In my MBA days, sleep was considered a luxury. There were often too many group assignments and pre-reads to complete that 24 hours in a day seemed to too less (or rather unfair). In those days, you would find disheveled guys moving about the hostel hallways like zombies not in search of human blood but the nearest water cooler. The would either go back and bury their heads in a heavy tome-like textbook or sit in front of a PC and move the mouse pointer frantically about the computer screens. Some of us managed 4 hours of sleep while some had infrequent hour long (power-)naps. Most of us were quite convinced that there was a monumental amount of work unnecessarily piled up on us. So when there was a weekend or a party coming up, all the frustration seemed to be vented out there in the form of exaggerated expressions of celebrations. Indeed, anybody witnessing such an event would have misunderstood us as a bunch of gaol birds on a parole.

An Anomaly

But in the middle of all this, there was a guy whose waking hours shockingly resembled that of normal (non-MBA) people. Let’s call him Jeevi (loosely translated to Malayalam as creature). Jeevi has his dinner with everyone else at 8 pm in the evening. Nobody even notices him quietly slipping into his room after that. By 8:30, he is fast asleep. Jeevi is rarely seen in any of the birthday bumps celebrations that start appropriately at 12 midnight. In fact, everyone made most out of the opportunity when Jeevi’s roommate’s birthday came up. As it was customary, the roommate also receives the royal treatment at the rear end.

Everyone thought Jeevi was an oddity or some sort of anomaly. He seemed to finish all the assigned work to him like the rest of us. He was in fact having a very good academic record. He had a decent social life (despite being quite an introvert). All this felt somewhat weird and ridiculous to our minds. The question bothering us was - ‘Where did he get all that time?’ Harry Potter fans among us wondered if he processed a ‘Time-Turner’. Sci-Fi geeks propounded if he had a Time-Warp device. Whatever he had, Jeevi was always surrounded by an air of mystery around him.

Where Truth Lies

It is said that everyone loves a big fat lie. It often doesn’t matter whether it is the truth or a lie. It is just how often you hear it. Most of us lived in the myth that we never had enough time to work or study. While, in fact, we found ourselves mostly crippled by inaction because we were simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work. Some experts call this Procrastination. It often happens to the best of people such as celebrities. Perhaps by the time you reach a top-notch B-school you are a bit of a celebrity yourself. Your tolerance for failure becomes really low. You wouldn’t want to do a shoddy job or rather embark into a territory you are least comfortable with. So you try to dodge at best or lay low as much as possible. But that is only as long as the deadline is not close. When the D day arrives, the inevitability of the deadline strikes you. It is then that your apparent productivity soars and the actual work starts getting done.

Most of also believed in another myth that we wasted a lot of time which could have been utilized for academic work. People tried hard to break their gaming addition or outings to squeeze more time out of the 24 hour cycle. But sadly the fungibility of time was another myth . This excellent article by Aaron written like a HOWTO debunks this myth. In fact, most of the MBA assignments required some degree of creativity which one is not prepared to give at all times. Also it is extremely boring (if not depressing) to be with books all the time. Personally, I took studies as just “one of the things” I had to do at college. And trust me, it works.

It would be unfair to generalize this to all management graduates. Some of them manage the course and extra curricular activities quite well. But they still live the lie and never forget to complain about the lack of time. But, as examples like Jeevi shows us so clearly that after all Einstein was right. Time is always relative to the observer ;)

I have also started tagging my bookmarks on Technorati. I suggest anyone who browses often always faces the problem of transferring their old bookmarks. Also, the problem of bookmarks growing much larger than one’s screen height is also a problem ;)

My browsing habits have become more extensive over the last couple of days. Actually, it has just caught up with the times. I mean, we are talking about a generation who has 1324 contacts in their social networking mini-site (i.e. their profile page in a site like www.orkut.com). I have supplemented my news reading with RSS feeds from most major news sites including Hindu. Other than Slashdot.org, I now also frequent Digg and reddit.

All this is thanks to the amazing open source browser Firefox. Unfortunately for 75% of people out there, Firfox is just a browser that has tabs. But few things which Firefox does, I can’t live without is

• Blocks all kinds of ADs and tremendously speeds my browsing experience.
• Having keyboard shortcuts for everything speeds it even more.
• Takes me straight to ‘Printer friendly’ pages, so no more paging around
• Shows all the downloads in the statusbar

… and much more. Of course all these is because of the extensions

It is so much exciting when websites have sprung up based on simple but strong concepts rather than the all encompassing portal based sites of the dot com days. It is probably what everyone is calling Web 2.0 these days. I welcome this change. Personally, I think has helped budding entrepreneurs like me bring ideas to market thanks to full fledged open source web frameworks like Rails. I have been trying to study Django and Turbogears out there due to my interest in Python (or rather my reluctance to learn Ruby after multiple half hearted attempts).

One of the most disturbing questions most game developers face is whether Video Game is an art form or not. Of course, by Video Games I’m also including computer game and console games.

A very well written essay on this can be found here Video Games as Art by clysm

My 75th post! (or so says my Wordpress engine), a big thank you to all those who have visited my little space on this sea of information. Is it now due to move to Wordpress 2.0? I’ve read all the enhancements and me don’t think so :)

With more and more projects like Basecamp and Gmail, the application space within a browser is limited only by ones imagination. If AJAX sounds greek to you, probably you might not have heard about all the excitement behind it. Basecamp is already net’s most favourite Project Management tool. And you would really need to get out of that rock if you haven’t heard of Gmail.

As a budding game developer I’m quite frankly petrified by the alarming growth of such web based apps (this includes Flash based and Javascript based apps). These days I’m sceptical if a gamer would download a zip file or (shudder) an EXE file and go through the installation to just try a game. All the while when there are many of your favourite games like Pac-man (-clone) and Lemmings already ready for you to play. Well, I guess hard-core gamers would be put off by the slow interactions within a browser, but playing speed might just be a question of time.

Anyways, I’ve decided to try my hand at some cool javascript coding. Right from the moment I discovered the game at E-Scribe I found it quite addictive. I just had to finish coding it. In fact, it must have actually taken me less than 5 hours to code, design artwork and test (in 3 browsers - IE, Firefox and Safari !!!) meanwhile sippping tea over endless discussion in the foodcourt ;).

For the impatient the game below is ready to play, so try it online, try it now ;)

Rules

The objective is to arrange the some jumbled numbers into numbers in increasing order. At each step all you can do is click on a number. As a result all the numbers to the left of the number including the number will be reversed.

For example, if the current list is 2 3 4 5 1 6 7 8 9 and you reverse 4, the result will be 5 4 3 2 1 6 7 8 9. Now if you reverse 5, you win.

Play here, now!

“Reverse” in your website?

Simple! Just copy paste the following code in your site

<iframe src="/downloads/reversegame/reverse-js-game.html"
width = "420" height="100" frameborder="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Please give due credits. The code is release under the GNU General Public License

Learnings

This section would be of interest only to Javascript developers Some interesting lessons learnt whilst developing this game are:

• IDE: Mozilla Firefox is an excellent platform to develop JavaScript apps thanks to the DOM Inspector and clickable JavaScript console
• Presentation: End output is very professional and customizable. This is due to usage of CSS which very effectively separates presentation from design. For eg: I can make any number of “skins” for this game. Also traditional game art resources such as fonts are already present “out of the box”
• Paradigm: Out of the box event handling model need some getting used to, especially for new programmers. This is especially true for timer code which I would expect most games to use extensively.
• innerHTML: innerHTML is not fully crossplatform. It is very useful for debugging hence was often used in alert boxes. Use for node creation use DOM functions such as createElement or appendChild
• Animation: This was one of the primary reasons I wanted to turn the text based game in E-Scribe to a graphical one. It was no clear which digits were being swapped. Rather than go for a full blown fading/translating animation, I opted for a simple blink. As a result the gameplay is faster and more responsive.

It looked as if a bright yellow galaxy of stars had fallen on the dark surface of earth. These scintillating golden specks of light, however, felt far more alive. Slowly you could make out the roads, the cars and the houses.

‘Beautiful’, I almost gasped.

‘Is it?’, remarked the wide-eyed Bengali girl as she leaned towards me. The airplane window afforded only a mere slice of the full view, thanks to the wings obstructing a fair bit of it. I shuffled quite a bit so that she could catch a glimpse of what I saw. Just to fill the silence, I stated the obvious, ‘Bombay is truly beautiful at night’. She merely smiled sweetly in agreement. I guess it was the thought that she would be meeting her hubby in Bangalore soon; that was running at the back of her mind. Just like it was the thought of me finally getting to see my family after a year; was running at the back of my mind.

You are home, now - once that realisation hits you, every second passes in a crawl. The sights, the sounds and the people around you have suddenly changed. Changed to something you instinctively recognize. An environment to which you were organically a part of. An environment that’s no longer sterile or alien. But one into which you can blend yourself in and be liberated. Yes, it’s like you were pickled and back alive again. I’m already loving this feeling.

Five hours later, I’m home. Yes, this time it is my permanent residence in Kerala. And this time, I’m showered with love and tendered with longing by everyone. After a modest amount of chit-chat, I’ve been advised to take rest. It must have been a tiring journey - they say. Couldn’t agree more, but worth every bit. I change to something more comfortable - like the super comfy lungi.

I lie back on my good old bed and wondering if I’m yet to dream or am I already in one? That I must say, was the best sleep I’ve had in months ;)

[PS: Regardless of the date of posting, I left for India on 17th Dec, 2005. I had reached London on 13th Dec, 2004. So an year had passed. Actually, there was no break in between. So this time, I took a month off. Well, Happy new to year to everybody :) ]

In the claustrophobic confines of an underground train, heavenly music fills my ear canals. Feet rhythmically tapping to those familiar pulsating beats. Fingers playing a salsa to the playful guitar strings. Lips curled to a blissful smile. I’m in a cocoon of music. Creating a small discontinuity from the surrounding space, a familiar microcosm from hundreds of miles across has suddenly surrounded me.

There must be, of course, a quiet rumble of the train outside. An odd stranger’s lips are also moving without a sound. But most of them are in a trance in their own cocoons. Sporting earphones with the classic white wires or simple black ones or sometimes ridiculously large headphones; they can be easily spotted. Mine is a white one. Easily mistaken to be an iPod, but it is in fact a Creative Micro Zen. Nicknamed him ‘Rave’, less technical and much less mouthful. My sole companion for routine soulless commuting. A chore that occupies about one and a half hours of mine everyday. I prefer music to reading. Reading is engaging, but music is both engaging and uplifting. I have come to terms with the weird disorientation I had blogged about earlier. Now, I revel and relish in the pleasure of my musical cocoon.

Unlike well planned officers-goers with a fixed commuting schedule, I have travelled to office at different times of the day. Every time-slot brings up a different set of people. For eg: at the 8:30 slot you will spot the cool-but-busy-business-women, 9:30 slot is for too-late-to-wait-office-goer, 11:00 slot are for casual slackers. Add to this varying traffic patterns, school children, helmet wearing cyclists, road construction workers, windows glass cleaners and the illusion is complete. To revisit the illusion of that particular slot one would have to wait for an entire day to pass. That’s London for you. Never hustle and bustle, never noisy, but a kaleidoscope of life with diurnal patterns.

Once one gets used to the music-induced deafness, your visual faculties grow keener and sharper. The familiar sights would now bring memories and unfurl curious patterns. A study of daily life is more interesting than it seems. But soon this would be a bore and my mind would wander to a different idle pursuit. I hate commuting!

---

They say there is always a calm before a storm. My inactivity in the blogosphere has worried many and excited some. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not going to pull out a bunny from my top hat. My excuse is the lamest and perhaps most overused one - Been saddled with work.

One of the first questions that pops up when you mention that you visited the U.K. is that have you visited Oxford. This Saturday, six of us decided to answer that question in affirmative. Would we get to see the coveted Oxford college at this late juncture of our lives? Or even manage to get a degree? We wittily mused. Reaching at 10 am in Oxford, most of the planning was done in the Tourism information centre itself. They were so thoughtful that they have a walking guide that covers all the important places you’d like to visit there. It is as simple as blindly following the arrows.

Even so with my famous sense of direction, I managed to reach a dead end at an uncrowded mall. Smitha and Bharathy decided it would be a good time to open the tiffin box. I was too busy gobbling down the Bread Upama. While JD didn’t miss the opportunity to tease about the girls’ culinary skills. Meanwhile Jaanavi bought some essential supplies to ‘fuel’ us for the rest of the day.

Cornered in the Quad

Though unfortunately many colleges were closed on Saturday, the most important (and spectacular) one wasn’t. That was Christ Church/College

• where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka. Lewis Carroll) taught and in the settings of which based his famous book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ . Some of the nooks and crannies of the place began looking eerily familiar when someone pointed out that many parts of the college was used for shooting the Harry Potter movies. The rectangular grassy open space in the centre (referred to as the Quadrangle) was truly breathtaking. Whenever this happens, that is, stumbling across such breathtaking vistas - the inevitable, the unavoidable happens. The next 15 mins is taking pictures of the individuals, sometimes in different permutations, with our gorgeous view backdrop. Rather, whatever you could make out of the view from the jigsaw puzzle that was created. Newbie photographers like me prefer to shoot just the landscape, but my more knowledgeable friends never fail to advice me - “Da fool, how will others know that you visited that place”. I scratch my head and grin as if I’m a fool and move on. Enough of my rant on photography.

As we went inside the church, a sweet lady noticed our interest in the stained glass paintings and offered to explain. For the next 30 minutes or so, I have never experienced such a perceptive and detailed analysis of a place or an object. It was like she was taking us hand in hand through time. Retelling forgotten tales peppered with humour, unravelling hidden forms from a seemingly complex artwork, pointing out awe inspiring characteristics that would be normally missed by a casual observer, she would weave herself and us across the Church. Hearing I’m from Kerala, she mentioned that she is writing a children’s book based on and elephant from Kerala. No wonder she is so good at story telling besides being patiently meticulous about finer details.

As we made exit from Christ Church, it started drizzling. But we continued visiting most of the colleges which comprise the world famous Oxford University. Being a weekend and vacation time, many of them were closed, but we managed to go inside a few of them. They were quite different from our Indian colleges. Mainly it was designed for a lot less people and had a lot of well maintained green spaces.

If we ever visit Oxford another time, I would surely try out the water ways, as it practically encircles the city. After a fair bit of (window) shopping at high street we boarded our return trains.

Surp- Rising

This Sunday we saw ‘The Rising’, a period drama based on the first war of Indian independence centred around the life of Managal Pandey. I expected a pretty boring retelling of events. I was surprised to find it quite well written both in terms of story and dialogue. However, it failed in numerous areas. The characters were not fleshed out well (even Mangal!) and the songs were jarring interruptions to the serious tone of the movie. I’m not writing a full review here, as the celebrities say, see it for yourself!

Remember how in UNIX how easy it was to run python scripts? Just type name of the script. No need to even type the extension .py

I got soon fed up with typing

C: > python foo.py

in windows. Digging up some Microsoft documentation, I soon found a way to simply type

C: > foo

and make it work. How? read on…

All you need is to create a batchfile, say ‘startme.bat’ with the two lines

ASSOC .py=PythonScript
FTYPE PythonScript=python.exe %1 %*
set PATHEXT=.py;%PATHEXT%

If you want this to be the default behaviour everywhere, put this in ‘autoexec.bat’. But wait, we have a better way to do this. You can make ‘startme.bat’ work like ‘.bashrc’ in UNIX by registry hack. Create a REG file, say ‘cmd-changer.reg’ with the contents:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor]
"AutoRun"="startme.bat"

Now opening this file will merge it to the registry. Now ‘startme.bat’ will be run every time you open the command prompt say by typing ‘cmd.exe’ in the Run command box. Hope this helps!

Sun, Sand and … you know what. Mixing six ordinary desis with that deadly cocktail will result in the inevitable. A weekend of pure escape in a scenic (check out the pictures) place called Bournemouth.

Here is a recipe I wish I had when I was learning to cook. For the benefit of all the Indian bachelors who are gonna start cooking, I give you - a lifesaver:

How to make Pulaaaaaoooooo

Or

Idiot’s Guide to Homely Indian Food

Since I’m going to teach you this ultra cool recipe, you are going to do all the cutting and slicing. He, he, he… start with the onions. We’ll need half a piece. Cut it into small pieces. And a tomato too. You can keep them together if you are really stingy and cannot afford many bowls (like… say a cookery show).

I’m assuming we are preparing for 2 (But that I’m eating both is a totally different matter altogether), so take 1 cup of rice. Now “wash” the rice. It’s easy - Pour some running water on the rice, do some sort of cleaning action with your fingers and drain it off. Do this 2-3 times, till the water gets clear. Now drain off all the water.

Take a pan-like vessel. Pour some oil so that it is about 3 millimetres high. Now, put some mustard seeds and cumin seeds. Heat on medium flame till the mustards starts “popping”. Now add your onions and tomato pieces. Did I remind you to cut potatoes? Of course, I did, you idiot. Well, one small potato is fine. Keep stirring till the onions turn slightly golden (or fumes fills the nearby room ;) )

Time for Masala mix. No, not the TV programme. Real masala. It’s roughly like this (all are in tea-spoons):

• 1 spoon turmeric powder
• 2 spoon dhaniya powder
• 1 spoon masala powder
• 1 spoon red chilly powder
• 3 spoon salt

Keep stirring till the onions looks shrunk (or your roommates starts coughing in the nearby room). Looks good? Maybe not. It sure tastes amazing. Not yet, you fool. Just wait some more. For now, transfer it to a pressure cooker or a large vessel.

If you are cooking in a pressure cooker, use twice as much water as rice (note to use the same cup you used to measure rice). Close the cooker and let it cook. If its an open vessel, use thrice as much water. Stir occasionally to prevent the frothing up effect (not as cool as it sounds, very messy actually).

Turn off the cooker after you hear three “proper” whistles (as in, not half whistles or hissing sounds). Or in an open vessel, wait till the water dries up (or till your roomates start jumping out of the window)

That’s it. You were expecting more, right? Sorry, that’s all there is to it.

Tip: Best eaten with Yogurt/Ketchup