Thought Garage

Praja Rajyam political campaign has copied almost entirely the NTR’s Political beginnings of 1983.  Starting with the way party was announced, venues and literally step by step of the election campaign. They also copied most of the manifesto from Lok Satta’s 50 irrevocable guarantees and applied the ‘Caste’ magic to it in the name of social justice. Now, most recently, PrajaRajyam.org, the official website of Praja Rajyam party tried it best to copy Barack Obama’s website. Starting with the tag line of ‘Change’, it appears they copied the source of the BarackObama.com website and just applied new colors to it. Click on images to see full images or just click on the websites to see for yourself : PrajaRajyam.org vs BarackObama.com   The most striking and funniest part is the Online donations page. Where, they even copied the list of Confirmations by a donor. Are there 'Federal' Lobbyists in the state of Andhra Pradesh? This is the original text you will find on Barac

“Think Global and Act Local” is a well known business line, that underline the importance of acting local in order to stretch a business to global levels. Going global has been a dream for many businesses. So it fits in well. You know lot about State, National and World Politics. But do you know what are the key issues in your City? Most probably, answer to that question would be, ‘not quite’. When it comes to democracy, we must always think Local and act local. Too often, Politicians blow issues out of proportions and make simple differences large election issues, and many a times, they become deciding factors in elections.  So contrary to principles of Democracy and Swaraj, quite often Politicians set the agenda for you. They define what are your issues. They convince you that you must act on them. Act on them alone. Because, they don’t know what your real issues are. If you care for Swaraj, you Must act local. No media (News Papers or TV) or most blogs want to focus on local

Chiranjeevi brought in a new keyword to political fore, ‘Samajika Vargam’ (Social Group) to exploit Caste based politics in Andhra Pradesh, India in the name of social justice. (Read more why this Social justice is really shameless Caste exploitation ) The keyword caught on most political parties and media alike.  Now, they no more feel ashamed or embarrassed to exploit ‘Caste’ for votes. They call it ‘Social Justice’. Now even advertisers caught on to the keyword and of course Caste is a very important matter for most when it comes to marriage, throughout India. See the ad by Telugu Matrimony, a micro site of BharatMatrimony.com that is exploiting the latest buzz in the market. Using the kewword, Samajika Vargam, social group, aka Caste. Well, that is the essence of Marketing, use the buzz to promote. Isn’t it?

Its quite obvious that Media in Andhra is almost totally biased towards one party and promote that party. Eenadu is quite well known to support TDP while Saskhi is literally owned by Congress.  And TV stations are doing the same with Maa TV literally campaigning 24x7 for Chiranjeevi. The problem is that none of them admit it openly. They try to project them selves as ‘fair media’. And the clash between each other is so obvious then. Most contentious are the fights between Eenadu and Sakshi. They even went a head put a seperate microsites on their websites to extend the war. Sakshi questions Eenadu reports with ‘Edi Nijam?’ (what is the truth?) while Eenadu setup a ‘Pencounter’ to reject fight back. http://www.sakshi.com/main/edinijjam.aspx http://pencounter.eenadu.net/ Finally, anybody know who is right and fair in reporting? I guess, None.

The application demonstrated in this talk is hardly handling about 500 users, but demonstrate some interesting points about scalability that could be almost taken for granted in Cloud hosting services like Amazon. Also a good introduction to Cloud if you are not already on cloud 9. Listen to the MP3 of the presentation here . Scaling Rails Applications In The Cloud View more presentations from subelsky . Watch slide 23, the non-RDBMS bonus carefully. If you have read about my previous post on this topic, moving away from RDBMS/Tables , the point comes home pretty convincingly in this presentation.

When it comes to rendering, the world’s fastest browser, my favorite Google Chrome still has some rough edges. I mean, really some rough edges. It has trouble rendering rounded corners on WordPress login page. See how a WordPress login page is rendered on different browsers. I am on Microsoft Vista. Google Chrome : Not happy with round edges and shadow Issues: Round corners are not transparent enough and shows thick black edges. And somehow shows a much wider shadow (compared to Apple Safari) Apple Safari : The Best Finest and quite crisp when it comes to rendering content. See how the it stands out from the page and just enough shadow. Firefox : Just Fine Renders round edges fine but completely misses out on the shadows. So the form looks more like embedded in to the page rather than standing out floated (like in Apple Safari) Internet Explorer 7 : Completely ignores round edges, but better than Google Chrome IE completely ignored round edges and has the same

This is the most trickiest and yet the most popular question asked on this blog and in direct emails to me, Will the H1B rush we have witnessed in 2007 and 2008 repeat this year in 2009 as well? The official H1B year 2010 starts from October 1st of 2009. USCIS will accept petitions starting from 1st of April, 2009. Please visit USCIS website for accurate and timely information. Now the answer to that question, without any doubt, a Big NO. That's right. As far as I understand, its a BIG NO. Its my gut feeling and I could be totally wrong. It is very unlikely that USCIS will run in to lottery this year. I will be surprised if even the cap is reached this year. Enough Engineers in US and still searching. Well there are many reasons for it. First of all, there are more than enough IT consultants and Engineers already in US still searching for a job as I write this post. So, I don’t think there is any reason for companies to look to hire somebody on H1B from a different country

Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo,” and we’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose. This feature can't pull back an email that's already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don't worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we'll still send your message. Source: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-in-labs-undo-send.html

When Chiranjeevi, the leader of 6 month old Praja Rajyam party started with hopes on unconditional support from his Caste group, Kapus, and started openly addressing caste based groups during campaigns, I feared that ‘Caste’ will become a much bigger issue than it already is in this 2009 elections. And unfortunately, I was right. Caste based polarization has reached the peak in this elections already. And Praja Rajyam gave a new name to this ‘Caste’ based grouping and exploitation; It calls the concept, Samajica Nyayam, or Social justice. Now every party started talking about social justice. In essence, Caste will be called Social Group or Samajika Vargam. And parties are attempting to allocate seats based on % of people belonging to a specific caste. So in effect, they are envisioning the demographics of population based on Caste will be the demographics of the Assembly too. In essence, primary qualification to contest in elections through any of these political parties is YOUR

In the past I used Internet Explorer for most of my browsing. Then came along Firefox, the open source browser with 100s of cool extensions. I immediately switched to Firefox and never looked back. Well, for some time. A few months back, I have replaced Firefox with the world's fastest browser, Google Chrome. Google chrome even without extensions made browsing lot cooler and quicker. Recently, I downloaded Apple Safari and I immediately fell in love with the way it renders content. Crisp and so easy on your eyes to read. So, these days, I am spending more time on Safari to read content while still using Chrome for general browsing. One more feather in the cap for Apple Safari. It renders content in Telugu quite beautifully and it is much more easily readable than other browsers. Google Chrome comes last in rendering Telugu content. Here are some snapshots of Yes To Politics , taken in different browsers. You can see the much crisper image in Apple safari. Internet Explorer

INDIA is the Largest living democracy in the world.  And the growing community at Yes To Politics believe, We Can make it Work . By no means, Democracy in India is perfect. Indeed, quite far from it. For many of us, the most active participation in Democracy begins and ends with a vote once in 5 years. And contemporary Indian Politics seldom stand for people or principles.  I believe We Can make it Work rather than continue watching from side lines and crib about how politics went from bad to worse. Enough has been said about politics already, so let us stop whining and say Yes to more meaningful politics that will put democracy at work. That starts with me and you and our active engagement with the political system. The N.E.W. Way We must engage in politics in a N.E.W. way. By that I mean organizing ourselves in to smaller and local communities and work from bottom up. I have built a web application Yes To Politics to organize communities around cities, districts, assembly and