India has successfully launched its first spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 today. With the launch, India joined the elite club nations -- USA, Russia, European Space Agency, China and Japan. It is definitely a huge step for India's space ambitions. ISRO had announced a week back that they will do it today (October 22) I was hoping  in particular they do it today, which happens to be my birthday!

As a surprise, I got a call from Radio Mirchi RJ "Anjana" about my purchase of land in Moon for my wife. I told her I did it because I thought it was a cool idea - a novelty. At the same time, listeners should be aware that there is currently no real value or legal framework for buying lands in Moon today, so this is a not an investment for future. 

I am in Bay Area, USA for 2 weeks which will take me to Silicon Valley, Redmond (WA) and Los Angeles (for Microsoft PDC '08). Sunday evening I went along with my cousin who lives here to Fremont Temple. This is a well maintained and spacious (considering it is outside India) temple and I was impressed by the newly build area for the south indian gods.

On Monday morning I went to the Intel Museum in their campus in Santa Clara (CA). The museum covers about the history of Intel from memory chips, 4004 to the latest chips; chip fabrication process and basics of silicon, etc. The self visit doesn't take more than 30 minutes and I will recommend visiting this only if you happen to be in Silicon Valley area. Not worth travelling from anywhere far for this. I was told most of this is available online in their website as well.

Seeing the Intel 386 PC on display brought old memories for me. I started learning and doing extensive programming first on this PC - a 386SX (without the math co-processor) computer from Wipro during my school days. It is on this PC I learned my first business programming language - FoxBase and then Clipper. It is amazing the progress we have had in terms of speed and features over the last 23 years - unbelievable.

Today Indian Stock exchange lost its recovery from earlier the week to below 10,000 and closing at 4-digit marks. I was curious on how this journey was, so I downloaded the data for last 10-years from Yahoo! India finance and plotted the below chart. It was interesting to see:

• It took nearly 2 years for it to climb from 10,000 (7/Feb/2006) to 20,000 (26/Dec/2007)
• The downward from 20,000 (15/Jan/2008) to below 10,000 (17/Oct/2008) was over 9 months 
• Ten years before from today SENSEX was at just 2848.11 (16/Oct/1998) which is still 3.5 times from today's value

Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature "Geode". Geode is about browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide appropriate location based information. Though Location-aware applications are present in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort to do something similar on the PCs.

Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods - GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi. It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose hybrid positioning system (XPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy of 10 to 20 meters. Click on the video below to see how it works - basically they are building huge database of Wi-Fi access points and correlating them with Latitude/Longitude information from other sources like GPS for each access point profiled.

All these are transparent to developers and users, for developers it is just a Javascript call like the one shown below:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
  alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})

Before these initiatives web applications were limited to deducing user's location based on your IP. Technology is not standing still with IP based deduction, earlier they were limited to US cities, now database are more complete and are able to identify cities world over including India.

Related links: ZoneInfo database, GeoNames

Before I proceed let me state my position on this topic: I am not against Open-Source Software, at the same time I I believe like all other literary (creative) & engineering works software too needs to be based on a sound viable commercial model.

I came across this video of Stephen Fry celebrating 25 years of GNU and introducing "Free" Software. Being an award winning broadcasting professional Mr.Fry has done a great job of delivering a simple yet powerful message on what he believes on. But his introduction to "Free" Software and especially his plumbing analogy to be incorrect and can misguide general public. (Please see the video below before continuing)

Why?. He says just like you can change the plumbing in your house any way you want, "free" software allows you to change your computer the way you want it. Operating System vendors like Microsoft prevent you from doing this. Nothing can be far from truth.

All software vendors including Microsoft, Adobe or Apple have never placed any restrictions on how you can use your computers or on what applications you can write on top of them. The licensing comes when you want to change the core of their work (operating systems or software written by them) and then redistribute that resulting work. Going back to the plumbing analogy (which is a bad pick by Mr.Fry) this is like you wanting to cast your own steel pipes in a furnace and for doing it you want the pipe vendors to share their blue-prints and chemical composition "Free". Of course, there is nothing wrong in you wanting to do your own steel pipes if you want to, similarly no one prevents you (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple) from writing your own operating systems.

My whole point is it relevant for the masses, is it necessary?. I feel there are more pressing problems that can be attempted in the applications space, in the industry domains where the scarce human creative energies can be used on. Not on writing yet another Operating System, yet another UNIX/LINUX, yet another MS Office clone and so on - which is precisely what GNU has done.  To see this clearly you don't need to look far - just look at the number of Linux Distros that are out there.

In terms of software licensing if it is all about "Freedom" as GNU claims it to be, then my pick is always BSD style licensing over GNU. The difference being that GNU is of viral nature, meaning any resulting work needs to be GNU licensed, whereas BSD licensing doesn't put any such restrictions - you can do pretty much whatever you want.

While driving in the Chennai rains over the last two days this fact struck me. In most areas of Chennai there are hardly any road signs:

- No Pedestrian/Zebra Crossing marks on the road. This gives a good excuse for people to cross wherever they wish, and absence of X Crossings makes it difficult for drivers to identify crossings and slow-down.

- No lane markings, no Yellow/White lines in middle of the road. This makes it convenient for two-wheelers and three-wheelers to go on the opposite side and block the incoming traffic, again not that the lines will cure this but it can be a good start

- No uniform street name signs. Today you are lucky if you can spot a street name sign especially if you are in crowded market areas. Having US style street name boards at an height visible while driving will be useful, they also serve as good platform for future to host CCTV for surveillance.

For all this, the money can come from advertisement and sponsorship. I feel PPP (Public Private Partnership) here will work great.

Is anyone from Chennai Corporation of Tamilnadu government, listening this?

Few months when the Petrol/Diesel shortage happened in India I decided I will buy an electric two-wheeler. Apart from the advantage of driving when Oil is scarce, I thought it will also give a personal satisfaction of being environment friendly. Of course, nothing is more "Green" than a bi-cycle. So about a month and half back I purchased the Ultra Velociti - an electric powered scooter. It runs only on Electricity with no Oil at all, the dealer claims there is nothing to maintain or service in the vehicle other than periodic Tyre Air-Pressure and Battery check.

Specifications of the scooter (* Under Standard Test conditions and a payload of 75 Kg):

• Speed    45 Km/ Hour*
• Range    50 Km/ Charge* (Each full charge takes about 6 hours)
• Vehicle weight    88 Kg

The only dealer I could find in Chennai when I searched was GEE GEE Motors in Royapuram, but they were willing to come down and give a test drive in my office. The scooter on road including Road Tax, Registration & Insurance costs about Rs.41,000/-. After paying the full money I had to wait for nearly 2 weeks before I got the vehicle complete with registration and Number - I don't like to drive vehicles without number and insurance.

Having been driving only a car for last several years, when this scooter arrived it was a experience of "Freedom" for me. I was able to go for local shopping in crowded market streets in West Mambalam & T.Nagar easily, without having to worry about parking and traffic. When I am driving this scooter and see the vehicles next to me I feel good that I am not polluting and I am spending negligible money for driving. Though the manual says maximum load is 120Kgs, I was able to ride it myself with my wife and kid comfortably - obviously a bit slower than riding it alone, but nevertheless you can. The one problem I faced was of charge, the power meter is unreliable - from full, once it drops to half it takes only few minutes to drop to zero. While it is in this region, it runs in kind of a stop-n-go motion. But this was because I didn't charge for over a week (though I didn't drive more than few kilometres as well), but it will be a wise idea to charge it every few days once - to avoid this problem.

 
(You can see the charger in the left picture, the other end can be plugged to any 5V socket; The Power-meter and Speedometer in the picture on right)

Overall I found it to be a great second vehicle. Can it be the only one?, I doubt. I feel the technology, power of the motor and the engineering have to undergo one or two more iterations before the first time two-wheeler purchaser can go for this, selecting this over a motorbike. 

Reference: GEE GEE MOTORS, 73, Mannarsamy Koil Street, Royapuram, Chennai.Phone: 044-43528008, 43528009

The recent issue of IEEE ITPro Magazine (July/August 2008) had carried a very interesting Editorial. It raised the question "A Moving Target: Try to Define the IT Workforce", where it pointed that job titles in IT industry were being invented and qualifications were shifting daily. It uses the US Bureau of Labor's List of IT Jobs and arrives at a suggestion of a short list of 3 distinct "identities" in IT today:

1. computer scientist
2. software engineer, and
3. IT Professional

In the above list probably it is easier to understand "IT Professionals" as a broad designation. And the other two as niches within that.

The authors Keith W.Miller and Jeffrey Voas clarifies those two roles in detail as "Both software engineer(s) and computer scientist(s) think of software artifacts as means to ends, but those ends are distinctive. A computer scientists sees the artifact as an object of study, a source of experiments and data to analyze.  A software engineer sees the artifact as a tool to accomplish a customer goal, a method to solve a practical problem. Both could be interested in exactly the same piece of software - perhaps even the same aspect of it - but their goals will likely be quite different". 

You can read the full article from here (for short time only unless you are a member) from IEEE IT PRO - JULY/AUGUST 2008

According to a recent release from market research firm Gartner where it listed the Top 10 disruptive technologies it believes will reshape between 2008-2012:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualisation and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

When I see a list like this with overused and often repeated items like Multicore and Social Networking (though both of them are important technologies in the next 5 years), I get a feeling they overshadow the others. If you ask me for one technology that is under-hyped from this list but most important it will be "Contextual Computing".

I don't know Gartner's definition of this term, but when I think of "Contextual Computing" and its possibilities it is mind boggling - sky is definitely the limit with this. Contextual Computing is applicable in both enterprise and in consumer facing applications. Particularly in the consumer space it is all about catering to the basic human emotion of wanting to be listened and get a feeling of being cared for.  Present day examples of this can be seen (roughly) in the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon user interface or more clearly in Amazon's recommendations feature. Even these two are just scratching the surface. All of today's software (Internet/Enterprise) applications are mostly designed for doing a single task at a time with the user interface and workflow almost linear, but in real world we are never linear, our thoughts are always in parallel running various tasks each triggered by the context at that time. This is were I feel "Contextual Computing" can make a great impact. For realizing the true potential of this the software development tools and all the other 9 technologies listed above have to evolve greatly. When computer scientists understand how to implement this, only then we will harness the benefits of the digital world to the fullest.

What are your thoughts on this , post your comments here.

From Chennai you can buy affordable Air tickets for international destinations including return (two-way) to say Singapore (Rs.15,000 with Indian/Jet) or Kuala Lumpur (Rs.21,000) or Bangkok (Rs.19,000 with Indian/Thai). These fares are still kept cheaper despite the fuel hikes due to the heavy competition and high load-factors. But travelling within India especially to Non-Metros (where you to do a hop from another Metro) tickets are phenomenally expensive. I knew about this but didn't realize the magnitude on how costly they can become until I started booking the tickets for my vacation to Jaipur and Udaipur from Chennai.

From Chennai to Jaipur, only viable options are to do a transit either in New Delhi or Mumbai. The normally recommended option (because of more flight choices) is to fly to Delhi and then go by Road/Train to Jaipur. I didn't want to go by Road as it will be little tedious and since I had only a week time I couldn't get the tickets in Train either. I decided to go with Mumbai as MAA-BOM is shorter taking only One-and-Half Hours, compared to Two-and-Half Hours for MAA-DEL and hence a little cheaper. After few tiring hours of browsing all Airline websites I booked myself for this itinerary MAA-BOM with Jet Airways and rest all with Indian Airlines (as they had more comfortable timings) - BOM-JAI, JAI-UDR, UDR-BOM, BOM-MAA. I normally don't prefer low-cost airlines for family vacations as their flights tend to get enormously delayed, with the only exception for this being Paramount Airways.

As I said earlier the tickets for this travel was very expensive. For one person Onwards (MAA-BOM-JAI) costs around Rs.13,000 and Return (UDR-BOM-MAA) costs around Rs.12,500.

For Jaipur to Udaipur, I thought I can go by Train. Surprisingly the trains between the cities run at odd hours - not convenient with a small kid. So I was left with going by Air even for this sector with one person ticket costing around Rs.5000. You can't drive from Jaipur to Udaipur as it is more than 450 Kilometres. We don't realize how big is Rajasthan (I had earlier assumed Maharashtra to be the largest state in distances between cities there)  until you go and see for yourselves. The Aravali hill ranges (one of the oldest in the world) there has created diverse landscapes, so in Rajasthan you have Deserts, Hill stations, Rich fertile valleys and rivers.

Having done all the Air tickets I thought I was good to go. On landing in Jaipur on 27th (Saturday) I got a SMS from Indian Airlines saying the 4th (Saturday) October flight from Udaipur to Mumbai is cancelled. So I started my vacation with first redoing my return ticket from Udaipur to Mumbai, this time with Jet Airways. That was not all, yesterday when I called to tele check-in in they said the Mumbai to Chennai flight was postponed from 5:55PM to 8:30PM (combined with this flight). With my earlier experiences I knew the Indian Airlines 8:30PM almost never leaves before 10PM, so I went ahead and cancelled it. Redid my Mumbai to Chennai as well with Jet Airways - this made it easy in transit as the baggages could be through checked-in to Chennai.

I find it really surprisingly how Indian Airlines is able to get away with these changes and cancellation without worrying a bit about customer satisfaction. It can't be load-factor as the only reason, as even the Jet Airways flight from Udaipur to Mumbai was only 50% full but still they flew and nearly on time. So next time you are travelling with Indian Airlines (Air India) have back-up plans ready (or) fork-up more money the first time and go with Jet Airways or Kingfisher.

Note: For government (AAI) owned Airports that too Non-Metros Jaipur and Udaipur airports were both clean and good looking. The Udaipur airport was the best with its newly done exteriors and modern interiors & rest-rooms.