Idle/Random/whatever Thoughts of a Demented/Idle/Whatever Mind

Wow this was something I did not expect. But this surely did hit me hard the first time I got through it. It seems like I could access most Airtel Broadband users routers using simple telnet. Once I was connected, all that was required was username and password. Boy and I am in. I have access to the router now and I sure can do a lot of crazy stuff with it. Wait a minute, did I say you need username and password. How would I get the username and password. Well actually not very difficult. Is it. No one ever changes the username and password of their router. Actually no one expects anyone to be able to access the router without their knowledge. But the sad fact is, anyone on the internet can access their router. Most people do not even realize that their internet connection can be easily compromised. How? Well simple steps to follow 1. Press Window Key + R  to open the Run Command Dialog 2. Press cmd (Enter) 3. Enter 'telnet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' Where 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...

I saw this amazing headlines from Economic Times, 70% Indians worry about outliving retirement funds . Well my first reaction was "Oh my God" . Most Indians would be unable to sustain themselves once they have retired. More likely they would kill themselves or die of hunger or may need government support. But then I read the fine print there. Well its a survey by MetLife. They sure do see a big market with 70% Indians not having retirement funds. But then another truth is that 50% Indians do not have funds for the next month too. Most of them survive on a daily basis. Mind it survive not live. Then again there is still a large majority who do not invest in retirement funds. Well that reminds me of people like my dad. He has no retirement funds. But then he does not need it either, just like my grand father. He did not need it. My dad is there after all to support him since he has retired long time back. Obviously same applies to my dad of course. The truth also is that yo...

Well that a provoking first line, but then thats exactly what I have to say about this company. Tata Elxsi should be blacklisted, but wait a minute by whom? Well the software developers fraternity. Its a blood sucking corporation which is right documented in the documentary The Corporation . Ok why am I telling this after almost one year of leaving it. Well when the fact is that I have nothing to do with it. I have already let out my personal experience here , here and here . Well it was not just me as its obvious from the comments but then it was general feeling of my friends there. Well all I can talk about is friends because I dont know how each and every employee of Tata Elxsi felt. Anyways heres one more story about the kind of harassment and employee of Tata Elxsi might have to suffer . Though I had read it earlier but am blogging now about solely because I wanted to confirm the news being true. And sadly it is true. An employee was indeed made to resign. And indeed its legally ...

A picture is worth a thousand words. Obviously simplymarry.com went overboard with the ad campaign.   Common yaar every body knows there are no beautiful girls in Software. By the way never heard anyone say Software Engineering as their qualification. What do you think of simplymarry.com now??   A few other ads which they may have A hunk describing himself as havaldar or constable. A hottie posing as PhD in science. Another hottie posing as Women Welfare executive Can u think of any other situations??

Well this Wednesday 5th March 2008 I had this unfortunate experience of flying by Jet Lite. I must say that if there is a competition among the worst airlines in India, Jet Lite would definitely be a winner. Well as it has been renamed by some as Jet Late as its too often too late. As if that was not all, what is worse is that aircraft that they have. They are literally held together by duct tapes. These were the comments on the plane by one of my friend on it. Initially I thought it to be a joke, but then he asked me to look at the window and what I saw was this(they say a picture is worth a thousand words ) A little more in detail in the following two pictures   So you can imagine what we went though. But the bottom line is that we are alive . I am not sure if it caused a security risk or something but I did not feel comfortable at all. Obviously unless there is a crash or sorts there would be no learning for these airlines. Worst there are something which not jus...

Recently I had this opportunity of witnessing this amazing concept. Let me start from describing this place. This place is stretched over acres of land, with a parking lot bigger than the car park at any of the Indian Aiports I have seen. So u can imagine the total size of the complex. Its just humongous. So I enter the gate and am there inside this really huge open area. Now time for the first surprise. We need to deposit all out bags, cameras, mobiles, handsfrees and basically everything that is there with you except of course you cash and other valuables. Anyways proceeding from there I moved on. At another point I was told to take off my belt. Yo Baby. This is amazing. Never seen this thing happen anywhere. I believed that Airports and Red Fort also dont have this amazing security. Then a 'proper' security check and we are now allowed to proceed and put on the belt over the falling pants. Obviously the complex people dont want to visitor with their trousers falling every no...

We heard some time back from our economist prime minister, Manmohan Singh that Indian CEOs are overpaid. Their salary should be brought under control . And now we have the latest news that 'Big pay hike for President, VP and Governors' . I am sure something is in line for MPs too. But then why crib over salary of the CEO who are going great work for the country and its people rather than the bureaucrats who are plainly killing off whatever is left out. Seems like one of those 'suits me well' attitude as they have for secularism and development. Doom Congress Doom, thats where you are headed to. Never is any educated Indian going to vote for you. The best way for u is to eliminate them tactically.

According to this story by Engadget , the rate of piracy of Vista is half of XP. Now should MS be happy about. After all piracy is low. But are they overlooking the fact that people hate Vista even if its free or at real dirt cheap prices. There have been several instances where people have downgraded their system to XP instead of the standard Vista. If the kind of hard selling that they are doing, I feel they are pretty much aware of the fact that people just dont trust Windows Vista. The acceptance level has reached a new low. The only way for them to outsell is to make their earlier product look bad. But then why would not they believe that the competitor (Linux and Mac) would not be dubbed as better creations. I really dont know if Vista is all that bad. I am happy with XP provided by office. I plan not to shift to Vista, unless forced. So the big question is, would you shift to Vista, even if it were to be free?

Well I dont know if accidentally I had made some correct statements in this post about sikhs. I was so sure that it had no intellectual value but then I read this story . So here its says that Mr Anil Ambani is at fault for 'allegedly' circulating derogatory jokes against the Sikh community through its mobile Internet services. The masterminds again are from Lucknow, Lucknow Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee(LGPC). Seems like Lucknow is fast turning hub for all kinds of religious intolerance and communalism. I would like the LGPC people to first read the classics by Khushwant Singh. His jokes are the best of their kind. He is one guy which really made the sardar jokes reach out to the market. Then came the MTV and Mr Cyrus Bakara. They took these jokes to the masses. Each one of the young generation waited to hear these jokes. The final death nail was the Great Indian Laughter Challenge and Great Indian Comedy Show. Both of them literally taking humor and sardars to new height...

I today got this amazing story to read from the master of 'office humor', Scott Adams . Usually he would write the stuff in a very discrete and sarcastic way. But today he missed the bigger point. So here is that point for u. There are two ingeniously stupid researchers who have come up with something interesting. This actually is worth the igNobel or "No Balls" if not the Nobel Prize. Research 1 says that Happiness = success. Research 2 says that Sadness = productivity. Now if I say that both researchers are earnestly true then I can form some real good mathematical equations. Sadness = No Happiness. Since Happiness = success, Sadness = No success. Hmmm now is the fun, as Sadness = Productivity , we can say that, Productivity = No Success Now effectively, No Productivity = Success. This clearly proves that harder you work, less successful you would be and your appraisal will reflect that. So for more success work less. If you have worked hard ...

I think you guys must have had a real good experience searching on Google. No wonder they have a very good algorithm but then that too us susceptible to spam so you cant really have 100% reliability on that. That was the question that made me think that googlrithm is more complex than what it seems. And yesterday night I got that light from my thinking bulb. At first when Google introduced Google Sitemaps and Google Analytics. No one would have suspected it to have any consequences on search. But now I realize that the assumption is perhaps wrong. So heres my hypothesis on how Google makes it happen. Well every webmaster now by default goes to Google Sitemaps to get his site in the list. The webmaster would get information like his indexed pages, when his page was indexed and what searches picked up his pages and at what rank. It also records for which searches his site was visited. Great now you know who visited your site for what result. But then Google also knows. From here Google...

With so many things happening for the engineers Bar Camp, OCC and now D Camp . Sure we are going to see the next MS or Google from India very soon. D Camp or design camp was held a Yahoo office in EGL. First presentation was by Muthu from Sun Microsystems. He started with demo on how to use CSS and Javascript. Next how to use it to get ' Your Kind' of a look for your webpage. Then we had the demo for YUI Javascript Library. And the usual corporate bashing was kicked off but Muthu cleverly moved the controversy out by saying that YUI is his favourite thats all and the ultimate call to use is on the developer themselves. Joe Arnold from Yahoo! was next to make a presentation with an unusual title " Learning to Fly ". Rather actually it was a great one. Interesting way to explain how to design, using the Wright brothers experience on how to build invent a plane. Some interesting thought on what it takes to build or rather invent a good product. You need ...

The Wall street Journal reports with this as its headline How a Muslim Billionaire Thrives in Hindu India Mr. Premji Has Wealth And Clout as Wipro Chief; The Imam Disapproves. What bullshit is this. Hindu India??? Was it Mr Praveen Togaria or some stupid Hindu Fundamentalist who gave this view. India is not Hindu first of all and it was not he being Hindu or Muslim that made the difference. It was his hard work and vision that saw him make that mark in the International space. More than Mr Azim Premji I feel its former President of India APJ Abul Kalaam who is looked upon a role model than anything else. And if the report is to suggest anything, its the fact that Wipro has made its mark because of its secular policies. I dont know of any Indian Hindu billionaire who would not be secular. Although you are a pious Hindu like the Birlas building a temple in every city in India, but when you do business you cannot constrain yourself on the people front. I dont think its true....

Well last Sunday I again happened to be at the Open Coffee Club of Bangalore. A whole lot of interesting ideas on marketing and all were tossed up. The big question that's always in my mind was answered during this session. Yes what is my ideal startup. I think what would make up my ideal startup would be some ideas taken from Hari and Venkat (Venkat has a startup named OutSmart, so guys be ready to expect something). Here are the something's a startup should do. Be positive about your idea and more importantly show it. Have a long term plan, something like 2 years. Be ready and plan up to flourish in those two years, not just survive. This should be planned before you get your hands wet. Waiting for VC may not be the best bet. Keep ground realities in check. More often than not the power of idea is so strong that one can loose track of customer expectations. Be firmly stitched to that ground. Make employees feel that ...

Well this was one event I was skeptical about. I thought may be 10 odd people will turn up. To add to it a few startup people, and probably a VC. But when I reached there, 30mins late, I saw there was a large group. 60 around, thats what Ramjee told me. Anyways after the introductions there was that useless debate on how to take it forward. So many people saying the same thing, in different words obviously. Instead of taking the current thing forward people got lost in future, not very different from what all startup guys look at. Anyways the real fun started right after the event was over. People actually split into a number of groups. There was more of one to one interaction rather than a formal one. I think that was one of coolest thing out of the entire event. Well I did have interaction with a lot of people. Some of those really stuck out. One was muziboo by Prateek Dayal. I think its off to a good start. Probably he does not make mistakes that most startups do, not having a lo...

I had talked about bloggers not being trusted source of information. But its not just the bloggers or the new media which needs trust of its readers. The traditional media too needs it. But the traditional media has to its advantage belief of its reader set to trust mode. But there are several newspapers who are losing their trust each day some readers at a time. The latest one being Mid Day. I am sure that if not anyone else, it has lost my trust. All for this one article which was published on 14th August 2007 on page A21 and A23 in Mid Day, Mumbai. I being a ex-employee of Tata Elxsi know that this whole article is a fairy tale. The fact of the matter is that all the photos are nothing but a shoot just like for some movie. Tata Elxsi does not promote anything that was quoted in the article. It just seems to have come out of fantasy of the writer Priyadarshini Nandy. I having the first hand knowledge and I know the culture and the environment in which people work there. That itself ...

I have read the Dilbert principle N times. And each time I have read it I have known that most profitable corporations are run not by the smartest of the people but rather the dumbest of the breed. The people who have no regard to others working under them. I have an experience of just 2 years but with added advantage of experience from Scott Adams (This link may not open as typepad is still banned by a few indian ISPs so use a proxy) via his Dilbert series of books, comics and not to mention his blogs, I consider myself competent enough to make comments about it. Say I give you this hypothetical situation where your boss is good enough to not bug you for anything at all irrespective of whether you do things right or wrong(I believe that everyone goes wrong at some point or the other). Would you do things with all that liberty that is given to your. Would you work your ass off and finish off the job, in process making some stupid mistakes(According to the Hypothesis of Scott Adams, w...