Best of Python Hyssssteria - Side A

I've always wanted to go to Evam's plays. And finally it was my friend L who fulfilled my wish. We both were too excited to hear about the play in Land Mark (City Centre)that we immediately asked the ticketing office to block the tickets.

We got to know that the show was called "Best of Python Hyssssteria - Side A". I absolutely had no clue of the story line etc. L told me that it is inspired by Monty Python. Well I've never heard something like that before and hence couldn't correlate with anything. However the 2+ hrs of BPH was enjoyable.

On doing some research on what Monty Python is all about, I finally understood that it's the sketch show kind. Wondering as to what a sketch show is? Sketch show is a series of comedy scenes spanning between 1-10 min. Often sketches are first improvised by the actors and written down based on the outcome of these improv sessions, however improvisation is not necessarily involved in all sketch comedy.

Watch out for Best of Python Hyssssteria - Side B on June 16th and 17th :-). Ticketing starts online from June 1st. Book your tickets at evam

AML

Here's an interesting read about Money Laundering.
http://www.capitalismsachillesheel.com/case_studies.html

I got to know about this book through Business World. Raymond W.Baker has a long career in international business and he is also a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington DC. He often testifies before the US congress on the parallel economy. If you are wondering as to what the parallel economy is, it is nothing but in simple terms the black economy.

Raymond Baker has written a book on how black money acts as the single biggest anomaly in the functioning of the free market economies around the world. He has also presented interesting case studies on Venezuela, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Algeria.

I recently saw this movie "The Last King of Scotland" where Idi Amin tries to have a complete control of Uganda and in the process performs many atrocities. I was surprised to know that it happened in the recent past sometime during the 1970s but after reading the case studies I'm shocked to see that many such atrocities still happen around the world.

It's sad to know that despite having all the policies in place with respect to AML, both the developed countries and the developing nations continue to not act on the same for their own benefits. Ultimately illegality, poverty and distorted philosophy exist in a continuum and it is these short comings that reveal capitalism’s Achilles heel (vulnerable point).

If there is political will then all of these can be completely curtailed. We need to have sensible steps with utmost commitment to share good fortune to close the gaps between the rich and the poor. As we all know that there are many contradictions between fresh thinking emerging from schools of philosophy and justifications for the status quo in the free market’s supporting canons. We may have to revise these so that capitalism can extend its opportunities and benefits to the whole of humankind. These are some of the suggestions given by Raymond Baker.

Do you know that 50% of our economy is driven by black economy? It's shocking but that's the fact. Though we have the Right to Information Act, such reports are never revealed for the reasons such as black ecomony helps run the political parties during elections.

Do you know that 50% of our economy is driven by black economy? It's shocking but that's the fact. Though we have the Right to Information Act, such reports are never revealed for the reasons such as black economy helps run the political parties during elections. Eventually we pay more taxes and the poor suffer due to inflation.

Managing Blogs?

As the number of blogs grow by the day , one question that was haunting my mind was - how do we keep track of those of our choice?
One option is to list them one by one in a piece of paper and check them everyday to find out on the new postings.But this is laborious.

I came to know recently that there are tools available which would make things easier for us.One such tool is RSS Bandit.What this typically does is this - it converts the publishing into an XML format with number of tags like title,description,link so on and so forth.

Say for eg: You not only want to visit http://greenhorns.blogspot.com but also a couple of other blogspots to check if there are any new publishings on a daily basis, the RSS aggregator would aggregate all the various blogs to which you subscribe.Ofcourse as a first step after one installs this tool, one has to add the subscription list into the RSS Bandit with the New Feed Option.It's the aggregator which will read the not-so understandable markup(this is with respect to our eyes) coz the computer still understands this language and will notify the user saying that a new publishing is available that has not yet been read.

For more information about RSS, please see the following URL: http://www.mnot.net/RSS/tutorial/.

RSS Bandit is a freeware and you can download it from the net provided you have the .NET framework already installed. Also RSS Bandit is an ongoing open source project and for all those geeks who are interested in .NET and would like to code in C# can play with the code that is available.

Have you ever wondered ...

Why Windows 95 had functions called BEAR,BUNNY and PIGLET?
To find out check this : http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/raymondc/PermaLink.aspx/95286d47-3732-4cac-9cbd-bd1746deb305

Why BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS?
http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/15/55296.aspx

How Microsoft Lost the API War

This is an interesting article that I came across. Joel accepts that ASP.NET is a good programming language but he also argues that Microsoft is loosing its grip on software developers.

Some interesting extracts from the article:
A lot of the bets Microsoft made are the wrong ones. For example, WinFS, advertised as a way to make searching work by making the file system be a relational database, ignores the fact that the real way to make searching work is by making searching work. Don't make me type metadata for all my files that I can search using a query language. Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973.

But the power of the web: So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

No matter how consistent Microsoft is in their marketing message ("just use .NET—trust us!"), most of their customers are still using C, C++, Visual Basic 6.0, and classic ASP, not to mention all the other development tools from other companies. And the ones that are using .NET are using ASP.NET to develop web applications, which run on a Windows server but don't require Windows clients.

Microsoft grew up during the 1980s and 1990s, when the growth in personal computers was so dramatic that every year there were more new computers sold than the entire installed base. That meant that if you made a product that only worked on new computers, within a year or two it could take over the world even if nobody switched to your product. That was one of the reasons Word and Excel displaced WordPerfect and Lotus so thoroughly: Microsoft just waited for the next big wave of hardware upgrades and sold Windows, Word and Excel to corporations buying their next round of desktop computers (in some cases their first round). So in many ways Microsoft never needed to learn how to get an installed base to switch from product N to product N+1. When people get new computers, they're happy to get all the latest Microsoft stuff on the new computer, but they're far less likely to upgrade. This didn't matter when the PC industry was growing like wildfire, but now that the world is saturated with PCs most of which are Just Fine, Thank You, Microsoft is suddenly realizing that it takes much longer for the latest thing to get out there. When they tried to "End Of Life" Windows 98, it turned out there were still so many people using it they had to promise to support that old creaking grandma for a few more years.

Unfortunately, these Brave New Strategies, things like .NET and Longhorn and Avalon, trying to create a new API to lock people into, can't work very well if everybody is still using their good-enough computers from 1998. Even if Longhorn ships when it's supposed to, in 2006, which I don't believe for a minute, it will take a couple of years before enough people have it that it's even worth considering as a development platform. Developers, developers, developers, and developers are not buying into Microsoft's multiple-personality-disordered suggestions for how we should develop software.

It's a long article but surely worth a read.Check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

My thoughts on The Future of Work (by Thomas W. Malone)

I was browing through the website and came across the review of this book."My thoughts on The Future of Work " seems to be an interesting book.This book reminds me of Maverick by Ricardo Semler.The most interesting aspect of the book is the example given.Looks like there is a company named AES corporation.They are one of the biggest energy producers and are highly decentralised. Rank and file employees decide about multi-million dollar acquisitions and a group of workers invested 12 million of cash that the company had after getting some training on money markets from a consultant, even beating the internal department that does nothing else.

Malone argues that "When most people think about decentralization, they stop at loose hierarchies {...} decentralization as delegation of many decisions {...}. What if, instead, it [power] originated there [lower levels]?" This sounds a bit weird, but if you really think about it, this is a totally different mind set.

Doesn't this sound interesting???

There are many such examples given and the review seems to be even more interesting.

I'm planning to get a copy for myself.

Poems

William Wordsworth was born on April 17, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. These are some of his collections, which I cherish.

The Solitary Reaper

BEHOLD her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listen'd, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

--William Wordsworth

Daffodils

I wander’d lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

--William Wordsworth

Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every beast keep holiday;
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
O evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the babe leaps up on his mother's arm
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have look'd upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely nurse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage'
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity;
Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a master o'er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

--William Wordsworth

Books from my Lib

I don’t know how she does it - by Allison Pearson

This is a book which any working woman can easily relate one’s day to day experiences with. Managing home and work is no joke. One has to be patient, shrewd, smart, bold, loving, caring and what not and these have to be exhibited at the right place to the right people at the right time in right proportions and missing any of these would make life all the more difficult.

Women are born to take additional responsibilities in the current world. One part of women are more career oriented .They no more wish to stay at home to do only the house hold activities rather they love to come out and make the best out of whatever they have learnt. In this way they are also able to contribute a phenomenal amount in improving the economy of the family and also have a sense of satisfaction for whatever skills they possess. The other part of women is the typical house wife kind. When I say a typical house wife kind, I also would like to emphasize on one thing. Do not ever underestimate the women who play the role of house wife. Just like how a career woman strives to be the best at her work, the housewife tries to be or rather taken for granted most of the times to be at her best in doing the regular household chores. But the irony in life does not allow you to be only a career woman or only a house wife. A mixture of both is required in the long run when the woman transforms her status from a single to a wife/mother in today's world.

Kate Reddy is one such person who tries to be at her best both at home and at office and she never wants to compromise on any of these which makes her life all the more difficult. The more you want to be perfect the more challenging life is and the more the woman tries to strike that impossible balance between work and home the more difficult life seems to be.

I loved reading this book and I’m sure you would too. So go ahead and get a copy for yourself to know how this woman tries to make the impossible possible.