blog@Yantrajaal

Followers of the Sanatan Dharma, or "Hindus", in general and those who believe in the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, as propounded by Sankaracharya, see the world as illusion ("Maya") that hides an underlying unity of universal consciousness or Brahman. This concept has been explored in greater detail in The Road to pSingularity but one of the key ideas is that there exists a central consciousness and all individual sentient entities ( or people) are a part of this central consciousness. The linkage between the central ("Brahman") and the individual ("Atman") is something that gets lost because of the illusion of "Maya" and only the true adept, after significant effort, realises the existence of the link and in doing so, succeeds in uniting his individual Atman with the universal Brahman through the process of Yoga or union. This post is not about trying to establish the authenticity of this point of view. Instead we explore how t...

The current national outrage about the absolutely heinous and brutal rape in a Delhi bus is understandable but in our anger and frustration we are missing the wood for the trees. Well meaning ( and good looking ) participants in TV channels are asking for anything ranging from castration to capital punishment and criticising everyone from the police to the judiciary  ... but hardly anyone is interested in identifying that elusive "deeper" cause ! image from GovernanceInnovation Because if one were to pause and think, it will become clear that this rape is a symptom and not the disease. When you get a high fever, the fever is not the disease -- it is merely a symptom of malaria or dengue or something worse. Trying to cure the fever by throwing ice water would not work -- you need to drugs to kill the bacteria. And for that you need to find the cause. In fact, that cause is quite well known. From the personal rape to the nationwide CWG / 2G / Coalgate scam to localis...

  All these applications were built using Zoho Creator , the amazing environment for building your own Applications in the Cloud.

As a concept, Cloud Computing is neither new nor anything unique -- in fact the business proposition  around this model of system architecture is so compelling, that one wonders -- as I have explained in the Economic Times --  why people do not see it as an inevitability ! Of late the idea seems to have exploded into the public psyche with the unstoppable force of an idea whose time has come and we in the Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT Kharagpur have included this into our curriculum. I have been exploring Cloud Computing on the Zoho platform for the past couple of years and this year our students have built some very smart applications -- in fact a nano ERP if I may say so -- that were evaluated by two executives from Zoho itself. I am grateful to Mr Aravind Natarajan for helping me with this evaluation. You can see the three top applications here on this page, or you can follow the links to the actual application <p><br /...

The Doors of Perception is an iconic book by Aldous Huxley where, while exploring  the hallucinogenic properties of certain shrubs and herbs, he came to the unusual conclusion that any cognitive sentient has instant and automatic access to all possible knowledge in the universe. However the neural faculties that are expected to process this information and render them useful in a socio-cognitive context are in danger of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data -- as occassionally evident in what we refer to as 'madness' -- and so are protected and isolated from the same by the mind that works as a gate or valve that reduces the quantum of information that the brain is eventually exposed to. This mind or gate or valve is what Huxley refers to as the Doors of Perception : that can be opened wider by the use of mental techniques ( Yoga ?) or the use of hallucinogenic drugs -- to reveal a greater amount of "significance" or meaning to the sterile ream...

source : Gartner Report Every new technology ( or idea for that matter ) that appears in the human psyche goes through the phases shown above [ see chart ] if they survive adolescence and enter maturity. Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing are three ideas that keep churning through my thoughts and I was pleasantly surprised to find the three of them being addressed in the Gartner report on technology hypes. Being an early enthusiast of and evangelist for Second Life -- the 3D Virtual World where I had first set up my first Kali Temple and virtual Praxis B-school -- I had been resigned to the fact that low penetration of personal broadband lines will hamper the growth of this wonderful technology. But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Second Life has posted a 94% QoQ growth and now has nearly US$ 50m of user to user transactions every month . Also the availability of Wireless Broadband from the CDMA players will accelerate acceptance and finally pull it out of the ...

Onward Software Soldiers, marching as to war, With a Chrome-on-Linux going on before, Google, the loyal Master, leads against the foe; Forward into battle, hear its trumpets blow. Predictions are hazardous and emphatic ones even more so -- for the credibility and reputation of the predictor -- but let me stick my neck out anyway and state that Google Chrome might just as well drive a stake through the heart of the proprietary and paid-for software story. The ethic of reciprocity also known as the Golden Rule is an ethical code that states one has a right to just treatment, and a responsibility to ensure justice for others. One of the many ways of expressing this ethic is "do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you". Microsoft violated this code when it killed Netscape by bundling a "free" browser with its dominant operating system but having sowed the wind, they now reap the whirlwind as Google plans to ship a free operating system along with th...

Web 2.0 in general and social networks, like Orkut and Facebook in particular, have emerged as very powerful models of social interaction ... so much so that Iran is trying to quell its election related insurrection by trying to block Facebook and the US Government convinced Twitter to defer its scheduled downtime so as to allow Iranian thought processes to play out to their full potential !! While Orkut and Facebook are privately owned public platforms, we know that similar ( if not identical ) platforms are available to build own's one private social networks. For example we at the Praxis Business School, in Calcutta have our own platform, the Kollaborative Klassroom ( see http://kk.praxis.ac.in ... to know what i mean ) that we have customised to reflect our own organisation ( courses and departments defined as "communities" and "friendships" that delineate relationships between individuals) Currently employees of the government operate on a diverse set of p...

In an earlier blog post I have written about Zoho Creator , the truly amazing platform for developing applications and deploying them on the web using the metaphor of Cloud Computing. I have introduced this platform in my Systems Engineering course both at the Praxis Business School as well as at the School of Management at IIT Kharagpur and the product has been very well received by students at both places. Management students who had in the past felt that programming was beneath their dignity ( though in reality it was more often beyond their ability :) have now started writing real programs. As a part of the course, the students have to develop a basic order collection application that has a few slightly complex concepts like referential integrity and updating multiple tables and to help them I have created a presentation that shows the various steps that are involved. Being an open source enthusiast I had created the presentation in Open Office but then I found to my dismay that ma...

I believe I have found one of the most complete as well as easy to use Application Development platform. Why do I say so ? Consider the following features : A relational database for the persistent storage of data. A total GUI drag-and-drop front end forms builder with the ability to extend the logic with a scripting language. The database supports multiple tables linked through foreign keys and updateably both directly and from the application Easy integration with internet ( send mail ) and web. But the real icing on the cake is as follows There is NO SOFTWARE to buy and install. Both the RDBMS as well as the IDE are web based. The final application can be embedded into any website that allows Javascript. No support required for CGI / Perl / PHP whatever on your webserver. The entire service is currently FREE !!! and I really hope that it stays that way To see the kind of applications that can be built .... see Contact Manager Application or the Bank Transaction Application The two ...