There is a lot of debate on the influence of movies in our lives. Can violent movies or games be responsible for increase in crime?  There are people who want a complete ban on such material. But then there are those who support these citing freedom of speech. The struggle between them has a long history and is not going to end any time soon!

In India, attack on freedom of speech is much more violent and is on the increase. As you can guess, every movie is going to offend someone. If the villain is of a specific color some people get offended. If the hero is muslim some others get offended. There are even guys who get offended when they see love between a man and woman!. There is no end to such madness

I am always on the side of freedom of speech. But when you see all the latest english horror movies (for example - saw series or hostel series) I get doubtful. These take violence into its most vulgar form. Most of us may see it and then just forget it. But there could be psychopaths who would want to simulate the movie and that isn’t pretty.

That is exactly the problem with freedom of speech. Above I have written that I somehow find Saw and Hostel movies repulsive enough to warrant a ban. But another person might find other movies equally repulsive. See? It is a catch 22 situation.

Movies have affected my life in various ways and mostly it is in a positive sense. My career in software development is a direct result of the movie terminator 2. I still remember staggering back home after watching T2 lost in thoughts about artificial intelligence. It has motivated me to jump into programming and soon I realized a machine like terminator is not going to built in my lifetime :-). Another movie that left a lasting impression is American Beauty (especially the character Ricky Fitts).  If you haven’t seen it yet I suggest you rent the movie for this weekend.

I will be attending the second barcamp organized at cochin (Thrikkakara Campus) on 3rd February. I will not be presenting anything, but just want to listen. Hopefully a lot geeks are going to turn up there. I know a couple of them through their blogs.

If you are geek, don’t miss this event. It is an ideal platform to meet other geeks (as you know finding geeks in Kerala is not easy ) You can register for the event here.

Wondering what a barcamp is? Here is wikipedia for the rescue.

Ok. First thing first. I am still alive. It is almost a month since I have written anything  here.

Last month I changed my company. Right now I am in a very small company. We are developing a product based on open source technologies and it is pretty cutting edge stuff in web application development. So obviously there is no free time these days!

Here is a summary of stuff I have gone through in a month - Jboss, portlet specification, jetspeed, jbpm, struts 2, orbeon forms, google web toolkit and maven. I found Maven a pretty neat tool, especially for a large project with a lot of dependencies inside and outside the project.

One of the good things in a company is that you know everyone and everyone knows you. Of course a lot of bull* in big companies are missing. That to me is a big thing!

Here is another thing for you to check out. My “former roommate” Rana Basheer has started a Web site for home library cataloging. Rana is a genius and I am sure this site is going to be famous soon.  Integration with other systems is a strong point in this site. Check out a sample library.

After a stint of over 2 and half years, I have decided to quit from Infosys. Today is my last day in office. Unlike the day I left TCS, I feel quite happy today!

There isn’t much to write about Infy experience. I did meet a couple of good guys, but the overall experience can be hardly called “intellectually challenging”.

No, I am still in the rat race. You see, I have a family to feed So I am onto a smaller company, with the hope that I will find some really challenging technical stuff and would be able to make “some difference”.

I have been really busy for last few days. On the professional front, I am looking for some challenge. Couple of interviews,  but I am still to find a better job.

The other thing that kept me busy was the Ruby programming language. I had gone through python language couple of months back and wasn’t much impressed. So when I started on Ruby, I was very skeptical and it seemed like some Japanese propaganda.

But 2 days of Ruby programming had me fully excited. You can  say I am on the “programmer orgasm”. Ruby is a very compact language and you will be amazed at the code reduction when you convert something to Ruby.

I will soon be writing a quick reference on Ruby for a Java/C++ programmer like I did with PHP. After a month of programming in PHP, I think it is a very badly designed language. I think PHP became popular due to two major reasons; Almost all web hosting providers support it. Also for a novice Web programmer, PHP was an ideal choice.

If you were to develop a Java web application, you had to study the entire J2EE stack. Then after that you find out that not many Web hosting providers give Java or JSP support!

Now that is where Ruby shines. Ruby on Rails is a Web application framework built on top of Ruby. Interestingly, Dreamhost provides Ruby on Rails support. I am yet to dig deep into Ruby on Rails, but from a couple of simple tutorials it looks very promising.

I have dabbled in linux long time back but never took it seriously. But this week something triggered inside me and I have decided to give it another try. My cousin sunil is a linux guru and with his blessings I have restarted my linux love!

But hey, I have no intention to chuck Windows out. After all I have paid over Rs.6000 for it! So instead I decided to use Vmware (which is a virtual pc server and is now free!) as my new machine and install Debian on it.  Check out the Debian social contract to see why I am interested in Debian.

Earlier when you run linux on Vmware it used to be slow. But not anymore! With my machine (amd64 with 2GB RAM) speed difference is hardly noticeable!  Another advantage is that with NAT networking on Vmware, your Wifi network will appear as an ethernet network for the virtual pc!  (Configuring WiFi on Debian business card ISO seems to be almost impossible).

So I downloaded business card version of Debian (33MB) and I am currently running the net-install from it.

One  of the simplest software to manage personal finance is the Acemoney lite from MechCAD. If you don’t want all the fancy stuff offered by Microsoft money or similar tools, Acemoney is the ideal choice.

My basic need is to track all the expenses over a period of time and then analyze it to see where my money is going. For this purpose I found Acemoney extremely useful. You can also export your expense/income details as a csv file or XML file.

The installer itself is less than 2MB and there are no adware or spyware with Acemoney lite. Only limitation is that only one account can be created on the lite version. For me, that is not a limitation at all!

I stay in Kerala, southern state of India. Kerala is unique in many respects. I won’t go into details but in short, day to day life here is a challenge!

Today I came back from work early since I was not feeling well. Summer is at its peak and there was no electricity when I came home. My father told me that power was down from morning. I called electricity office to check on the status. Here is the conversation,

Me: Hello
Electricity office guy: Hello, electricity office

Me: We don’t have power in area “xyz”
Electricity office guy: We have switched off electricity in the entire “abc” area

Me: Why? What happened?
Electricity office guy: We are painting the transformer

Me: eh? painting? oh! When will it be over?
Electricity office guy: No idea, probably by evening

As you can guess, power came back after 12 hours of painting! You can imagine how challenging it is to run a business around here

Today I assembled a brand new computer! The idea is to use it exclusively for programming. Since the new one is not intended for gaming or for any high end stuff I kept its configuration minimum. Here are the basic specs,

1. AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor
2. Asus M2N-MX motherboard
3. 2GB DDR2 533 RAM
4. Seagate 160GB SATA
5. Wireless mouse and keyboard

Total price for the components was below Rs.20,000 ($450) and I have decided to keep it free of Windows. So right now I am downloading the latest stable version of Ubuntu, the hot new linux distribution! The server edition has LAMP builtin and hence I can straight away jump into some PHP coding.

The fastest way to download anything is to use a torrent distribution. Fortunately ubuntu also has files on torrent network. Today I tried out a new bittorrent client - utorrent. This is free of any adware or spyware and the download is just below 200K! It is hard to believe that people still produce optimised code! Give it a try, you may decide to use it instead of your current bittorrent client!

When I wake up, I check my Gmail account for emails. Then I scan website feeds on Google Reader to see what is happening on the online world. After that I scan latest news from Google News.

If I have any doubts about anything I straight away go to Google Search. Infact I have set Google Search as my homepage.  Whenever I need an image related to a topic, I do a Google image search.

My friends contact me over Google Talk. Once Yahoo messenger was the IM I used, but not anymore.

My various “todo lists” are now on Google calendar. I maintain various pieces  vital information (passport number, contact numbers etc.) in Google spreadsheet. I rely on Google Adsense to finance this blog.

So if tommorrow Google disappears, I will have a tough time! Let me be clear, I am a big fan of Google. Their products simply kick ass and I am impressed by the way they have adopted Ajax in everything.  But the reliance on Google for everything is frightening…

I came across the story of a small company who had gone out of business simply because their pages disappeared from Google Index (Possible reason? - trying to game google!). For example, 80% of the visitors to this blog come from Google search!

Another problem is the fact that the Made for Adsense (MFA) sites are getting smarter. Instead of just copying content, they are also building links. The net effect is that the original site which actually authored the content will be flagged as spam and may get removed from Google Index! It is a hard job that Google has in their hands!

I have 3 broadband networks at home. I use BSNL 900+UL, Asianet WOW 199 and Reliance Netconnect. My main network is BSNL which is quite stable at 256kbps. Asianet is the backup which gives speeds upto 2MBPS. Reliance netconnect using USB modem is the final backup and I use it whenever I am on train or bus or on the beach thinking about hot babes like maria sharapova (don’t worry, it is a gimmick to get more traffic!).

As I have posted earlier, I recently upgraded IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. Also Firefox was upgraded to 2.0.0.3. Everything looked smooth until today.

Today being the last day of the month, I wanted to check the Asianet WOW 199 usage. The maximum I can use is 700MB/month and I just wanted to see what is left and download something (paris hilton photos perhaps?)

So I switched my Wifi connection to Asianet and clicked on the account usage link. The login screen came and I typed in user/password and clicked go. Following is the screen I got on IE 7.0.

As you can see the error is quite informative. It is as useful as a britney spears album is to a seminary (oops I did it again, the traffic bait!).

The error looked suspicious since login page and account page were served from the same server. Anyway I called up customer care and they sweared that the server is infact working!

Ok, probably IE 7.0 has some bug. So I tried the Firefox 2.0 to login, and here is what I got,

Thank god! Atleast it says there is something wrong with SSL! This error is much more useful than the IE 7.0 error. But still I have no clue what is happening. The idiots who coded this error decided that I don’t want to know how to access the site.

But I want to. Otherwise I have no other way of getting my account info. So turned to the ultimate saviour of tech problems. The Google!

Ok. Here is the true picture. IE 7.0 and Firefox 2.0 decided to support only SSL version 3.0 onwards since previous versions of SSL (1.0 and 2.0) are insecure. But luckily in IE 7.0 there is an easy way to enable SSL 2.0 (which Asianet account page is using).

1. Click on Internet Options -> Advanced.

2. Under security, check the use SSL 2.0 checkbox.

The firefox 2.0 hack to enable SSL 2.0 is bit complicated. If you are itching to know about it, search in Google!

Now this incident clearly demonstrates why many Software developers are idiots when it comes to usability. Be it microsoft or the open source community, there are many who fail to understand simple user interface/communication principles.

I guess this also explains why geeks are incapable of getting girl friends like aishwarya rai!

Last week, I went to vadanappally beach with some of my cousins in Trichur. It is not a crowded beach and is an ideal place if you are thinking of spending some time in meditation or introspection! Here is an interesting photo from the trip.

We are admiring a piece called kadal nakku (fish bone). On top of it we could see some crawling mollusc type creatures.

Just last week I realized that it is over 8 years since I started my programming career (In India guys are ashamed to call themselves programmers, they would rather say “software engineer” or “senior software engineer” or “consultant” etc.). Last time I counted my experience as 5 years and obviously that was 3 years ago!

In Indian software industry, any guy who completes 3 to 5 years of programming career automatically becomes a manager. So essentially no programming/design after 3 or 5 years. Instead the guys start to do what is called “project management”. Something which terrifies me. It is a sheer waste of human talent and experience.

After 8 years of programming I realized an interesting fact. My ability to design software systems or code a software component reached its peak only after 6 years of programming. Ok, it may not be same for all, but it seems that you need to have atleast 5 years of solid programming experience to become a master programmer.

Another ability I acquired recently is the ability to troubleshoot a programming problem instantly. Also during code reviews, a glance at the code gives you lot of design/code improvements even when it is written by an experienced coder!

In most of the software organizations, human resources team(HR)  has no idea about the different types of talent employees possess. There cannot be any exceptions. Everyone has to have the same talent and same aptitude. So that means they cannot imagine a guy with 8 years of experience as a programmer. HR thinks, this guy must be either a lunatic or a total looser to remain as a programmer even after 8 years!

Following is a hypothetical conversation. But it could happen anytime

Tech support : You have all tools needed on your system - Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook Express.

Me: I need Java compiler.

Tech support : I don’t believe you. You are too old for that. Get a written approval from the CEO.

My office is about 25Kilometres away from my home. There is a company bus from a stop about 2 Kilometres from my home. If I am on time, I take this bus or otherwise I drive my Maruti 800 to office. 

Of late I am trying to take the bus more often. The morning 2KM walk is a good exercise for the body and mind! Bus starts at 7:45, so I start around 7:30 from home. It is a pleasant time to walk - cool weather and plenty of fresh air

This short walk of 15 minutes is a good time to reflect on the life. Today as I was walking, I noticed a mother scolding her young child. The child is refusing to go to school. Mother tells him - “I will call the police and let them take you”. Suddenly child was very afraid and he became submissive.

This reminded me my first visit to UK. One of the things that surprised me most was the fact that british generally had no fear of their police. They respect them, but fear? - I doubt it. This is just opposite to India or Kerala where Police has a very bad and fearsome reputation. They do command some respect, but most people consider them as some kind of monsters.

Now the people themselves are to blame for this. Indiscipline is so part of our life that only a fearsome police force can control us. It is the fear of police that keeps most of the anti social activities in check. 

Recently there were some attempts to give a humanistic face to Kerala Police. Some videos were made  by public relations department which showed how politely police should handle people. When it was publicly screened, people were laughing it off. It was as if people expect the police to be brutal!

In Malayalam, there is a saying - “yatha praja thatha raja”. This translates to - “as the ruled so the ruler”. I guess it applies to our police force as well.

I received S3 IS on thursday. I love this camera.  It has all the features a beginner to medium photographer needs. The only bad thing I noticed so far is the rather “fragile looking” built in flash. I doubt it will last more than few months.

Here is my first masterpiece using this camera. It is the macro shot of vinca rosia flower at home. It is shot in manual mode around noon and came out really sharp!

I have bought a brand new Canon S3 IS powershot camera from Ebay. It is yet to reach me and I can’t control my excitement. The seller has provided a tracking URL for the camera and I am refreshing it every minute

S3 IS will be my 4th digital camera. My first one was a Kodak camera bought in 2000. It was a 2MP camera with horrible photo quality, but neverthless was worth over Rs.20,000. Last one was a Canon A80 and it no longer works. I am yet to come across a digital camera which worked for more than 3 years!

I decided to buy Canon S3 IS due to following reasons. Will post a detailed review once I get hold of it!

1. Excellent feature set
S3 offers 6MP which is good enough along with 12x optical zoom. It has got image stabilization which is quite useful when you use zoom. Users of this camera also reports that the image quality is quite good. Uses AA batteries (I hate Li-Ion battery based cameras).

2. User reviews at dpreview 
I use  dpreview for quality camera reviews. The users of S3 IS camera has posted a lot of information which influenced my decision.

3. Amazon reviews 
Lot of positive feedback at Amazon as well.

4. Pbase/Flickr photo gallery of S3 IS 
I am impressed by the photos at Flickr and Pbase taken using S3 IS.

5. The price 
It is priced below Rs. 20,000 on Ebay India. I was looking for a 12x zoom camera below Rs. 20,000.

You can buy Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS 6MP from Amazon.

I had to take mandatory vaccinations for my daughter recently. This includes polio vaccine, triple antigen etc. But I was not so convinced about the need for some injections (for example, the costly injection for meningitis).

The problem is simple. Private hospitals want to recommend as many vaccinations as possible, since it means more money. Also latest vaccinations are pretty costly compared to long time running old vaccinations.

One thing I have noticed is the blind faith that people have on modern medicine. They are more confident about the medicines they take than their own immune system. I have seen this even among many doctors who think that medical intervention is good in all cases.

But you don’t need to be a genius to see that medical intervention is not needed in many cases and in some cases is more damaging than the original medical problem you have. Most antibiotics are a big burden for our body systems and affect the kidney directly. Long term use of relatively harmless medicines such as paracetamol can cause kidney failure. I have seen many taking it casually like a chewing gum thinking that it will prevent any fever!

Now things are even reached ridiculous proportions in United States. For example, people queing up to take flue vaccinations every 3 months and the recent case where Texas has made it mandatory for girl children to take ant-cancer vaccination. I was stunned when I looked at the vaccination schedule for a baby in US. It is like complex computer flow chart. Healthcare in US is hijacked by medical mafia and their profit margins are unbelievable!

In Kerala, healthcare is big business. “Hitech” hospitals are coming up everywhere. To achieve profitability it is natural that these always recommend a huge set of lab tests/scans for any patient they can get hold of! Patients are also to blame. If a doctor says, “You have a mild cold, go home and take rest” - patient thinks - “This guy has no knowledge in medicine!”. I have heard that some good doctors even give distilled water injection to patients to give them psychological comfort!

One of the most difficult decisions I hade to take in my life was when during my wife’s pregnancy doctor asked me whether I want the painless delivery injection to be taken.  I was well aware of the side effects of the same. I asked back whether there is any  pregnancy complications, to which doctor (she was a good doctor, always calm and smiling) replied that only problem is that the pain is unbearable. I said I will wait 2 more hours and probably it was plain luck, the delivery went through fine within one hour.