Harry Potter and the Sickly Realisation

Well, I am a huge fan. I owe HP, or JKR rather, for getting me into the reading habbit! Yes it is embarassing, but I am proud of it. By the way there are a couple of spoilers so beware.

Anyway, I had finished the final installment HP and the Deathly Hallows last night at 3 AM. Thanks to the flu and an assignment I couldnt get into it earlier. But it is done. What an absolutely fantastic finale to the series. This is testament to the fact that she deserves every penny of the couple of billion pounds she has amassed thanks to the magical world she has woven. While the ending itself is not as surprising or brilliant as that of the Prisoner of Azkaban or the Goblet of Fire, it still ranks as one of the best books of all times. I am so glad that my theory (well not uniquely mine ofcourse) about Snape’s innocence and Id even say greatness, came true.

Ofcourse the deaths of Dobby was I think unnecessary. I loved the poor guy, and to have him killed especially after all that… well no words… but I think his death is made up by the house-elves’ participation in the final battle. The other deaths I beleived unnecessary were Tonk’s and Fred’s. I mean Moody and Lupin’s departure was inevitable, but Tonks and Fred’s? Surely we could have done without Charlie (no offence), but to deprive George of his significant other, thats just too cruel.

But deaths aside, an absolutely magnificent plot and character development. One thing that was a bit dissapointing was the epilogue. I could have used a bit more on what happened to more of the characters. JKR only had briefly described how Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny end up (with a couple of others). Hopefully these will be cleared out in an interview.

The hardest part was however the sickly realisation (which began as I had started the first page), that once I had gone through the 600 pages, that would be the end of HP world for ever. And boy was that painful. Actually it still is. I suppose this is nothing new. All good things must come to an end, but one can still wish otherwise.

By the way who is the individual who discovers magic late in his life (as JKR had pointed out in her interview?)

OmniFS

Today marks the release of omnifs. I had started trying omnidrive – a storage drive on the web in mid April. I am still on the free service (which comes with 1Gb of Storage and 5Gb of transfers/month). It is still in beta mind you, but not bad at all. They even have a client for windows and mac. The windows client lets you mount omnidrive as a special folder which can be accessed from windows explorer.

However, for Linux, I had to install a Java client. Now I am not against Java, but wondered why couldnt this just be a mountable drive? So being the fidder (or is it twiddler?) that I am, I thought, “if you cant find it, make it”. I set about making a mountable drive for omnidrive. Luckily I had come across the omnidrive developer API. It is not bad but could really be better by being clearer. The result of this work is omnifs. This is small program that uses the Fuse (Filesystem over User Space) library to mount your omnidrive account as a directory in Linux! By doing so, normal file operations can be performed (eg cp, mv, ls and also developer functionility like fXXX functions in the C library). Please do try it out. Would love to here what you think about it and ofcourse to fix it up more.

The general goal of omnifs is to transition into a “webfs” so that it would eventually support WebDAV and other online storage accounts!

NextGen Travel – Saucer Style

I wonder when these flying saucer’s would be available for the public? Would love to see the M2 and the M7 Highways with their 3D/Altitude versions so we can manage suburbian air traffic as well!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=447317

Wireless Power

How cool is this? Basically a dime-sized attachment that fits to any device (like mobile phones or pace makers and so on), and quietly converts all that static in the air into a constant DC voltage. Effectively makes batteries last for ever!

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/04/01/8403349/

At the moment this can only be used with low power devices.  So with laptops getting less power intensive, it would become easier to power them as well.  For higher-powered devices, I wonder if these can cascaded together to provide a higher power?

KabookiWater

STIRR Sydney was hosted again last night (Thu 29/03/2007) at the Ivory Restaurant 620 Harris St, by Tangler, Atlassian, Omnidrive and TVP. This was my first time at this event (well I had been to BarCamp earlier so I knew some of the gang here) and the event stood upto its reputation. Smaller than BC, it was again teeming with loads of entrepreneurs and VCs alike.

As usual, the game HalfBaked was played here. The idea is something like this:

1. Come up with a whole bunch of words in random: Kabooki, bungy, vodka, lemon, wave, sequins, sheik, water, etc
2. Split crowd into 5 groups (around 8-12 in people each).
3. Each group comes with a two-letter word dot com name drawn from the words above (in step 1).
4. Each team now has 10-15 mins to make a pitch to the VCs out there.

SO the fun begins. Our team came upon the company name KabookiWater like a pack of bums on Sydney’s Liverpool St upon a juicy steak. We had initially thought this was something to do with japanese beer, but soon Michael had pointed out that Kabooki actually stood for Japanese theatre (D’oh). After a bit of hair pulling (lucky for me), we decided it should be User-Generated Interactive Drama – aka Theatre On Tap (TOT).

Kaching!! Folks, this is big money. Imagine a soap, that is actually controlled by what users want on any particular day, instead of the usual Birth-Marriage-Death cycles their writers have to churn out till time immemorial? Audience demands drama, KabookiTheatre gives them crying and moaning. Audience demands sex, instead of crying and moaning, KT gives them, moaning and THEN crying. So possibilities are limitless. I dont want to spoil your fun by revealing all the possibilities to you.

So where is the money coming from? Simple, folks. Product Placement! Users are telling you what they want from the drama, and that should give an indication of what the kind of audience is. So bingo. Google, with your Ad-Sense, eat your corporate hearts out! Not to mention Spin-off markup languages including UGIDML and TOTML for representing and distributed user theatrical preferences. Here come those courses on Tafe’s and those TOTML and UGIDML for Dummies books – Kaching Kaching.

So if any of you out there (especially VCs with lots of money) are interested in the next best/super-duper thing since sliced-bread and Google combined, here it is. Il be waiting. I have nothing better to do .

Upcoming Concerts

Well. As you all know about my little obsession with the violin. Im accompanying in a couple of concerts.

Lingo: In Indian Classical Music, there are two roles for an instrument.

• Solo Playing: Actual solo concert and you do your own thing.
• Accompanying: This is the hard part. You play for someone as they sing (or they may be an instrument doing a solo). The challenge here is that now you have to play in a totally different style and try and at times replicate (as close as possible) what they are doing. Pros do this without even rehearsing!!!

Anyway, I am accompanying Dr Ramanathan. Ive also been learning vocal Indian Classical Music from him for last 3 years so that it would better help me with the violin (follow the logic?). Details are:

Time and Date:
To Be Seated by 5PM, Sunday 1st April 2007 (no kidding)

Venue:

Bowman Hall,
Campbell St,
Blacktown,
Sydney

Hope to see you all there.

Cybersquatting

I am sure many of you read the article last week about M$ going on a crusade against cyber squatters. Great finally someone doing something about all those useless (albeit rich) rodents of the society trying to make a quick buck (or a lot of it) by getting a free ride on hard work (and not to mention trademarks) of others. But as much of a problem as this is, ie these folks trying to peddle spam and all other garbage, should Microsoft’s reaction become the defacto standard in the industry?

First of all, the money generated on such bogus sites (eg micrsoft.com or microsof.com) can be monitored and as a result the loss to MicrOsoft can be clearly evaluated. However, if you are stupid enough to end up falling for material on a squat-site, may be you are not the kind of material to be visiting MS? (wait a minute, I may be wrong about that).  If cybersquatters are making money from typo-ed sites, then surely Microsof and Microsoft are completely different entities, so while this is unethical, clearly this is not legal (isnt that what we are all about these days?).  Ofcourse, the easiest and most obvious solution is allow rich companies decide on what constitutes as law and in which situations these laws are applicable.

A more serious argument could be that a typo-ed site could be “sponsored” into redirecting a visitor to a competitor’s site. But how is this different from internet explorer redirecting invalid addresses to MSN.com? This is just free-enterprise. The legal boundary is crossed, when the typo-ed site is actually being used for slander and misrepresentation. But is this what the cybersquatters were doing?

An argument in favour of cybersquatting is that of free-enterprise and capitalism. The argument of free-enterprise goes something like “well they got there and bought it first so they should do with it what they can”.  And to extend the argument, being a free market MS should have got in there first and bought out the typo domains as well. Surely microsof and micrsoft could not have existed before the real deal.  However, the argument does not hold for common words. In this situation, the counter argument that unlike in a free market, the domains were improperly priced initially actually makes sense. But if common words had been used for company names, then companies registering these words SHOULD have gotten there first. If they couldnt, then why rely on common english words for a company name?  How about being a bit creative about it for a change instead of opting for a easy hack?  Besides how cool would “www.cool.com” really be?¹.

What determines a trademark infringement? How would MikeRowSoft and MyCrowSoft be treated? With speech recognition becoming common, a browser could direct a search to one of these sites rather than MS. Should MS have the authority to deem these as evil and try to get them closed (after extracting all compensation ofcourse).  At the end of the day, such battles will be one by the sides with the more expensive lawyers rather than being based on any sense of legal or ethical fairness.

Notes

1. Example taken from Paul Graham’s essay – “Why Smart people have bad ideas?“

Light and Tangler

I had first met Marty at a lift.  After forcing myself on him (conversationally ofcourse), I had managed to get myself invited to weekly soccer matches (Luckily you can suck at soccer while still loving it!).  At one of these matches he had told me that he was working-on/starting Tangler.  At first I had assumed this was a flavour of chips for us geeks.  So I had decided to go to tangler.com and was presented with an option to signup for beta-testing their new product.  All I had known at this point was it was kind of a forum – “jees done before” I thought.

Soon after I had received my account from Mick.  So I logged in for the first time.  Big mistake.  Let me say I am still paying for it.  While forums themselves are not a new idea, Tangler’s approach to facilitating forums is in fact quite simple and yet very very addictive.  They have used a pure web 2.0 approach to their app.  No software installation is necessary, works on major browsers (so far I have only tried it on Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 on linux), and provides complete control to you.  Also Within moments, I was part of about 15 groups (mostly invited to by Mick) and managed to create a couple myself.  Ofcourse this is what  contributed to one of the biggest mistakes of my life.  With the ease of (instant) communication, lacking in many other forums, you are never out of communicado with your contacts.  Eagerness of new technology will have to give way to rudeness and introverted behaviour if you would like to get any work done!

Tangler also has a standalone desktop client for windows and linux.  However I have not got this to work in linux yet (complains about missing libfXfixes.so.3).  I would have preferred a plugin to existing IMs like everybuddy and/or Trillian rather than YASIM (Yet Another Standalone IM).

One thing I had found (possibly) buggy was time-zone management.  Even though my profile says I am from Australia, I found some of my posts to have the wrong date.  May be I havent set it up correctly.  Also being in beta, I cant expect color-scheme customizations which I think would be very useful.

But all in all a great approach to forums, and especially justifies the eccentricity of folks at Tangler.  Hope to see lots more of it in the future from this bloody awesome team (For non-ausies: “bloody” can be negative – ie “what a bloody f@#%” or positive like “what a bloody ripper”… and this definitely is the latter).

Are reeding and riting important?

Lately (well last five years anyway) there has been quite a bit of media frenzy regarding whether traditional penmanship and writing skills are now becoming obsolete in this day and age of computers, PDAs and styluses (stylii?). One article (Jason Fry, “Mightier than the Pen“, March 05 2007, Wall Street Journal), suggests that the said new forms of communication are sufficient to replace traditional methods (writing and penmanship). Reasoning is that throughout human history new forms of communications have replaced older forms of communication successfully and this is no exception. Also, as Jason suggests, these new forms break down the creative boundaries for child who has embarked in his/her educational journey thereby increasing his/her imagination in ways not envisaged before. Another common argument presented is that (the physical process of) writing, due to outsourcing of this task to computers, itself does not add to human competency (of which survivability in the woods was traditionally a measure of ).

As a high-school student, I absolutely abhorred the idea of writing in all forms (essays, analysis, creative writing, poetry for women and all that “boring” stuff) so I am not sure Id be the right person to comment on this issue. But I suppose that is what blogs are for.

Ignoring the issues of availability of computers and word processing tools, bad (font) typing, eye-strain, difficulty in entry, should a child with access to a computer and wordprocessing tools, first develop handwriting skills or bypass this process in their favour?

I am not so sure it is a good idea to dispense with the basic writing skill (cursive or not). While efficiency can be definitely gained by using computers (via touch typing, voice recognition, styluses etc), there are other benefits that only handwriting, if not a clear and neat one, can offer. Briefly, these include:

• Motor Skills: Handwriting, that most adults take for granted, requires dedicated effort to master and maintain. Learning to type is a process of taping fingers at discreete locations on a keyboards; Handwriting reuqires careful and controlled motion to produce continuous and fluid patterns.
• Orderliness of the mind: Wordprocessing facilitates the noting of ideas in a sequential manner. This forces organising thoughts in an orderly and flowing fashion.
• Internalising Skills: This really falls into the “Terminator” line of thought about maintaining/improving skills internally rather than (unnecessarily) depending externally on machines for basic skills and ideas.

At the end of the day, where can we draw the line regarding dispensibility of core skills? Do we need reading abilities? Text can be synthesized into voice. Computers can solve some of the most complex mathemtical problems so why do we need algebra? If Matrix (the movie) has anything to say, we could all be feeding ourselves via tubes attached to our bodies. Talking about dispensible skills, how about this automatic beer dispenser:

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/beer-launching-fridge-all-lazy-men-rejoice

Having said all this, perhaps a bit of organising my thoughts on paper would have helped?

On Startups (and Software and Violin)

I think I may be a bit presumptuous in incorporating “Startups” in my blog title.  Like the other two items in the title, this is something Id like to do well, not something I am an expert at or even know anything about.  At best, its an effort to documenting my efforts in creating a (successful) startup (which is probably more imaginary at this point in time than the lord of the rings trilogy).  Hope that clarifies it.  Same applies to Software and the Violin.

Arranged Marriages

Well, I guess it is time I come out of the closet and admit my selling of the soul to the system of arranged marriages. Yep, Ive succumbed (actually a year ago) to a combination of the cultural carrots and sticks that are so common for us beans who sprout from indian parents.

Sticks (best read in an indian language or in an indian accent) including parents giving you the “oh you are too old to going on enjoying your single life” to “look at your friends (really meaning, their friends’ kids) who are married and giving their parents (ie their ‘friends’) lots of grand kids – why do you want to let us down and be such a bad boy”..

Ofcourse the biggest and the juiciest carrot is really the ending of such sticks delivered on a daily basis. Not to mention getting a decent meal (or six) every day. I was going to add that sex on tap (atleast while it lasts) isnt a bad deal either, but I guess anyone used to the sydney life style wouldnt think thats a great advantage .

Dont get me wrong, I am not one of those blokes who lets his wife do all the work for him (seriously, how can you live with such a shameless view). I am simply facilitating a conducive environment for said class of partners (only one in this case) who are happy to perform said duties (purely to vent their creative outlets) and indulge in other related activites!!

I am sure my wife would agree with this. I guess Il find out soon one way or another! But since I think she agrees with this, there’s no point in her really finding out about this is there?

Carnatic Violin

Well Ive been learning vocal carnatic music (South indian music) since 1996 and started violin since 2002. Just love it even though I struggle with it at every level. I know it sounds corny (even for me), but there is a certain bliss when you are sitting down with the violin and start making those noises (carnatic music involves sitting down!).

The person I need to thank most for helping me is my violin teacher, Mr Murali Kumar. My first and foremost guru, he himself learnt the art, unlike me at a very young age, from Violin Vidhwan Kanchi Janardhanan, and later had the great fortune of receiving advanced training from violin maestro, M.S.Gopalakrishnan. Needless to say, for all you MSG fans out there, his style takes a few lifetimes to just understand, let alone master it! Il post out more in the future what Ive learnt (drops) and what I would love to learn (the ocean). If you have any tips for improving MSG style of violin playing please pass them along.  Id be eternally grateful to you.

BarCamp Sydney

BCS (http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampSydney) was hosted on 3rd March at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). It was a gathering of entreupreneurs and wanna-make-it-biggers (like myself). Only one way to describe it – AbsolutelyFantastic (no spaces so its a single word!)

Key speakers were Martin Wells from Tangler, Mike from Atlassian amongst others.

HelloWorld!

Here I finally am. After years of avoiding blogging (due to neutrality and laziness rather than passion – or anti passion), I have jumped online, to yell to the world, all I can yell about.

So as an engineer here is a big HELLO WORLD to you!