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The Olympics brings us all a package of inspiration, patriotism and hope once in 4 years. We are in a lucky era to see people like Michael Phelps ruling the pool and yeah, Mr.Abhinav Bindra the lone gladiator from India. We are also lucky enough to witness some of nature's beautiful creatures jumping, swimming and having fun at Beijing. Have a look:

3. Achiever Beauty

Yelena Isinbayeva - Arguably the best women pole vaulter clinching golds in Athens and Beijing. Does it feel lonely at the top?





2. AquaBeauty

The stunning Aussie swam away with 3 golds at Beijing. Stephanie Rice is only 20, so there's a great chance of her gracing the next Olympics too. Hey wait..Reality Check. Next Olympics is 4 years away. Which means, in all probabilities I'll be watching that Olympics with my Missus. Hmmmm..Whoever that is!



1. Beautyo Beauty

Paraguay's Leryn Franco failed to qualify for Javelin finals. But with her stunning Indian looks, she was the gold-medalist in many a heart.







Beauties with brawns.
Phew!

I recently downloaded an open source software called FreeMind which helps you create Mindmaps. The site itself is a neatly organized Wiki. So I tried my hands on the software to experiment with it and pass time. I mapped an article on diversification and competitive advantage by Michael Porter and this is how the first map turned out to be.



Is it easy?
Yeah, learning to use the software is damn easy. But it takes time to create a map. There are a couple of keyboard shortcuts you can use to save time. Especially Enter and Insert for a sibling node and a child node.

Is it worth it?
Depends. I'm more comfortable underlining and taking normal notes. But it does becomes useful especially when you are dealing with a lot of info and you want to organize it in a single page for easy revision or something like that.

Does it enhance my memory or thinking ability?
Not at all. Go solve problems, puzzles, crosswords or some mentally challenging stuff. If you find these are not your cup of tea, you can eat memory tablets or get enlightenment by doing meditation under a Bodhi tree for 100 years.

Are you kidding?
Yes.

Who is Michael Porter?
It is this gentleman.


To make things simple, he is a funda dude in management circles.

Why is he famous?
He gave a lot of frameworks which management students endlessly rattle on in their job interviews to impress the interviewers. Like the Pancha Boothams, his "5 forces" are very powerful in turning the tables.

~Jai Hind

This is it. (Though not news in the US)



More about Kindle
Will paperback books hit the fate of snail mail? Seems so. Kindle is the answer to the portability advantage that books have long since enjoyed. Even though the price now is at a higher side, as with all technology products we can expect it to be more affordable soon. By bringing books digitized, Kindle has made even books affordable - the price of books are now reduced by an average of 60%. Again you can expect it to go south further.

Adjustable font size, built in dictionary and the book-alike looks will definitely make reading a kick-ass affair.

I need it ..Badly. Waiting for the Kindle to hit India.

Of late I'm upto something worthwhile. Learning German. Learning something new always has its pleasures which I cherish. Like French(during TCS training) and swimming. But learning languages gives you a real kick as in when you start noticing the words in that language especially in movies, you start jumping up and down with joy. You turn to your next seat neighbor and say.. "You know what? Sprachen Sie is German" and he might turn around and give you a cold stare or at best say "Is it?". But what the heck, you still enjoy the moment. Coming to language classes there are always opportunities of humour where you can't just control laughing. Few categories of students:

1. Initial enthus:
These guys just are so much enthued about the language that they keep asking the teacher- What is this in French? What is that in German? At first the teacher is also excited about the student's curiosity but after a while, she gets irritated and starts saying - "We'll come to that Kumar. We'll be covering it soon". Needless to say they are the ones who point out obvious differences in the language in comparison with English. Whenever the teacher writes a new word on the board - they burst out and mispronounce it (Dei avangala pesa vidungada!). To me these guys are at best a pain in the ass.

2.Children of Wren and Martin:
For these guys, the world revolves around the order of Subject, Verb, Objects, Common Nouns, Proper Nouns, Present Continuous, Participles and Articles. (Idhellam enakku Englishlaye theriyadheda). The teacher might argue - English is not German, but this grammar guru of English is never satisfied. He is specially the one who runs and asks questions to the teacher after the class.

3.The US dude
He is the one who puts an accent in every word he talks. Not only in English, but he takes it to the language he learns. "Tu est" becomes "Tchchyyyyyuuu Yeh" and he brings in the style factor. Blame it all on the BPO call center trainings. Senthil Palanivel from Aminjikarai picks up the phone and says "Hi there! This is Shaun Paul. How can I help you"? Anyway, these guys contribute to the much needed fun in class.

4.Tam/Mallus et al
Waat is praaajact in Franch Maam? Waat is maadyool in German? (Dei modhalla Englisha ozhunga pesungadaa). I love these guys. The best stuff is "Un conversation entre Shiju Appukkuttan et Saravanan Pichaimuthu". I almost fall laughing off my chair listening to their dialogue, thankfully the class comes to an end.It gets even funnier when your friend sitting next to you starts laughing as well - the laughter chain reaction starts off. Even when the class is silent and serious, you both erupt laughing.

On a serious note, learning new stuff is good for your brain. It's scientifically proved that it kicks off new neurons and helps you make new associations or something like that. All the best.

PS: What's Selamat Datang?? (Ask someone who has flown with Malaysian Airlines.
If you don't find anyone, I assure you it's not that interesting though and you may choose to Google instead)

YSL, the fashion guru of Paris passed away recently. Now you may wonder why a Tamil guy, student who has totally no sense of fashion as in à la Paris style wants to bid adieu to YSL. Rewind 10 years back.I get a phone call from one perverted friend of mine - "Machan..There's a new channel right after NDTV in VHF band..Check it out ..Semmaya irukku" . Given my sincerity and studiousness, I was hoping to see something on the lines of Discovery Channel or National Geographic. And then I tuned, and once I reached the given specifications by my friend, the remote stopped searching further. Whoa! What was that? Seeing something like that in the tube(as against other media which I deny the cognizance of) was initially fun, surprising, shocking and a whole lot of mixed feelings.

And yeah, it took a Mambalam boy on a virtual tour of Paris, Cannes, Rio and New York. For one who thought fashion was Jeans and T-shirt, it introduced Spring Summer & Fall Winter collections, Haute Couture and Lingerie. For one who believed the hottest tailors were Glamor Tailors & DressLand in Mambalam and Vogue (a costly but effective one) in Ashok Nagar, it shattered that belief into pieces by bringing in Armani, Roberto Cavalli and Gucci before the eyes. It made mamis in madisar and lasses in churidhar passé. For one who grew up marking half-yearly exam dates on large font Sundaram Finance calendar, it explained how even calendars can be exciting by showing the making of the Pirelli calendar. Maths tution figures, WWF, cricket matches gave way to Rio Carnival, Cannes Film Festival in class room discussions.

The joy and bliss of millions of adolescent Indian youths and quite a number of oldies was finally checked by one powerful lady from Delhi who thought this channel was the main culprit in spoiling the Indian culture. But by then it was sufficient for the Mambalam boy to know about everything from Ritu Beri to wardrobe malfunction. And among other things he came to know about YSL also (the bespectacled old man who always walked with 2 babes on the ramp).
YSL's death on June 1 marked the end of a saga in the French fashion industry.
No points for guessing what the channel was.

1.Kamal is God. That's expected.
2.Kamal in 10 roles. Cheap marketing gimmick. Few roles wasted.
3.New age film making. Taking Tamil cinema to a new level.
4.Music. Bore.Himesh fails to connect with the Tamil audience.
5.Concept.Settings.Novel.Appreciative.
6.Graphics.Unprofessional.
7.Screenplay.Pacy.
8.Humour.Subtle.Effective.
9.Blood and gore. Bold.Remember Tarantino?
10.Dialogue delivery. Fletcher, Vincent, Reddy - Kudos.
11.Movie.Barrier breaker from cliched Tamil movies and brings in some thoughtful concepts before the eyes. Fresh.

பிரிவு - பாடம்

அலைகடல் கண்களென்னை உருட்டிய நாட்களெங்கே
கனியினும் இனிய சொற்கள் செவிபாய்ந்த நாட்களெங்கே
மறந்ததுவிட்டாய் என் மனதை கல்லென உடைத்துவிட்டாய்
மலையினும் மிகுவலியை நானெவர்க்கும் இனி தரவேன்

1. Nadsat and Newspeak
Appy-Polly-Loggies for not updating this space for a very long time. It's all because of the cliched time constraint which I never wanted to mention. Have been spending the time watching lots of movies, hanging out with droogs and the new timepass swimming.More often than not, the English language gets stylized with new advent of slangs and a mix of fictional languages. Most of the times, novels are the birthplaces of such phenomenon. One is Newspeak, a double plus good imagination by George Orwell in his great novel 1984. The other one which I came across recently is Nadsat, which has lots of Russian interjections, first popularized by Anthony Burgess in his novel 'A Clockwork Orange' which was later made into a great movie by Stanley Kubrick. Beyond linguistic intricacies, one more concept popularized is Ultraviolence or excessive unjustified violence which has links with aestheticization of the same brought out in many art forms. Nowadays people around me are speaking a certain language - Straight line method, Porter's Framework and activity based costing which am trying to decode badly.

2. Swimming in deep
Yeah, most of us would have waddled into the swimming pool some day or the other. So have I, but till this time I had been splashing in the shallow half, taking extreme care, not to accidentally wade into the deep areas. I believe lots of us fall into this category. Some even pick up swimming, but still are unsure of getting into the deep. How to break this barrier? There are a few tricks which help you do this, let me tell you which one worked for me. These are not to be followed just like that, these might be dangerous and do it with someone who can save you incase some mishap happens. Get into the deep side of the pool(unless you do this, you'll never swim in deep), hold the side rim. The idea is to give a push, reach the bottom of the pool, touch the floor with your legs, then come up. Do this some five times. While going in, give a push, hold straight, hands up, hold your breath, don't panic you'll get in automatically. Once you hit the ground, give a gentle push off the feet, keep your arms sideways, push the water down (palms face the bottom of the pool), slightly move your legs and you should automatically come up. Do this is in 9-10 feet. Once you do this often, you kick the fear out of your mind that you'll sleep in a watery grave and that whatever happens, you can atleast damn well come up. This should remove 70% of the fear of swimming in deep. After this you can move a little bit away from the rim and try the same, and then try cycling in water which would come intuitively. After this, there is one more step, standing near the edge of the pool, jump into the water feet first - this is the same as the previous exercise, just that the force is provided by jumping instead of pushing off the rim and come up the same way, swim to safety. That's it - this should make you break the cherry of getting into the deep.

3. Sahana
She is beautiful, she is awesome and she can make your day. She exemplifies pathos, brings out the love and moves your soul. If you haven't met her, it's high time you did it. I can say she was my first love in the music world and that's what she stands for. Technically she took birth in the family of Harikambodhi the 28th Melakartha and goes like this - s r g m p m d n s| s n d p m g m r g r s. That's Sahana - one of the beautiful ragas in Carnatic music. AR Rahman made a good use of it in the song "Azhagae Sugama" from the movie - Parthale Paravasam. The situation where the song comes fits beautifully in the context set by the raga itself. The song comes when Madhavan and Simran split up and both feel the suffering of love tearing their hearts apart. It would be criminal not to mention K Balachander's direction and the choice of the song in this regard. He himself seems to be a lover of Sahana - he made a serial with the same name and the title song is also in the same raga. "Parthen rasithen, pakkam vara thudithen" is another film song based out of this. To get a feel of it, listen to the great composition "Ii vasudha" by Thiagrajar and rendered amazingly by Veenai Doraiswami Iyengar available in this link :http://surasa.net/music/tyagaraja/.

"Knowledge makes everything simpler".
Yeah, yeah...I have read this article many times and still it retains its kink. Also explains our natural affinity towards Apple's products and for that matter anything simple.
http://lawsofsimplicity.com/category/laws?order=ASC

http://philly.metro.us/metro/topstories/ap/Jail_Escape.html

Besides this, "The Shawshank Redemption" is an awesome movie.

We were in the final year of Engineering and had joined a short term course for GRE. That was when our vocabulary blossomed exponentially, thanks to books like Norman Lewis and to a small extent the course itself. My close friend, an amazing character called Mr. Vivek used to be a part of the gang that attended the classes and he used to come with me in my bike. The classes were in the noon and the hot Chennai sun had no pity on us. One day I hadn't parked my bike in the shade and after the classes, when Vivek climbed and sat on it, he screamed - "PYROPYGIAN".

iykerworld: hello
shreyas: hi..
iykerworld: how are u doing
iykerworld: i am paul by name
iykerworld: and u
shreyas: doing good and my name is shreyas
iykerworld: ok
iykerworld: so where are u from
shreyas: am from India
shreyas: wat abt u?
iykerworld: from nigeria
iykerworld: i am anetwork marketer
iykerworld: and u
shreyas: i'm an MBA student
iykerworld: waoo that is good
iykerworld: do u know about network marketing
shreyas: is it some kind of viral marketing or something..
shreyas: haven't heard abt it,,yet
shreyas: cud u elaborate?
iykerworld: well that is what the world is going into
iykerworld: and many are making money throught network marketing
shreyas: yeah now i can guess wat it is about it is like u go on growing a chain of network
shreyas: and the more people join ur network, the more you are rewarded
shreyas: guess it should be something like that
iykerworld: yes
iykerworld: but however not only that
iykerworld: it is also about heath
iykerworld: ur heath
BUZZ!!!
shreyas: heath?? wats that?
iykerworld: which is the most important thing in ones life
iykerworld: sorry
iykerworld: health
shreyas: are u meaning health
shreyas: oh ok
iykerworld: yes
shreyas: wats the connection??
iykerworld: ok
iykerworld: the product is for health and for using it and let people know about it
iykerworld: the company pay u for that
iykerworld: do u have ear phone
iykerworld: so that we can talk
shreyas: well no...sorry bt that
shreyas: dun hav one
iykerworld: ok
iykerworld: do u get my point now
shreyas: yeah yeah i get that...
iykerworld: so if u are intersted to network
iykerworld: i will give u the site
iykerworld: u will check if the company is in ur country
shreyas: k..cool
iykerworld: www.somesite.com /*Now don't try to visit the site*/
shreyas: you are doing this job quite nicely []
iykerworld: thanks
iykerworld: u can also check my sponser website from USA
shreyas: sure thing..
iykerworld: www.someothersite.com
iykerworld: check it and let me know ok
iykerworld: if u are interested
iykerworld: my sponser can call u on phone
shreyas: k sure...thanx
shreyas: gotta go now...
shreyas: bye
iykerworld: ok
iykerworld: so that mean u are not interested right


All this, while I wanted to pass time in Business Chat Room section of Y Msgr during vacation.

What’s your favourite letter? Probably no one would have asked you such a question. Even I didn’t think of it until a week back. But somehow this crept up in my mind and pondering over that question for a while, I focused my thoughts on the letter ‘M’. On the first sight it might not look that appealing but some interesting facts may make one’s head turn around.

There are words that come into a language from others like Latin / Greek making generous contributions to English. But some seemingly unrelated words when scrutinized a bit, reveal mysteries. For instance in French, death is “mort”. In Hindi, it’s ‘mar’ and in Tamil ‘maranam’. Even ignoring the connection between Hindi and Tamil, the French/Spanish(morte) and Hindi/Tamil share the sound “mar/mor”. Similarly Mother/Ma/Amma/Me’re share consonant M. Life starts in the latter and ends in the former word discussed and Ma seems to pervade in both. Also consider Man/Manidhan – they represent the same entity - you get the idea.

‘Ma’ is also important in Indian classical music. This note divides the 72 melakartha ragas into two equal halves of 36. The first 36 with “shudha madhyamam” M1 and the next 36 with “prati madhyamam” M2. Rotate the letter M in all four directions you get something meaningful – M – normal letter; Rotate 90 degrees in the clockwise direction, you get 3. Another 90 degrees gives W and another 90 gives ∑, the summation symbol. M (neglecting W which is a 180 shift of M) is the only letter that gives the maximum notations for rotations.

M is also the starting letter of words like Majestic, Monumental, Mega, Million, Multi, Mountain, Monarch, Michael Schumacher, Myriad, Mighty, Matador which all signify domination and grandness.

So, how do you like ‘M’?

Snapshots from hostel during Mumbai rains

Here is an excellent video about RSS/Feeds and readers.
http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

However, while adding a subscription in Google Reader, it is not mandatory to give the URL of the RSS/feed, but its enough to give the URL of the main site. For ex. you can give
http://shreyaswrite.blogspot.com while adding subscription in Google Reader instead of http://shreyaswrite.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

RSS feeds are actually XML files in a standard format, so readers basically incorporate an XML parser and pull out the feeds.

Have you ever wanted to listen to famous kirthanais of Tyagaraja rendered by stalwarts like Madurai Mani Iyer, Maharajapuram Santhanam, Mandolin Srinivas etc.?
Visit:
http://surasa.net/music/tyagaraja-archive/

Just thought of recording my experiment with slowness. It all started with an email forward which was talking about the slow movement taking on silently in Europe starting with the concept of Slow Food, which you might have guessed as opposed to fast food. Anyway, as the name suggests the movement is all about going slow. That's it. And in every possible task - do it consciously. Sounds wonderful doesn't it - especially for all those lazy readers. Actually it is.

The prime rationale behind this is to go easy on the anxiety and do things better. Of course, we in fact practise this unconsciously- rather forced to practise it. Imagine you are in caught in a traffic at T.Nagar or wherever, possibly sweating in a hot afternoon and thousands of horns honking at you to move forward when you have just enough space to allow a current of air between you and the vehicle ahead. That is one point where your adrenaline rushes and the stress level goes to an all time high isn't it. Well the good news is that you need not feel such sensations anymore. Consciously shift your thinking about our topic - yes slowness. After all you are supposed to be slow. So, the traffic is somehow helping you. Take a deep breath, and share the philosophy with the honker. Sometimes you'll get showered with pleasant acknowledgements especially from auto drivers. Take them as your motivators and strive forward with your goal. You'll receive enlightenment. Or you can choose to retort slowly- " Youuu..areeee...aaaa... reeeeeal.....bosss......stud". The other party will never know you are praising or scolding. It really saves you from getting a bloody nose.

Further in some countries embracing this principle, the per-week work hours are restricted to 28.8. But the productivity level in these places are comparatively high.(It's interesting to compare this with a typical software engineer's work hours. Maybe its more meaningful to compare with 3 or 4 of them taken together.) That basically is because, the slower you are, the more you are able to see and avoid mistakes and hence lesser the defects and higher the productivity. It's easy on the blood pressure too. Further tea is considered as the drink of the slow. But coffee beats tea any day easily.

What happened to my experiment? It was a huge success. I woke up slowly, ate slowly, watched a slow going movie, again ate slowly and crept into the bed slowly. What about work????? It was a Sunday!

You may be interested in visiting the official slow site : http://www.slowdownnow.org/

J2EE development is going strong and it will certainly in the future. In most places. So, no wonder products aimed at easing stuff up for developers is destined to thrive. So is RSA - http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/architect/swarchitect/index.html.On thinking what makes RSA tick(read RSA 6 or 7)..the following points spring up in that order:
1. All under one roof - do every deliverable with RSA.
2. Don't sweat it out - It's fairly simple to learn and get acquainted with.
3. Performance - Will talk about this soon.

Now with RSA, you can do/deliver most of your J2EE artifacts and it provides a very good usable IDE to do so. One of the noteworthy things is UML modelling/design. We all know how important is design in any project and a good design cuts cost/rework and adds to the bottom line and so on. But design seldom is stable and it evolves/changes during development. So syncing up the developed code and design is always a challenge and doing it well is very useful for everyone. RSA accommodates this with alacrity.Now the advantage here is that, you can have the design model and development code in the same workspace and it allows for easy referring to the design during development and vice versa. Forward engineering and reverse engineering have never been so easy. Applying design patterns can also be done but I haven't tried it out myself.

As its built on Eclipse, development ease is also taken care of. Further it supports And to use RSA, the tutorials are fairly good and the time to learn it will be minimal, provided the user knows what he wants.In any system, the wait time experienced promotes a feeling of added complexity. And this factor is less in RSA. Since there is no need of a separate designing software, it will be easy on the system resources as most of good UML design softwares tend to eat up more resources.

Ofcourse, there's a lot more in RSA than what's mentioned here which haven't been discussed like JSF/Junits/Change management linking/Code review tools/Plugins etc. Overall the experience with RSA for J2EE development is good.