Waves

Most households (atleast in Chennai) know a dishwash powder called Sabeena. Its rate is just under Rs.5/- and almost everyone can afford it. There is a man living near my house. The first thing you would notice in him is that his teeth is crooked. If you just continue your examination on him, you would notice that his legs are shaped awkwardly. More examination reveals that he cannot talk properly. He doesn’t stammer, but his voice is a blabber to hear. His eyes are squint, hands are also not proper. He wears a torn slipper. If he goes to any other area other than the place he lives in, the street dogs would tear him apart.

Now, there is one thing special about him. He is an entrepreneur :D. He has been running his own telephone booth for more than a decade. These days, he has also started supplying a dishwash powder to nearby homes; including mine. He toils day in and day out to earn a few bucks so that he can sleep peacefully with the satisfaction of earning and eating his own bread. THAT is an awesome attitude… which many of us should follow.

Until today, with the conversations I have had with him, he has never complained of his disabilities. He just doesn’t consider them to be a stopping point in his path forward. There is something to learn from him for many of us.

Following the success of proto.in version 1, The Knowledge Foundation team is gearing up for the second edition called “proto.in Summer Edition”. The time ahead is damn exciting. You can get more information from the proto.in website. If you had attended the first edition proto.in and you have feedback to give, please mail us at admin@proto.in.

Sponsorship kit, media kit and other necessary items are on their way. They should be out in a couple of weeks. Preparations have started way ahead this time… Let wait and watch about how this event turns out to be.

Hi guys, I just learned that the whole website of gnu.org doesn’t use GIF images. I just read through the reason and was bombed 🙂

Crux of the Reason: Unisys and IBM have patented the LZW compression algorithm which is used in generated GIF images. Read the full article.

Also, the page links to a library called libungif, which uncompresses GIF images written using the LZW algorithm and writes them in uncompressed format. The philosophy section of GNU.org is very interesting. Please go through it.

hmm…

Some days back, I linked to a post on GigaOm which did sound scary. In that post, Om mentions about an article called “A Myth called the Indian Programmer,” on the Times of India newspaper. Fortunately enough, that article came as an email forward and here it is. The issues they have mentioned in the article is worth pondering about.

Here is the article… I mean the email forward. That speaks for itself. The article is long, but its a good read.

Do you know what an Indian software engineer does for a living? T Surendar finds uncomfortable answers.

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently. Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of Bangalore. Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion. But what exactly do they do? That’s a disturbing question.

Last week, during the annual fair of the software industry’s apex body Nasscom, no one uttered a word about India’s programmers. The event, which brought together software professionals from around the world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple geographies. But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies. Perhaps you imagined wrong. “It is an explosive truth that local software companies won’t accept. Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere coders ,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and developed by a handful of programmers. Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts it “if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school knowledge of the subject.” Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap of the software hype and now realise that though their status is glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded. Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

There is nothing new to learn from the job I am doing in Pune. I could have done it with some training even after passing high school, says a 25-yearold who joined Infosys after finishing his engineering course in Nagpur. A Microsoft analyst says, Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for the fact that we still don’t have a domestic software product like Yahoo or Google to use in our daily lives.

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India’s best known companies like Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out. The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, who did not bite Infosys’ offer, says, “The entrance test to join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what the Indian firms are looking for.”

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics. The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late ’70s and early ’80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all kinds of fields. In the mid-’90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of education after high school. “After Y2K, as American companies discovered India’s cheap software professionals, the demand for engineers shot up,” the executive says. Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction of a programme. They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a client’s site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the need for engineers who have four years of education after high school. Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the engineer?s job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects. The CEO of India’s largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had earlier explained, “The core programming still requires technical skills. But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates.” NIIT’s Arvind Thakur says, “We have always maintained that it is the aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact, there are cases where grad uate programmers have done better than the ones from the engineering stream.”

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but cannot find a different kind of ‘break’, given his coding experience. He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don’t know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don’t know that they can eventually fly. Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life. TNN

Thoughts?

Yay! the last week was easily one of the most exciting weeks for me. Three days at Hyderabad, for Sun Tech Days, was 3 days well spent. Met a lot of cool people from Sun and more importantly, Moyeen and myself provided some tips to some Hyderabad based college students who wanted to do their final semester projects on their own; using java and ofcourse netbeans.

Here are some cool things that happened at the conference:
1. There was a netbeans contest stall on day 1. Moyeen and myself participated and completed the given tasks right on time. We won the contest with full score 😀
2. On the second day, right after the keynote and before the java jacket give away, we were called on stage (audience > 4000) and given a small kit that contained an ultra cool netbeans t-shirt, netbeans ide field guide, some dukes (duke is the mascot for java) and some sun bucks that were supposed to be exchanged at the stalls for more goodies.
3. Day 3 had me unexpectedly flying without wings :-). I’m a fan of Geertjan’s blog since a long time and yup! I met him and had a short chat.
4. He got my tech blog URL, visited there and made a post on converting this two minute web browser into an app that is integrated into the netbeans platform 🙂
5. Finally, met some of my own college juniors… was shocked to see a girl in the gang though 😀 cos’ most of the times its an all-guys show. Kudos to the girl who has shown interest in technology.

Wikicamp was an astounding success :D. It went on very well. I loved the way Jimmy Wales moved around with the crowd. Considering the popularity he has, its surprising that he is so unassuming and was always willing to join the fun, which ended up being many of us showcased in this article by The Hindu. I wasted no time in networking with the attendees, which at the end of the day proved very valuable. Photos of wikicamp.

Thus, comes to end, an excellent week. Have fun !

This is my first post from my very own k300i. Staying connected is a boon :-D. Im on the way to attend an event called sun tech days at Hyderabad and this low res pic is from central station, ofcourse captured from my mobile :-). Catch you guys when I'm back home.

😉

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I read an article in GigaOm. It’s scary, but its the bare truth. I loved this paragraph 🙂

…… lot of churn at companies like Infosys is a result of dissatisfaction with being just coders and engineers are switching to jobs with bigger challenges. A Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) executive acknowledges that the outlook is gloomy. The question then is that if the top outsourcers cannot attract the best and the brightest, then how are they going to stay competitive?

That was a point well emphasized. Read the full article here.

I was in my 8th grade ok… and there was this doom(amn)ed subject called Social Science. So much so that I used to fail, without fail, in that subject in every possible grade. But magic happens atleast once every year… they promote me to next grade by making me pass in social science. Don’t ask me how.

Ah! Coming to the point, a small incident happened during the 8th grade that makes me laugh if I remember it even now.

It was one of the routine special classes after school hours for me. Myself and 4 others who were perennial failures in social science, were waiting in the class for the Sir (teacher) to come. He tucks away the textbooks under his arms and walks like a fat doll to class… the very sight that would make us go ROTFL. Coconut hair oil would leak from his hair and as he walks near our class, all the guys would identify him through the distinct stink that encircles him all the time 🙂

That fateful day, as usual, he came to our class. All the 5 of us sat on separate benches. The minute he walked in, he announced, “Dei.. today civics 1, 2, 3 lesson test da. I come in 10 minutes da. If not all writing test, you get beating da. I coming back in 5 minute. You all start study da.” So saying, he left the class and promptly came back in 5 mins. I was sitting in the bench that is straight opposite to the teacher’s bench. As soon as I sat down, I started laughing. He noticed it and told, “Dei.. once more you laughing, I hitting you.” But ofcourse, the laughter hadn’t died down and the other 4 guys were so curious as to know what was happening.

Soon, one of them threw a pen near my desk (yup! that same old trick), came near and asked me why I was laughing. I told him, “Machi, sir zippu podla” (Sir hasn’t zipped his pant) and he went ROTFL. Soon, the other 3 guys also came to know… and we all were laughing like hell. Now, the sir also got curious. When 5 of them are laughing, there ought to be some reason and so he questioned us.

I gathered a little enough courage and amidst my laughter, told him that he had forgotten to zip his pants. He face became tomato red… hands cold… expression changed to a cold stare… bits of anger popping up… but we were still laughing. He looked down, looked up again.. smiled.. and then zipped it up. LOL! No test that day and you know what, when he came to class the next morning, the whole class laughed at him he he he… !

Yup! It’s www.aswinanand.com from now on 🙂

Blog: http://blog.aswinanand.com
Tech: http://tech.aswinanand.com

You need not update the RSS feeds url because the old feed url exists. And the new email id is aswin[at]aswinanand[dot]com. Ofcourse, the old ids will continue to exist.

After a long time, I have done a post on my tech blog. The post is about “sc.exe”

Read about it.