Of This and That

28 th August 1995, a thin, tall, hesitant, individual had joined one of the upcoming IT companies in the Silicon Valley of India. Thin and tall, because that’s how the individual was built, as are most fresh graduates, stepping out of college. Hesitant, because he had no idea what to expect, this being the first job. At the back of the mind, first day of college was coming up again and again and that meant being scared of seniors and ragging. As he slowly ventured into the company premise, he was impressed with the office building, nice and clean, shining floors, security guards, immaculately dressed, standing at the gate etc. The office bus had dropped bus full of employees, including this individual, at the company gate, ahead of time and hence there were not many people to be seen. The receptionist was also yet to arrive. Watching his each step, he slowly moved towards a room besides the reception, having seen some people inside. In a barely audible voice, he asked, “Excuse m...

When I upgraded to Windows 10, I had in my mind to retry the Microsoft’s new explorer. I had long stopped using IE and shifted to Chrome as my default browser. MS had been claiming that Edge is a totally new browser, very fast performing etc. However a few days of use of Edge and I seem to be concluding that Microsoft should just stop making the browser and concentrate only on the OS and other applications. On launching Edge, it opens up in a page called as Start Page, which has tried to do a Google like simple interface. So you get to see a search box titled “Where to Next?” (See image below). There is a small circle towards the right of the page that seems to be my account picture. It took me a while to figure this out. This could have been a bit bigger to easily understand what this is. After a few seconds, the page loads MSN News and some other items like local Weather, Stocks (if configured in the Stocks app). The page uses the infinite scroll list concept, so as you...

More than 2 years back I had written about the ever growing problem of banning bachelors from staying, in many of Pune Societies. The problem hasn't been resolved and I am definitely surprised how come those affected by this, the bachelor community, which is pretty sizable in number, hasn't acted on this yet, when we all know that this isn't legal.  But the good thing is that Pune Police has finally decided to do something about this on their own and address this growing menace. The bachelors probably don't make as much nuisance as this self proclaimed ban by the societies has.  I stay in a society that fortunately didn't fall pray to this rule. We had successfully counter argued against it and today we follow a simple rule. Anyone can stay, but any tenant (bachelor or family) if found creating nuisance, which is unacceptable behavior in a public place, will be asked to leave immediately. And we have been living happily with this rule for the last 10 years at...

When I heard the news yesterday morning about the twin train tragedy in MP , I could not help but wonder - Kamayani express was the first to derail and then later it was Janata Express. Lives were lost, which is terrible, but could at least the second derailment of Janata express be averted?  In the era of GPS tracking and internet of things where we have billions of sensors helping collect and manage so much data, could proper user of these technologies help avert some of these disasters? The first train got derailed due to localized issue of flash floods and the land near the bridge giving way. This probably was difficult to predict and prevent against, but after the first train derailed, why wasn't the second train stopped before it too got derailed? If the time gap between the two was very small, then I guess nothing could be done. I tried to figure this out, but could not get much from the news, as most articles just mentioned about the two trains being derailed.  Mo...

Microsoft’s Windows 10, last of the lot , upgrade started to roll out yesterday world-wide and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to be one of those who upgrade on the first day. While at my home laptop I had reserved the Windows 10 upgrade via the Windows icon in the task bar, I had not been able to do so for my work laptop. The Windows icon wasn’t appearing. KB 3035583 is required to be installed via Windows Update for the icon to appear, however my attempts to install this optional update failed continuously. When I tried various options like sfc /scannow or DSIM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth , I could not get past the failure. My system constantly showed that a system reboot was pending and however many times I rebooted, it kept showing the same message. I wasn’t however going to miss the opportunity for the free upgrade, so I followed the steps mentioned in this article . Note that if you are upgrading the OS on the machine on which you access this link, then...

Close to 20 years back when I joined the IT Industry, I felt that I could increase my productivity many fold if I could learning typing. I had seen people struggle to type on the keyboards even after years of use, and it basically was due to the fact that they had never tried to really learn typing. A classic case was one of my colleagues who used to hold the keyboard with one hand and used his pointing figure of other hand to type. In time he did get good speed with it, but it was still not fast enough.  With proper training, one can type almost at the speed with which one is thinking and that's when you get the true benefits. To put my plan into action I had downloaded a few free tools that taught typing and once I felt comfortable, I started getting my daily news paper to office. I would pick up any random article, open notepad and start typing it. My attempt was to type as much as I could without looking at the keyboard, but only at the news paper and then see how much mista...

The other day I was reading " India's IT Party is over. Reinvent yourself or suffer " by Ravi Venkatesan. He has touched upon some very interesting points. The point on slower rise in incomes, slow hiring etc. I feel should also be looked at from another angle. Any new industry will typically have an initial high rise, high demand period and slowly in time it will saturate. About 40 years back, when the IT industry as an Industry started to pick up, it was like an ocean and anyone getting into it like a drop in the ocean. So there was plenty of demand but very less supply. Hence things moved fast for the initial players. They got good business, good rates, they rose very fast and expanded at a fast page. In nascent stage as the organization was growing, it needed more and more people, so ‘hiring’ was good. It needed more and more people to manage the growing work, so ‘promotions’ were good. Business was growing by leaps and bounds, so the ‘compensation hikes’ were g...