ArunRocks

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.

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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

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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

(His email id is altered for obvious reasons). Cool, isnt it? For those who have been following my blog, here comes a shocker. I’m on a transfer to Pune DC from Monday for 3 months. Yep, I’m still in the same project and the reasons are purely technical, but bothersome nonetheless. There are hundreds of things to do and I have started to jot down the first few atleast.

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.

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Yesterday, I watched “I, Robot” fully anxious with excitement of
watching a sci-fi movie. Having written read many sci-fi short stoies
and written one or two odd sci-fis myself, I was really looking forward
to see a creation of none other than Issac Asimov himself. I’m pleased
to say it was the best movie I’d seen this season. I have grown to
dislike what I’d call “franchised movies”, like Spiderman, which is made
to satisfy a different audience than movie goers. Hence a typical movie
goer would never get the same sort of satisfaction as a regular movie. I
subscribe to my good friend Karthik’s taste of having a complete story
in those 2 hours. That’s the beauty of “I, Robot”. The screenplay and
the cast seemed to gel perfectly. The “Minority Report” style art
direction didn’t fail to enthrall yet again.

Yesterday, Dinky brought his camera along and considering the beautiful
campus of Infosys, the shutters went chanting ‘Click’, ‘Click’,
‘Click’…all the time. Apparently, Abeer who was supposed to be in Pune
(Peoplesoft financials) is now here in Finacle for the past 10 days! The
other surprises of the day were Aby’s call for his laptop buy and
Shine’s messenger buzz.

Today’s meat for discussion would be the typical ‘Herd Brain’ of most
MBAs. Yes, the so-called poised and enterprising tribe that emerges out
of premier B-schools every year. Almost every one of them are hung up on
getting tasks higher up in the value chain. The motto is to get there
and get there faster. The operational part is usually “uncool” for this
band of ego-driven megalomaniacs. Sadly this is a mentality that is
implanted in their heads at a much early stage; at the stage of being
“aspirants”. It could may well have been their only sane reason to do
MBA too! The implication is that this vast majority of “aspirants” serve
as a very effective myth propaganda machine and it gets to….you know,
a vicious circle. The problem is so crucial that he next Scot Adam’s
strip might be focused on a “Herd Brain” type of character.

I believe that the media also has a lot to do with this. Every single
business magazine that the MBAs or “aspirants” lap up so fondly brings
out many success stories with a sharp stereotype. There is no past for
that stereotype and he is the best in breed for that functional area and
his present job is anything but operational. He might be still doing
operational but that isn’t sexy enough for lack of precious column
space. And of course he would be covered in the riches of Arabia, curvy
pouting bombshells and would hop the globe as matter of routine. Nobody
mentions how obsessed he was (and still is) about the details of the
companies operations and how hard he worked till he was familiar with
every aspect of it. He was not always the “finance” guy or “marketing”
guy till now. He was the “everything” guy.

I feel today’s MBAs are not obsessed with the area of a company’s
operation well enough. They are too impatient to let the natural
evolution to happen. It’s this preconceived mindset that characterizes
the Herd Brain and ultimately dooms it to oblivion.

Next time I’ll write about Sodipodi and Gimp, the tools of a Linux
Artist.

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Yesterday in a continuing series to a string of surprise appearances Himanshu Arora, who is another ACON from my previous batch, appeared talking to my PL (Nitin). It seems he is moving in to our project. He came down from Hyderabad and he himself got the news two days back. Now it seems he will join Piyush onsite.

The day before one of my junies needed help in their CRM assignment. I made his day by spewing a couple of pages of some of the best CRM stuff I’ve written, perhaps ever Again, when you get in the flow, there is now stopping, right? Dinky is coming to the DC today and I’m gonna make sure I get some IDs of junies. They seem to be so lazy to mail. Geez, how ironical!

Well, another good news is that, finally, my site appears right at the top if you type Arun Ravindran in google. Try http://www.google.com/custom?q=Arun+Ravindran this is really cool! Though there is another Dr. Arun Ravindran and an M.Sc Arun. V. Ravindran (My full name in Infosys!), I actually made it. The Google IPO is out and had a terrible start with the cutting down of the share price. Google is one of my favourite companies and this really broke my heart. I saw ‘Kill Bill Vol 1’ yesterday. The blood fountains and ‘wriggle the big toe’ sequences were typical Tarantino.

Today is the earliest I made to Blore office so far, excluding the first day of course, which is 8:45 pm. I finally shelled out the damn room rent which the receptionist (who BTW is a Kannadiga named Bintage!) was bugging me about. As expected it was too early for office. But anyway, at least, now I know.

These days I’m back to the MBA mode of thought. More business and money minded in every thought, all thanks to Shiv who gave me a reality shock the other day. It was actually not just because of that, we went down to IIMB in Bannergatta Road and got quite disappointed with the infrastructure. It wasn’t a big deal after all. The library had about 0.18 million books and in quite a disarray. I would love to be in my library anyday. But I must say there were some rare books which could have helped for my summer at least. Coincidentally, my “MBA timings” are also back, namely, 5 ½ hours sleep. God! What’s happening to me?

Oops! Time to get back to work. I just finished mastering XML Schemas and Nant, I’ve no idea what’s in store for me today.

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I finally figured out what “foley” stands for in the list of film credits. It is simply recreating sounds in creative ways that production mikes miss in the actual shooting. It is one of the most interesting aspects of movie making according to me. Steven Spielberg ones remarked that sound tells more than half of the story in a movie. But foley artists look at the world of sound effects in totally unique way. Rather than recreate the sound by recreating the action what caused it, they look for other similarly sounding events. For eg: in the oscar winning movie Terminator 2, the methods used were:

Bullets hitting T-1000
For the sound of the bullets hitting T-1000 Gary Rydstrom(foley artist) slammed an inverted glass into a bucket of yoghurt, getting a hard edge to accompany the goop

The sound of the crushed skull
The sound of the crushed skull is actually a pistachio beeing crunched by a metal plate.

Read the full interview here for more details. I’m sure this is an area in Bollywood which is catching up as seen in some movies. Imagine sholay being reshot which realistic sounding gunfire and trains! I would definitely like to work in this area
_____________________
On my personal front, Archie (Archana) surprised me yesterday by “appearing” in the Bangalore DC. I was dumbstruck according to eye witnesses :). Well, later I met her friends Vidya and Hema. The former is her best friend in every sense of the word. We had lunch and seems, finally, I’ll have a contact in Bangalore who is quite aware of what’s hot and what’s not over here.

The guest house folks though always friendly and nice, have started pestering me with the strange half monthly payment thing. Their legendary averseness to cheques (they sent someone along with my roommate to convert his SBI cheque to cash!) is another headache. Well, looks like I’ve made lot of friends out here in the guest house. The most important of them are Anmol, Alok, Dhiraj and Ram (who are Samarth’s friends) and of course my roommate, Shiv. Would you believe that we talk for hours till 1 am most of the days? Well, we talk about a lot of stuff including his 7 year stint in US, films and of course game programming. That sums up the last couple of days, I guess.

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It has been a while, isn’t it? Well it seems this blog has been
receiving greater eyeballs than ever before, thanks to its reference
in my signature line. Also I’m slowing redesigning the main site to
make it similar to the design of the blog.

A quick update on me before I dive into my topic. I’m in the typical
disarray mode right now. Work takes about 12 hours in a day. Traveling
is approximately 2 hours and reading/T.V takes up 2 hours. I sleep for
around 6-7 hours. The remaining 1 hour is all I’ve got for doing
something creative. It is simply not enough!

Back to my topic, there is a certain part of me, which secretively
tries to implement a mini-language in every project I do. I’m
passionate about reading about new computer languages and their
compiler/interpreter techniques. The inexplicable passion has driven
me to learn at least 20 odd computer languages and still counting.

Though it is one of my interests, I wonder does it serve any purpose.
The common reason most academia cites is the advantage of knowing
various paradigms that will enrich your programming style in any
language. But my take is that in reality it helps you in at least two
ways: adaptability and judging suitability. Many times, I have been
able to help people coding in language XYZ which I would be seeing for
the first time. They would exclaim “Hey, but I didn’t find that in the
manuals or even in Google”! What helps most of the time is that a
language designer is one, like me ;), who studies all the existing
languages before he makes a new one. Hence a many, many features are
intentionally or unintentionally copied. Another advantage is
suitability, if somebody is doing an AI program in javascript, I
definitely know something is wrong. Most language are theoretically
capable of doing everything what another language can, but the
expressibility of each language makes it suitable for certain kinds of
problem domains for eg: Perl for string processing. Only a person who
has savored most of the offerings (i.e. languages) can save hours of
programming effort and maintenance but choosing the right one for the
job.

In the long run learning different languages or even applications
always helps. No matter how difficult it may seem

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