When I was a kid,I used to watch the only television channel then Doordarshan which on 15th August had the following line-up of programs.

• Patriotic Manoj Kumar Songs
• Prime-Minister’s unfathomable speeches by Prime-Minister of India from Red-Fort
• A Regular movie ‘Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi’ which Doordarshan used to telecast on following days Aug15,Oct 2,Jan 26 and Jan 30

Me being the kid who grew up in the 90’s the above set of programs were enough to instill patriotic feelings atleast for the day.The last episode of patriotism that came in my life was in 1997 the 50th year of Independence when I saw the “Independence 50” sticker in cars,handpulled ricksaws,trams ,metro trains (I was in Calcutta that time),autos and many places wherever stickers can be pasted.The song that captivated the nation during that time was ‘Vande Matram’ by A.R.Rahman.I don’t know how much impact it made on other people but as a teenager I was deeply impacted by that song.

Unfortunately that was the last episode of deep patriotism in me as I was introduced to the concepts of ‘Internationlism’ and about various cultures across the world by my History teacher.Before that the only cultured nation I knew was INDIA.The definition of CULTURED was very clear and simple in mind then, it’s rather more vague and in a state of chaos right now !!

After I moved to college and got a job in an MNC , the concepts of patriotism faded into my childhood memories.Today I feel the concepts of NATIONALISM and PATRIOTISM are just phases in the human history .I believe the international borders will fade away to give give way for a new world order called HUMANITY, the seeds of which are already taking shoots in the form of Human Rights , Globalism , Internet etc etc

Today Morning I woke up and as usual I started checking my tweet stream , blog statistics , mail and some technology news.After a while I came out for getting some fresh air and I saw something infront of my appartments which reminded me of my childhood activities which I did every Aug 15 and sometimes on Aug 26 as well.

After watching the flag-hoisting at school by our school principal and having sweets and ladoos distributed by the school prefects,I used to make paper-flags and hoist it on my table.The quality of flags underwent the following enhancements each year.

• Hand-made Tricolor in paper with one side blank,hoisted on a single-wick of broomstick
• Hand-made Tricolor in paper with color on both the sides
• Hand-made Tricolor in paper with color on both sides and the pole of the flag(broomstick) painted in white
• Hand-made Tricolor in paper with color on both sides and the pole pasted with white paper and an intricate mechanism for hoisting it.(pull the rope at the bottom and the flag goes up)

I never made a flag with cloth because I grew up by then and patriotism had faded away.On one Independence day , I even made a British flag and burnt it infront of the Indian flag hoisted on my table.(this was probably the flag version of the silly GI-JOE toy games I used to play)

Today after so many years,I saw similar thing by the kids from our appartments was really nice to see.A paper flag hoisted on a giant pole by a group of small kids from age 3 to 7.I didn’t have the usual 8 megapixel DIGICAM nor my 2 megapixel camera mobile to capture the snap.I have to borrow my dad’s mobile and take the snap.

Really nice to see such Hand-Made Paper Flags even today.

W(here) T F is  GOOGLE and TWITTER in the category list.We have so many documents on GOOGLE and TWITTER but Digg seems to be still in the old world where Bill gates and Steve Jobs fought over OS supremacy

It’s second time since this blog that I am trying to consolidate whatever i read about past , present and future of something.I chose search engines this time because search engine wars and most importantly the interesting (well partial)mergers have captivated me for the past few weeks on Techcrunch.We are really at a very interesting juncture where we will see some quality duels between the internet giants.

It’s Really interesting to know that Yahoo once was powered by Google search (somewhere between 2003-04) but now it will be powered by Microsoft’s Bing

I have Gimp’ed (created an image using GIMP) , rather a timeline of search engine history.Please read the image below and any genuine comments are welcome

Search Engine Timeline

Ask my friends how many movies I used to watch every week.There was a time ,last year when I used to watch as many as 5 movies per week,most of them Night shows.Kiki was my movie partner and had a lot of adventures like being caught by the corrupt night policemen near the Madhya Kailash signal.We even used to watch movies continously.

• 7PM -9PM Journey to the Center of the Earth(English)
• 9:30PM-1:30AM A Wednesday (Hindi)
• 2 AM We were caught by a Corrupt Policeman while coming back at Madhya Kailash Signal
• 2:03 AM KIKI dials 100 to complain about the policeman who caught us
• 2:05 AM I give Rs.140/- to escape the cop before the other cop(whom kiki called for SOS)reach the spot

I give all the credit to the online booking system by sathyam cinemas at thecinema.in.We used to book the tickets at the end of day just an hour before the movie.The ‘Q’ was really DEAD.The website was intuitive and mostly flash based.We struggled a lot when we booked the movie tickets through mozilla , though the site worked like maska in IE browser.

It’s been around 8 months since I had visited Sathyam Cinemas though I have frequented Mayajaal , INOX and our own RAKKI [Ambattur's biggest Multiplex ].After a long time I wanted to watch a movie at Sathyam.I was planning to watch both ICE AGE on SATURDAY and TRANSFORMERS on SUNDAY.When I tried booking the ticket,I found the thecinema.in has undergone a complete transformation during the multiplex strike period.

The site is fully done in FLash.I suggest they could have had a LIGHTER version of the same site for people booking the tickets from low configuration systems.

Another major design fault in the site which screwed my weekend was WRONG colors chosen for the active tab in the ‘MAKE PAYMENT’ screen.Take a look at the thecinema.in’s MAKE PAYMENT screen below

PAYMENT THROUGH FUEL CARD OPTION

MAKE PAYMENT SCREEN -PAY THROUGH CREDIT CARD OPTION

I noticed that the line separating the inactive tab shouldn’t be there for Active Tab.

Minor flaw yet it spoiled my weekend

Second thing I noticed was the color of the inactive tab is more eye catchy than active tab, which lead to a confusion in my mind and When I wanted to switch to PAY BY CREDIT CARD MODE, I kept on clicking on the FUEL CARD tab without reading the tab title,thanks to the color of the inactive tab which looks like an Active Tab.

You call this poor Design of thecinema.in or my impatience,it took a lot of time for me to figure out the difference between the active and inactive tabs and I ended up booking the tickets for Transformers for Wednesday Matinee show.In order to compensate for the half day of work at office I burned my Sunday in my cubicle.(Remember there was no A/C on Sunday).

Hope Sathyamcinemas takes note of this simple yet weekend screwing design flaw and make lives easier.

It occured  to me during the IPL season 2 when I was asking my friends in an excited mood :

“Which team you are supporting ?”

The response I got from most of the people was

“I am not interested in IPL,there are even bigger issues to be resolved like Recession”.

It is really sick that people,companies and nations tend to brood over recession and instead of coming out of it they fallback into the vicious spiral of negative thinking.

RECESSION   —>   NO SPENDING —- > RECESSION

Even my bosses are uttering the word ‘Recession’ for any new proposal I suggest.What the companies are not realising is that recession is the time when world needs people to take risks…ofcourse Innovation is a child of crazy risks taken.I am getting sick of the people’s sick attitude towards life,people becoming more and more defensive and hence giving way for more recession.We will never be able to fight recession if we continue like this.

I remember a story which I read in my 11 th Grade namely “The Man who saved Pumpelsdrop”.I believe the world today needs this story to be read and understood so much.For those who don’t remember this story or have never read this story :

The story goes like this

• The City of Pumpelsdrop was once going through a Terrible Economic Crisis
• The people stopped celebrating their birthdays and there were no festivities.They didn’t celebrate christmas for two years.
• One day a newbie to the town of Pumpelsdrop visited a car dealer and ordered for a pair of Rolls Royce car to be delivered on the eve of Christmas.One for her daughter and another for her wife.
  
• The car dealer was elated since , it was the first time in years when a customer has visited his showroom.
• The car dealer was so happy that he gave the part of his saved money to his wife to buy a pair of necklace.
• The diamond merchant was so happy that he gave his wife a lumpsome money to buy furniture for the house.
• Hence the Furniture merchant became so happy that he ordered white-washing to his old house.
• Like this ,within two weeks the whole town came alive and was bustling with economic activity.People were now even ready for celebrating the Christmas this time.
• On the Eve of the Christmas, the car dealer was waiting for the Man who has ordered  the Rolls-Royce car.Instead a truck from a Lunatic Asylum came to the showroom and some men from the truck said “Did you see a lunatic man, who was ordering two Rolls-Royce car”.

The Moral of the Story is If you continue to be in Negative Thoughts you will never come out of it.Start taking real calculated risks if you want to reverse the bad times.

The above story is in the context of a small town and may not be an exact analogy for the current recession(as it involves various micronomies invloved) but the point we need to understand including the companies which cribble in the name of Recession and get away from giving it’s employees promotion and various other incentives is that never live in Negative thoughts about the current or past failures, try to come out of it;Even if the risks you take sound CRAZY.JUST DO IT.

]]> http://pinastro.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/the-recession-is-in-your-mindset-its-not-real/feed/ 0 pinastro http://pinastro.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/obama-was-probably-looking-at/ http://pinastro.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/obama-was-probably-looking-at/#comments Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:54:33 +0000 pinastro http://pinastro.wordpress.com/?p=503 ]]>

I was browsing through the internet when I saw this story which caught my attention.“Where was Obama Looking?”it’s really funny juxtapose indeed.But I think,even if Obama was looking at the Mayora Tavares’s bottom,he can be forgiven.It’s a normal reaction of any straight male on seeing stunningly beautiful women

Here’s is the picture again that made all the uproar for your viewing pleasure.

Obama looking at a girl? what's wrong ?

Pictures can be deceiving…so take a look at the video here

I tried searching her face in close-up on the internet but i got only her back.I even tried searching her on orkut as she is from brazil(orkut dominant country) but in vain

This is what I got,hope her pics start appearing on internet soon

The Girl

This is a trivial thing so forgive our president,he has got a lot of other things to do.This is not the first time Obama has been associated with a girl.Remember, Obama Girl Video by Amber Lee Ettinger produced by barelypolitical.com

Please help me in this.I am trying to deploy my Rails app on my bluehost domain.The tutorial mentioned in the bluehost sucks and doesn’t seem to work though I am getting this screen but again with a 404 not found message in place of … (server info??)

WTF ?

I asked the help from Bluehost’s Live chat but there doesn’t seem to be any solid support guy who can guide me on this.Even the ROR guide mentioned in the Knowledge base seems to be an outdated one.

I asked about using Subversioning as mentioned in various blogs about deployment in rails.They said they do not endorse SVN for their host though we can do that…Chat closed..

WTH

There are so many ways to deploy rails application…though I still not able to figure out what is using which strategy.I was following blindly whatever was mentioned in the blogs.

This is my current stop at deployment effort.

http://www.codeweblog.com/capistrano-automatic-deployment-of-rails-projects-windows-to-bluehost-fastdomain/

Which asks for installing SVN client on my host… and for installing SVN this is the blog i am following

http://www.tabruyn.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55:tortoisesvn-subversion-and-bluehost&catid=36:digital&Itemid=58

I found that apr and apr-util versions are outdated ones so I went to the gtlib,gatech.edu and downloaded the latest versions of apr and apr-util that is apr-1.3.5 and apr-util-1.3.7.

then I downloaded neon-0.28.0. I don’t know what is that for ???

then the subversion 1.6.3 then 1.4.6. I am able to MAKE apr and apr-util versions and also the neon versions but the SVN 1.6.3 said that the SVN is not compatible with apr-version so I tried making SVN 1.4.6 which was compatible with apr-1.3.5 but was not compatible with apr-util-1.3.7

The odd men here is the SVN 1.4 and 1.6 versions ..help needed

What I need is a proper version of SVN that can work with the following :

• apr-1.3.5
• apr-util-1.3.7
• neon-0.28.0

I need help …if you have any easier way ..ONE CLICK DEPLOYMENT for RAILS please suggest me

I am trying to install SVN client on my server for the rails deployment.While doing that I am seeing few changes in me.My eyes can read this and infact understand what Google search returns when we put a search for “latest subversion for apr 1.3.5“

And the encouraging background music is by my favourite website last.fm

Geekdom ??? but certainly not fully...HALF GEEK

I have been sick for the past few weeks.Apart from the medical prescriptions the other tonic that helps me to come out of my past and sometimes also from my own spiral of negative thoughts is the musical website , modern wonder in the internet world …last.fm

I recommend last.fm .Believe me, music really cures everything.

Modern Marvels in the Virtual world

It’s not only music.It’s also the huge amount of information surrounding the music that keeps you immersed in trance while listening at the same time keep your working without worrying about anything.With profiling , the site keeps track of which category of music we have loved or favourited and hence similar genre is played to us when we listen to RECOMMENDED radio.I love this Recommendations feature of the site.Ofcourse,only 30 tracks are free and after that the site asks you to pay 3 dollars per month.I bet you , you will fall in love with the site after 30 tracks

I got discharged only yesterday from the hospital and here I am on my laptop blogging and vandalizing my greatest investment of my life so far…my website hosted on Bluehost.com

Anyways,I am trying to deploy a Rails application on my webserver.While doing that I discovered how poor I am when it comes to linux.I am not good in linux though I love it.

So the following image is not for the LINUX EXTREMISTS who could go mad seeing the simplicity of the question I am posting here.It’s for those who love Linux and want the world to be baptised with linux.See the SSH terminal below and can u guys please explain me the meaning of each color.

Blue is for Folder ; Green is a File what is for that 'Twitter' Blue?

BLUE is for Folder (I guess) and the GREEN is for Filenames. What does  those in ‘Twitter’ Blue or ‘Bikini’ blue colored ones mean.Also what is the meaning of @ symbol at the end of it and what does “.” (DOT) mean which are in front of the file names like (.contactemail, .my.cnf)