Passing Out

Its been more than two years since I left college, now sitting here, perhaps I am separated from it by enough space and time, to reflect on the time I spend there, and the things I saw and learned more objectively and try to be a troll on my own blog.

Darn, no body takes college seriously. Everybody is after easy marks.Everybody wants to have some fun.Everybody wants to choose the electives which "guarantees" the most marks.There is no purpose to anything.Never mind paying hefty fees just to while time away.

yet the moment , we "pass out" of college , and enter into a job, a kind of "seriousness" comes in out of nowhere.Now everything has a purpose, everything has to be done proper.Because if it isn't so, your boss will get angry, perhaps you can even get fired for it.And that is so obscene.

When I see a person, who was an easy goer in college, turn into a sincere and true worker in a company, I feel like taking a steel bar and breaking their knees with it on the spot, because that person is the ultimate hypocrite, since he can do work for the earning of money, but he cant attach the same seriousness to college which is supposedly is done for enlightenment, and we are paying for it to boot.

The guy who does good work , only so that he earns good , and does not get fired , is a creature of small ambitions , he will probably make a lot of money , buy a good house and live happily , but I feel chances are less that he will either invent the steam engine , or write the "Ulysses".

Aftermath

The results of the 2009 elections are out.Left parties have obtained much less number of seats than they are used to, so have many regional parties like RJD and TDP.Many "pundits"have taken this as an opportunity for Left bashing and hate speech, but we should see what are the real things , what role the Left has played in the history of our country and what role it shall play in its future.

Many conservatives try to establish that somehow Left is anti-development.But development is an all encompassing term,we cannot equate the short term prosperity of a few people of the higher strata of the society as development.One oft cited example is that the Left parties opposed the introduction of computers and usage of mechanized farm equipment.If the Left have opposed these , then it was a reasonable stand at that point of time.

Computerization would have lead to a certain degree of job losses as many tasks would be mechanized and would not require human intervention.So even as computerization would create a few jobs for well-skilled personal , a lot of existing workers could lose their jobs ,if they became redundant. It would also have made us owners of large amounts of proprietary systems ,and we
would had have to give away huge sums as contract charges to international concerns like IBM and Unisys. We would have been locked into these vendors software and hardware , and would have no option but to keep paying them forever.Besides if we had bought lots of expensive stuff then , by now we would have lots off stuff worth pennies,which would have to be sold for scrap.

Similarly farm machinery also posed a genuine risk of pushing unskilled labourers into unemployment and starvation. We expect the government to take care of all the people , not just a few well-off people in the big cities. But unfortunately many governments fail to see things clearly , and someone has to do something so that government does not do the wrong thing.And Left has done this very well in the past and continue to do so.

Right wing commentators often depict the left-block as a hindrance to taking decisions , because the left does not allow to take steps designed to serve the vested interests of the right wing and its backers. Contrariwise,I would say that the Left's opposition to the nuclear deal was in our people's interests.One of the greatest decisions ever taken by the Left was that of withdrawing support for the UPA,over the Indo-U.S nuclear deal.The Congress was seen to be pushing for deal ,without any semblance of transparency.

The urgency with which the government acted on the nuclear-deal issue is strange and uncalled for and raises questions as to what where the real motives behind it. The best recourse for the situation was to pull the support for government and dissociate from the nuclear deal and build up public opinion from the outside.

The power at centre is not to be used for giving special bonuses and freebies to different regions as the regional parties are doing. By doing this the regional parties are diluting our national purpose.In exchange for regional benefits ,they are sacrificing their stake of opinion on economic and foreign policy issues which are of paramount importance, and have an impact over the entire country for all of the future. In the choice between using the influence of a political party to either strive for regional development or get a decisive role in setting national policy , the latter is certainly a better choice.But short-sighted commentators still clamour for narrow development.

The role of Left will not be diminished by a singular electoral debacle.If we let the Congress ,which has the ideological depth of a doughnut,have its way, we might be on the way to see rampant opportunism and hypocrisy:Its leaders not having any unifying philosophy to guide them , and acting purely on individual whims and fancies.And its allies true blooded regional parties ,who will give the government nightmares while dealing with issues concerning the concerned regions.

So Left will resurrect , because the 'right' just doesn't take care of anybody else.We need social security and free medical care and education for our needy citizens. Even so many years after our county's birth ,it is strange that the government has no obligation to take care of its citizens.All these can change only with major influence of the Left.

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