The Man from Earth

It has been a long time since I penned last. Many things have come and gone, many things have changed. Many things actually provoked me to write something, but guess, not enough motivation from my end.

Well, saw a quite thought provoking movie named "The Man from Earth". It is based on the work of writer Jerome Bixby (wiki helped me there) who started writing it in the '60s and finished it on his deathbed in '98.

The movie moves with quite a rapid pace and it actually keeps you on the edge for most of the time. The entire movie is a discussion between the protagonist and his friends on the day he is moving to a different city/town. Won't disclose more of the plot here.

I can see why this movie won those many awards. This work seems to be the masterpiece of Bixby. Also the narration quite crisp and rapid which really does not let your attention wander. The actors delivered a wonderful performance.

All in all, a movie worth watching and the time devoted is not wasted.

Nice Quote

Today I read one of the better quotes and guess from where! Our very own "Orkut" which has a habit of throwing some of the weirdest quotes that I have ever read.

Anyways, coming to the quote. So the quote is - "One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat them at politeness".

Diff'rent JVM's

A few days before, I came to know of another JVM (apart from the well-known Java's and the lesser-known Microsoft's).

It comes with the BEA's Weblogic (which has now been purchased by Oracle) - so, Oracle's JRockit (which incidentally Oracle states - "The Oracle JRockit JVM is the industry's highest performing Java Virtual Machine now built into Oracle Fusion Middleware.")

Now, the story starts when our team was given the responsibility to migrate our codebase from Win32 to x64. We use JNI and so when the migration was over, we tested it. And, whoa we got a core ;). After spending like a day going through the whole JNI and trying to find out the cause, we got an idea to try the Sun's JVM and bingo, it worked.

I will not like to jump into conclusion, might be some parameters were not right with JRockit, but definitely in future I will always be suspicious of these different JVM's flavor for sure.

False Hopes

False - Wiki states, "False is the antonym of True".
Hope - Again according to Wiki, "Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best".

The literal conversion of False Hopes turns out to be the feeling that the event will turn out for the best, infact, turns out for the worst. This applies to many situation we face in our day-today lives.

Okay, let me get the context straight. I am talking about the most important part of a democracy (for the uneducated - Election).

With every election, there comes a list of promises (from the illogical, baseless, biased, foolhardy, laughable...) from different political parties as well as leaders (distinguished as well as otherwise). These mostly turns out to be hollow promises. They hold little water when the election gets over.

So, where does the false hopes comes here? First of all, each election, we think our situation will get better and we try to elect the lesser evil (its also called TINA factor - There Is No Alternative). And after the elections, we feel betrayed by the very people we had put in our trust to.

This year may not be different. But again my false hope tells me otherwise. What to do - Hope Floats!!!

Google's Multiple Inboxes

Google enabled a new Google Labs feature "Multiple Inboxes" today.

First of all, the name seems to be inappropriate because it is misleading. We do not get multiple inboxes, rather we get multiple panes where we can have different view simultaneously. Whoever thought of such a name.

I am not sure what its use will be for me, but you may wish to try it out. I, for now, will stick to the conventional look. Its much more convenient and more logical.

For those who wish to try out this new feature, you can enable it from your Google Labs icon (top right corner of the inbox). Once enabled, you can go to the settings and choose "Multiple Inbox" tab and may wish to provide search strings which you would like to enable in certain pane. The positioning of the pane can be customized.

Here are a few examples of some generic views:

• is:starred
• is:unread
• is:sent
• is:drafts
• is:spam
• is:trash
• has:attachment
• label:[your label]

For more information you may wish to have a look here.

A far more better lab item would be the real "Multiple Inbox". One which actually lets us handle multiple GMail accounts simultaneously.

The other feature that I liked is the Offline. Its a real nice thing, although it requires a browser extension installation. You are not connected to the internet, you just go and compose an email, send it. Whenever you have internet connection, the offline contents gets synchronized with the gmail server and viola, your email is sent. That's innovation.

Cricket - A Funny Little Game

Tonight, I was watching a cricket match (I prefer the term - keeping abreast of the score) on CricInfo (not paid to publicize them, but just a way of thanking them for keeping me in touch with the game, still). The game was a seesaw kind of a match, and at last, to my content, India won.

So, I was just browsing the CricInfo site and came upon this funny article (anecdote, to be exact) about a match and thought to share it with all. It went on like this (the funny part)...

The pair had added four when Robertson-Glasgow drove the ball to long-on, fielding in front of the Pavilion, and set off for an easy single. Despite having taken the first one rather slowly, the pair decided to come back for a second. Raikes, running back to the danger end, was less convinced but after hesitating, set off. "Then," Robertson-Glasgow later recalled, "strange things happened".

The two of them crossed mid-pitch, at which point Robertson-Glasgow (according to the Times) or Raikes (according to Robertson-Glasgow) had a change of mind and direction and the pair ran side by side towards the Pavilion End.

After a few yards Raikes realised that this was a recipe for trouble and turned round to try to get back to the safety of the Vauxhall End. At the same moment, Robertson-Glasgow did exactly the same, so both were again heading in the same direction. "I followed him," Robertson-Glasgow wrote, "but, thinking the crease was overcrowded, I set out for the other end."

To the amusement of what the Times described as a "now thoroughly interested house", the hapless pair turned almost simultaneously for a third time and resumed their side-by-side pursuit for safety. "The Old Carthusian beat the Old Wykehamist by a short head," noted the newspaper dryly.

The situation was allowed to reach a near-comic state by the dreadful fielding of the Surrey side, who were "driven temporarily insane by the goings-on". The initial return from long-on was poor and was then fumbled by mid-on. As he picked up the ball he was confronted with loud shouts from both bowler and wicketkeeper to throw the ball to their end. Confused, he dropped the ball for a second time before returning it to the bowler, who took the bails off, only to see both Robertson-Glasgow and Raikes standing in their ground, albeit exhausted. He duly threw the ball to wicketkeeper Herbert Strudwick, who whipped off the bails.

You can read the full article here.

It was hilarious, to say the least. I could just imagine how it would have looked to the spectators and those poor guys out there...

Be sure to read the entire article though...

Finally A Human Error

Today I tried googling something and came up with a list of sites flagged as malicious. I tried googling "Google" itself and it too showed up as a malicious. :-)

So, as thought, it was indeed a bug in Google. They have claimed it as "Human Error".

BBC News
Computer World
CNet
Guardian UK

Finally, we can sleep peacefully knowing the big guys out there too make errors, that we "The lesser known Software Engineers" are generally prone to.

Nobody's Perfect

Life has a strange way of bringing out our fallacy, one way or the other. Frankly, we human beings are never going to be perfect. But we may start improving upon it.

I am not going to shy away from owning up that I too am in the process of identifying my mistakes and trying to find a solution.

One thing I have noticed is that I keep expectations from friends, not that I find it a vice. My friends too keep expectation from me, which is natural. Still, there are times when it really leads to the odd ill-feelings when expectations doesn't materializes.

Live life, "bindaas" type. Trying to imbibe this new motto. Let's see how successful can I get.

Of Slumdogs And Millionaires

After hearing the hype, I watched the movie (Slumdog Millionaire) yesterday. The movie goes from innovative story to pathetically Bollywood-like screenplay. Haven't read the book "Q & A" on which it is based, but a crispier narration would have done a lot of wonder.

I had heard about the low light this movie shows India in. My take is a bit different. It does shows what is truth, but gets stuck with showing only the single side of a coin.

The other contentious part is that a boy from the slum (agreed, he worked as a chai-wala in a BPO), still he speaks English with an accent. The Inspector and the Constable are speaking with Indian accent. Also, many a times the host speaks in Hindi, but this boy replies in his accented English. Doesn't look like he is from the slums, does it?

This is my opinion, but I would have liked the movie to be either made in Hindi and dubbed in English or vice versa. This kind of experiments (this is far from Hinglish genre movies we see now-a-days) is really bad.

All in all, a nice movie. Could have been much better if handled in a different way. A nice cliched Bollywood movie, I can say. The end songs is typical Bollywood.

Events shown are definitely improbable, if not impossible.

A New Beginning

"A new year, a new beginning."

Thought of starting a blog which will contain my, so called, "Random Thoughts". The original blog has been moved to http://lifeonthesinecurve.blogspot.com/. Hope the followers will continue to visit it.

That's it, "short and sweet" :-)