blog@Yantrajaal

I achieved a major life-goal today when I managed to acquire a new machine which is completely free of Microsoft products ... Thanks to Financial Express and the Big Idea contest , I am now the proud owner of an HCL Ultraportable Notebook MiLeap .. and it was delivered today ... loaded with Ubuntu, the Linux distribution and the ease with which it became operational is amazing. I simply pushed the power button and the machine blinked to life. It offered me a choice of Ubuntu and DOS to boot up .. and when I pressed the Ubuntu option it asked me just three questions : my name (and password), my city / country and language. That was it ! Machine was up and operational !! I connected my Airtel broadband cable into the lan port and the machine sensed the network and hooked on. I fired up the Firefox browser and breezed into my portal. No problems .. not even with the bangla unicode font. I had to only download the Shockwave plugin to see some of my fancy stuff. Next stop OpenOffice .. whi...

Today's copy of the Economic Times carries two articles that, taken together, highlight the disastrous corner that India has painted itself into in the area of education, and then offers some hope of finding a path through which it could extricate itself ! If this is too confusing, consider the following : First, Rajrishi Singhal [ End License Raj in Education ] has very elegantly made the point, known to most of us in academia that it is the license-control mindset India's bureaucracy -- led by the last two, regressive and venal, education ministers -- that is at the heart of the darkness that has eclipsed the academic landscape. Jurassic institutions like the AICTE -- that insist that educational institutions cannot have a profit motive but must pretend, hypocritically, that they are charitable organisations -- have ensured that educational services cannot be delivered to the citizens unless it is through entities that are controlled by politicians. This includes both the Pub...

PanIIT in association with Infosys has embarked on a well meaning programme to get professors from the US come and teach professors in India how to teach effectively. Unfortunately they are missing the wood for the trees, or even if they did find a tree, it would be the wrong one that they would be barking up against ! Because you do not need people from the US to come and teach us how to teach ! There are enough people in India who can teach, and teach well, but the problem lies in getting them to teach. But why do good people not take to teaching in India ? The answer has been given out ad nauseum but since PanIIT has still not understood it, let me explain once again. A full professor at IIT, with 10 years of teaching experience, gets Rs 40,000 per month before taxes are deducted. Whereas a student passing out of the B.Tech program in almost any engineering college gets about Rs 20,000+ from day 1. So unless a person (a)has a separate and independent income that makes the IIT salary...

Star Ananda -- the popular Bengali TV channel from Calcutta -- has started an interesting bengali community at their website but the tool that they offer to write in Bengali is rather diffucult to use. I have modified the excellent tool that Deepayan has created on his website and have made it available as a widget that you can embed in your blog. Since Deepayan's tool is available on available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, i believe that i am free to use, modify and redistribute it with the provision that it is under the GPL again. If you want to embed it in your website use this code : This tool has been used to create the Sonartoree blog as well as to post in the Star Ananda website. It should work well with as long as your machine is unicode compliant. P.S. For a good collection of free, Unicode compliant, printer friendly Bengali fonts I would like to thank the good folks at Omicronlab .

I have always been fascinated by the possibility of high volume education delivery and the immense potential this has to transform the country ... without taking recourse to divisive tactics like reservation. My first attempt to articulate this was in 1999 when I participated in the CSIR sponsored New Millenium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative and proposed the idea of Shikshaajaal . The proposal, like most proposals sent to the government went -- i suppose -- straight into some bureaucratic dustbin. My second attempt was in the CII Eastern Region Meeting on Talent Management in 2007 where I delivered the keynote address and presented the idea once again ... but all to no avail. The distinguished delegates, had their lunch, dozed through the lecture and went back to their mundane existence. My third attempt was directed at Big Idea Contest that asked participants to send in ONE Big Idea that can change the face of the country and to articulate this in less than 50...

Mediocrity has finally triumphed over Merit. The Supreme Court of India -- led by the Chief Justice who has been a direct beneficiary of the politics of reservation -- has sided with our politicians and have declared that in India, the search for Excellence is over. From now on we should be in search of Irrelevance. The IITs and IIMs , that last, albeit shaky bastion, of the intellectual elite has fallen to the powers of the Dark Lord of Venal Populism ... from the depths of despair the citizen cries out What Next ? For all such anguished souls ... all that we can say is Take Heart. This is not the first and shall certainly not be the last ... Let us go back in time and reexamine the painful journey that the people of this hapless land have had to travel .. and how they have fared. Those of you who have been born and brought up in Calcutta in the late sixties and early seventies may recollect an organisation called Haringhata Diary, owned and mismanaged by the Government of West Ben...

The Internet -- as the TCP/IP backbone network -- has been around for a long time but the World Wide Web ( or simply the "Web" as we know it) really took off with Netscape. With its genesis in Mosaic / SpyGlass ... Netscape was the first icon of the fledgling Web and the Netscape IPO is very often taken as the first milepost in the long journey. That was the First Era, the era of Netscape. But Netscape was shouldered aside by the marketing might of Microsoft but strangely enough was not quite replaced by it. Despite trying so hard and with its flagship IE becoming the default browser by sheer brute force, it was not Microsoft but Yahoo that symbolised the Second Era. With Tripod, Geocities and other web properties under its belt, Yahoo was the big boy and the definitive icon. But like hot adolescents that grow into pot bellied middleage, Yahoo too had to give way to next emerging hotshot .. that is Google. The Third Era of the Web was symbolised by Google .. the icon of innov...

বাংলাতে লিখতে গেলে প্রথমে আপনার চাই একটি রোমান হরফ থেকে বাংলা হরফে ট্রান্সলিটেরেট করার একটি সহজ উপায় । এর জন্য আপনি চলে যান এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা এই ওএব্সাইটে । অথবা ওফ্ফলাইনে কাজ করতে হলে এই ওএবসাইটে গিয়ে একটি বিনামুল্যের ওযার্ডপ্রোসেসার ডাউনলোড করে নিন । মহাআনন্দে এই রকম কথা টাইপ করুণ । স্ক্রিনে যা দেখবেন কাট্-পেস্ট করে একটি উনিকোড UNICODE কম্পাটিব্ল ওয়ার্ডপ্রোসেসারে নিযে চলুন । । তার পর যে ভাবে সাধারন ইন্গরাজি ব্লগ পোস্ট করেণ সেই ভাবে নিউ পোস্ট খুলুন এবোন্গ নোটপাড থেকে আবার কাট্-পেস্ট করে দিন । এই বার সাধারণ ভাবেই পাবলিশ করুণ । দেখবেন ব্লগে বান্গলা হরফ দেখা জাছে ! যে মেশিনে ব্লগ লিখছেন আর যে মেশিনে ব্লগ পড়ছেন দুই মেশিনেই উনিকোড (UNICODE) ব্যবস্থা থাকা দরকার । সব আধুনিক কম্পুটরেই এখন উনিকোড থাকে সুতরান্গ চিন্তা করবেন না সব ঠিক কাজ করবে । একটু আধটু বানান ভুল হলে মাপ করে দেবেন । জয বংলা!

Long before there was Firefox, the browser, there was Firefox : the fictional Soviet cold war era fighter aircraft around which Craig Thomas had crafted a wonderful techno-thriller novel that had introduced the idea of controlling machines by thought. Twenty years later when I was writing my book on Vedanta the idea had cropped up again as I tried to reconcile reality with the idea of a maya or illusions . This was in the context of virtual worlds like Second Life and and it was my belief that these advanced technologies would one day blur the borders between the real and the virtual. But even while I was writing these, I had always felt that perhaps the usage of these technologies was way, way into the future and it is perhaps unlikely that I would get to see these being applied in my daily life. No more !! Given the rapid speed at which this technology is maturing I believe that we will see early versions of these technology being deployed in the next five years. Why do I say so ...

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 ...

Web 2.0 means different things to different people but perhaps the most authentic -- and original -- definition is given by Tim O'Reilly in his now classic articulation of What is Web 2.0. One of the key aspects of his articulation was the premise that Web 2.0 is less of technology and more of a platform -- or if you use the analogy of "Hindu" sanatan dharma, less of a dogma and more of way of life ! The word platform -- like the word architechure -- is widely used and abused in the world of computers. So to make things easier for us, let us first look at a more traditional platform : the ERP as implemented in SAP or Oracle. An ERP consists of a collection of applications developed using a one or more technologies. At the core there would be a database management software and on top of this would reside application, integration and presentation software. Woven into this is a set of business logic which in a sense should be common to or at least relevent to a vast number o...

We should be grateful to INTACH and HSBC for taking a very positive step to revive and rejuvenate the Strand along the Hooghly by organising the Prinsep Festival at the forgotten Prinsep Ghat -- that wonderful piece of architecture on the river. With the twin towers of the Second Hooghly Bridge towering in the background, it was a wonderful setting for the evening program featuring a very vigorous Manipuri Dance by Preeti Patel and an equally impressive interpretation of the Dasha Avataras in BharataNatayam by Bhanumati. Not being a dance critic I will not hazard a display of my ignorance by commenting on the quality of the presentations .. but from the perspective of a layman, it was a truly enjoyable experience. What was a little disturbing though was the immense ignorance about James Prinsep and the reason why he was honoured by his fellow citizens !! Neither the compere nor any of the other dignitaries had anything to say about the man who was the first to decipher the Brahmi Scri...

A change of job – or affiliation – is of course no headline news in today's vibrant economy, but even this otherwise simple event opened my eyes to a new way of looking at the reality of departure and absence ! A mail from an erstwhile colleague mentioned that the reality of my departure has become evident, not so much because of my physical absence from my place of work, but because email – on which I was on the cc: list – was bouncing back to the sender ! Which set me thinking ... what if my company had graciously allowed my email ID to exist ( in total violation of all corporate procedures) ... would it have meant that a lot of people would not have known that I had left ? And what if my erstwhile secretary had continued to respond to these mails .. in the manner that she knew that I would have ? In the globalised mega-corporation – which is anyway quite faceless – would anyone, other than a close group of friends, have known that I was no more associated with the company ? But...

We have been looking at what is possible with Virtual Worlds but for the next few minutes let us step out of the domain what is possible now and explore what could become possible in the next couple of years. From engineering, let us step into the domain of imagineering -- which is what this blog is all about ! Why are we constrained to 2D displays ? We are inherently 3D animals ... and the world that we are simulating virtually is supposed to be 3D. So why should we stick to traditional computer displays that render 2D images ? There are display technologies available that create 3D hologram style images ... that one can 'almost' walk around and see ( though not quite touch as yet ) Go to google and search for 3D displays and you will see stuff like what you see above and below. Just imagine what your SecondLife, or whatever 3D world that prefer to live in, will look when you view them on a display screen like this. And interestingly enough, the cost of these display devices i...

Unlike other professionals, the value of a person in the IT business does not necessarily go up with time. In the case of medicine, law or engineering, a customer is willing to pay a premium for someone who has been in the profession for a long time but a person who has been writing C code for 20 years or configuring SAP for 15 years is, in general, not more valuable than a junior colleague – at least not in the technical sense. IT professionals handle this niggling discomfort by transiting into management roles – which in effect mean shuffling CVs and juggling spreadsheets, not technology – and then claiming that it is beneath their dignity to do otherwise. One wonders if it is beneath their dignity or beyond their ability  My transition from Tata-IBM to Pricewaterhouse was a case of trying to defy this diktat of circumstances. At Tata Steel I had played a key role in introducing RDBMS technology into what was then the country’s first and largest enterprise wide integrated applic...

One of the most overused words in digital cyberia is paradigm but unfortunately there are instances when there is really no synonym that will suffice. Such is the case here where I describe a completely new way of doing business in the book publishing industry. After Encyclopedia Britannica, Travel Agents and other brick-and-mortar establishments that have been severely challenged by web based business models, it may be the turn of book publishers next ! The online publishing and print-on-demand (OLPPOD) business is all set give the established publishers a run for their money and offer new hope and unprecedented empowerment to unknown authors. Online publishing is old hat. I have been writing on the web since 1998 but have always felt that substantial pieces of work need to be in hard copy for the reader to first enjoy and second make sense of complex content. However efforts to get one's work in print has been very difficult. While JK Rowlings and other well known authors have no...

Why do companies exist ? Since companies consist of individuals who have the skills for which the market is willing to pay .. why is it that companies do not disintegrate ( or rather deconstruct ? ) into its constituent components ? Ronald Coase was the first to ask this question in 1937 in his essay on “The Nature of the Firm” and his answer was simple : The cost of doing a certain transaction – that adds value – is less inside company than it is outside. What he meant was that doing business by assembling all the right people and support services inside an establishment was more efficient than trying to find and coordinate the same things in the world at large. This answer was good enough for him to win the Nobel Prize because people saw for themselves how individual craftsmen in the cottage industry could not compete in cost and lost out to the mega corporation. But unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for many of us, this was not the last word on the subject. Jacques Derrida coine...

[ a more refined version of my earlier post on the same topic ] Movies created without a camera or human actors is nothing new. From animated cartoons by Walt Disney to dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park tools to create artificial characters have played an important role in movie production and of late productions like 300 have demonstrated the versatility of digital technology to transcend the limitations of physical reality. All this however pales into insignificance when we consider the immense potential of virtual worlds technology – as implemented in environments like Second Life and Active Worlds. Movie making as we know it today is set to change beyond recognition as producers and cinematographers realize the disruptive impact that this is going to have in the future. Virtual worlds have their origin in interactive computer games of the category that are commonly referred to as Massively MultiUser Online Role Playing Games. Technology that first appeared in games ...

St. Xaviers Collegiate School, Calcutta has organised a Computer Exhibition to help students look beyond the boring ( truly boring ) world of the Computer Syllabus that they have to follow. While most students stuck would still tend to stick to the straight and narrow, I helped my son and two of his class-mates create a movie based on and shot in location inside Second Life. If your bandwidth supports it, please watch ... but be aware that these are heavy files with embedded music & voice-over Part 1 Part 2 and here are two images ...........................................................................

I have been trying to access the article on Nandigram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram but have not been able to go past the wikipedia home page and into ANY of the articles. I am from Calcutta and this has been going for the past two days .. My brother-in-law however is able to access the same pages from Ahmedabad .. which I thought was funny. What is even more funny is that even in Calcutta, if I dial into my office LAN and then access the internet through the company firewall ( which happens to be outside Calcutta ) then I have no problems in accessing the same pages. I do know that wikipedia is banned ( or rather blocked ) in China .. by the Great Firewall of China. Is something similar happening here as well.