https://gist.github.com/3958041

Have you ever wondered why a seemingly simple task never gets completed? Or how does the Indian cricket team manage to lose from an highly advantageous position? Or why doesn’t the fish hook even after so many hours, at the most populated hole?  Or how did your boss appear suddenly (when he was supposed to be off for the day) when you were in the middle of ogling that new comer at your office?  Or how did the professor who evaluated your answer book miss that big block diagram that you’d drawn right in the center of the page?

Or why would a very healthy four month old baby suddenly die? of a rare condition that occurs only in a so small percentage of babies, that it is almost certain not to occur!

How do you get a statistically significant answer to these questions that could satisfy the probability of their certainties? Or would the traditional Karma theory provide a more plausible and easy to accept solution for questions about these uncertain events?

Though Karma is almost always spoken about in hindsight, its value is better realised by its futuristic application. Telling somebody that being kind, pleasant, disciplined in this life, shall ensure that you’ll be endowed with amazing things right from the beginning in the next birth — may actually result in his being all that.

Life is full of events – happy, sad, exciting, disappointing, etc. We tend to qualify each event based on our perception and training. Each qualification could be viewed through other spectrum and a different conclusion could be drawn. Again, tradition tells us to be the Stithaprajna — person with a steady mind — under all conditions.

To tackle Life’s (un)certainties, mathematical modelling does not help. It IS in-fact spirituality and tradition that does have solutions to such conundrums.

To configure GitHub for Windows to use your  corporate proxy, edit the .gitconfig file typically found at C:\Users\<yourusername>\.gitconfig or C:\Documents & Settings\<yourusername>\.gitconfig

Close GitHub for Windows; In .gitconfig, just add

[http]
proxy = http://dumbproxy.yourcompany.com:8080

[https]
proxy = http://dumbproxy.yourcompany.com:8080

And speaking about dumb proxies, take a look at the category this proxy spews out as the reason for filtering it out

OnMobile was founded by Arvind Rao who led it to tremendous heights as its CEO, before falling to his own success. OnLive was led by Steve Perlman who had quite an awesome pedigree before he founded the company. OnLive has been having its share of bad times of late.

More about OnMobile here, and about OnLive here.

Today isn’t every day, though. Today is Monday. The day I travel from my home town to Bangalore, where I work. I had arrived at my home town, three days back. After putting in an extra 0.5kg to my already bulging pot belly – thanks to my mother’s extra helpings – I am ready to leave for the war zone in some time. I ran through the motions, got all dressed up and encountered the matroness at the door, by 5AM. My mother has a glass of hot milk and a satchel containing my breakfast ready by then – Sweet Mom!

My ticket for the 05:30AM train has been booked some days in advance. Just knowing I wouldn’t have to wait in queue or jostle for space makes me feel lazy … and happy. I leave home at 05:05AM and walk down the road, where I hope to meet a dozing auto-rickshaw-wallah, wake him up and ask him to drop me off at the Railway Station. Unfortunately, there seems to be no auto-rickshaws parked here today. A couple of auto-rickshaws that are on the road are already engaged. The time is already 05:15AM and my train leaves in fifteen minutes. Though it takes less than 10 minutes to reach the railway station from here (in clear early morning traffic), from where will I find the elusive auto-rickshaw? … or a bus!? Then, suddenly I see the headlights of what seems to be a bus coming down the road. As my luck would have it, it is a city bus and most buses do go via the railway station. So nice!

But, the bus stops at the designated bus stop down the road and the next bus stop is still some distance away from my current position. I couldn’t possibly run that distance and catch it at the bus stop – no, really! These days, buses have been very strict in stopping only at designated bus stops, opening and closing the doors only after stopping, being on time, etc which are infact good things.

I frantically wave my hand – right in the middle of the road – signalling the driver to stop and open the door. The driver stops and does open the door. I get into the bus. Hand over a Ten Rupees note to the conductor and ask him for a ticket upto the railway station. The conductor hands me change of Six Rupees and walks away.

I ask him for the ticket. He simply says “You’re getting down in a few minutes. Why do you want a ticket? Leave it”.

Should I have got into a fight (and risk missing the train, starting the week on a jumpy note) with him over the ticket, the non-issual of which was actually corruption?
Should the driver have stopped for me in the middle of the road, which was in-a-way, out-of-the-way favor for me?

Unfortunately, I do not have any answers.

Please, Kindly Adjust!

1.  Linkedn says display of tweets in user’s profile no longer possible due to a limitation imposed by Twitter - http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-linkedin-partnership-2012-6
2. The supposedly all pervasive and ubiquitous AWS cloud got punctured taking down Netflix, Pinterest, Instagram and many other services down with it. http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/30/there-goes-the-weekend-pinterest-instagram-and-netflix-down-due-to-aws-outage/
3. Facebook in an attempt to push its email usage screwed up their implementation and in the process got its users annoyed and frustrated. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57464415-93/facebook-e-mail-mess-address-books-altered-e-mail-lost/

Now, these social networks and services do not work in isolation like the Yahoo, Aols of the yesteryears. There are a lot of startups, companies, other services who have based their critical infrastructure on these services whether paid or unpaid.

The lesson that is obvious from these repeatedly occurring natural or forced disruptions  is that their users need to maintain a certain amount of healthy skepticism and also should keep looking beyond these services.

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/venture_capital/

I came up with the Ego Theory of Venture Capital while reading through a list of startups that recently got funded. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t see anything in the bunch that looked like a potential winner. Ego has to be behind much of the funding because economics wouldn’t explain such weak investments, even under a venture capital model. Historically, a venture investor hoped to succeed 10% of the time. Now I’m seeing startups that seem, at least to my non-expert eyes – to have something like a 1% chance of success.

The punch!

Now we have this absurd situation in which society is complaining that the rich have too much money at the same time the rich are begging the poor to take their money. The only condition the wealthy put on the transfer of money is that the poor need to put together some PowerPoint presentations that use the words “social” and “cloud.” Is that too much to ask?

Finally …

If you think the rich have too much money, stop complaining and do something about it: Start your own Internet company and go get some venture capital funding.

Y-Combinator, one of the Internet’s most influential startup incubator gave a call to `Kill Hollywood’. And it also declared its intention to back startups who `compete with movies and TV’.

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

This has prompted several responses, commentaries on the internet including this particular one advocating inclusion of Hollywood instead of working to kill it.

The `Kill Hollywood’ call if put in the right perspective, is more of a call to ‘Disrupt Hollywood Model of Business’ than killing the entire industry altogether. The post in support of including Hollywood rightly throws light upon all the stakeholders who make up the industry.

Disrupting the movie industry would mean introducing better and easier ways for movie production, hiring artistes, distribution using newer and wider channels like the internet, lowering capital and distribution costs, enabling cheaper access to new and library content, etc.

A key point that needs changed is the mindset of the Hollywood studios about control of content. History shows us that popular content become popular when people identify themselves with it, they play with it, create variations of it and in general make it their own.

The `Hollywood mindset’ should be modified from a `Source to Consumers Model’ to more of a `Creator to Community’ mindset. Just as the software industry discovered the benefits of having their user community contributing back (the Open Source model), the `Hollywood community’ could see the multi-fold benefits as their consumers number much more and has a better global reach.

Thus `Killing Hollywood’ would in turn give birth to a `new Hollywood Community’. And this I believe is the essence of the Y-Combinator’s call.

I wrote a small shell script to achieve the same. Modify suitably and add it to your crontab.





The file /opt/zimbra/conf/all_list_ignore contains a list of email addresses that should be ignored.

Some years back while still in school, we were made to recite Swami Sivananda’s Universal Prayer every Saturday morning. The lines

 

O’ Adorable Lord of Mercy and Love,
Salutations and Prostrations unto Thee.
Thou art Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Omniscient,
Thou art Sat-Chid-Ananda, Thou art the in-dweller of all beings!

Grant us an understanding heart,
Equal vision, balanced mind,
Faith, devotion and wisdom…

still rings in my mind every now and then. This prayer helped me through my student days to stay focused on the immediate goal – tests, exams.

But, how times change!?

Brass Horse

In my pursuit of a living, I usually forget that joy, prosperity, “happyness” is a function of my own inner-peace (yeah, Kung-Fu Panda!). Which, I had in plenty – way back then! Now, not a day passes without me getting frustrated about something. Be it a domestic attention or an assignment at work, be while at home or on the road, be it when awake or when asleep, some or the other event gets my goat.

I find I’m not alone in getting frustrated so often and about everything. In fact every second person I speak to nowadays, has an axe to grind. About their work, family, friends, cricket, politics, economy and even about failings in the latest movies!

Amongst my various efforts to find succour, dwelling upon the above prayer has been a frequent and sincere attempt to find my lost inner-peace. But events beyond my control or even participation continuously drive me crazy. So much, that I am frustrated about being always frustrated!
A few other attempts at curing my fetish of getting frustrated are trying to blank my mind, piping the latest film music at a very high volume directly into my ears – so that all the frustration in the air do not get into me, etc.

Now, if the spelling mistake in the title of this monologue didn’t get you frustrated, hope the rant has woken your frustrations to a small extent!

PS: This is an experimental piece. If it has frustrated you or woken up your hidden frustrations, please accept my apologies.