Thought Garage

Wow!!! Mangalyaan, the spacecraft on a voyage to Mars has been successfully blasted off.  Superb.  Hoping to see spectacular and ground breaking results from the ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission .  Pictures from ISRO

How long will it take to multiply these two numbers ? 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 It just took 28 seconds for Shakuntala Devi and earned her a record in the Guinness Book Of Records.  A child prodigy with unbelievable power to calculate will remain an inspiration to so many.  She died earlier this year. Google’s doodle today honors Shakuntala Devi , known to the world as the ‘Human Computer’, on her 84th birthday. RIP.

Mangalyaan, the aptly named spacecraft will take off on Tuesday on a 11 month voyage to Mars, from Sriharikota. No matter what happens tomorrow, it will remain a big day for India. Image Source : BBC Hope and wish for a very successful launch and fruitful voyage.

Latest news reports confirm that Infosys has reached a settlement to pay $34 million in fines for visa fraud, for bringing in developers on B1 visas to work and other irregularities in keeping accurate I-9s.

If you already have Vonage or planning on signing up, you may be better off dumping it as there are now much better alternatives. Read on. Vonage was touted as a pioneer for commercial VOIP phone service back in 2005 when I first signed up for the service.  The excitement of a killer and industry disrupting VOIP service evaporated very soon. The  quality never measured up to the ‘carrier’ quality. I disconnected in a couple of months due to voice quality issues. And what happened when I tried to disconnect was yet another totally frustrating customer service story, “ Vonage – expecting good customer service is stupid ”. When Vonage announced unlimited international calling to India (and few other select countries), I hesitated due to my earlier experience. A few months later, we needed a landline phone and I did little research to shop for a better one. At that time, Vonage proved to be a better option for a landline phone that would also double to be able to call anybody in...

By all measures, the rise of China as one of the leading global economic power houses of the world is a great success story.  And by all estimates, China will become the largest economy sooner than the rest of the world is comfortable accepting it. So, isn’t China, then officially the largest living success stories of communism? Watch this great TED talk by Eric Li, a venture capitalist, I bet,  your understanding of China will never be the same. And so does your understanding of efficacy of democracy. Eric X. Li : A tale of two political systems I can’t resist the temptation of comparing the largest living democracy, India,  with tens of parties at the helm and the largest living communist country, China, and for all practical purposes a dual party system in the US and its current political gridlock, only to realize that the point Eric Li made is quite reverberating. Unfortunately, while China can easily replicate the best of the rest of the world in terms of  ...

I am not a big fan of Upma. Never really liked it so much, though I eat when I have to. But somehow my 3 year old loves it. If you ask what she prefer for a breakfast on the bed, she always says Upma. And it goes without saying, she gets it. So today is one of those days. It’s the second time I prepared it in the last few days, and oh boy! I nailed it today. It was awesome. Even I really liked it myself and my daughter loved it so much she comeback for seconds. Yahoooooo !! While preparing I was wondering, what most people that cook in the family go through , to prepare something that you don’t necessarily like, but you do it anyways because others love it.  Hats off to you all.    Am I getting my first lesson in what matters when you care? Hmm, that may sound little heavy on the breakfast table, but I guess I made my point.  Have a nice day.

Beautiful sight of Godavari rail road brdige. via 92229232@N02@Flickr

When you are writing software, you always get a second chance. In fact, lots of chances to get it correct. You have compiler warnings, failed test cases and some times crashes alert you that something is not right and will give you a chance to correct. And you get literally unlimited chances to apply those corrections.  Well, cooking looks to be totally unforgiving in this respect and on any given day, you may get just one chance to get it right. If you fail, you fail. Try again right away if you have patience of starting it all over. Or start over some time later or next day. But not much of a second chance to correct a mistake.  More ruthless, when it comes to salt. If you put just a little more, even a tiny little more, it never hesitate to show what it got. Totally ruthless. End result will be a failed dish that no one will be able (and/or happy) to eat. And most dishes, you may not be able to add something little more to offset it. Little trick I learned the ha...

What happened to Microsoft’s usability team? The color choices, particularly the single glaring white background everywhere make it appear as one giant screen instead of meaningful sections on the screen. Why dumb down so much in terms of user experience? No more round edges, gradients, shadows, contrasting backgrounds or easy on eyes highlighting.  I am not a designer, but I see an UI element communicate by its color, shape, position, contrast, focus and of course text. The new UI in 2013 definitely eliminated some of those attributes for some elements. Word 2010 vs. Word 2013 So far, the only big difference I see is the integration of SkyDrive so that documents can be readily saved in to the cloud and retrieved any where.  At another level, going towards subscriptions could be a game changer for Microsoft. But when it comes to the UI, I find it boring and am little disappointed.