Ideate

It is the philosophy that Alain de Botton talks about in TED entitled - A kinder, gentler philosophy of success . A profound speech on society, that inspired me to jot down the experts.

Success - Why We need it ?
We want success not because, we are more materialistic, but because we want the rewards that it brings us - the success which leads us into the luxury.

What is our chance?
He says that our chance of being successful is as just the same as one had centuries ago, to raise above the French Aristocracy. Books, and success stories seduce one to reach that eluding success, that bill gates had and has. Our society is convincing that we bring about the social justice by subscribing to meritocracy. A meritocratic society is the one in which the person gets what he deserves.

Does Meritocratic society help?
Before even getting to the effectiveness of a meritocratic society there is a huge question of whether a meritocratic society is even possible. The answer according to Alain is NO. There is no way of achieving a pure meritocratic society, since there is so much randomness which will prevent such a society from being established. Apart from the biggest challenge of establishing such a society, there are few other evils that a meritocratic society brings in.

It makes people envy. Strangely the envy is related to equality. When everybody is thought to be equal, then people relate to each other strongly. Nobody is envious of the queen of England, though she is in a better position, than many. That is because people do not relate with the queen of England as well as they do with a peer at school or an union.

It makes the failure personal. By saying that someone is successful because he deserves it, it also means that some one is a failure because he deserves it too. That increases the burden of failure. A person who was had suffered a lot of failure would be called as unfortunate many decades ago. Now the same person is called as a loser. This is one proof that it has already started putting failure more personal. That according to Alain is a major reason for so many suicides.

It breeds snobbery. What does snobbery mean - a person who is judging one on what he/she is in the social hierarchy. This society has rendered it common. A person would face this judging from everybody except his/her mother! It is not a co-incidence that Paramore’s top single ignorance deals with snobbery, and gets debuted as the No.1 song in billboard!

Strangely this is one society which has put Man in the center. Every other society and eras before us has either had something at the center. Bet it God or Nature or Earth. There is a sense of human centric philosophy in everything that is being done.

Anything good?
As with everything there is something really good about this. It is said that man can achieve a lot in his/her lifespan with this society!

It is a rewarding twenty minutes of life spent hearing this talk! It is better there at TED. Here is the link.

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This is a short story narrating my experience of buying my first american burger! It highlights the language usage across different cultures, and the humor it begets!

use the fullscreen option in the embeded reader, or view it in the scribd by following the link below

Fahiya_Archugo

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literature, short story, stories

“A sure-fire all-American success story”, this is how The New York Times Book Review chose to comment on Sam Walton, Made in America. It is more than a story, a life of success, is what I found out after reading the book. It served me the much required motivation!

Things that I learned from his life!

1) Be a learner. Sam Walton was a keen learner. He learned from everything. It is written that he had the habit of learning from every store that he would walk into. He was always on the look out for something to learn. He learned from his competitors, critics and literally from everybody.There are instances where he would be given just ten minutes of time, which he proceeded to extend to two hours. Such intensive was his pursuit of learning, that he would milk all that he could from those meetings.

2) Lay emphasis on execution of your ideas. Because if you don’t, somebody will embarrass you by doing it better. Sam was one person who embarrassed his competitors with unfailing regularity. Either protect your idea by IP, or get to execute it with utmost sincerity. Good idea is just a good start, not the distance.

3) Relish change! Sam just did that.  Sam Walton not only reacted to change, but he anticipated the change. He even went a step further by bringing about change to the retail business! Swim upstream was his philosophy. When everybody was content with running a variety store, he was busy morphing his variety store into Walmart, changing a lot of convention all along the way!

3) Give it back to the customers. Almost all companies today have the philosophy of customer being the king. However they are keen to transfer the profits due to their operations efficiency to the share holders than the customers. That is where Walmart differed. Every thing that is beyond the profit margin went to the customers! Every dime is important. Every dime that Walmart saves is a dime saved for the customer. That is a different way of treating your customers!

4) Innovation. Give importance to innovation right from the macro level to higher level. For example the promotion of some tide packs to their laser guided inventory system, Walmart is designed for innovation to bubble up!

5) Work while you work, meet while you meet. He has Saturdays earmarked for meetings. That was the crucible for innovation. Womb of too many ideas and innovation, that went on to change Walmart.

6) Sow technology, reap success. Walmart has spent a lot on tech from the seven second credit card readers, to their satellite tracking, to their laser guided inventory. Walmart was a culture that embraced new technological innovation quicker than any body else in the market.

Highilghts:

1) Never played in a loosing football team!

2) His valor of saving a child in the stream, was reported and appreciated by a local daily.

3) He decided at a very early age that he was not going to be poor, after seeing his father work as a strong man.

4) Started very early. He started his entrepreneurship very early in his life, when at the age of six or seven he started selling milk! He also ran a paper route!

5) He did the Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt hula on Wall Street in 1984, for losing a bet in one of the Saturday meetings, about a pretax sales margin.

6) Named the store as Walmart - seven letters - so that he could save money on Neon!

7) “If you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail.”

If there is something eight dollars could buy, this book is the best of them all!

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The central prison in chennai, a 150 year old prison is giving way for the General Hospital and Metro. Its death sentence for the prison. In these twilight days, it has opened its gates to the general public. The gates which were once guarded heavily are as free as they can be. They don’t even have an entry fee!!

This has been the first seen of many a movie in tamil. A cliche shot! Pardon the cocunut trees!

The Symbol

A must have photo for the visitors. A regular in con movies, usually used in a flash back, or at the climax!

There are lot of dark rooms in the prison, lending a distinct shady side to these photos

Electric fences, to quel the adventurous!

Plight of welfare in prisons! Blame it on the ruin!

Beyond the fence there is a life

Patched

A withering flower symbolizing the state of the ruin the prison is in

A majestic array of arches in a section of prison

Open doors - how inmates would have loved this sight

Beyond the bars, there is more prison!

Bars painting a picture of gloom on a bright sunny day

If walls were not enough, there are glass pieces to guard!

Putting mobile phone cameras to maximum use. Everybody did it!

These are the beds in the prison.

From the inside

Another typical photo that people want to cherish over!! Thanks Sankar for posing!

The only word, that kept coming back again and again was “freedom”. The word acquired a new meaning, since I realized what the lack of it would be like! I shudder to think of the lonely cells in prison, the thick bars and the walls! Treated like a prisoner, having no free will!

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What started as a search for a driver, is now turning out into a search for a linux distro! This is an experiment in trying to find a software bride for my hardware groom. Let me give the details of my groom, before I proceed to document my tryst in finding the best partner for it.

The hardware
•    AMD Athlon xp 1800+
•    512MB RAM
•    40GB Hard Disk
•    VIA Chipset for my mother board.

I have a very old system, which I had configured for my college level programming! That was seven years ago, and now the machine is grossly outdated in all technologies. Right from the sdram to the IDE hardisk to the 32 bit computing, this sounds like a machine of a previous generation.

I tried installing Windows XP; the OS works well. The screen drivers were detected automatically giving a resolution of 1024×768. Everything went well, until an Anti Virus was put in place. Throwing in a few other applications like a spy bot, windows defender, etc made life pretty pathetic for my machine. I somehow believed that my machine could perform faster, with a stripped down version of a winXP. I dint think of win 98 though! I felt XP demanded more than what my machine could afford.

This made me search for a faster and more compact OS; an OS which does not require the luxury of extra hardware to perform ordinary tasks. Tux is what I looked to. The most popular tux distro presently – Ubuntu -  was my natural choice. I tried to install Ubuntu, out of a live CD. However I could not use the Ubuntu live cd, for some strange reason, so I burned up an alternate cd.

I was able to use the alternate CD to install Ubuntu on my oldie. After an hour, I could finally log into my brand new Ubuntu desktop as djo. As I was waiting for my new desktop to load, I tried to sniff the aroma of success from the air around me! I told you, my system is not super fast, so it gave me the time for all these festivities and emotions. And when I opened my eyes in anticipation, I was let down. What I saw before my eyes was huge characters, however a very good background of the intrepid. I realized it was 800×600 reso, that I was seeing before my eyes.
I had remembered the last time I installed Ubuntu, it was the same picture; however Ubuntu had a utility(screen and graphics) with which users can choose the monitor type and driver. When that choice is made, Ubuntu gave the set up the monitor resolution to 1024×768. I was busy searching for that utility. Then I realized that it was vain, so I asked google about it. Google gave me a list of people infuriated by the decision of Ubuntu to leave out the tool in 8.10. I realized Screen and Graphics utilty had been made obsolete in 8.10.  The reason Ubuntu developers gave was simple – it was automated, so it does not require manual intervention.

It so turned out that the automation in my case turned awry. My hardware was not detected! I guess I was not entitled to the luxury of automation that Ubuntu had provided. I moved on. I tried to figure out ways to configure my system to proper resolution. I tried the popular xrandr solution from the Ubuntu forums. Xrandr is a command to set the proper screen size. It started working at first, however later when I was trying to restart the system I had to configure it all over again. That was not even the problem. The problem was when even xrandr failed to set the desired resolution after a few times.

The temporary solution having failed(xrandr), I was in search of solution that could permanently install some driver or whatever. I was directed to modify a configuration file in Ubuntu – namely the xorg.conf. “Modifying a configuration file must not be a big deal to somebody who is earning his life coding”. So I thought! The pride bubble was burst the after a failing a few times with the  xorg config. I got a bit serious in xorg. I tried to incorporate all possible details, the motherboard drivers, the information about my monitor etc. I had commanded all my resolve and spent the last full week-end to try and learn the xorg.conf. At the end of the week end, I figured out that it was not possible to cook up the right xorg for my computer. Either the xorg.conf did not work, or it ended up crashing the system!

In these searches, I frequently hit upon threads, where people gave up configuring xorg! I was fast joining the club, with scores of failed configurations. I did not want to give in so easily. So what I did was to install the utility that Ubuntu had made obsolete. I took it from a previous release of ubuntu. Everything went well, till I started the utility. The moment I launched it, my terminal was full of error messages, making that effort futile. I tried all other methods out there in the book, however nothing worked. The irony was in the reason given by Ubuntu stating that the reason they removed the tool was that it broke xorg.conf. The reality is that, there was no other way I - for that matter many like me – could create an xorg.conf with out that tool. Nothing seemed to work.

At last after a lot of perspiration, caffine, desperation and dejection, I joined the club that moved away from U 8.10, with the hope of returning back to a better jaunty!

With both stalwarts of Ubuntu and Win XP out of contention, the next in line was Xubuntu. I tried Xubuntu, and dint spend long to figure out that it was suffering from the same malice as Ubuntu! So I moved away from *ubuntu. Now trying my luck in slackware – Vector, and zenwalk.I am downloading in the hope that my oldie finds a match -“Hope will not die”! I shall keep you posted on this hunt!

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Some products are made for people to buy. Some others make their buyers adore them. A  few others create a place for themselves in buyers’ life. Also an eco-system for itself. The first thing that comes to mind at the thought of eco-system is ipod. The accessories market it created is a story that plucked millionaires out of cottage industries.

The web is such a platform that creates quite a few rags to riches stories in social applications space. Initially it was myspace which created that buzz. Myspace themes made millionaires out of teen agers.Read here about Ashley and her whateverlife.  Apart from myspace iphone app eco system, seems to be leading the way in grooming millionaires. The app store of iphone has created quite a handful of millionaires. iShoot and trism, are part of the apps millionaire folklore.

This is a popular culture these days for lot of applications and accessories that spring up with every successful product or social web app. If that trend is universal and to be believed, in today’s context, the most appropriate app to apply on is twitter. Twitter is gaining such a momentum that, it is already thought of as a successor to Google, in many ways.

The best part about twitter is, you extend it and you get a great new product out of. Extend twitter you get an alternative to Google, a search engine that gives you information about the present. Extend twitter to see another linked-in. Extend twitter you see another delicious -sharing your links. Extend twitter you get an IM. What started off as a micro blogging platform has become a platform which can forged to anything else.

With such huge potential, it is only natural that a twitter eco system was born. And with it a lot of applications. Twitpic is one, which help twitter share pictures. Tiny url has suddenly become a meaningful app. There are couple of search engines that are cropping up too. Trying to be out there before the official twitter search engine gains prominence. And at the end of it there are some graphical applications too, trying to get you a background like twitterpatterns.com

This eco system which is growing is really a place to be given the following facts:

• The eco system is at its infancy. There is a lot to mature
• The potential is huge for twitter. It grows at astounding rate.

If there is something that you could invest on, invest on this eco system. In the long run it is sure to become profitable, and interesting. Not just money, also time and ideas. Looking forward to see this eco system grow millionaires out of it!

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URLs constantly remind two things. One they represent a set of trillion items like money. Two - it is hard to remember even hundred of them.These haunting reminders paved the way for the birth of the bookmarking culture.

These bookmarking apps evolved from browser based ones to web based. Then they started contributing to the social intelligence. And today they are one of the driving factors of social intelligence.

There was delicious  and then there was magnolia. I chose magnolia. I had taken the road not taken. I went ahead, and never looked back. Secretly enjoying the fact I was using a Rails application. There was always a tinge of sadness that was added to it, considering the fact there was no recommended tag. That means there was no artificial intelligence. The social intelligence of groups somehow made up for it.

I had never thought that this path would lead me one day to the message that I read on the magnolia screens. There was a data loss. I felt wired. I never believed that this could happen today. I was the staunchest believer that if there was data loss then there was recovery. Sadly till today it is false with magnolia. Some how the data could not be excavated.

This turned me to another common wisdom - back up. It is so common that nobody is practicing it. If there is data then there must be back up. I had used my delicious to back up the magnolia data once in a while. Yet the latest ones were lost. Whenever there is loss there is a learning. And here there was more than one:

Learnings:
* Back Up Everything that is data.
* Opt for service providers, that give importance to it. Like google, yahoo.
* De-risk your data, by having it in couple of other service providers. At least use them for your back up.
* Act fast if you have lost data. Some service might have cached it!

Thanks Magnolia.
I dont regret the decision of going with Magnolia, for one - my learnings, two - they helped me get whatever data was present.  I would like to thank Magnolia, for they devised creative ways to get me the data back - atleast partially through caching of feeds, or google. Kudos to you guys. Wish you were there!

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Google made a striking change to GMAIL recently. Well if you are thinking about the offline Google, I am sorry. Go ahead, guess again! Dont be harsh on you, jump to the next line to read what it is!

I am speaking about the buttons! Yep you read it right - Buttons. If you look at the buttons in GMAIL, they have undergone a transformation. The other applications of Google, like the Google docs, and Google reader have sported fancy little buttons. However our sweet GMAIL was subjected to this step mother treatment. Not after Feb 5 2009, that is when I spotted this change in GMAIL.

It had always been my silent request – which never escaped the neurons of my brain – to Google, to show some mercy on these buttons. It seems Google has heard my neurons. I noticed this change on 5 Feb 2009, when I spotted this change in GMAIL. Thanks Google for ending this cruelty to the buttons!

Styling buttons – the science behind it
It is a common practice for developers to style the buttons, instead of leaving it to the browsers to do it. For example take a look at aol.com. Observe the buttons there. The styling is usually done using an image, which is one pixel in width and appropriate height. This is the minimal price that these companies had to pay to style the buttons.
I felt Google was too stingy by refusing to pay even this minimal price to beautify one of the best applications on web! That is one eye sore that I had to put up with while enjoying the minimal styling of the GMAIL app. Things dint change even after introducing themes. However I was never more hopeful about this change, when they introduced themes.

They did it in Style(sheets)!
At last when I spotted the change, I felt like atlast Google has started using images for buttons. Alas I am wrong. Google executed that in style. They never used images for that. They just used the background coloring and border to achieve this. No Images! Trust me!! When I saw that in firebug I was shouting wow!

Luckily I stumbled upon this article which saved me the explanation

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A brief stint at US was my first exposure to a culture alien to the one I was brought up in. As with every other thing in this world, this culture lost the ability to excite me, beyond a point when I was used to it.

It so happened that I had to return back the my homeland, which triggered a confrontation with the culture that I was born into. This means that I had to get re-used to the culture that was so second nature to me. This is something I would like to term as the cultural lag!

What is so different?
1)    A bit sad about people walking across the road not greeting.
2)    Feeling that people are rude, when they don’t hold a door open for you.
3)    Enjoying the freedom of crossing the road anywhere. Now though there is a bit of fear, which I never felt before!
4)    Spending money. There are lots of bucks to spend, so that brings in indiscipline!

When I tell people that I am worried about these things, it is always ridiculing that follows! However I feel they have a valid point when they say that I had been away from this culture for only four months!!!

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