As many of you know, I started in Civil Engineering, before moving into the IT arena. All I know about computers, www, languages etc. is self taught and sessions attended virtually. Hence I always felt like I really missed out on getting a true CS degree. The more I talked to other kids (who were in College or recent grads) I felt like I was better off than them for being trained by the industry and the job. But still something was nagging me..I couldnt put in words what it was, until reading a recent essay by Joel.
An excerpt from his essay

But what about the CS mission of CS departments? They’re not vocational schools! It shouldn’t be their job to train people to work in industry. That’s for community colleges and government retraining programs for displaced workers, they will tell you. They’re supposed to be giving students the fundamental tools to live their lives, not preparing them for their first weeks on the job. Right?

To which I say amen…Learning to do a job is not the right way to go about this, learning to think and create is the goal.
Joel surmises accurately why the standard CS curriculum these days dont produce the caliber programmers and thinkers we need..or better yet, the ones I want to emulate like him, him or him.
This is semi-analogous to our recent MLB players on steroids to play better ball..by not working hard and paying the price, some of the best things are missed. By not thinking about core CS concepts like a good language design/functional programming/pointers etc. the brain is not stretched enough to make the jump to the next level of thinking, which is very crucial in making the next big discovery or invention.

As I pen this from Mineta San Jose Airport, I am waiting for my flight to take me home. I anticipated traffic (vehicle and humans) and decided to give myself 3+hrs instead of the 15mts I give myself.
Here is an interesting and funny read on flying in the middle seat…
Back to my waiting story, I am enjoying the people and conversations I overhear: Families trying to get to their extended families or students trying to get back home, ticketing assistants trying to maintain their composure handling bed-raggled customers, kids running around trying to find entertainment, dudes scanning for chicks and chicks scanning for dudes…
I am also enjoying the sceneries of the valley: clouds lifting off the mountains in front of me, planes taking off or landing, turkey vultures flying, and the greenery turning green as the sun breaks through the clouds to paint a beautiful landscape…

From my family to yours Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays

Warning: This post is of personal nature
Thatha - Grandfather in Tamil (my mother tongue)
My maternal grandfather has been sick for a while. He is pushing upper 80s and was in reasonable shape, but deteriorated due to change in weather and climate in Southern India. He was dog sick in the past few months and has finally recovered after his sons (my uncles) and my parents, along with his devoted wife nursed him. He has been a long time snuff user (over 70 years) and his lungs have been damaged. This leads to all sort of issues with breathing/respiration during colder months. This time around it caught him good. I am glad that he is recovering.
The past few months have made me realize the value of family - extended family. He and my grandmom were almost like my parents and friends when I was in IIT, Madras for 4 years. I chatted with them about everything and argued about who will win the India-Pak Cricket match or my investment philosophies in stock market. He pulled himself by the bootstraps and raised 5 kids in a very tough environment.
I am very proud of what he has done with his life and what he went through to give my Mom and his sons a good education. I wouldnt be where I am today without him, and I am thankful for that. It has also put an impetus to make the family trip to India so that he can spend sometime with his great-grand kids and for making memories….

Among seeing your site traffic and RSS subscriptions go up, you get splogged (SPAM+BLOG or link spam) a lot..
Ted mentioned this at dinner few weeks ago, and I have been link spammed for the past 4 weeks, like this blog thing was running out of style….I thought I wrote arcane, uninteresting stuff that didnt pertain to very many people

Often times we are faced with situations that question our ideals, especially in the corporate world. What seems right deep down inside doesnt gel with what your boss might ask you to do or propose to do for your customers..I have been there many times and I am sure many of you have been as well..I had one such conversation with a good friend..
We operate in a customer-focused economy (driven by consumers) and we need to be cognizant of who we serve. If we, as company stewards and corporate citizens see some things being done by our bosses or the corporation that contradicts with our ideals and values, we have couple of choices -

• stay silent
• quit
• rant and whine
• propose a creative alternative (that is in line with your ideals)

I have tried to do the latter as many times as I can. First and foremost, I care about the organizations I work for and see that changes for short-term gain might yield long-term pain for the enterprise as a whole. I do that after much deliberation and ruminations.
In effect, that is the suggestion I gave my friend.
If you feel strongly that the company is making a wrong decision,

1. convince yourself that it is wrong by arguing for it,
2. then look for why you feel it is wrong and come up with a creative solution to paint to your corporation.
3. present it in a cogent way for all the bosses or management to follow. Make sure you highlight any financial downside to their decisions.

May be I worked in smaller roles and smaller orgs to see my theory work..but I have a suspicion that if we are passionate in what we do and have paid the price, we can bring up how we feel and what to do about how we feel on the decisions made by our company.
I am not saying that your company will change its course immediately, but at the very least your concious will be clear and you wont get fired over it (and if you do, it wasnt the right company to begin with).

I met Geoffrey of Ruby on Rails Podcast fame for dinner yesterday.
He is doing a rails project for a startup in Petaluma, CA and we went to dinner in Catai, CA to a great Himalayan joint - Shangrilla Grill. It was great to chat about ruby and rails and I got to informally quiz Geoffrey.
Thank you Geoffrey for good company and conversations. Good luck with all your ventures.

Stef is back blogging. It was very hard for her to get online with the 3 boys and managing the schedules.
She has written about Jay, Ro and Sam in the 3 posts.
Thank you Stef!

I am not sure if many of you know Doc (Doc Searls). He does many things, but to me he was the catalyst to get me into Open Source. I had read about him and read one of his talks, he gave at Linux World conf during late 90s and decided to get religion. He is an amazing resource and knows all the right people in both the Open and Closed worlds.

I had never met him in person, until yesterday. I ran into him at the Hilton, I am staying in San Francisco. He was speaking at the Syndicate conference. He was very cordial to a practical stranger (me) and gracious enough to answer some questions on Mono, Microsoft and Macs.
Thank you Doc, for the manifesto and for introducing me to Linux.

I was ecstatic when IBM introduced Cloudscape and then included it in Portal as part of default db to speed up install. Since then, a lot has changed for the good. IBM donated Cloudscape to Apache Software Foundation and named it Derby. There has been a lot of traction within the industry and open source community.
[Via Ted] Mr. XML, Tim Bray delivered a keynote at ApacheCon this week and demoed an app, that….

how you could use Derby as a local store for Firefox by talking to a copy of Derby via Firefox’s ability to talk to Java. His application was a simple tax app and he showed how you could fill in a form, quit (or crash) the browser and have that data returned to you when you restarted the web app.

Life is so exciting when synergy happens between friends, competitors and nuetral parties alike

I am not a big American Airlines guy. I have been forced to use them since travelling direct to San Francisco from Austin. I was wondering why I didnt particularly like AA, and found the answer this week when I flew direct to SJC from Austin. The Flight Attendents (or whatever the politically correct term is) were just rude - I dont mean rude like “noticeable rude”, but rude as in attitude rude. They had an attitude that was similar to that of a primo-donna ending up in coach. God forbid, they had to serve us lowly mortals..atleast thats the impression I got.
The more they reduce these basic customer courtesies, the more people will look for alternatives. I for one, already am switching most of my frequent travels to Southwest and jet Blue.
I am finding that my tolerance for these kinds of BS is getting low..not sure if I am getting old or restless (that is supposed to translate to young )