Their tariff plans were “Local calls at 0.29p/min and National calls at 0.49p/min“. That means, you can talk continuously for 5.7 hours (344 mins) with just Re. 1. (Click the screenshot below to view the entire website)

This is a classic example of the Verizon Math where one confuses dollars and cents. I found that they were on twitter and told them through a tweet after which they changed their website acting as if nothing happened. This post is just a testimony to the first ever occurance of “Verizon Math” in Indian Telecom Industry.

Also congratulation to Uninor on having the weaseliest marketing technique I have ever seen. All the ads and press releases tell that you can talk at 29p/min, but there is a “call setup charge” of 39p for every individual call. So, if you thought you can call all your 100s of friends to just wish for New Year, be ready to spend 39p + 29p for each call.

Soon the signal turned green and the auto driver went off to drop his ride along with the bike keys. These two guys were left standing in the middle of the road and without anywhere to go.

This is a common sight whenever the traffic police catch people at signals. The first thing that they do is to take the key so that one couldn’t speed away in the bike.

All this problem is because the key is easy to remove. You have to turn it less than 30° to remove it. Instead there should be a more complex mechanism to remove the key. Maybe some kind of switch/lever to release the key and have it in an inaccessible place. Or make them do a complex turn left-then right-then left combination to take it out.

However all these extra stuff makes it more complicated and surely my dad wouldn’t buy a bike like this. So, the best way to avoid losing the key to an auto driver or a cop is to take it out yourself first. Be very quick and you would have a chance to speed away when they are not seeing.

BTW, I think this is the first time someone suggested a lock for a key and reading this post I see how stupid it was.

All this website and blog is just trying to emulate the success of Obama. Obama was very active in Twitter, friendfeed and all the possible social networking tools in the world. But that alone wasn’t what won him the 4 years stay in the White house. Even if assuming that atleast 30% of the voters were influenced by his site and blog, it is entirely different here in India. Here, less than 10% of the total population is having internet connection and having a website and putting out ads on Google only means investing huge amounts of money in a very low return gamble.

I am sure that whichever party comes to power, they aren’t going to do much good to the citizens, but I am happy for one reason. If the political parties go this route and spent crores of rupees on advertising in Google and other sites, it means all this money will goto Google and other great sites that I use. This would help Google to innovate and bring out new and better products which everyone can benifit from. This would help in circulating a few millions of the trillions of dollars stashed in the swiss banks.

So the next time you see an ad for some political party (if you are lucky you will see one right in this page) or see the photo of Advani grinning at you, please click on the ad. You are doing a great help for the entire world by doing this.

I went and got a few books and have set my eyes on a few more books. I also got a membership for American Library - but later found that it is open only in the weekdays.

Here are the books I bought:

Programming Erlang

Programming Erlang

I was searching for this book for many days in Landmark and other book stores in Chennai, but couldn’t find it. Erlang is a high level dynamic language for writing concurrent programs which can run on multiple machines. Very important factor when you want to write a high traffic web application. Written by Joe Armstrong, this book is a highly recommended for people who want to start with Erlang. Though I had a ebook of it, I got this one.

jQuery Reference Guide

jQuery Reference Guide

jQuery is the best thing since sliced bread. It is a small but powerful javascript library. It is well documented and has an active user community. jQuery includes support for manipulating the DOM, supports AJAX and it provides some basic graphical effects. The functionality can be also enhanced with plugins. Though the docs are easily accessible over the web (they improved the API docs page the next day I got the book) I wanted a reference which can be kept on the table. Flipping the pages of the book, I got to learn lots of ways to manipulate the DOM and other effects which I wouldn’t have cared to read while using a search engine on the docs page.

Stick to drawing comics, Monkey Brain

Stick to drawing comics, Monkey Brain

I was lucky to find this book. This is by one of my favourite author and famous cartoonist, creator of Dilbert - Scott Adams. I have read his previous books - Dilbert Principle, Dilbert future, Dilbert: Joy of work. Majority of the chapters in this book is from his blog where he discusses about the various funny stuff. I have started reading the book while travelling in the bus and I keep smiling and laughing. Hope I can finish it without any incident in the bus. Some of the stuff that he writes in the book are: adopting a human embryo (just like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopting African kids), narscissistic murderer, hygiene (Hi Jean), Jet lagged babies, phrases he had invented, thieves who steal your purse and return it back in your house, etc. He even explains why newspapers don’t publish some of his original comics and how he had to change them. You can read this in any order as each chapter is very short and discusses only about one thing. This is one great book which wouldn’t bore you even if read it again.

Next

Next was the last book by Michael Crichton published before his death. I have read many of his books Jurassic Park, Lost World, Congo, Andromeda Strain, Sphere, etc. I haven’t liked his recent books much, but would love to read this one though.

I have to go for a second round and get some more books. Would probably go tomorrow as it is the last day. If you are in town today and tomorrow, please do go to the book fair and see the various books and buy some. Also please comment and suggest books which you think I would like.

PS: Man, it is difficult to link all these books to affiliate link page. Hope somebody buys a book from the link - would love to get an extra dollar or two.

• 28 April, India sets a world record for sending 10 satellites to orbit in a single launch
• 13 May, Bomb blasts in Jaipur kills 80 people
• 4 June, Government increases petrol prices due to the increase in crude oil price. Though crude oil has now become cheaper, there is no decrease in price of commodity petrol.
• 22 July, The ruling United Progressive Alliance wins a vote of confidence in the parliament over the Indo-US Nuclear deal
• 25 July, Series of seven bomb blasts in Bangalore - causing me to cancel my trip for design camp
• 26 July, Bomb blasts in Ahmedabad killing 45 and injures over 160 people
• 22 October, India launches Chandrayaan I and joins the elite club
• 8 November, Chandrayaan successfully put into orbit
• 26 November - 29 November, Terrorist attack in Mumbai kills 164 and injures atleast 250 and one terrorist captured alive

If there are some events which I missed, please feel free to put it up in the comments below. Lets hope the year 2009 is better.

Happy New Year.

First, about the “377 PhDs being awarded“. For those who are lazy to read the article, here are the important bits:

• 377 scholars is a record in the 29 year history of the university. Last year only 160 scholars got PhDs.
• 300 of the 377 scholars are faculties of self-financing colleges. The vice-chancellor says that “this automatically indicates that the colleges will have competent faculty with better qualification”.
• 89 students will be awarded the gold medal with 29 of them from private engineering colleges.

Reading this, people would immediately think that Anna University is a great institute to pursue your higher education. Before you jump to such hasty conclusions, a little bit of history.

A few years ago (about 3-4 years), there was some kind of a visit by AICTE or some comittee from Anna University. They started to question the competency of the staffs and remarked that only PhDs could become a Head of the Department. Till that point most departments of the self-financing colleges were headed by BE (and very few ME) graduates.

Immediately the next year people began to register for part time/full time courses for their higher education. The incentive was that getting a PhD would look good on resume, would lead to higher pay and better job title.

To give an example of the competency of the staff - there was a lecturer who was about to finish his ME and his dissertation was about a spam detection software (which he bought it off the readymade project market). On reading his paper, a familiar name caught my eyes. This project was later taken over by another lecturer (who was a Head of Dept) and she did the project with the help of a few students from my class. This reminded me of the name and I searched for the name “Spamato” and let Google feel lucky - bingo I was taken over to this page of the open source spam filter system.

They weren’t even building/contributing new stuff to the project. All they did was to compile the stuff (it took them 6 months to get it compiled without errors) and it was just a basic rule based system (no, they didn’t know about bayesian filters yet) with a blacklist of words. Last I heard, one student from the group which helped the lecturer was using this same project for her MS.

This is what most of the lecturers in private engineering colleges in India do. This means, most of the 300 of 377 PhDs are of no use - which brings us to the second new item “Anna University pips IITs for top slot in research publications“.

To summarize this news item,

• Anna University has published 311 research papers and has an activity index of 1.83 (the highest in the country) way more than the IITs. The IITs are somewhere in the 0.91 to 1.17 range.
• The vice chancellor says “we are ahead of the IITs now in the activity index”.
• However, when it comes to impact index, Anna University doesn’t even come in the top 10 universities. Not many papers published by Anna University scholars are cited (I doubt whether they are even read).

This shouldn’t be a shock, as with more people trying to get a PhD (for the money and name) more papers need to be written by them. Which leads to a higher activity index. Of course with people who go to “instant project/dissertation shops” for getting a research paper, the paper they publish has no real value.

Of course in a country where getting a doctorate is so easy that even tennis stars can get it sitting in a 2 hour function - who cares what research they did?

I have blogged about the entire trip and what we all did for the 5 days over here. Some of the things I found about Ahmedabad are:

• There are numerous IELTS and TOEFL training centres around the city. Near our hotel, there were atleast 3 such centres(within 200 metre). But the people there aren’t so good in English. Conductors in public transport buses over here in Chennai atleast can speak so much to suggest where a tourist needs to get down to reach his destination, but we didn’t try going by bus anywhere.
• All the bus numbers/signs too were written in gujarathi. All the shop names are also in Gujarathi (except the cyber cafes). Thank god Tamil language doesn’t have seperate script for numbers.
• People are really very nice over there. There were numerous places to eat and the food was good enough to eat. People don’t cheat mostly. The general public makes sure that even if it is a small change of Rs.6, they get it back.
• The roads are very good and wide. The infrastructure is constantly being developed.
• There are no liquor shops there and I wonder how the government’s treasury gets money. In Tamil Nadu, liquor shops are the most profitable business for the government.
• The marriages are celebrated very much with dance and lots of games. But people were very much interested in the buffet than watch the wedding. Also the timings were a bit odd (at 12:30) which makes people and kids hungry. If it were here, the lunch halls would be open only after the wedding is over.

Do check out the entire story on my personal blog and leave comments about what places are there that we should have visited. Maybe we can go on a trip again if needed.

During the Diwali weekend, we (Pratheema, Sudarsan and me) went to buy a mobile and thought we will go try out Hash 10. We asked for Nokia E51 and that person knew nothing about the mobile except the price. Whatever question/specs you ask him - the reply would be “I will ask and tell sir”. 

So we were waiting for him to ask and tell, when another customer came in and asked that guy about some mobile. This was the conversation which took place.

Customer: So how much zoom does the camera have?
Hash10 technician: It has 20x optical zoom sir!
Customer: 20x optical zoom. Ok, great. How much does it cost?
Sudarasan (to me): Hey, These people are nuts. He is telling that the camera in the phone has 20x optical zoom. 
Me: Whaaaat?

Guess they don’t even know the difference between a mobile and a high end camera. I guess during the New Year offer they will have a mobile using which you can see the Indian Tricolor on the moon placed by Chandrayaan I. Waiting to get my hands on it.

Head Lamp beam distribution in India

In highways it is totally different. In India, you can see huge trucks carrying heavy load with no tail lamp. I didn’t draw a pie chart for it, as it would be a huge big red circle.

Located in south west of Bangalore, the National Park is around 15Kms from Madiwala (where I stay). The way to this national park is kinda hilly and one can always enjoy the ride in motor bikes. There are also Volvo buses available to this place from the city bus terminus. You can board in to any of the buses numbered 365, to reach this place.

The following post is kinda big that may contain boring stories. If you wanna take a quick photo look of Bannergatta National Park you can reach my picasa web album over here.

We started our trip at around 14.00 hrs. After the 1 hour journey through the city traffic, we reached the national park and started collecting money for the safari ride. Suggestion !: Start early if you planning to go there, so that you can spend more time in the zoo. As usual none of us had more than 100 rupees in our wallet So we went to the ticket counter to enquire about the ticket price. To our surprise we fell short of money (for the Grand Safari). For an adult in a weekend, the ticket prices vary from 30 to 120. There are many rides like, Wild Safari, Grand safari, Zoo, … Suggestion 2: Always have adequate cash (no cards !!) in hand as there are no ATM machines out there (there was supposed to be an ATM out side — may be 1km away from the zoo). No. Not even Credit Cards. Some how, after continuous wallet digging, we managed to get tickets for the grand safari.

Initially we were asked to wait in a long queue (there are queues for all kinda rides), then we got our van. We were the first one to board in to the van, so got hold of a nice seat. Suggestion 3: Try to get the front side seats as you get to see the animals through the wind shield also. The van started in 10 minutes. We were kinda excited about the ride (also kinda worried that we don’t waste the money which was got after a long battle with our wallets).

The journey started off with the herbivores zone. The first 10 minutes was kinda bad as we barely saw a couple of monkeys (and some dogs too ). After which we saw wild bisons and some deers. Not so exciting thou’. Still we didn’t loose our hopes. Then we entered the Bear zone. Atlast something really wild. Suddenly the van slowed down and there we saw a bear. In the path way. Grazing ?!? (I don’t know what it was doing). We were all excited and started to click our mobiles. Trying to cover the bear. Still surprised, we saw a couple of more bears on our way. The van driver was so kind to stop the vehicle in our request (You are not supposed to get down thou’ !!). Suggestion 4: If you have a camera, don’t forget to take it. Its a nice chance to show your photographic skills. We saw around 5 to 8 bears on our way.

Crossing the bear zone, we entered the Lion zone. Yeah. Now to meet the king and say hai to him. Everybody were excited. We were searching for lions everywhere. Even after continuous scanning of the land, we hardly managed to find two lions and those lions were very lazy. Can’t take any photos.

We then went to the tiger zone. We hoped that it will not be like the lion zone. Our hopes didn’t fall. We saw loads of Bengal Tigers. We would have seen around 5 to 10 tigers. We even saw white tigers. Cool. We felt satisfied for what we have paid.

Finishing the grand safari, we got down near the ButterFly park. Entry at Rs. 30 each. We didn’t wanna go on for yet another batter with our wallets. Suggestion 5: If had been there tell me how it was After the bumpy ride, we were all hungry. Went to a near by shop to eat something. Suggestion 6: Do take my second suggestion.

There is also a zoo in there. We were doubtful whether we will be allowed To our surprise we could use the same ticket for the zoo. As we were very tired, we just covered a small part of the zoo. After getting out of the zoo, we managed to get something for out tummy spending around Rs.40 (thats was all we had that time) and started our way back to my room. Though it was a quick trip, it was really a great fun. Hope i have given you some suggestions that shall help you when you go out there !!