ArunRocks

Please note that all the jokes below are in Malayalam. Salim Kumar is a Malayalam film comedian who often pairs with Dileep with a knack for witty one-liners. These jokes are mostly from the Salim kumar communities in Orkut. Many thanks to all Salim kumar fans

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Thilakkam
onnam class muthal kanjavu valichirunenkil
chalpalannu ippo english parayamayirunnu…

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madhya tiruvathankorile oru rajavu .peru sasi

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KalayanaRaman
Trying to break the coconut besides the lady and the lady falls to the pool of water and SK says
‘Yenta oru shabdham ketathu???’
‘Thenga odachappo oru piece vellathil poyathaanu’

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“njan advocate Mukundan Vakkeel. da coat-e”

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Thilakkam
Salim Kumar: njangalkku aliyanum aliyanum koody kurachu talks nadathanundu………..cashine kurichulla talks …Casual talks…….

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Chadikaatha chandhu
“Im Micheal Elias ,JAckson Elias,Vikram Elias”

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Thenkashipattanam
salimkumar to dilip:
nammal kaanaan pokunnath devootiyeyalle allathe mammotiyeyallalo.

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Salim Kumar is reading the classifieds section in the newspaper…”Varanmaare aavashyamundu……………………AASHWAASAM KANDAAL MAATHRAM PRATHIBHALAM. Eh?? Ithu veraiy parasyamaanallaiy…oh..thetti vaayichu”

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“Iyaal enthu pani aado e kaanickkunne…Thanne kondu njan thottallo..I ALL SO FAILED OF YOU.”

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nee sahakarikukayanengil ee kalavara namukoru maniyarayakkam…

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VAYARINTE VALATHU BHAGATHU KARUTHA MARUGULLA STHREE AANO EE KUTTYUDE MUMMY…..

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Pulival kalyanam
Nammal Nalu perallathe moonnamathoral ethu ariyarythu. Nee vichal aval erangi varumo?.

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dileep: entha ithu???
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Web Development is now getting dominated by frameworks. After the initial hype of Rails, Python based frameworks are getting more popularity especially after the release of Google App Engine. Nobody seems to be interested in building websites using PHP, even if they are highly experienced in PHP. This could mean two things:

1. There will be more demand in Indian IT companies for PHP skills similar to Perl scripting skills these days
2. There will be soon be a viable competitor to the immensely popular Wordpress blogging platform from the Python/Ruby world

I have nothing against Wordpress. In fact, it is one of the easiest tools to deploy. But with tools like cPanel, deployment could be no longer a deciding factor for blogging platforms.

Coming back to the topic of Python Web Frameworks, there is a multitude of options. I have used some of these framworks and found them to be ‘pythonic’ in different ways:

• Django Well documented. Tightly Coupled and ‘Batteries Included’
• Pylons Extremely flexibility to Plug and Play components. ‘Fun to Hack’
• web.py Great for beginners. Entire framework ‘fits in your head’

Pylons looks most appealing to me. So far it looks like the underdog largely overshadowed by Django’s presence lacking the marketing or love it deserves. A few weeks back I would have complained about the lack of Pylons tutorials on the web. A google search brought up several links pointing to the wiki tutorial. As many have pointed out, the wiki tutorial is too long and complicated for beginners. It would easily put off a beginner. It took me quite some time to realise that the best place to start learning Pylons is the Pylons Documentation itself and the best Pylons tutorial is the Flickr Search. Going through the documentation is almost feels like reading a book with every concept explained in detail.

Pylons currently seems to the having an edge over Django for enterprise application due to its well tested interface with SQLAlchemy. Django seems to be having a fairly recent branch for SQLAlchemy integration. Pylons typically uses Python eggs and VirtualEnv for deployment which is might seem a little complex to beginners, but once you try it once it is actually quite convenient. Most of the installation can be done from the command-line and it will be nearly an independent sandbox for Pylons development. However it might take sometime to understand other aspects of using python eggs such as uninstallation and creation of new eggs. I haven’t had much success with making a portable version of my Pylons installation on Windows though

My favourite templating engine is Genshi because it is very designer friendly(which also means it works with the tools a Designer has, not just that it is easy for a Designer to learn). I can easily do all HTML designing directly on my Genshi templates because they are valid HTML or XML documents. Almost all of Genshi’s logic can be hidden away as attributes which is a great idea. In fact, the templates are even valid XML which makes the creation of valid HTML pages a much more natural experience. Almost all XML tools and even HTML tools like Tidy will work flawlessly on Genshi templates due to these reasons.

Once you get used to Genshi’s templates, you might even use them for static web site designing. I am sure it will save you a lot of time whenever those last minute ’sidebar redesigns for every page’ pops up.

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I noticed that four out of the ten richest people are now Indians. Is this is a sign of India’s growing economic power? Is this an indicator of the overall economic disparity in the country? Has this happened before? Am I asking too many pointless questions? Maybe.

Here is the billionaires list from Forbes website as of today:

The list features many Indians like Nandan and Azim Premji. Hope this is a growing trend

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Dasavathaaram or Dashavathaaram or Dasavataaram has a premise that could have worked. Kamal’s retelling of the 10 Avatars of Vishnu to the modern audience (if you think I am crazy, please click here ). Each Avatar (like the legendary Avatars) contributes to the sustenance of the universe (ok, just Earth in this case). It would have been a classic, but here is what probably happened over a plate of idli and filter coffee:

Kamal: I have written a rough script that will be the mother of all scripts. It will be my biggest project of all time and it will have the budget of a Hollywood movie…ummm… around 70 crores.

Aascar: 70 crore? (Stops chewing) Sounds huge. But why 70, sir?

Kamal: I dunno. 70 crore sounds really big, you know.

Aascar: Yeah, good point.

Kamal: I mean, it will be colossal. Should take at least 10 years in the making and I should have 10 different roles, more than anybody else has ever tried before.

Aascar: Errr… 10 years? what will we do for 10 years!!!?

Kamal: Makeup, of course

Aascar: Oh, that’s true… but, err…. we would still have time left!

Kamal: Build some hype around for a long time. The buzz will be good for the publicity.

Aascar: Hmmm, ok…. but we might still have little time left

Kamal: Oh, then postpone the release a couple of times. Tell them its Post-production delays. Filling in jazzy visual effects and stuff, you know

Aascar: (Chuckles) Yeah. I like the sound of it. Sounds like a Sooper Dooper Meggga Hit already. Lets work out a rough budget for the producers and finally we can figure out the visual effects budget.

Kamal: Oh, I almost forgot. We need to hire only Hollywood folks for all the lead technical stuff. This one is for the Oscars. They might be a bit pricey though.

Aascar: (Face brightens when Kamal says Oscars, but saddens when he hears Pricey) hmmm… okay

(Several furious punches on the calculator later)

Aascar: (Yelling) Got it, sir! The Visual Effects budget figure is also done.

Kamal: (Excitedly) Really? How much do we have? 30 Crore?

Aascar: No, sir!

Kamal: 20 Crore?

Aascar: Nope!

Kamal: 10 Crore?

Aascar: No, no, no….

Kamal: Huh? (Angrily) 1 Crore? 10 Lakhs? What is it?

Aascar: No, dear sir… its only 1 Lakh. These days even Tsunamis can be created on laptop computers. Besides, due to our global offshore animators, the entire film can be done in India at low cost.

Kamal: But thats the budget for a TV serial’s special effects these days. I wonder if the output will be any better. Isn’t there any other area where we can cut costs?

Aascar: Hmmm… well sir, then there is your pay package….

Kamal: (Interrupts) Oh… 1 Lakh you say? That’s should be fine, then.

Yes folks… the visual effects are an eye sore. Even a 2 year old will be able to make out that the stadium was computer generated, the ship carrying the idol is a 3D model and Kamal is not present in many of the stunts. The grotesque makeup of some characters have tones that remind you of plastic and dough rather than skin. The only saving grace is Kamal’s rendering of some characters by imitating their accents and body language (Bush was truly delightful ).

In short, don’t have any (Hollywood? ) level of expectations.

Dasavathaaram - Meaning of 10 Avataars

This is copied from a forward and I lay no claims on the authenticity of its contents. But kudos whoever wrote this, he understood more than I understood in 3 hrs and 10 mins

One thing we had noticed is why people didn’t get the real subtext and reason for the various roles and hence the title. If you knew the real dasavatharams of Lord Vishnu and their characters you can appreciate the script more.

Let me explain, starting with the best adapted role:

1. Krishna avatar - Vincent Poovaraghavan Lord krishna is actually a dalit, he is dark-skinned [shyamalam]. He saved draupadi when she was being violated and he was the actual diplomat in mahabharatham. Lord krishna dies of an arrow striking his lower leg. Now look at how vincent was introduced.. he appears when asin is about to be molested and he saves her like draupadi. Vincent is the dalit diplomat, fights for land issue [soil issue to be exact] and dies from the metal rod striking his leg. Oh even five of vincent’s men are drugged at P. Vasu’s.. sounds familiar???

2. Balarama avatar - Balarama naidu This is an easy given. as the name suggests and the role personifies you can easily get it.

3. Mathsya avatar - Ranagaraja nambi nambi is thrown into water in an act of trying to save lord from being thrown into sea, though vainly. what more clue do you want?

4. Varaha avatar - Krishnaveni paatti During the mukunda song, krishnaveni paatti does varaha avatar in the shadow puppetry. The frame freezes on it for a second. there is the clue. Moreover, in varaha avatar lord actually hides earth so as to protect life forms. Here too krishnaveni hides the germs - life form inside the statue so as to protect.

5. Vamana avatar - Kalifulla khan remember in vamana avatar, lord vishnu takes the vishvaroopa, that is the giant form! Hence the giant kalifulla here symbolises vamana avatar.

6. Parasurama avatar - Christian Fletcher Parasurama is actually on an angry killing spree and killed 21 generations of the particular kshatriya vamsa. Hence the real KILLER… Guess what thats what our Fletcher is! He comes around with the gun [modern upgrade for axe] and kills everyone around. I have to check if he kills 21 people though.

7. Narasimha avatar - Shingen Narahashi first of all the name itself is a play on the words singam [means lion in tamil] and narasimha [the avatar being symbolised]. Lord Narasimha manifests himelf to kill the bad guy and he also teaches prahaladha. In the movie, he shows up to kill the killer fletcher! and is also a teacher.. Lord Narasimha had to kill the asura with bare hands and hence the martial arts exponent here.. get it?

8. Rama avatar - Avatar Singh Lord Rama stands for the one man one woman maxim, kind of symbolising true love.. Here Avatar portrays that spirit by saying that he loves his woman more than anything and wants to live for her.

9. Kalki avatar - Govindaraj Ramasamy As you know, the hero in kaliyug can be none other than the Kalki avatar!!!

10. Koorma avatar - Bush This is the most loose adaptation I couldn’t clearly comprehend. But if you look at the real koorma avatar, the lord is the turtle/tortoise that helps in stirring the ksheera sagara and bringing out the amruth. This essentially creates war among the devas and asuras. Similarly today Bush facilitates war between you know whom… May be Kamal also indicates that this avatar is a bit dumb like the tortoise…

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If the over-descriptive title was not enough, this is another one of my tips to use my favorite editor - Emacs. Some of you really liked my earlier post on Emacs tips on Windows, so here is one more tip to improve your productivity.

Most of the time while editing a document, we need to quickly browse the folder of that file. Add the following lines to your .emacs files and so that by just pressing function key F12 you can immediately view its corresponding folder:

A nice extra is that the opened explorer will have the current file automatically selected. Press F12 once in a while, it quickly becomes addictive

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Ittesbin is truly a spectacular time each year. It feels like college all over again. And many would swear that’s not always a pretty sight. Sleep deprived zombies can be spotted around the campus at midnight tired from practice sessions. There are also the worker ant types who would be trying to collect every scrap they could get their hands on for making variety of props. And there are also the insomniacs who are just there to have a preview of the show and blabber some profane advice under the pretext of ’suggestions’.

Whatever it is, Ittesbin has always been an explosion of homegrown on stage entertainment within Infosys Mangalore. However from this time on, they introduced a new off-stage event called ‘Video Making Competition’. The theme was ‘My Infosys, My Mangalore’.

I took charge of our team and penned and directed a video over a period of three weeks (yes, almost whole of April!). It was a massive covert operation to shoot almost all of Mangalore without other teams getting a whiff of it. To see the result click on the link that follows

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AccoladES is a labour of love (and a little boredom) for the past one year. It is a website that I have be designing for the HR department of ES, the largest unit within Infosys. Yesterday it was inaugurated by none other than Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy. Infosys doesn’t have a 20% rule like Google, but sites and solutions like Accolades are getting more and more recognition these days. It is great for Innovation at Infosys and I hope will go a long way in helping Infy move up the value chain.

Sorry for the poor mobile-cam quality! NRN is on the projected screen (top-left). I am behind the lectern (top-right)

Some of the features of the site:

• Accolades has a Web 2.0 feature called Peer Appreciations for facilitating online appreciations.
• It runs on ASP (vanilla not .NET) and IIS which can scale up to hundreds of simultaneous users.
• It has an aesthetically pleasing and minimalistic design

Coincidentally, I was the MC for the event from Mangalore. People seemed to enjoy the way it was presented. Designing websites which was initially just a hobby of mine is already becoming a hot skill these days. I have designed several static and dynamic sites in the last 9 years and consider myself to be fairly good designer. But the real deal seems to be the dynamic aspect of it. Already almost the entire software development community is moving towards web based development. Soon all applications will be purely web based. Developers would be required to be skilled in managing web servers and/or Javascript. Personally, I see a tonne of work coming my way

Not that I am complaining but I also see a lot of MCing coming my way as well!

The views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer

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Emacs is generally not very popular on Windows based operating systems. The default installation of Emacs leaves you with a very spartan UI and a very basic editor. However, due to Emacs’ extendibility, you can create a very powerful editor by customizing your .emacs file and making some OS specific tweaks. We will be concentrating on the latter as there are plenty of .emacs files floating around for your reference.

I have 5 simple yet useful tips below, which I have tested with a GNU Emacs 23.0.0.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) running on Windows XP.

Tip 1: Starting off With a Prettier Emacs

Most of us customize the fonts, colours and window position of Emacs. In fact, I have found that dark backgrounds are much suited to Emacs than the default light background. However, when Emacs starts up, it annoyingly shows the default fonts and colours first. As your .emacs files load, it jumps around and changes colours quite noticeably.

You can avoid this annoyance by making a simple registry modification. Create a new .reg file say set-frame-and-fonts.reg and copy paste the following lines. Open the file to add the changes to the registry. Restart Emacs and enjoy the difference!

Caveat: The lines above are my preferred colours, fonts and window positions. Your’s could be different. Please customize to your taste.

Tip #2: Add “Open In Emacs” option to all Files

This will be indispensable once you are more used to Emacs. You will feel like opening anything and everything with it. And being the one true swiss-army-chainsaw it is, you will be delighted at the enormous no: of filetypes that Emacs supports out of the box.

This .reg file add an “Open in Emacs” option in Windows Explorer when you right click on any file. Copy the following lines to a .reg file say Add-Emacs-To-Open-Any-File.reg and open it to add the changes to the registry. Make sure that you have modified the path below to point to your emacs installation path (mine is in D: drive). The emacsclientw.exe resides in the same place where your runemacs.exe resides (right-clicking on the emacs icon, generally shows you this).

Tip #3: Goodbye Capslock

If you use Emacs a lot, you will find that you have to use the Ctrl key a lot. You might find your left thumb getting strained after prolonged use. The easiest solution for this is to reassign a less used key as the Ctrl key. Most people choose the Caps Lock key for this purpose. It is surprisingly not that much useful and soon you will forget that such a key ever existed.

Whenever I searched, I found that most people swap the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys. However, this is irritating as I might still want to use the old Ctrl key if I press it accidentally. Here is how to replace Caps Lock with the Ctrl Key.

Copy the following lines to a .reg file say replace_caps.reg and open it to add the changes to the registry. Now just reboot and you are done!

Yes, it takes some time to “unlearn” and “learn” the new key position, but trust me it’s worth the effort.

Tip #4: Use a Spell Checker

A spell checker is something I feel should be a part of any editor. Here is how to enable on the fly spell checking in Emacs.

1. Install aspell
2. Add the following lines to your .emacs file (adjust the path to aspell accordingly)

Tip #5: Setup a Postscript Printer

By default, you can pretty-print all your documents directly from emacs. But this requires configuring a postscript printer. There is a nice package called Ghostscript which takes care of doing this.

1. Download and install Ghostscript from here say at D:\gs

2. Download and install GSView from here say at D:\gs\gsview

3. Then add the following lines to your .emacs file:

Caveat: Be sure to switch to a light background color scheme before you print, else your fonts will be so light that they won’t be readable!

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Here is a belated valentine’s day greeting from both of us.

For all my readers, I recommend visiting the microsite I had made earlier. Now it is written entirely in web.py. Thanks to my new website host, A Small Orange, I can create and host python based applications. I agree that there is no need to design a new blog in python again, but it is a great way to learn a new (anti-) framework. Web.py applications are really small and easy to understand and therefore, has less bugs.

Guess what, Jeff Atwood owns an ASUS laptop model (W3J) that is similar to mine (F3J). He is full of praise about the decision. Considering I took at least 2 months (the standard duration for yours truly to zero into an buying decision) to arrive at the decision, it seems well worth now :).

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I use a fairly powerful laptop at home. It’s not exactly a gaming laptop but it has a pretty powerful gaming card (ATI X1600) and uses dual core (Duo T2300E) processor. In short its a great machine to play classic Sega/Nintendo games of yesteryears’ through emulators. Increasingly I have been concerned about the life of my laptop keyboard which I have found, unlike the desktop keyboards, could be quite easily jammed (especially if your 10 year old cousin is banging on Enter key yelling ‘MAAARREYO’).

Somehow I had this intuition that a gamepad-like input device can solve this problem. After a couple of minutes of googling I found that my guess was correct. I could find that it is easily available in cities like Mumbai/Bangalore and it is quite cheap too. But I was not sure if I can get in in Mangalore so I searched the usual places and a few unusual places like gadget.in. I had the following criteria for my gamepad (or joypad or game controller as it is called in some places):

• Must have the basic set of buttons for playing Nintendo and Sega games
• Must have a joystick. This is the basic advantage of gamepads over keyboard+mouse
• Must be cheap so that I can probably buy more if I need to host a mini game party
  Plus, it must have decent looks

The prices range from Rs. 450 (Chinese make incl. Shipping) to Rs. 1100 (Logitech Dual action) online. I also read accounts of people who went for Logitech and lost their calibration in a few months and accounts of people who have been using cheap gamepad for the last 3 years.

Finally, I could get a decent gamepad with vibrations and dual joysticks from Mangalore (Saibeen Complex, Lalbagh) itself for Rs. 350. It is a Chinese model called PU850 and is autodetected by XP when plugged into the USB port (though it comes with a mini CD with drivers). It has all the features I wanted. As regards to looks, decide for yourself

Don’t they go well with each other :D? I have played only a few games with it so this is a quick review but here is what I found:

• It is small and light for my hands alleast. It is fully powered by the usb (no batteries)
• Almost all emulators detected it out of the box
• Sega Genesis games work well with the joystick in Analog mode. I use the 4 shoulder buttons and right joystick in most cases.
• Nintendo Gameboy games work well with the left D-pad or HAT switches. It seems to be over-reacting to the joystick. Could be an emulator problem though. I found it more easier to hold it tilted forward when playing these games.

All in all, it has been a good value for money. I can now literally sit back and play my game collection with much better controls and stop worrying about my Pandora.

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