Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

cheezo pointed me to this lecture by Prof Randy Pausch at CMU. This lecture was called the "The Last Lecture", as professor was suffering from an pancreatic cancer. Inspite of all the treatment given, he was told he had only 3 to 6 more months. He died on July 25, 2008.

Its an insiprational lecture, where professor presents insights into how he anaged to achieve all his childhood dreams, how one can enable others to achieve their dreams and some of the lessons he learnt in life. He comes across as a wonderful character, cheerful and full of energy. Couldn't believe when he actually did some push-ups in front of the audience!

My take backs from the lecture (there would be no point if I had not learnt anything from it ;-))

• "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted"..how true !!
• Prof. on obstacles (ref to as brick walls) that tend to discourage you from following your dreams: "Brick Walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things". So if the drive to achieve something is too strong, the better the chances of someone breaking the wall. He goes on to add that, the obstacles are there to keep the "others" away and to just let you in...so dont lose focus and keep pursuing !!
• If you don't like someone, then you probably do not know him/her enough (or long enough). Everyone has a good side..you just have to wait to see it show.

Hope I have not missed out on anything...On the whole, an amazing lecture ! A must watch...

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

On moving to KDE4

I am a Gnome suer. Have religiously stuck to it for all these years. It is not that I did not venture out into the KDE domain..I did. And the first time I had, I had found it quite uncomfortable to work with. But, with so much talk about KDE4.0 and now KDE4.1, I was kinda tempted to give it a try (I know am late in doing this !!).

So I finally installed KDE4.1 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation. I am no good at analyzing or commenting on piece of software, however, here goes my first impression...look and feel-wise...

• Too large Icons: The icons on the desktop are too huge by default (Or is it only my particular setting I do not know) !! The desktop looked all cluttered and not a least bit appealing...and visual appeal is the first thing you would look for.. I was rather disappointed !
  

• O2: In this default theme, the icons besides being larger, also have a shadow of sorts which makes the desktop look really ugly. You right click on the file, the terminology of the menu list options is quite different. Normally, you would have options pertaining to the file, ie, file related operations. However, the list here is : Icon settings, desktop configuration, alignment, add or remove widget, etc. Not sure if it is the same in earlier KDE versions.

Not that the above are not configurable..like with all other things, these also are! This was just my first impression :-) Frankly, I somehow do not feel encouraged to spend the time and configure the entire desktop.

So what did I like thus far ? Hmm...can't think of anything...maybe I am missing something ?!?!

Nevertheless, there is no denying that some of the best apps are available on KDE! Just that I use them on gnome desktop..like soooo many others!

Post publish edits: I must admit that I have not read all the facts on KDE4. varun just informed me that one of the idea is to have no icons on the desktop! But since I already had lots of stuff lying on my desktop, I probably saw the undesirable result. So, I think the right thing to do here is to read the facts first and go back and do the settings...

X-Airport Road (Bangalore)

So the curtains finally came down on the HAL Airport. For those staying on Airport Road for more than 10 years, it was a mixed reaction. Some were happy that there would be no disturbance anymore and that the Airport Road traffic would ease, while others (the frequent travelers) were disheartened as they would now need to travel more than 50 km to get to the airport which was earlier a 5 minutes drive (for someone like me!). And for some others, it was just an _emotional_ attachment (sounds weird, but true).

There were many advantages of having the airport so close to my house. Of course, the biggest advantage was that I didn't have to leave home 3 hours before a flight. Second, it was so easy to go and pick up relatives and friends coming over. And the hidden advantage...many a times, friends and relatives did not have the time to drop by (coz they were on a short trip, or whatever else the reason), I used to either just catch up with them on the road across my house when they were headed to the airport, or at the airport itself (since it was walkable for me). Alas, this can happen no more! Now, I can't even think of going to the airport to pick or drop someone (a waste of time and money both).

However, as was expected, the traffic on Airport Road has decreased significantly. Its so much easier to cross the road now. The traffic gets cleared in one green signal. Even at night times (during peak international flight time) there used to be heavy traffic..but now, its like any other road.

So, overall I think it was beneficial as till now since I didn't have to travel, I have been enjoying the improved traffic situation and less pollution. But the day I have to travel or need to drop or pick up someone, I am sure to complain :-)

I wonder if there is any plan to change the name of the road ?! It still is airport road..though whenever I refer to it with that name, people tend to correct me by saying 'its old airport road' !!

Taboo

I came across this nice add-on for firefox when causally browsing through the firefox add-on library. This add-on lets you mark a page that you want to read later by click of a button. And when you want to get to it, you again just press a button in the toolbar. This add-on is extremely useful for me as I normally am in the habit of keeping stuff for reading later (which isn't a good habit at all I know). I have been using session saver to achieve this for me all this while. The result was that at one point, I would have about 20-30 tabs open..resulting in poor firefox startup performance. And I would ultimately simply close the unread tabs without second thought! Used to bookmark several pages, but in the interest of keeping the bookmarks organized, I used to spend a few minutes to figure out where the page belonged !

With taboo, this is so much simpler and faster now ! I am yet to explore more of its functionalities though. For more information, check here

IBM System x (tm) Technical Conference

My proposal for a talk on "Enterprise Realtime" has been selected for one of IBM's technical conferences !! This conference is in July in Bangalore itself. Looking forward to a nice lab session :)

Rendevouz with Paul McKenney

Paul McKenney needs no introduction. However, to mention briefly, he is the inventor and one of the implementors of Read-Cope-Update (RCU) synchronization mechanism, that is extensively used in the Linux kernel. Besides, he is a master inventor at IBM.

I had this wonderful opportunity to interact with him when he visited India in the second week of May. I had a total of 2 hours of 1-1 session with him...and to describe it briefly, it was simply wonderful!!

He has a wonderful personality. In spite of being where he is, he manages to come down to the level of his peers and involve everyone in the conversation. But his most striking characteristic is that he makes you THINK!! You have to be on your guard lest you be caught unawares ;-) Well, am just kidding, exaggerating.

For the technical discussions I had with him, he presented me with so many perspectives that I had not even thought off. Quite a lot to take from him! On the non-technical side, asked him about how he manages to be so productive. Quick came the response (which as expected is profound) -"Fluency and Effective Energy Management". Neat concept! Common sense, but a technique we fail to inculcate in us!


One thing I have to mention is that the discussion with him was extremely motivating...and the good thing is, to date it inspires me! I am just hoping it continues to stay with me in the years to come! Thanks Paul :-) If you reading the blog, sorry didn't take your permission to write about this...hope you have no complains ;-)

Movies..are they so important?

For folks who have known me for a long time, also know that I am not too much into movies, rather I must say that I am not all into movies :-) Not that I don't like watching movies, its more to do with me not being used to watching them! Its something that was not part of my up-bringing.

Why am I writing about this? Well, so Ozzy and Uttaran (my colleagues) were discussing movie as part of our usual afternoon \_/7 time. Both do not know me very well..and like everyone else beginning to know me, they too were quite shocked to find that I don't watch movies. They looked at me as though I was an alien and didn't belong there at all...not that their reaction surprised me (as am quite accustomed to such looks), but just made me ponder a bit. Hell broke lose when I told them that I have been to a theatre only about 3-4 times :-D. Are movies considered to be the most important source of entertainment these days? Are they such an integral part of our teenage lives ? Why am I looked at with such skepticism of even being a fun-loving person? I wouldn't want to believe it is true, but so far I have not met anyone (except one) who has made me feel otherwise ;-)

Ozzy, Uttaran, am not pointing anything at you guys! You guys are simply superb !! Just this question kept bugging me :-)

Me is still alive !!

Hola !! Its been a loooooong time since I blogged! Well, nothing new...this is how my blogging habbits have been from the beginning..*sigh* So, I found this nice add-on to Friefox, Scribe Fire (was reading Cheezo's blog the other day when I came across it). So just by pressing F8 key, I now get this nice neat editor where in I can put in the contents of the blog! No need to acutally go to the blog link, and then after lot of clicks, get to entering the blog! So hopefully, now I should be more regular ;-)

Been quite tied up for the past couple of months. In April, got to know that I have to go to Portland, Oregon for a week-long team meeting. Just preparing for the trip kept me busy throughout...first realized that my passport was expiring in May and for getting a VISA, the mimimum validity of the passport should be 6 months. And getting the passport renewed is not too easy, especially, if you are applying under Tatkal. Reason, you need some million documentary proofs, attested by gazetted officers (God alone knows where to find them unless you already know someone who is willing to certify your existance as a fine citizen of India). Gosh, that was a tensioning week, trying to get all the docs in place !! Finally, got passport within 3 days of application (which was surprising).

Now comes the VISA application process. Not that difficult, but time consuming..again preparing the right documents, obtaining invite letter in the *required* format can become a pain. So the invite letter I had from my US manager was apparently not in the right format..had to get it re-sent to me !!! I had to get a photo clicked for the VISA form. And I was appalled to find out that too was not in the *required* format...issue was, one of my ears happened to be covered by my hair !!!!! God bless, the VISA desk refused to take it..

Thankfully, the trip to Chennai for the VISA interview went smooth. I entered the US Embassy at around 8:45 in the morning (my interview was scheduled for 11 something). And to my surprise, I was out at 9:30 itself!!
I then had the whole day with me to kill..just spent sometime visiting the tourist sites around there..went to Marina beach in the afternoon..had an interesting incident there, which I shall post later.

Then after that came the actual preparation for the trip in terms of shopping ;-) Thankfully, this didn't have to an extensive one as it was going to be only a week-long stay..and I mostly had all the stuff I needed.

My US trip was cool! Just the thought of having got outside India and setting foot on a foreign land was awesome! Its an experience..my first foreign land was Frankfurt. The journey was long (duh! need I say that) and I slept most of the time :-D Times when I was awake, I could not get myself to do anything usefull..I either read some magazine or watched the movie that they were playing :-) Have uploaded some pics on picasa, will post a link here soon.

After coming back from the trip, been busy catching up with work items...pending tasks, etc. I also started writing an article on RT scheduler..its finally done! And hoping to get it published soon... haven't heard from the editor yet, but keeping my fingers crossed :-SS

So that was a quick summary of what I have been upto...hopefully would be more regular from now onwards !!