Home:Rains

Home!:Rains



Nothing like coming home.It washes all the murk in your head!My every trip to vizag is such a trip down the memory lane.It gives me loads of stuff to sit and ruminate and calories that take me a lifetime to burn.

Sh*T Happens

Original

Institutionalization!

I was planning leave for my friend's wedding and as it usually happens to me,some psychological undercurrents swept me to a my thoughts and I started recollecting all the discussions about marriage,of my friends,friends' friends,cousins of my age;everyone and anyone who had touched twenty three.Everyone discussed wedding.Longime boyfriend-girlfriend wanted to get married n 'settle down'!
Marry & Settle Down!
We in India tend to use these two words rather synonymously.For me they are two different words and mean two diametrcally opposite things.But as everything else marriage in India has been institutionalized.You are five you go to the school,twenty one you graduate and after that you marry(and settle down!).It is just another stage in your life.
Success Rate
It is not that this approach does not work,most of our parents did this and their parents too.But,I feel that this approach has been made to work.We have beaten this into the box and we are quite good at it,blame it on the adjust kar lo na attitude.
"Dad asked me to marry this girl,mom liked her too.They must ve chosen the right girl for me"
This applies even more to girls than guys.They solely rely on the decision taken by their parents and in most of the cases it is assumed that they must not go against their decision.What we donot undrstand is that parents are also humans like us and the margin of error is the same as it would be for any of us.The error in judgement might be because of scores of reasons,the short span of meeting being just one of then.Even the backgroud check that they might run(which extends to hiring private detectives in some cases) might prove to be inadequate.What we must understand is the fact that we ignore scores of things that we feel are not so important but the decison that we take might change a person's life completely.I am not even mentioning elders-are-experienced reason because noone and I mean no-one other than you can decide who you would be best with.
Why not?
Why can a person not chose the person he/she likes/wants to be with,marrying is a totally different thing,he may chose to marry or not.The lines of marriage and the person you would like to spend the rest of life with are skew symmetric often assumed to be interesecting by people whose vision lacks the ability to fathom depth.
If there is anything we donot know or cannot explain we take cover in our culture and/or tradition.Not chosing the right individual and spending the rest of our lives in the agony of incompatibility is not our culture,believing that others can make the right decision for you is definitely not our culture.
So what do we do?We should keep in mind that relationships are important but not everything in your life.I understand that people have their priorities but marking getting-married on the top of your list is something that still bewilders me,unless you are wedding planner or something.

· Current Mood: hyper
· Current Music:Jiye toh jiye

RSS - Dissection

I have been using RSS for quite some time now.I have closely monitored it for a few years and still don't see many people using it.It is indeed Really Simple and even people like my mom can use it.So,I thought to burst the myth and tell people without using much of jargon and terminology about what RSS actually is and what the orange icon on your browser is.

RSS,as the name suggests is a way to syndicate data for webservices.It is a group of feed formats used to publish works e.g. blogs news items,etc.It allows information to be published once and viewed in different programs.A user has to just subscribe to the feed,by visisting the feed's URI or the simplest aproach would be clicking on the RSS icon on their browser and voila!your subscription has been initiated,you donot have to visit the page often,fear missing the latest updates and stuff,just RSS.And yeah!Feeds can be read using feed-readers (such as feedburner or bloglines etc.) or an aggregator which can be a web/windows(desktop)/mobile based.So,it has something for everyone,the Publisher and the end user.

History:

If we trace the history a bit RSS started as RDF Site Summary(RSS) introduced by Ramanathan Guha for Netscape(RSS 0.9),later renamed as Rich Site Summary(RSS) and this incorporated Winer's scriptingNews syndication Format(RSS 0.9.1). Netscape gave up on this and later a team called the RSS-Dev Group developed a newer version of RSS,without much changes. In the version released in 2000 Winer made an attempt to include audio file syndication on feeds,which I feel gave birth to podcasting.RSS 2.0 was released in the later part of 2002,RSS 2.0 removed the type attribute. RSS logo was initially used by Mozilla Firefox and later incorporated by other softwares and browsers and the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds.

Downfalls:

RSS does not allow any well-formed XML markup in it’s content. This is very bad when it comes to using RSS-syndicated content elsewhere. In fact, it only supports plain text or escaped HTML which, without getting into the technical issues surrounding that, simply means it’s very difficult to work with.
RSS Example:

--HTML tags cannot be included-------------

How is RSS different from ATOM?

I personally feel that both are same and work the same but for the fact that metadata is not that comprehensive in 2.0.Atom is a relatively recent spec and is much more robust and feature-rich than RSS. A feed consists of some metadata about the feed, followed by one (or naturally more) entries. The metadata chunk in ATOM contains, happily, all of the data we found missing from the default RSS 2.0 feeds. The id element provides the "where," giving the feed's URI. The title provides a "what," giving the title of the feed.Author says "who" created the feed, and link provides the "how"--giving a link to an HTML version of the resource the feed represents.And my favorite - Atom feeds provide an “updated” field which means that any feeds that are modified have a timestamp associated with them. And if we sample a section of an Atom feed,it can also contain elements detailing categories, intellectual property rights, contributors' details, a feed's logo, and more.All these are quite important from a publisher's perspective. A cool feature of Atom has to do with autodiscovery. Most of the time, if you point your browser to a feed-enabled website, autodiscovery kicks in and the browser alerts you in its own unique way to the presence of a feed. The same thing happens when you point a feed reader to a feed-enabled website as opposed to the specific feed itself. While feed autodiscovery has been around for a long time, Atom feeds actually contain a self pointer autodiscovery URL which is highly unique from RSS itself. RSS is not the be all and end all of blogging. It is certainly possible to blog without using RSS either to collect your content or to publish it to the masses. However, the sheer benefit in terms of traffic opportunity and exposure should be enough for any blogger to add a new dimension to his blog.·

Current Mood: calm ·

Current Music:Mad

Leader of the Autobots

Before time began, there was...the Cube. We know not where it comes from, only that it holds the power to create worlds and fill them with life. That is how our race was born. For a time we lived in harmony, but like all great power, some wanted it for good...others for evil. And so, began the war. A war that ravaged our planet until it was consumed by death. And the Cube was lost to the far reaches of space. We scattered across the galaxy, hoping to find it and rebuild our home. Searching every star, every world. And just when all hope seemed lost, message of a new discovery drew us to an unknown planet called...Earth. But we were already too late.

I am Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. We have been on Earth since our ship the Ark crashed here so long ago. As leader of the Autobots, I am a very busy being, but my comrade Autobot Bumblebee told me that all the electronic devices around KK are crashing and this is because of who I am and I am writing this post in order to understand human culture a little better.
It started with the mobile of human KK, now the human found out that it had started behaving wierd,did wierd things,played its own music,went online,called friends all on its own.We suspect it was a Deceptacon.
Then it was the display on his automobile that acted strange.
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
Be it a mobile or a mobike display,if we have sense,they can too.
It's you and me, Megatron!
At the end of this day, one shall stand...one shall fall!Taking the children(their electronics) was a bad move. Megatron!You shall pay!

Am Back!

Alrite,

after being like an year away from the world.For a while I was in the “I don’t care what you’re doing right now” camp.Now , am back to my good ol' blogging days,actively orkutting,am into twitter too (*blush*).I feel like college again!

Am new to twitter(I know...I know) but have since discovered that it really is a great way to keep up on current events, find interesting people and keep in touch. And like a number of geeks, I carry several mobile Internet devices at all times,so it's easy to update and get updated.

Silly as I thought it was,am posting my blog link in my Gtalk status message,on my twitter.Stickin' my poster on virtually any online wall I see :P

Union Budget-Dissection-Beyond Numbers

Yesterday when the FM read out the budget there were many in the market who cheered and there were others who felt it was damp.Let us dig deeper into this.

The Numbers:

To start with 6.8% of Fiscal Deficit (on GDP) is not a very good news but the FM said that it would be partly compensated for by borrowing from the market and the remaining by printing notes.

What is it,apart from numbers?

It was a purely scheme-oriented budget rather than a growth-oriented budget as some pointed out, as the govt's major concentrated was on funding its flagship schemes rather than introducing any fresh ventures as it promised before coming into power.NREG got a whooping 144% fillip,Bharat Nirman was also taken care of well(with a 45% boost).IITs and NITs got 2113Cr and Rs450 for starting new IITs and NITs,apart from other plans such as, starting new branches for the Muslim University etc ,for the educational system.Increasing the relaxation band for Education Loan came as a pleasant surprise,would be of great help to the weaker sections,which was probably,some speculate,Rahul Gandhi's suggestion.What I loved the most was the concept of upgrading the polytechnics,under the skills-development initaitive.per se Education was handled intelligently and initiatives such as these would take us a long way.

For the Corporate:

Now,if we dive in deeper,Fringe Benefit Tax has been relaxed.Great News,eh?Only if you are an employer.It's just that the FM removed the FBT thorn from the corporate and thrusted it in the side of the employee,as ET put it.There would be absolutely no difference for the government which earns around 8k INR from this.Relaxation of this(introduced by Mr.Chidambaram and is termed as "nuissance tax" by many)also reduces the paperwork for the corporate(esp.IT).Now ,it is the employee who pays out(indirectly) for beneits like,prizes,gifts,concessional travel and stay and scores of other benefits for which the employer used to pay the tax previously.But increase of MAT from 10 to 15% might prick the corporate sector real hard,but if we look at it this way,that the credit period has only increased(7 to 10 yrs),so,even if you pay heavy taxes this year you reap the dividends later.

A brick here,a stone there

While increase of savings on personal income tax as exemption,from 1.5lakhs last yr to 1.6lakhs for men and 1.9lakhs for women,might not affect many lives,hiking it by 15K for senior citizens might sure help.Wiping out the surcharge completely might also fatten a few wallets,esp. those earning more than 10lakhs p.a.

Farmer perks are ,as was expected, good.All in all it was just the aam aadmi ka budget,which might not have pleased the corporate sector guys much,but what anyone would appreciate is the fact that taxes were not increased,they were just rationalised and also the FM has promised to introduce a new Direct Tax Code in the next 45 days,which many feel might put an extra burden on the fiscal deficit,which I presume they are planning to cover using the rationalisation receipts,disinvestment and the 3G auction coming up.Identifying sustainance of the GDP at 9% as the immediate challenge is also laudable,given the fact that this will act as the economic surplus that aould be needed to improve our standards of living,esp the bourgeoisie.

Kambakkth Ishq-Devil's Advocate

Kambakkth Ishq is a movie based on the oft repeated battle-of-sexes saga. Made with a whooping 60Cr,shot at the Universal Studios,a 2000 print release add some hit audio tracks to it, tadaa! a perfect recipe for one-of-the-most-awaited-movies-of-this-season.
This movie,inspired from a telugu movie Bhramachari starring Kamal Hasan,is about Viraj Shergill,a Hollywood stuntman who beds a new girl every night but the very thought of wedding gives him nightmares who accidently meets Simrita Rai, a medical student-cum-smalltime-model at a friend's wedding.On her first assignment as a surgeon she accidently drops her watch,which sings the wedding hymn mangalam every hour gifted to her by her aunt, in Viraj's stomach(!).Scared at the thought that she could be dragged to the court and sued for this act of hers she tries to find a way to get Viraj back to the hospital table.She tries to woo our hero by doing the pyaar-ka-naatak and at the same time our hero lands into a bet with his brother played by Aftaab Shivdasani that he will hitch Bebo and break her heart(:P).Quite predictably in this whole exercise our hero falls for the female lead,she dumps him post- surgery, thrashing the whole incident as just some naatak.But she later realises(as she 'should' in Bollywood) that he is the guy and gatecrashes into 'Viraj's wedding with Denise Richards(*jaw drops*)'.Viraj explains to Denise(God knows what!) and elopes with Bebo.
The plot might seem a bit(read overtly) illogical but the locales,costumes,stunts make up for it(to an extent).Most of the comedy is under-the-belt,which can be a family-audience-deterrent.
Rip-Masand :
a)I don't undertand what is it about using profanities that Rajeev Masand finds so offensive and downgrading of a film.Everyone uses them,Everywhere!.
b)What I don't understand is also that when you are in an area where the stars stay, can't people like Sylvester Stallone EVER come to the rescue of a couple of hapless girls in an alley.What is so wrong in that?
c)Reg. forgetting a watch in the tummy of a patient.Out and out comic movies like these are allowed to take such liberties,this has been an unsaid rule of world cinema since it's inception.I can quote a million examples of instances such as these in movies that have been runaway hits and many of which Masand himself reviewed.
DA's Review :
Watch this flick if you like expensive costumes,good looking people,great locations and sets,good songs,stunts,are ok with some slapstick humour and can shell out a 100 bucks for some timepass.This movie will not bore you,atleast. Caveat!Not to be watched with the family!Phaleez! ·
Current Mood: groggy ·
Current Music: Kyun

Bing Vs Google

I've been testing BING for a while now,It is a search engine,similar to Google,but it is NOT Google... then what is it??? a better product than Google or is it just a metaphor.
I played around with both side by side , and this is what I felt:
Main Page Size: Both have almost equal page size, 14KB with 4 http request and 15KB with 1 http request for Google and Bing respectively. Page loading times are almost equal for both the search engines.
UI:I liked the concept of the home page background image changing every day on BING. When you float over it, you find the hidden "Easter eggs" that lead you on some interesting and unexpected links. So, full marks to Microsoft's Bing.
Web Search Results:Web search results for a simple search query: When I searched "karthik" ,Google fetched me double the search results.

Image Search: This is a place where bing needs a lot of improvement. When I did an image search on myself, google gave me results from linkedin, Twitter, Facebook ..etc. Bing didn't give me any relevant image search result. Well, bing's mouse over features are good. But the image search is really bad.
Video Search: Almost same, mainly from youtube and other video streaming sites.
Well, Bing reached at 2nd place in the search engine war, after google, ahead of yahoo search and ask.com. I think that the market share of google will remain unchanged but bing will take away yahoo's and ask's market share. I am definitely not shifting to Bing, from Google.

Current Mood:Dorky

Current Music:Khuda Jaane