Good thing!

A few months ago Google launched a service called, google app engine. What app engine does is that it allows developers to create web services that was hosted in and made use of googles infrastructure. They were giving 500 mb of space with generous data transfer limits , all for free.
And the good news was that , it had to be programmed in Python.

When I first heard of python , like 5 or 6 years ago , I thought it was a major programming language for the web. Later I played a bit with Zope web application framework for python also. But , there was a big problem with using
python . Hosts for python were difficult to get and expensive. the once who had , often had ancient versions. I felt that python was not easy for web development , since its rather difficult to get a host to put the things on line.

Now , google has given a shot in the arm for python , anybody can now have their python based web application running on the google app engine.

Initially app engine hosting was given only to the first 10000 developers who signed up , but now anyone can sign up for the good stuff here.

Preposterous Article!

i have been foolish enough to send a badly written article to a 'respectable newspaper' , at that time , i didn't think about it , but now i feel it , from now , on they will junk everything that i send to them without even reading , they'll add me to their 'Black List' ,and I'll never ever get to see anything written by me ,on their 'respectable pages' ....

its badly written , but here goes ..


The Need For Unions In The Software Industry
-----------------------------------------------------
In most modern industries , trade unions play a proactive role , except perhaps in the software
industry. There has been considerable debate on the issue of having trade unions in the software
industry, but seemingly no noticeable impact has been felt on the ground level till now. The software industry is one of the pillars of the strengthening Indian economy,Yet the workers in this industry are being denied many rights , which has always been considered as fundamental by worker in other industries world over.

The industry is relatively new ,having been existent only for about a quarter of a century , that is perhaps the reason why the traditional trade union movements could not take root here . And they have not made much progress in their efforts to establish their presence amongst the community of software workers. The absence of unions have certainly granted more freedom to employers .Employers are in a position to push measures that put the employees at a disadvantage while garnering greater benefits for themselves. Employers are able to do things unilaterally without effective consultation with the employees.

The recent spurt of laying off of employees in several major IT firms illustrate , the volatility of the situation that the employees are facing. The employees , currently have little option to question employer actions. They are lacking a forum to express their opinions concerning matters that directly
affect them.

Many unfair practices like bonded labor and inhuman working schedules would not be acceptable in other fields but here this goes unquestioned. Employers in IT firms frequently subject their employees to work under harsh bonds , limiting their chances of seeking employment elsewhere for extended periods of time .Many employees are forced to sign contracts that demand hefty penalty in case of breach. If unions were active ,They could act as watch dogs against the firms using unfair and unethical practices.

They could act as a rationalizing agent , and help employees get a reasonable pay
consummate with the industry wide economic scenario.
Most companies are suffering from high attrition rates. Perhaps one of the reasons for it is the lack if employee satisfaction , and trade unions could act as a mechanism to guarantee employee satisfaction, by ensuring greater employee welfare.Right now , in many firms ,the employee relations has been handled under the name of 'Human Resources' .But HR department is just another department , that is ultimately under the control of the
ownership of the firm. How effectively such a configuration could manage employee welfare is not sure , since it is not an independent entity.

Employee welfare should be under the purview of employees only. Independent unions should be a good way of achieving this. There has been many criticisms against unions , but as a fact they have been existing for almost 200 years .They were born at the dawn of the industrial age , and they played and continue to play a great role in getting a dignified treatment for workers.
The IT industry's growth is perhaps as explosive as the industrial revolution. We are now having
immense number of employees working in this industry. May be the lessons learned from all these years of union activism in other industries in all countries could well be a major help in making the IT industry better for all stakeholders.

Book Hunting

One thing , that is difficult to get in Kerala are books , some books are never to be found , i had searched for some books for several years and still not found ...

i thought the situation would be better in metropolitan Bangalore , but here the situation is only very slightly better .Perhaps it is a problem with India as a whole ..?


the most frustrating things is that not enough information is available , even on the internet , like , there is no way to easily find out if a particular book is available with in India.

some of the books , by Indian writers themselves are not available here ... ,

like , Chandrasekhar's Principia for the Common reader , Chandrasekhar , was one of our greatest scientists , but his book is not available here ...


I wish if there was an Indian Amazon.com ,

We do have some online book stores that service here , but they are notoriously bad in quality of service , and in the selection of stuff available.

Amazon itself seems to have some establishment here , but curiously they don't have a service that is especially tailored for Indian customers , and if we buy through it we have to pay the US prices and the international shipping costs , what a raw deal.

The greatest joys of going to bookstores is the serendipitous discoveries one makes , sometimes one buys a book , that one haven't heard of before , that one didn't have any thought of buying ,
but , like the love that occurs at first sight, the book attaches to ones mind , and one has to buy it...

last time i went to tvm , there was a book fair going on there , a rather small thing , making people wonder why the Vice President himself come all the way to inaugurate it , i bought
Dickens's Bleak House for rs 100 , and a condensed version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire for rs 200 ,

i would say 100 rs is not a high price for the experience of reading Bleak House.

The Poison

There is only one textbook that I ever read from cover to cover , and it was not a
text that I had to study as part of my course work , in fact it had very little relation
to what I was supposed to study.But still I read it with interest , which I could
seldom muster while I read others.That book was Greg Mankiw's
Principles of Economics .

We did have an economics course one semester , but it used an ancient
text by someone called Dewett , and it was taught by an equally ancient teacher.
but then economics was so dry , and something distant .

Reading Mankiw's text changed all that , his explanations are lucid and
interesting.His text is full of illustrations and examples from the real world.
and he has placed of lots of boxed text , connecting the theory with
what is actually happening in the world.
And above all , the book feels comprehensive , after reading it , one feels good ,

one feels as if one has learned enough economics to understand how the world really works .

but , that is only one side of it . we are always accoustomed to associate people's work
to their political beliefs . Mankiw was an Economic Adviser for George Bush.

Even more politically , the solutions to the different economic problems
that Mankiw proposes and evaluates are definitely right wing.and he does that
so convincingly , that he definitely seems on the side of reason.

I don't know economics , so I don't know how to reason against his arguments. he argues that minimum wage limits are bad . he says fixed rents are bad , he says the best way to control pollution is by selling the right to pollute to the highest bidder.

Perhaps , many of his ideas can be opposed in terms of moral or humanitarian arguments , but is it possible to prove him wrong using economic arguments?...

I feel , his book is a poison , especially for Indian students , who have largely always adhered to left wing thoughts at least during their university days. this book will cause great doubts amongst them ,because its main instrument is reason and scientific method , and many like me will know no counter argument to what it says.

I think we need an answer to this book , till then perhaps the minds of many readers will be full of doubt.

Here's a link to a strong article against the book .

SQLling with Squirrel

Perhaps , one reason why religions exist , is that it gives those who
believe in it a sense of belonging , of being part of something , of not being alone..

Thats exactly what sql clients do in our office. There are people who believe that their favourite sql client is the ultimate one.may be it does give some sort of collective reprieve from the pointlessness of the work.atleast , it gives something to quarrel about.

of course , if we were all having *nix machines at office ,
we'd all be fighting over editors , but here sql clients seems to have attracted peoples minds more.(for some reason , most people here seemed to be hooked on a kludgy ,ugly ,shareware editor called edit plus . more on that on a future post).

There are supporters of toad , raptor , plsql developer , ......

But , I use Squirrel .

It is open source and has a kind of tough appearance , and has nice
little touches like quoting queries and generating java code to put that
query into a stringbuffer so that it can be cut and pasted in a breeze.

and it works with any database ...

only thing missing is that it wont chirp , unlike Toad which croaks on launch

Office Fun

Some people have a very serious attitude towards work . i have a friend in my office , he's normally a fun loving guy , always joking and playing pranks , but once he's at work , he is darn serious .

no body is serious in college , i dont think , even this serious-at-work guy really took college seriously. i wonder why ..

sometimes it is cool to have fun at work , here's one thing , that i tried .

Here is a link to a a page about , having fun with printers , it contains a C# program , which alllows one to show all kinds of messages on the office - printers LCD screen.
i wrote a python version of it , and well it was kind of fun ... here's the program

##################################################

import socket
import random
import time

fortunes= [
"STEP AWAY",
"Go Away",
"Who are you",
"All your bases are belong to us",
"one small step for mankind",
"NO PRINT FOR YOU",
"Plutonium LEAK",
"HELLO WORLD",
"Dont Panic",
"Be Gentle",
"MohanLal is not FAT",
"Hands Up",
"Bangalore is not nice",
"no rain today",
"cartridge frozen",
"i dont talk to strangers",
"take a walk",
"get a real job",
"Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic",
"This is not a bug, this is a feature",
"Maintenance free: When it breaks, it can't be fixed",
"Hit any user to continue",
"No use calling Sagar!"

]


sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)


while True:
s=sock.connect(('10.113.32.80',9100))
print 'connected to printer'
t =random.choice(fortunes)
v=sock.sendall('\x1B%-12345X@PJL RDYMSG DISPLAY = "' + t + '"\r\n\x1B%-12345X\r\n')
print t
sock.close()
print 'disconnected from printer'
time.sleep(500)

print v



####################################################

just replace the ip addr with your printers ip address and 'Sagar' , with your sysadmin.

it works on hp lasers , for sure , i dont know about others....

what a crappy name

the name name of the blog is darn ,wrong . getting out of college is not the same as getting an eternal recess , perhaps it is the end of all recesses....darn