Afghan (Frederick Forsyth)

In fiction Frederick Forsyth is simply superb. The first i read was Dogs of War. And since then, most of the other works. Further when it comes to short story collection, Veteran is simply too good.
Lately i have been reading Ram Gopal Verma's blog. His blogs are funny with a taste of like it or not here it comes. Sometimes i wonder if RGV and Amitabh really do have such free time to write blogs, or are they simply outsourcing this work to some junior intern? Call me a skeptic. Anyways in one of the RGV's blog he had praised this novel Afghan. Now i had to read it.
I will say that this is a good peice of work. Research done by author is always good. It looks like he has been to mountains of Tora bora and seen the place himself. So vivid are the description. Story plot was a little weak for me. Or maybe my expectations are too high. I found it unconvincing that CIA and MI5 can simply put their man in a mission critical of AQ at the last moment. Otherwise it is a good entertaining book.

Christmas 2009

I love christmas songs. So i have been playing them from Youtube. Last year when my in-laws were here, we went to Fremont Church near Fremont and Central. I haven't been to a church in long time. It was fun. Then we went to see christmas decoration in a nearby neighborhood. It was simply awesome.
So this year, me and my wife decided to check out decorations again. And we were also looking for some pastry to eat. Most of the shops were closed. Luckily there is one indian restaurant near our house (Peacock Restaurant), which was open. This place also has its own bakery. First we roamed around the places to see lights. Some neighborhoods were very decorated compared to others. It looks like decoration is also contagious. If my neighbor does it, then i will do it too. We went to Peacock for pastry afterwards. After pastry we decided to have chicken biryani too.
So overall we had a very fun christmas.

Book Reading Update 1 (Tipping Point)

I was so excited to find so many books. But it looks like i have put more in mouth than i can chew. Library has a deadline of 3 weeks. In one week i have only been able to finish "Diary of wimpy kid". Ofcourse that is easy, as it is a fun book. Not something for which i have to motivate myself. Now moving onto "Tipping point". I am at page 60 or 70. So far i have found that this book is about special people, who are very outgoing and connect to many people. So basically if an idea is sponsored by those people, the idea is successful. It is not as if we don't know it already. But with the exaples of successful people from real life, it becomes more important. Futher it talks about knowledgeable persons (Mavens). Now i know why the famous build tool in Java is called Maven (sorry if you don't understand what i wrote in this line. Don't worry it is just a software tool for my work). More on the book reading later. Meanwhile Merry Xmas.

Reading Great books

These days i feel very happy. From somewhere i heard about book "Outliers". Got the audiobook from library. After reading it i am so impressed with the author (Malcom Gladwell) that i went to his website and found out about his other works. Just finished reading "Blink" and now i am going to move to "Tipping Point". Meanwhile i went to shelfari to see what other readers like me are reading. From there got the great list of other books. Alas my library allows me only to put 10 items in hold at a time. Today several of my holds were cleared and have got "How the mighty fall", "Diary of a wimpy kid, the last straw.", "Microtrends", "Catch-22" and "Story of Pi". This list will keep me occupied for sometime. So which one to start. "Story of Pi" is audiobook, that i will read while driving in car. So my best bet for today is "Diary of wimpy kid" :-)

Pumdiana pumdiana

My son likes this song very much. Whenever he sees the laptop, he will make hand gestures and drag us to play it. Most of the time it is very cute. Only after hearing it for 30 times in a day it gets little tiring :-)

Astrology on radio in SFO

Recently i came to know of a desi radio station in bay area. It is on 1170 AM. There are several shows. Typically i listen to "Morning Masti with Mantra" and "On Air Dil se with Seema". These shows happen on my commute hours to work.
The format is to either start conversation on some topic, or invite some knowledgeable person on the show. And then people ask questions and share stories or opinion etc. Several times they have invited lawyers (immigration lawyer is typically in more demand), child specialists etc.
But today was special. Today they have invited one "Astrologer". I don't believe in it, but still continued on to listen to it. What was fascinating to see that out of 6-7 calls only one caller was male, rest all were women. Does it mean that women believe in astrology and stars more than men do. Or is it simply that women can talk about issues more easily than men can? Or maybe both?

Anyways here are the questions i could remember. Answers to invariably all were on the format that everything is good. You will get what you are desiring. Maybe a little delayed. Some graha is giving you slight trouble. May need extra pooja path. Call me after the show for more details. (We all know what will happen then.)

Enjoy the questions.

1)Yahi job continue karoon ki change karoon. Green card kab hoga
2)Mera beta padhai main bahut stress leta hai. Usko safalta milegi ki nahin.
3)Main ma kab banoongi.
4)Meri beti college main hai. Uski padhai theek se hogi ki nahin. Usko badhiya job milega ki nahin.
5)Mujhe ek doosra job offer mila hua hai. Main usko consider karoon ki nahin.
6)Mera Green card hoga ki nahin. Main finally india main settle hounga ki yahan.

Hiking trail on mission view

Marketing thugs

It is true that marketing guys are just shameless. (Friends if you are in this business, then it is not a personal allegation but it is on the marketing business in general. )They can do anything to sell a thing to you. Further i think they just take for granted that people are foolish. Following 2 examples clearly demonstrate this.

1)I have a subscription of time magazine. It costs me about $20 per year. Every now and then i will get subscription renewal notice in my mail with some quote. Typically they are about $40 or more. Why will i pay double or triple of current subscription price? And to top it on one of the notice there was something like "Enroll for automatic renewal, so that we don't have to send you renewal notices in mail and it will be good for environment." Common do you take me for that kind of sucker. If you don't want to damage environment then stop sending these junk. If your product is good and being sold at right price, i will get it. Stop emotional blackmailing.

2)I use snapfish for photo development. Lately i ordered about 50 prints from them. Using a coupon i had to pay in total about $9. Not bad. Today when i checked to see its status, i see a funny marketing message below my orders. "You've received the lowest price available for your order. You saved $186.30 on your order". Now this is an outrageous statement. Nowhere in the world anyone will pay this amount of money for photo prints.

My take on how popular is lost symbol

After reading Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress. It was very obvious i got excited when i read the news that new book Lost Symbol is coming out soon. I requested in advance in library, patting on my back over my smart move, only to find that there were more than 200 other people in local library who have already done that. So next thing i am trying to figure out how long is this book going to be popular. That i am trying to measure by how is the wait queue behaving. Blue line is for total number of people waiting in the queue. And green line is for my position.
As of day 12, you can see that my position is slowly moving forward. But on the other rate of joining people is higher than people leaving the queue. This signifies that this book is still very popular in library. My guess is that when more people from this queue or other interested readers will get the book from other source (ex. buying it, or borrowing it from friend) the trend should change. More for later.

Walking Kundan

Trip to Point Reyes

Another 'Jha' in bollywood

Looks like 'Jha' people are broadening their horizon. For a background i am a 'Jha', although my name may not reflect it. And why is that, is a long story for some other time. BTW if you don't know what is a 'Jha', then maybe this article is not for you.
So today i read an article on nytimes about a movie called "Sikandar". As being a movie enthusiast, i read this article. Although the movie doesn't have good review, i was delighted to find that it is directed by Piyush Jha. On doing a quick google search indicated that he has directed few more movies in the past and has even acted in some. To get more information about his background i searched him in wiki, but couldn't find it over there. Looks like there was an article earlier over there but it has been deleted by some one with following reason (A7: Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject). I don't know what does it really mean. I wonder if someone will create a wiki page soon.
Typically 'Jha's or in general people from Bihar, UP are considered to be good at studies. It doesn't mean that other parts of india are not. It simply means that they are mostly focussed on studying and getting jobs in offices. In earlier days the ultimate aim was to become a civil servant (why will any one want to become servant, i don't know??) or a doctor or engineer or to get a job in any government office. Kind of i am trying to say is that we are mostly focussed on doing one type of work. So it is refreshing to see that people are getting better at other jobs too ex. movie making, business etc. So far the only 'Jha' famous in bollywood is Prakash Jha. Who has made good movies.
Comments are welcome.

Dell problem revisited.

This is a continuous story. Other parts of the story are here.
Part1
Part2

Yesterday i recieved the replacement hard drive. It was shipped using the overnight shipment from Fedex. As i had requested Dell has sent me a screwdriver and 4 spare screws. They also sent another set of installer CD and DVDs. So far so good. When i looked at the hard drive, it was from Toshiba and there was a label saying it is "refurbished". I have never used a refurbished item yet so that made me little skeptical. It would have been real great if they had sent me a 1 page instruction manual for how to do it. Although to Dell's credit, their customer support guy called me at around 7:15 in the evening. But i was away and couldn't pickup his call. He was supposed to give me instructions on how to do the drive replacement. Anyways after dinner, i found some youtube videos of how to replace a dell hard drive. One of them is this. It is real easy. You just need to have a proper screwdriver, little patience and some common sense. So i took out the faulty hard drive. It was from Seagate. I will do some research to find out which hard drive is more reliable Toshiba or Seagate. More on that later. After the new hard drive was properly screwed, on start it did some installation. The whole installation process was automatic. It went on for about 20 minutes. In the end it asked me to configure the OS, saying what language, timezone, what should be the name of computer etc. After that i configured it to connect to my home wireless. Finally back in business. We will monitor its behavior for couple of days before saying that everything is all right. I have spent around 3-4 hours on this hard drive issue. Hopefully this will be the last of problems.

Dell Problem continued...

This is in continuation with my story from here.

Now i have started noticing that whenever PC boots up Windows XP says that one of the disk may have some problem and it is trying to check disk. Then it reported that 2 of the segments had error. I looked it up on Internet and found that it is most likely because of hard drive failure. So now i had no other option left, but to prepare myself with a phone call to Dell. The first thing i did was to burn the data on a DVD, just in case if it fails completely. Today i had a call with Dell tech support. When i explained my problem to the person, he thought it best to refer to senior level support. After a wait time of about 10 minutes finally i got hold of the senior level person. I must admit he was a very genuine and helpful guy. He asked me to run hardware diagnosis program. He explained me what is happening in each step. It took about 15-20 minutes after the memory scan was complete, it came to an error screen saying that 2000-XXX error has happened while testing hard disk. Well that was expected. So i am going to get a replacement of hard disk. It is good thing that i got 1 year warranty on this machine. I will keep updated on it in my next post.

Is recession ending??

Lately some good news is coming out. Hong Kong has shown signs of economic growth. Recent news from Japan also indicates that maybe world is finally coming out of danger. For the past couple of months stocks everywhere also has gone up. But i don't really believe that stock fluctuation can be a reliable metric of change.

One measure of how bad economy is by observing how people are behaving. I live in an apartment complex. It has several trash cans. Earlier i used to see that typically poor people (they are carrying a shopping cart, and wearing shabby clothes) came to pickup the bottles and other recyclable items from the trash cans. I guess they use to sell it at recycle centers. But lately i see a different trend. I see people coming in cars to pick those bottles. And these are relatively good looking cars. So it makes me wonder what has changed. Is the recycling that profitable these days or simply people are anyhow struggling to survive.

Flag hosting ceremony in car.

In the spirit of Indian Independence day.

Latest from Opportunity

It is simply fascinating how advance and exciting work the space engineers are doing. Today i got this picture taken by Opportunity rover from Mars. This one is taken on July 18, 2009. It is simply amazing to know that Opportunity was launched on Mars on Jan 25, 2004 and since then it has been sending us pictures. Hats off to all the persons involved in this project. More details can be found out here.

Bihar Samaj Picnic 2009

Yesterday we had a very fun time at Picnic in Lake Elizabeth Park. We played lots of games had good food and interacted with many people.
Link to other pics.

jigsaw puzzle (my time 28 minutes)

Janmashtami Celebration in Fremont

Book Reading : "Snowball"

First time i heard the name "Warren Buffet" was from my friend Trilok Agrawal (aka TK from ITBHU days). He was then studying management at IIT Kharagpur and was planning to come to US to somehow meet him. So he was telling me he is coming to meet him, and my question to him was who is this fellow? TK was shocked to find that i don't know him despite having been in US for couple of years now. Anyways his plan didn't materialize and this was my way of knowing about him.
After that i did little bit of research on Warren and found out that he is a person who has become rich by investing in stocks. Then from here and there i got tits and bits of information about him. Mostly by chatting with my friends.
Last year i got to know that a book has been written on his life and i got curious to read about this book. I looked up on internet and its price was not in my reach. So i reserved it in Fremont library. I was surprised to find that i am 46th person waiting for this book. Eventually after about 5 months i got the email that this book is available for me. That has been my highest wait time for any book from library.
Wow this book is amazingly thick. 838 pages to be exact. If i were not that interested and curious by so many people wanting to read this book, i would have never thought about reading such thick book.
Anyways i started it, and believe me it is very interesting from the very first page. I have been reading it page by page during weekends and night time during weekdays. So far i have been able to reach the section where Warren has already built a good set of partnership and is working with Charlie Munger. And it is about 25 % of the book. Alas library gives you only 3 weeks to read a book, and my time is up. I have to return it tomorrow as it is already on hold. I will recommend this book to everyone, and i am going to put it on request as soon as i return it.

Good news from Kolkata

Just now read this good news. Looks like government in India is getting serious on pollution issues. It is really a great news for people in India and planet earth in general. By imposing ban on very old commercial vehicles, i am sure it will improve air quality. But at the same time it will also help in preventing so many auto related accidents. I think government should also impose smog test rules on all the vehicles.

My new dell laptop - bad and miserable.

Couple of months ago, i bought a new dell laptop. It is Inspiron 1500 series. I had bought last laptop from dell too. That was in 2004. It was also an Inspiron machine. I have been very happy with its performance. Even now it is serving all my purpose of checking emails. I do some programming on it too. For this laptop i never had to talk to dell technical support guys once. I was so happy with its performance that i recommended it to my younger brother and my brother in law in India.
Now coming back to my new laptop. With totally satisfied from my past experience, i bought this one with cool features. It has integrated bluetooth, in built webcam, 500 GB hard disk, 4 GB RAM, dual core machine. I have bought 1 year at home service warranty too. To make my wife happy i even paid little extra money to get it in red color. Boy lookwise it looks great. But that is where i stop praising it. Looks like Dell is going very easy on the performance testing of its machine.

In the past 3 months i had to call dell tech support many times. First time microphone stopped working. Second time somehow the place where we insert power supply became loose. If anyone had tried to convince the support guys that it is not your fault that it is not working, i totally feel their pain. And everytime they try to sell me the extended warranty. As if they have built the faulty machine for purpose, just to squeeze my money.
Now the machine freezes very frequently and both me and my wife are trying to regain our energy to talk to the tech support.
I am not going to recommend any one again about dell anymore.

Indian Budget 2009 and Stimulus for print media

Source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4744252.cms
It is surprising to see that government is providing stimulus to print media. The question is why? What general good it will bring to us? Print media is failing everywhere. The news they provide is already outdated. New generation is less and less dependent on them for information. Failure of print media is not only limited to India, it is happening everywhere. If they cannot sustain themselves, let them reorganize themselves or fail. It is not tax payers duty to save them.

J2ME Http Tester Application

Http Tester

Blackberry Experience

Lately i have been involved in working on a J2ME application which runs on sprint network. This application was built for a Motorola handset and i was asked to make some feature enhancements. So far so good. I have delivered the build and everyone is happy.

Now i have been asked to port this application to a blackberry device and here come the worries. This phone has OS of version 4.6.1

1) File handling issues.
http://supportforums.blackberry.com/rim/board/message?board.id=java_dev&message.id=40896#M40896

The way files are organized in blackberry is quite different that other J2ME handset. It took me a while to figure out where can i look at the file created by the application. I was using /home/user as the URL. It seemed to work fine on the emulator as in the application i was able to see that i have been successful in writing to a file and from other part of the application i was able to read the content. But on the device it was throwing Security Exception.
It took me 3-4 days and countless google search to realize that you need to sign the .cod file using blackberry signature tool before it is usable at the device. So if someone who is new at blackberry and trying out file handling don't forget to sign it.
Now to look at the file you have created. Click on the option button from main menu. Now select folder "media". Selection option button again and pick "explore". Now you will see "DeviceMemory". Inside device memory there is "home" and inside "home" you will see "user" folder. You see it is not so easy to find this directory.

2) HTTP Connection issue.
In this application i post some data to a server (php page) and then read the data returned by the server. It works perfectly fine on the emulator and motorola handset. So there must be something special needs to be done at blackberry. If you have solved it please drop a note. I have posted it at blackberry forum too.

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/rim/board/message?board.id=java_dev&thread.id=43155

Obama getting his burger

Kundan 8 Month Old

Kindle DX

Today Amazon announced the launch of Kindle DX. It makes me happy to know that now it has support for pdf documents. But one thing it still annoys me is why do amazon require us to send the documents to them. Why can't we simply upload it using USB, when it is rechargeable using USB. At $489 it is out of my budget anyways. So i guess i will have to wait for some other device which is cheap and satisfies my complain. Sony are you listening??

Labors of life

These are the days I struggled.
The freedom only brought pain and trouble.

These shoes are worn to the sole.
This hard work has mean, i gave it all.

These are the times that i got tough.
I wanted to go back home, i had enough.


---------------

PS: I have borrowed this poem from Yaser (A high school student from Fremont)

Good lines from movie

There are moments which mark your life. Moments when you realize nothing will ever be the same and time is divided into two parts. Before this and after this. Sometimes you can feel such a moment coming. That's the test. Oh so i tell myself. I tell myself, at times like that, strong people keep moving anyway. No matter what they are going to find.
Denzel Washington (Fallen)

Oscar 2009

I am a movie fan. Well a little movie addict. So to watch Oscar ceremony is a something which should be done. Further this year it was special because there were high hopes of A R Rehman will win the prestigious award.
I don't have a cable connection so i rely on my indoor antenna to get the tv reception. The ceremony was on Channel ABC and it took me some positioning and tuning to get the channel in a decent state. I am sure Anshu (my wife) will not be happy when she notices that the antenna is still lying on the chair, instead of its position on the top of tv :-)
Anyways the award ceremony began. I was ready with netflix website to order the dvds of movies which i haven't seen in theater. I did add a few movies. Most of them were already in the queue. Meanwhile i was also busy in setting my gmail status to the whatever current event happening at oscar (as if all the people in world are looking at my status message to find the exclusive news of oscar). The proud moment came when "Smile Pinki" won the award. I immediately pinged few friends and emailed some more to let them know about it (sorry guys i was high !!!). And then when AR Rahman got two awards it was just awesome. Me, my wife and my mother in law all were very excited. With our cumulative excitement even my 5 month old son got excited. And thus it ended. Now admitting my guilt, i haven't seen Slumdog yet and plan to do that as soon as it is released in DVD.

Life in Saudi Arabia

The following text is copied from an article in The Economist.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made the most thorough reshuffle of his government since assuming the throne in 2005. He promoted reformers, sacked reactionaries and appointed his first-ever female minister, for women’s education. But women are still not allowed to drive a car.

Kundan 5 month old -II

Kundan 5 months old -I

My Tax Filed

This BBC Article about tax filing in US is pretty much true. I have been in US since 2002 and every year during this time, filing taxes is a thing of great concern. Furthermore i am afraid of the fact that Al Capone was sent to Alcatraz for Tax evasion crime. So just to make sure i don't land into any problem with Uncle Sam i have been very careful. Many people go to HR block and other tax professionals. But since i am the only bread earner and haven't inherited a fortune from a very rich uncle, i think it will be just a waste of money if i go and pay 100-200 dollars for something which i can do on my own. But mind you it consumes easily 6-7 hours of time even if i use Tax software like Turbo tax. Past few years turbo tax was kind enough to let me file for free. But this time they charged me about 15 dollars. Well last night i filed taxes and today morning i got the email from turbo tax that return has been accepted by IRS. What a relief..

WWGD powerpoint

WWGD? - The PowerPoint

View more presentations from jeffjarvis. (tags: buzzmachine business)

White Tiger

Just finished reading White Tiger. I have been planning to read this book for quite some time. Amazing book.