This is an archive of the site as it was in May 2009. Please go to www.rajeshgoli.com/ for latest content.
RajeshGoli.com
- Thoughts on Technology and life...
Reason - Description
This section, which I call Reason, is in many ways my blog of sorts. It is a collection of articles I write on random topics. I call it Reason: Random rants of a rational being.
I am no big fan of fiction, let me correct that - I was no big fan of fiction. I have been converted by podcasts - escape pod and podcastle. Escape pod is a science fiction story podcast and podcastle is a fantasy story podcast.
I really liked stories such as Exhalation, which is a truly amazing story - an alien "on the origin of species"; Article of faith, which talks about a religious robot; N-words, which deals with racism of a very different sort etc. On the fantasy side stories such as Dragon Hunt and Komodo were very entertaining. Do give them a try sometime.
I had mostly been reading only course material for quite some time now. This quarter was a little light on work load in terms of reading materials. Hence, I had some time to read something else for a change. Here is a short review of the books I read.
Ankit infotech is a somewhat famous shop on SP Road. I recently had a very bad experience buying from this shop. In short - the treatment you get when you are buying something has no correlation with the treatment you get when you need repair or replacement!
#1: You are better off doing what you do best even if you are really, really good at everything else.
A CEO is better off hiring a secretary even if he is a very good keeper of appointments and can type really fast. What he does best - hopefully - and thereby what he can do to add most value is CEOing.
I am no grammar Nazi, and quite often pick up and use neologisms. But one common mistake I'd very much like to see the back of is the usage of the word "common" to mean "come on". I see this more often than not in "chats" and in SMS. It is not uncommon for someone to say something like - "common man, it's not that far" - leaving me confused. Eventually it dawns on me that "common" must be read as "come on" and then it makes sense.
In the end, my humble plea is - "common guys, let us stop this usage".
6. Rules
Rules. There are lots of them in this world. Everybody you meet says rules are there to be, at the very least, bent, if not broken. But very few actually do, at least the right ones - the mindless unconscious rules - rules that owe their existence to evolution or some such unconscious and foresight-less force.
Perhaps it takes wisdom, perhaps it leads tranquility...
7. New Look
I am experimenting with various new looks. Do let me know what you think of the current look.
Since this whole exercise is merely about changing the CSS, I can revert back to any previous look by replacing HTML tag! In fact, all the previous looks are available as alternate CSS's and can be displayed if your browser supports it. On Firefox /view/ -> /Page Style/ will show you available styles.
Update: I've added a menu to change the stylesheet (instantaneously).
Warning: This post contains pictures of very large dimensions. The collective size of all the
picures in this post is 864 Kb. Please proceed only if such big pictures dont deter you 
.
Tonight I spotted Saturn in the night sky and photographed it. Here is the picture showing saturn:
9. Managers
Reuters reports - "Royal Nepal Airlines has apologized to Peru after mistakenly using a photo of the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu to promote tourism in Nepal. The Nepalese airline also fired an employee in the rank of a manager who was held responsible."
I can picture how the whole thing might have gone. The manager would have called an apprentice and asked him to come up with a new photograph for the poster.
A: Sir, here is a beautiful picture, we can make something like this!.
M: Hmm, yes it is beautiful, go use it and make a poster!
A: But, but Sir, this was taken in Peru!
M: Is that a new model of camera?
The rest, as they say, would have been history.
"The Greedy Planet", nice title that, grabs attention. Is this going to be a rant bemoaning how the world has come to become a greedy place? No, on the contrary, this post considers the idea the world is inherently a greedy place. I am not talking about morality here, instead I am talking about the world "running" a "greedy algorithm". Sounds geekish? Bear with me for a couple of passages and I will elucidate what I mean.
11. Irony
Ad of NDTV Pollution watch:
A rusted old vehicle exhaust bellows and coughs out obnoxious fumes..
"If something is in the Air, does it have to be this?"..
more obnoixous gases..
"NDTV Pollution Watch"
"Brought to you by ONGC, Working towards a brighter tommorrow"..
This post is not about more problems and puzzles, but about a place where you can share them!
<< Trumpets blaring 
>>
I have recently installed a SMF (simple machines forum) based forum to share problems and puzzles.
Please visit: www.rajeshgoli.com/pnp/.
I hope to be able to post
some of the good ones shared over there on my homepage to reach a wider audience.
Here is a collection of a few puzzles or problems that were posed to me and I had the joy of
solving. I got them from a different variety of sources. The only common denominator of all these
problems is that I enjoyed solving them.
I plan to update this Article as and when I find problems that are interesting.
You can leave the solution or the approach to solve as a comment to this article.
Here are a couple of management lessons or rather 'tricks that managers use to get stuff done' I learnt recently.
For the purpose of the article, let us create two entities: BOS and SOB. BOS is either a person or an entity that represents the management, in short BOS is the boss. SOB is person that works under BOS.
Now, as it happens all the time, BOS wants some amount of crappy work done, and wants SOB to do it. SOB, on the other hand, thinks he is better than that. Now lets call the crappy work CRP and the alternative or the 'good work' that SOB wants to do PRC. Let us also say ASSES is some guy who is working on PRC (good work) right now, and he'll do BOS's bidding.
I have seen that there have been a few stories floating around in biking forum that I frequent, XBHP [www.xbhp.com]. So I thought I'll try my hand at one, hence this story. A note before you start: My knowledge on a lot of subjects touched upon in this story is very limited, so it might contain factual errors, bear in mind that this is just an imaginary story.
16. The Experience
Another busy day in office. After half a day's toil, it is time for lunch on this beautiful Friday afternoon. It had rained yesterday and hence the air exudes a pleasant scent of moist soil. The sun seems to be playing hide and seek with the dark rain-bearing clouds. I head out to have a bite.
VIM's power keeps surprising me. I just wrote a dancing doll script for vim, a screensaver of sorts. Just create a file in your ~/.vim/plugin/ and call it dance.vim, copy and paste the following in it; Or just get dance.vim from here, put it in ~/.vim/plugin/ and restart vim. Then : Dance should show you some dancing dolls.
There is a holy war in geekdom, fought by the most esoteric of UNIX hackers. The cause for which the war is being fought must be noble one. It must be something that geeks hold dear, something that they have to do every day of their lives. What is it that an average UNIX geek cannot do without in his daily life? "Editing text", yes you read it right, "Editing text". There were many sides to the editor wars but most editors were killed and there are only two left standing, which brings us to the bone of contention:
Vi(m) Versus Emacs
I once had an argument with one of my friends, Sandeep, about the nature of beauty. He was of the opinion that beauty was symmetry and vice versa. The most symmetrical object in the three dimensional world that we live in is a sphere. You can rotate a sphere by any amount in any direction, it will look the same. Therefore a sphere is perfectly symmetrical, but is it the most beautiful? Consider a real life approximation of a perfect sphere, take an ordinary cricket ball, is it exquisitely beautiful? Let us compare it with a less symmetrical object, a cube. So is a a cricket ball more beautiful or is a ice cube more beautiful? An Ashoka tree can be very beautiful, but is it symmetrical? So, it is quite apparent that symmetry is not the key to beauty.
20. I, Cyborg
I was recently listening to a podcast called "Quirks and quarks" by CBC One radio. Something that a guest was telling on show caught my attention. He was saying something like this, "Every moment of our existence we are losing some cells in our bodies. Its a constant process in the body that dead cells are replaced by new ones. You probably have no cell in your body that you started out with 20 years ago. But you still feel the same person. Amazing, isn't it?"
21. The Quest
He saw up north through the large teak window that overlooked his huge garden, and saw the mountains of the north smudged against the horizon. The forest that divided the mountains from his town slept in between like a huge green ocean. His fairy land of a home town was located on a huge, largely uninhabited and ruggedly beautiful tropical island. His town was nothing short of paradise on the face of the earth with clear blue ocean down south and a large evergreen forest up north competing to accentuate its charm. Beyond the forest were the great mountains of north, standing atop one of which one could see the entire island, or so it was told for no one alive at the time had ever been on top of one of them.
We have all been soothsaid; some of us believe the people who can apparently look into the future with as much ease as we look out of our windows. Well, my article is not really about them. I am setting out to prove that we can never look into the future. Let me first define what I mean by looking into the future. Given the current state of being of a system, if we can predict the state of system in a future time accurately, we have effectively looked into the future.
Search
Articles
Portfolio
Styles
Ads by Google
