Dark Knight: IMDB #1

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

Saw this one over the weekend, and yes … the news is out. We have a winner here … pro’lly the best batman flick ever!!

It’s a whopping 9.7 on IMDB, ousting Godfather from the top spot is a feat … a huge feat!! The reason?? I believe the movie is not like your run of the mill batman flick, with chics, action and baddies all over the movie. It goes deeper into explaining why the characters are as they are … why Batman has to be a vigilante, how is police officer Gordon promoted to the Commissioner post. Why is the Joker who he is … why does two-face hate Batman’s guts.

The casting of the movie is superb, with acting greats like Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine (playing the role of the wise Alfred). The action scenes are realistic, the characterisation is superb, if you are a Batman fan, this is your Meccah!!

Sacred Underworld

Prasad Ajinkya9 Comments

Well, I downloaded the expansion pack as well … and the installation of the same nearly killed my machine!! But the refined game is much better, the item drops are much more … with 2 more character classes and more missions and more areas. I want longer weekends where I could play this game!! I also want to play this on Multiplayer!! I wonder if I could get my fiance hooked onto it, so that post marriage, we can play this on the LAN!!!

Please honey?!? – The trials and tribulations of an over-aged gamer and his family :-)

Wanted

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

It was quite a while since I had seen a movie, and I was kind of desperate to watch one (it’s almost an addiction now!!).

Had heard from Harshu, that Wanted seemed a good movie, very well, lets give it a whirl I thought. The movie is action packed!!! Let me tell you … some of the stunts have you saying Woowwww!! and Yowzer!!!

The essential story revolves around a secret clan of assassins who can bend bullets and accelerate their heart rates for higher adrenalin secretions.

Just one word for some of the stunts … unbelievable!! Go watch them for yourself.

On a sidenote – This is a medical fact, at higher heart rates, your perceptiveness and reflexes increase, but it takes a toll on your body. I had read it somewhere.

Quantity v/s Quality

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

Today Don and I tried out this new restaurant in Hyderabad, it seemed new; considering the fact that we had not noticed it earlier. Upon entering the restaurant at peak lunch hours, we saw that the place was like a graveyard … rows upon rows of empty seats. Thats not a very good sign, let me tell you at the outset.

We still decided to persist, it’s the never-say-never attitude combined with the kya-hi-farak-padta-hain attitude that pushed us. Prices were decent, we ordered our usual order … one meal and two rotis plus one more dish. This normally is enough for the two of us. Just about more than enough actually :-)

When the waiter came, he had his tray full with dishes … the quantity was huge .. big dishes and loads of dishes (what a meal!!!). It was enough for maybe 5 people, 6 even. The food quality was not that great, neither was the service … but pricing and quantity. Wow!

I wonder, what would have happened had the restaurateer focused on quality instead of quantity.

Hyderabad

Prasad Ajinkya4 Comments

Only in a city like Hyderabad do you see such idiosyncrasies. Our office timings were 9am to 6.30pm, which worked out for everyone (although I found them a tad too early!!). But ever since I have started waking up at 6.30, it has become much easier.

Nonetheless, today when I walked into office … I found that the AC was not working; which was very fortunate considering the fever I was running. After half an hour or so, the enter lights, connectivity, etc went. zook, kaput, gone … silence. The office does come to a stand still, especially the tech department. The newly installed UPS took the brunt of all the machines and the servers … phew!

Upon further questioning, we found that this is now going to be a daily occurence with the AP electricity board. The area is going to face extensive power shedding and daily from 8am to 11am, the lights will be cut. Great!!! Awesome!! As a joke, I asked our admin that maybe we should reschedule our office timings to suit the AP board.

11am, the management decides to reschedule the office timings … 10.30am to office it is!! What am I going to do in the mornings now?!?

Groupware

Prasad Ajinkya6 Comments

So we finally decided that Google Apps is not a sustainable idea without subscribing to their paid service (which costs a LOT by the way!). The only solution – look for alternatives who can give the same kind of service (my Head Ops wants this, thats Manish) and be as easy to administer (I want this) for as less as possible (my finance guy wants this). Yes, we want the BEST :)

So after doing a long due diligence, we decided, that having our very own hosted email server would be better (yeah, the cost-effectiveness hurts since Google Apps was free). Now, my MD wanted an interface where everyone’s schedules and calendars were visible to every other person. So, the need for a calendaring system was apparent, the moment he said that … I realized that we want something like the Google Apps paid version at a cheap cost. Fair enough, we can have that, just buy MS Exchange and enough Office licenses instead of using Gnumeric and Abiword bounded with QMail. My headaches would be resolved. Again, the financing of this exercise looks like a nightmare to me.

So, I have to look the open source way once more. Apple apparently offers CalDav, which works well with Outlook even (Thunderbird needs Lightning extension, or you can use Sunbird). Very good, so I take one derelict machine lying in my office (it’s a P3 you know :-)), and I install Ubuntu 7.1 on it. The installation goes without a hitch, I choose command line and remove the GUI interface, that drastically brings the load on the machine down. Sadly, for some reason CalDav is not installing, I cant compile the @*#@*^ file.

No worries, I look around and then decide to go with eGroupware, which needs not much just apache2, php, mysql and its own binaries. Installation has now begun …

10 minutes later … the file system on the machine has crashed. Some days are just fun days :-)

I am beginning to appreciate Google Apps from a whole new perspective.

Knowledge Value Cycle

Prasad Ajinkya11 Comments

I was reading a friend’s blog about how he has decided to have a mission for his blog. Immediately in the comments, I put in that along with a mission, one should also have a vision to know where the mission is going. Now, while suggesting a good looking and smart sounding mission and vision, I came up with this term – Knowledge Value Chain (I wont edit the comment on Biggie’s blog). I do not claim to have invented this, since a quick google showed me that the term is already used and abused many times over. So heres one more to the count.

Small explanation:
The cycle is divided into six stages, with the ultimate stage or goal of knowledge is to be the guru, the one, the yin on that subject. Look at our education system for example, that should tell us how this process goes … initially we do only rote (remember those horrid 10th and 12th exams??) … as we go into graduation, the awareness increases, we start listening and finally understand that theres more to knowledge than rote (try doing Hearn & Baker of graphics or Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein or any other thick book for that matter) … next comes the phase where you actually start learning yourself (that would be during your post graduation or job where there is no one there to teach you or learn from) … post which you become comfortable at internalizing a lot of information in a go … once it is internalized, you say … “hey, this stuff is awesome!!” … you want to spread the word … write blogs, talk with friends about it … you become an evangelist. People start looking up at you … they start saying … “yeah! he knows stuff” … you become a teacher.

Of course the process can be extended into a heightened form of knowledge cycle … thats when the teacher learns from his students. Interaction.