Today, I saw Vaastu Shaastra in E-square multiplex just 5 rows behind the screen. From start the movie was strongly reminiscent of Bhoot and hence will draw comparisons by default. However, Bhoot scores over VS in terms of acting, characterization and cinematography.

For horror fans, the styles of horror utilized have been slightly expanded. It is a familiar formula. Perhaps, gruesome makeup has been added to the series of close-ups of hysterical characters, sudden appearance/disappearance of strangers and conservative use of ambient light. The really killer is the sound effects. Personally I felt that it has been overused. The script was heavily flawed. There is no direct connection between the movie and its title and there is no motive or a good explanation for the events. The only notable performance was that of the boy Master Ahsaas, who contributes a lot to the spookiness of the movie.

Surprisingly, the best thing about watching this in a theatre is the crowd. When I was watching The Exorcist, I was in the balcony circle and you could hear genuine gasps and squeals. But the VS crowd was a lot more mischievous. Their witty comments made the dragging scenes quite entertaining.

For me, the most amusing part was the location. The story is set 23 kms from Pune. Hey that’s where I live! Seems I have to check my Vaastu soon ;)

Yes it’s true. ArunRocks.com is now a truly multimedia site. You can see it in action at http://www.arunrocks.com/gallery. Its powered by Coppermine and GD 2.0. The results are much better than I expected. I cannot wait to integrate it with rest of my site.

Today was Dussehra. Pune was still in the Dhandiya mood and people could be still seen partying at many places. I saw the movie Collateral. It was a very different movie in its genre. Most of the usual clichés are avoided making it a straight to the point - thriller. Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx make an amazing pair. One flaw could be that the storyline was predictable. You would say that for a thriller, that would be a big minus. Not for this slickly shot movie (80% shot on digital camera and trust me it shows). Every character is fleshed out with elegance and the dialogues are crisp. The best part was this was a morning show, so it is priced half at E-Square. Though, when Abhishek and I had planned this, we never thought we would make it. Mainly due to the fact that our body clocks had gotten so used to UK timings. But we pulled it through.

ArunRocks.com was still having its default green theme of Wordpress for so long, that I decided its time for a makeover. Thanks to B A Khan, I have installed his DarkFire theme. I have also cleaned ugly Word tags from old posts as well. For this I used a wonderful website called Testism. Now I can heave a sigh of relief!

Hi All,

I have imported most of my stuff from my old blogger site http://rasvi.f2g.net/blogger.html

I’m really excited. This marks the birth of www.arunrocks.com ! Hurray!

This week end, I decided to discard my robe of immobility and decided to treat myself with some adventure. By god, truly it was… a real adventure of sorts. I’m referring to the my first TAPMI Alumini Meet in Manipal, held this Saturday and Sunday. The “adventure” part is the grueling 16 hours of travel by bus, which makes one think twice in trepidation.



Click here for the group snap



The best part was the warmth of reception. In all three years I’ve never met a more nostalgic bunch of junies (senies i.e. 2nd year to be precise, but still junies to us). Interestingly, every one had similar questions to ask me. The first question, perhaps being the most apparent, is the disappearance of my mustache. Now, the reactions range from disdain to cheerful approval depending on whether the person is from south or North. Most seemed to agree it makes me younger. Which paradoxically leads to the second question, “When are you getting married?” A question, which I remind them, is far from consideration to a person of my age. Most of them seemed to believe that I’m still in Mangalore proving that they are at least 2 months out of sync about me. We received a recent copy of our college zine ‘Amartya’ from CCG (Corporate Communication Group) who interestingly still uses and credits me for the logo I’d designed.

This time I was able to meet everyone whom I’d intended and more. I met my ex-batchmates (of course), esp the Amisha gang (except for Suraj , Bobo and Kaizad), my junies, my profs and even some super junies, who were much older than me, keen to listen to my career tips! My old faculty advisor Mohankumar or M.K. was pleasantly surprised when he saw me. Unfortunately he had broken his right wrist and would be unable to write anything for the next 6 weeks.

Karthik is still in his downloading spree and was able to copy some of the excellent Half Life 2 videos and some movies as well. He is also busy with inking his cartoon strip Doorways, which looks pretty slick at the moment. We were able to revive, without much effort, the CCG strategy game ‘QuickSand’ that I had developed last year, written in PHP. I also chatted with Prof Simon George, Prof Badri and Prof Rudran.

The formal events of the day gave way to a colorful party at night. The super junies and the super senies seemed to be everybody’s cynosure this time. Almost every old favourite number from the old bunch of Music.com was rendered again by the Alumini. I recall the junie who played the drums was very impressive and a really talented addition to the new Music.com. A rocking disco followed soon after. Not surprisingly the ‘Laws of Indian disco’ (mentioned n my earlier post) were at work again.

I left Manipal on Sunday 2pm. But I did not forget to savor the Andhra and Udupui delicacies, which had missed for a long time. Unable to book a Volvo, the ride back kept me really ill at ease. However, by any measure, it was really worth it :)

Come Friday and Pune Infosys would witness a remarkable phenomena perfected by weeks of alliteration. Early morning, beside the lush green landscaped autrium multicolored airbags get lined up in neat rows to greet a visitor. By late afternoon, the rabble of excited youngsters begin to make frantic calls for booking tickets. You could feel the buzz of excitement resonating off virtually every cubicle wall. By late evening, not just the D.C but the entire area becomes a ghost town. Then you realize you have just withnessed the mass weekend pilgrimage of mumbaites to their “home sweet homes”. This week was Ganesh Chaturthi, a festival no self respecting Maharashtrian should miss being at ones home. Hence, Monday has been granted a holiday for Ganesh Visarjan.

There was a party, the day before, celebrating ES (Enterprise Solutions) unit in Pune crossing the hundred mark in terms of employee strength. It was a dance party after a long time and it was really fun. Indian dance parties are always the same. On the dance floor, as in any party, there are always 2 kinds of people. You must be expecting the cliché. Those who can move and those who can’t. Well, that’s not quite true in India. It should be those who know what they are doing and those who don’t. The latter category, being a majority, knows that every self respecting DJ should play loud Punjabi numbers and crass Bollywood remixes which forces everyone to some simple Bangra (Punjabi) steps. Even an odd “Summer of 69” or “We will rock you” is a piece of cake. You just have to imagine that you are in a communist rally and you are leaping while you are shouting a slogan.

The moment a DJ strays from this unspoken code, the entire junta goes haywire. Reactions would range from “This party needs some juice, man” to “Stop the F*@%ing show!”. We, Indians, practically play Dhandia (the Holi dance) on a disco floor. People form circles and try to make a formation as if they were Bollywood extras. The circles without girls shrink over time and the ones with girls keep growing till they start stepping into everybody else’s feet. The hot favourites both on the dance floor and for desi DJs are the Punjabis (or the mundas and mundis as the DJs affectionately call them). Feel the party is getting cold? Slowly fade in to that Punjabi pop number (which one? doesn’t matter which, yaar!). It always works. They would even happily go on for the next couple of numbers without skipping a beat, never realizing that they are dancing to some salsa tune. Perhaps the famed Newton’s law of inertia is at work here.

The distinguished crowd prefers to ogle, ahem, watch the proceedings by being comfortable seated in the surrounding chairs. This brings in elements of the classical Indian mehfil, if you wish. Some make the switch to sitting, quietly in the middle of a noisy number. If you look at it closely, it is quite a strategic move because the next moment they would be wolfing down their chicken leg like an industrial-grade pencil sharpener. This leaves the poor party good Samaritan having less desirable parts of a chicken eyeing the thankless audience with longing eyes.

Inevitably while the party draws to a close there will be two kinds of enthusiasts rocking the dance floor  the unnaturally gifted and the intolerably high spirited. The gifted are your next door girl-who-was-practicing-classical-dance-turned-cinematic-dancer. They paint the clueless crowd onida green with their authentic dance steps which you might have forgotten from the silver screen. For once it is their field day and they have to fight for all the attention they get before the Cinderella spell breaks. That should explain their superhuman stamina. The other half is the happy people in their high spirits. These cheerful lots are the twilight zone of any party. They hardly wait for sunset, ain’t they? They move with amazing flexibility and no power. In no time they cover an entire dance floor in their amazing snake-like movement.

At the end of the day, a party is all about meeting people and having really nice conversations. So what if it was an articulate goofy looking guy who you “happened” to have dinner with. You can always pretend to forget him the next day. Dim lights, you know, dim lights.

Thanks to Dinky (Dinakar) I have discovered a very effective means of “time pass”. The wonderful online community orkut.com. Unfortunately it comes at a time when I work for 14-15 hours everyday. Yes, folks you heard that right. So much for my grand Pune visit right? Well, hope it will stave me away my boredom when I get back to “warming the bench”.

A good news for my Mallu readers is that I’ve made a simple change to my site so that you can see Malayalam text without downloading any extra fonts. Here goes my first line in Mallu:- ????? ?????? ?????? ???????????? ???????? :)) If you are still seeing gibberish, maybe you should try it on Windows XP (Service Pack 2) or upgrade your IE

My personal project ‘Agony’ is taking a back seat because of all this. I must say that I’m getting impressed at The International Functional Programming Contest 2004’s task description.

That’s exactly the way I want Agony to be defined. Mathematically clear. Like Knuth’s style in Art of Computer Programming. Well, need time dudes, need time.

The project I’m happy to say is staying on course due to lot of things committed team members, some good reporting mechanisms and a little magic. The magic is the magic of scripting which is done in VB.Net and Python. Both I have initiated. I’m happy to say that by automating we have achieved a Herculean task in a much abbreviated time. I had already realized the importance of scripting, but now the result is for all to see.

I’m planning to move my blog to a better domain (basically non-free), I’m trying out various options in my home town, Thrissur. I hope to use Blog:CMS which I find to have best feature set somewhat matching my requirements. Rest is PHP hacking which I’m pretty comfortable with. I’ve joined the Indian Bloggers list mainly due to the moderator contacting me spotting me from the Infy Intranet. You gotta see how many Indian bloggers out there. You’ll see me there soon.

It has been a long time since my last blog. Last week was mostly slogging than blogging, that’s why. But I must not complain. The System Integration Tests have turned all five of us (in my team) into beady eyed, excel-sheet tinkering workaholic sloths, but yet I must not complain. Why? Because ladies and gentlemen, welcome the most beautiful Infy DC of em all, Pune Infosys! Well, nestled in the far far away hillocks of Hinjawadi (Pronounced, as an auto driver tutored me with the patience of a primary school teacher, with a soft j as in ‘jump’), this DC is a feast for the eyes. The people are friendly and demographics being largely
student population, Pune sets one at ease. While we are at it, the people are also really good looking. But like Hyderabad, there seems to be a mix. While I figured out it is the Iranian blood in Hyderabad, I might have to dig deeper into the history of this city for more info.

The auto drivers here are demi-gods here, with the pathetic public transport as a constant irritant. But when these gods start talking (which they often do) there is no stopping. A running commentary about this city was happening on my very first ride itself. Bombarding me with facts and figures from the political significance of a particular road to the date of establishment of a college, I couldn’t help feeling a little dumb. My guest house is inside the campus and it was everything what was promised. Gym, swimming pool, recreation center, washing machine etc. I couldn’t help feeling that this is my lucky break. Check it out:

Well, to have a real good view, you need a panoramic shot. Imagine about 8 buildings forming a circle around a lush green island with a golf course, exotic palms and a wooden bridge with criss-crossing meandering pathways. You get the picture. The gastronomic delights in all the food courts were par-excellence. Bangalore DC is really bad in that area and almost everyone complains about it. My room mate Atul Chaturvedi is, yet again, a PL (like my ex-roommate Shiv) from the Oracle practice. A pretty senior guy, but very friendly and having wonderful sense of humour to boot.

Managed to see ‘Dhoom’ over the weekend. It was a mind blowing experience. Unusually good special effects and great action sequences were the high point of the movie. In fact it becomes very difficult to make out the parts which have been digitally composited due to the use of avidtechnology. the output is crisp and coherent. I’m sure it would appeal to the international audience as well. As if to ensure that, the producers – Yash Raj films have roped in the pop sensation Tata Young for an English rendering of the title track. Currently, Young’s version seems to be more popular. I also saw ‘My Boss’s Daughter’ on TV with Atul, it was absolutely hilarious. Such kind of pictures hardly rise above slapstick humour, but this one was brilliant. The timing of the events piling up one after the other, leaving the protagonist in really really tough situations was throughly entertaining. I also watched ‘The Insider’, despite Al Pachino and Russel Crowe, I felt it just an average drama. Crowe delivered the same shy, introverted yet upright character he portrayed in ‘A Beautiful Mind’. Maybe the plot was the saving grace.

After doling out 4,000 for a 256 MB iBall USB drive, my next major purchase happened yesterday with my new pair of Reebok for 1,990. It is black on white with orange streak having an overall futuristic look. I intend to use it when I start going for the gym. My intention of going to the gym is simple: burn somecalories, no stupid body building.

Well, that sums up my week. Today, Atul is leaving for Belgium at 2 am in the night. I wish him a happy journey.

Today is my last day in Bangalore. A last day before travel unlike any other. No Mad Rush, No Panic, not Eleventh Hour changes. Mentally picturing the two packed bags in my room, I chuckled to myself reclining in the office chair. Even the minor details were raked out, written and executed in a timely fashion with chilling precision. As a testimony, my pocket diary contains 4 pages of crossed out entries under the heading “Pune Transfer”.

Crossing out the last entry, I suddenly realised, “Now I have the freedom to decide. Freedom from this stupid diary. Freedom to plan something to celebrate and savour my last few moments (20 mins to be precise) in this DC. Freedom to make…. Well, last minute decisions”. Well, paradoxically, the whole planning thing was beginning to defeat its own purpose. So I sent a frantic mail, inviting some of my Blore buddies to join me at Food court. Well , only Anmol and Archie turned up at the health food joint, but then the decision proved to be very “fruit"ful. We hatched a plan to meet at Brigade Road for dinner.

Of all places, why Brigade you might ask? Well, apparently it is one place which I can reach even while sleep-walking. Me and Anmol have come down to this narrow lane (and short one too, perhaps 150 meters or so) on a zillion Saturdays and Sundays. Being jolly teetotalers we brisk to and fro down the stretch, as aimlessly as the rest of the beer-loving, high spending, raucous and dandily dressed crowd. After a long walk or equally long movies, we would customarily end up in Barristas before we part to our own ways. Incidentally as a side effect, though I never drink coffee, I have developed a slight taste for cappuccino.

The real reason was, I had to free myself from my loathsome cellular service provider, Hutch. By the time I reached there, the shutters were down and I had to cook up a really good excuse to squeeze in. The usual diatribe of customer complaints were as usual fun to over hear. A sample “I’m telling you, you are new here. She(pointing at another employee) knows me better. I’ve come here a minimum of 100 times last month….” ad nauseum. After the ordeal I felt relived and gratified. I’d been wanting to do this for a long time.

The dinner at Rice Bowl was unforgettable. We laughed in splits (at me, most of the time) till we started developing early wrinkles near the corner of our eyes. There we met another group who had come down for shopping– Shuchi, Swapnil and Abeer. Finally, we bade good bye to Archie and moved on for culminating our age old custom. There is a quirky rule that never gets broken whenever we sit in Barristas – Inevitably, Anmol will be facing a lady who smokes and from where I would sit, none of the ladies would be venturing such an act. This irritates Anmol by no ends and never fails to amuse me as well. Before we parted almost suddenly Anmol remembered that it was Raksha Bandhan and all six of his rakhis are still in his bag. We managed to tie all of them exactly at 11:59 am, setting some record of being the last “brother” to be so. Catching a final glimpse of the speed crazy bikers grunting loudly down M.G., I caught an auto back to my guest house.

The Bangalore stay would be incomplete without a formal mention of the folks at my guest house: the coy and talkative Manoj, the always greedy Venkatesh (I mistakenly used to mention him as Bintage, thanks to the Oriya accents), the ever serious Guddu who did some weight lifting as well, the boy Santhosh, the handy cook Joy. I must say that the one and a half month stay there was truly unforgettable.

Wow! Infy Bangalore looks really amazing today. With many Keralites coming in ethnic wear (men in mundu and women in onakoodi, a form of sari) and the Kannadikas coming in their ethinic wear (celebrating the eve of Gowri Puja), the DC looks really colorful. The women look especially elegant in their Indian wear (at least to me) which is welcome break from their Friday Western casual wear. There was a pookalam (Floral carpet in Malayalam) contest on the occasion of Onam and I saw about 7-8 ones, some very well done. Mallus make their mark wherever they go, but this goes to say that those marks are really pretty too ;)

No more farewells or treats for you! This would be what I would get to hear from most of my friends as I leave Bangalore. With the transfer to the Pune DC, I might be the first and only ACON from my batch (ESU May 2004) to cover all the DCs with ES practice. This is fortunately or unfortunately is a chain of coincidences. The Pune visit being merely because the only available connectivity to UBS being from Pune and I being a part of the testing team would need to be there. I got my tickets and guest house bookings done quite in advance as opposed my usual late-latheef fashion. Guess I’m learning something fom all these transfers.

Well, my sis (Ambily or Sandhya as I prefer to call her) is coming down to Bangalore tomorrow for her TCS walk-in. I’m preparing the unit testing documents late tonight to make myself free for tomorrow. For the build team it is a working day.

On the subject of Stress Management, I have come to realize that the Software Industry is plagued by the enormous everyday stress of executing projects. The requirements changes and the tough problem solving situations can easily vex even the most cool-headed ones out there. There are ever changing team roles and responsibilities. In such a complex and uncertain environment, the individual needs to find the job both challenging and comfortable.

The mantra here is keeping your cool. The one whose stress management is the best will emerge the winner. I must appreciate the management style of Shiv (my ex-roommate) who turned around the DHL project. There can be various ways to achieve this. Firstly, not let the problem overwhelm you. This means that even critical or urgent issues can be thought out with a relaxed frame of mind. Secondly, accept your limitations. Overlooking this might lead to over committing oneself to the point of failing to meet deadlines. Thirdly, manage your time smartly. The yardstick should not be how much time you put into it, but how best to make use of the available time. This is a totally different way of thinking I’m getting used to. Last but definitely not the least, maintain a good sense of humour. As Shive has often proven to me, good humour can inculcate team spirit and gain confidence every quickly. He says sometimes even a bit of clowning around goes a lot way ;)

Please do not post here to ask for NRN’s email ID. It was not the objective of this post

Hi All,

Yesterday, one of the most unexpected things happened. I got a mail from Mr. Narayana Murthy himself! It was a reply to a birthday greeting I’d sent. I have reproduced it below

From: Narayana N. R. Murthy Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 9:29 AM To: Arun V. Ravindran Subject: RE: Birthday Greetings from Arun Ravindran Dear Arun, Thanks a lot for the best wishes. I am touched by your kind gesture.

With regards, Narayana Murthy E-mail : no.spam@infosys.com Tel :91 80 2852 03XX Fax :91 80 2852 03XX —–Original Message—– From: Arun V.Ravindran Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 3:04 PM To: Narayana N. R. Murthy Subject: Birthday Greetings from Arun Ravindran A very warm greeting from a well wisher Warm Regards, Arun Ravindran Enterprise Solutions - Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) Infosys Technologies Ltd, Mangalore To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Samuel Beckett

The Onam celebrations are going on in full glory in Mangalore and Trivandrum DCs of Infosys. Considering the main day (thiru onam) is on 28th, it would have been exciting to be there at this time. Well, all I can go is flip through those colourful snaps.

Karthik seems to be continuing the work we had started with the TAPMI intranet portal. In many ways the vision (of Punit, Prof Sankran and me) of having a collaborative learning environment in TAPMI is still a long way to go. But as this shows, it is still alive.

Ok, time for some technical stuff. As I had promised I would give a brief intro to Sodipodi and Gimp. Sodipodi is a widely used vector drawing program. To see how widely used, take some time to visit sodipodi.org’s gallery. You would find most of the familiar open source logos here. Some of the uses of Sodipodi would be designing icons, logos and banner. I’m planning to use it in big way in designing my site. However Sodipodi’s export module is not yet stable in Windows. Hence I have to resort to GIMP, which seems to be not fully compatible.

The future of icon designing is vector based than pixel based, hence tools like Sodipodi have already gained currency among icon designers. Unfortunately, the promise of “scalable to any resolution” is misleading. Like truetype fonts, there should be various vector paths that are turned off at lower resolutions and vice versa. This problem which has been largely solved by font designer should be taken up by icon designers as well.