this web-app java development), or who is already in Java and wants to get to the next level. What this post is about? Few years back I was slogging on a swing app without knowing what the market was all about - though the swing app taught me the good and bad about Java - it did not help me in getting a job. This post is a guideline for that directionless soul... this.post : Heres some philosophy of mine. Ask yourself - how much did you spend last year on books on technology? If technology is your livelihood, think of it as an investment. You need to invest a lot ( and read a lot ) to get good returns. So do not hesitate to buy books, magazine subscriptions - its worth every penny/paisa/rouble. Lets start. Step 1 : Get to know Java's strength. Assuming it was me years ago, happily coding php in dreamweaver and nodding along with the posters...