Lee Kuan Yew on India

Part 1, part 2, part 3 summarising the lectures of LKY on Atanu Dey's blog. Long posts but good reads.

Bar dancers ban: The Life After

For the past few weeks Sonia Faleiro has compiled a series of articles for Tehelka on the life of bar dancers after the ban. This concluding article sums up all the pathos. The articles are also posted on her blog* and you can find links to them in this article which is the last profile in the series.


*As an aside, Tehelka allows journalists working for them to post articles on their blogs but for some convoluted refuses to open up their online edition..I think it is one of the stupidest things that they have ever done. Suhail's very well written Open Letter to Tehelka also raises this point but they haven't mended their shop yet.

CNBC picks up the IIPM story.

CNBC TV18 today carried a story which had an interview with the UGC chief who said that IIPM's ads are "misleading". Surprisingly however, there was no mention of Gaurav Sabnis, Rashmi Bansal, IBM etc etc. In essence what they reported was just a part of the story. The whole truth is out there..but only in the blogosphere. Now is IIPM going to sue CNBC? :-)

UPDATE: Apparently there is truth also on some of the news sites like NDTV, Business Standard. Check here for the links, but I am not sure if anybody other than CNBC TV18 has carried the story on TV.

UPDATE2: http://rga.blogspot.com/2005/10/weekend-adventures.html
tells that CNBC did mention desipundit and had an interview with Rashmi Bansal during "the tech show".

A new era

Today marks the dawn of a new era. I have shrugged away 5 almost 4.5 yrs or lethargy and finally started calculated gambling err..investing some money in the stock market :)!! Hurray! Thanks to Nabajit to guided me through the web site (ICICIDirect). While the stock that I have bought is marginally down just hours after the epoch making transaction :) the hope is to cash in on a (1:1) bonus, the record date (see how I have started slipping in the money jargon :)) for which has been fixed for Nov 14th. I hope this era is that of prosperity!!

Coming soon: the mp3 breast implant | The Register

Coming soon: the mp3 breast implant | The Register

Likewise, God alone knows how you select tracks, but breasts do come equipped with a pleasing alternative to the iPod's selector wheel. We can imagine the scenario: Girlfriend: "Oi, what the bloody hell are you doing?" Boyfriend: "Hold on, I'm just scrolling down to Stairway to Heaven."

Legal entertainment

An interesting, entertaining saga is doing the rounds for the past few days. Involves IIPM and some bloggers, including one Gaurav Sabnis who resigned from IBM during the fracas. Apparently JAM magazine tried to verify the claims in the ads of IIPM and posted their findings and Gaurav linked to it. IIPM then sent Gaurav a "legal notice". There is comprehensive coverage on DesiPundit. Read and enjoy.

Story heard via Suhail's blog (Imaginathon).

Modeling tools..

Microsoft has just announced a perview release for its DSL tools that can be downloaded here. Should be interesting to see how it turns out. I am not gonna try it out right now since it is a competitors tool :( IBM Rational's tool Rational Software Architect(RSA) can be downloaded here or from the linked site. RSA exploits UML tooling and UML profiles for modeling while Microsofts tools have a DSL approach. Other interesting tools are Meta Programming System from JetBrains. For business modeling IBM has a the WebSphere Business Integration Modeler which allows business analysts to model business processes without using UML since business analysts typically do not want to get entangled in knowing UML. These models are similar to UML activity diagrams and the user can associate costs with each business task in the process. The models can then be simulated and subsequently optimized based on the simulation results. When the analyst is done with the business modeling the model can be imported into RSA as a UML model for use by architects and developers during the implementation phase of the processes. There are pretty interesting days ahead in the modeling space.

Thou shalt laugh I say!!

Flathead: Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman. (via Atanu Dey.)

Given a chance..

Given a chance any place can turn into Bihar. These and other conclusions were reached after a discussion about Katrina and its man-made aftermath with a few colleagues some days ago. Stories like Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences support the theory. (via Ongoing)

Story of a hard-disk crash and recovering data from it..

A few days back the ThinkPad I work on started behaving wierdly and the wierdness increased monotonically and then gave way to predictability..i.e. the TP refused to boot after a certain point in time. Tech support analysis confirmed that it was a disk crash...it did make wierd noises...The repair centre then gave me back the disk to salvage data whichever way I could..(no integrated "repair TP and get data salvaged too" solution was offered unfortunately).
So I put the hard disk in an USB enclosure and looked at what I could get...Initially the signs were very discouraging and I was not able to see any partition even though a USB device was being detected..After much thought, Neeraj Sharma (of key mapping fame :)) came to the rescue and pointed out that the disk was password protected (IBM security policy :) ) and this could be a reason it was not readable on USB. So he and another colleague, Ramanathan, put it back in a Thinkpad with easily removable disks and diabled the password after which I plugged it back into USB. After a rather long wait I saw that the boot partition was completely invisible but the other two were. Most of my data was fortunately on those and I managed to copy it just like that and some after running a disk scan. A further disk scan later the boot partition too was repaired and was up for scavenging. Managed to get some data out of it but a rather big (350MB+) mail archive file was not recovered since the copy would terminate after about 120 MB due to unknown reasons. Anyways, thanks the help from Neeraj Sharma and Ramanathan and the USB enclosure a lot of data was recovered and time and money which otherwise would have been spent on some third party vendor were saved.

Mapping keys on a ThinkPad

If you miss the windows key or the application/right click key (I know Prerana did at some point of time) on your ThinkPad then you will be pleased to read this. Click the blue button i.e. Open "Access IBM" using the button on the TP or the desktop shortcut. Then "Manage keyboard & pointing devices" -> "Map keys to functions" and customize as you like. Thanks to Neeraj Sharma for enlightening me!

Getting help in Mumbai..

Got the following mail from Suhail today morning..

Just a quick update that two new blogs that have come up in the past few days, w.r.t. the recent Mumbai flooding tragedy (& in general Maharashtra rains).
http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com - relief/rehab info, NGOs. hospitals, medical care, ambulances etc...etc. (long-term help)
http://cloudburstmumbai.blogspot.com -- running news tracker, collated by a host of bloggers spread all over (mainly frm Bbay), about news/links related to this incident. e.g. - telehpone/water/electricity going on-off-on in certain areas, roads/rlystations/airports opening-closing etc..drainage, sewerage, filth conditions..even individual calls for help, and getting in touch with lost folks. etc..etc.

More details can be had here from my blog. I am a contributor on both of these. Pls spread the links, on yr blogs, in your organizations and to yr folks who might have anything to do with Bbay. feel free to write back to me, with any queries/suggestions.

LDT proposal withdrawn..

The Eclipse LDT project which I talked about some time back has been unfortunately withdrawn. This is bad news.

Autoclipping??

Yahoo! now offers transcoded web pages for mobiles. If they do support any random site then they ought to be doing some sort of relevant content extraction on a page.. I think at some point of time we had discussed similar things in firstRain.

Hawa Hawa

And here I sit in the afternoon hearing for the first time in MP3, the faint notes of Hawa Hawa by the once famous Hasan Jahangir, playing on a colleagues machine and I say to myself I am lucky :) For me the album is a collector's item. Really I mean it. Even during college days when the pockets were always light I had spent 18 Rs IIRC on buying a copy from a certain friend Ajit Khanzode who had once bought it in his childhood craze I guess. However, over the last few years I have lost track of the cassette :( Hopefully I can lay my hands on the mp3 :)

Another good blog

Via one the earlier two recommendations..
The Jesustan Diaries. The Pervert's Progress is a pretty nice, in a perverse way :)

TOI hears dirt on TOI

Checkout this conversation about a TOI faux pas on Chien(ne)s Sans Frontières. Has some comments from TOI employees. This is the first evidence that I have come across which tells that all the -ve feedback has started reaching TOI.

Some recommedations

I recommend reading Imaginathon. This is Suhail's blog who used to be a colleague.( In a way still is but has moved to a far away land (of the free) for now :) )

Another recommendation is C***S***F Chien(ne)s Sans Frontières. Suhail co-blogs here and has also won a writing contest for the Myopia for the Masses piece on the same blog.

Eclipse LDT

I am looking forward to the Eclipse LDT (Language definition toolkit) project delivering something concrete. Eclipse JDT has a number of very good productivity features like refactoring support, completions, quick fixes, hierarchical view in the package explorer etc etc. However all these features are pretty tightly coupled with JDT and hence supporting same levels of functionality for other languages involves a lot of rework in terms of infrastructure. A typical example is a package explorer like view. If one adds support for a new language one needs to parse the source, create an AST and then populate the tree viewer widget in a package explorer like view with the appropriate values. Then one needs to listen on changes to the source files and update the views appropriately. Ideally one would like to create an AST (with a standard interface perhaps) and just hook it into the view and the rest should be taken care of. Things only get messier as your xyz language development toolkit plays catchup with other functionalities like refactoring, editing etc. There is a scope for creation of a platform layer over which addition of new languages is easier. The LDT project has this as one of its goals. Needless to say for IBM Rational tools the problem is similar (or worse even) where we try to build modeling, visualization of source in UML notation etc. In the absence of a base toolkits the process involves creation of a JDT like toolkit on top of which we can provide our value adds. In these layers too addition of new languages becomes difficult in the absence of a common framework. Hopefully LDT will provide something good. Chris Daly from IBM has done some work on this is actively participating in the LDT newsgrp discussions. I think IBM should have some more participation. I am trying to understand the work that he has done and probably will be able to use some of his ideas in my work and probably come up with some on my own too ;)

Joe Sat pictures

Some photos from the concert and the airport are posted below.

Nice red lights here..

You can see at least 3 camera phone at work in this picture

Him again

Joe Sat himself

The BileBlog

I have to recommend The BileBlog to all who enjoy a well written flame or two. To give you some preview of the kind of foul languaged flamage on the blog here is an excerpt:

In terms of self love, we have 23 wank related incidents and 22 faps (including things like fapfap noises, fapfests, and boring old fapping),

And there is more you can discover on your own. Enjoy!!

Camera phones are everywhere.

About a month back my mom and sis Saee flew down to B'lore. The very next day B'lore was going to host a Joe Satriani show and Saee wanted to attend it pretty badly. Saee was on a different flight and reached a bit earlier and was waiting on the airport with Megha and much to her delight realised suddenly that certain white people coming out of the arrivals gate were in fact the Joe Satriani troupe along with the man himself. What followed involved plenty of delirium I am told :) They got some books autographed but wanted to take pictures too..Megha has a camera phone and that one came in very very handy...I was not expecting very good picture quality but was impressed when we actually transferred the images to a comp. Have posted some of them. And not only here but when we went to the concert I was surprised at the number of hands that went up trying to capture images of the concert..

Posting from a train..

People get happy posting from aircrafts which are wi-fi enabled..I get happy posting from a train using a reliance phone and a data cable :)

Revenge of the non-nerd.

This piece (apparently from the Late Night show) on star wars nerdery is too hilarious. (via Nikhil)

Some updates..

Apparently my feed url is now "http://minus43.blogspot.com/atom.xml" instead of the earlier "http://minus43.blogspot.com/rss/minus43.xml". Consequently a lot of people have not been able to see any updates for a long time. I came to know about this from Harshal a few days back and it is possible that a lot of other people are also facing this. So if you happen to see this you know what to do. Also since IBM has announced a blogging policy I thought it would be wise to add a disclaimer at the bottom. And yes Harshal, the news about IBM internally advocating Firefox as the browser of choice is true, I just got to see some internal web pages announcing "tech support" for Firefox.

Bloglines-del.icio.us integration

Finally I have installed greasemonkey and a script that allows posting links to my del.icio.us bookmarks. Consequently I won't be posting links to my bloglines link blog. More information about the script integration is available here.

The 4th Amigo

Once in a while we all see interesting resumes. (Harshal had pointed me to this about a year back I think..). Today I got another one..However, the difference would be in the vibes that it sent out..The one linked to probably sends out some positive ones while the one I got sent out slightly negative ones :) Nothing against the person as a software engineer..we will be interviewing him tomorrow and probably might hire him if he is good..just that a couple of lines in the resume were kind of gems :). First one..the very first line in the resume:

My Goal: To Become The 4th Amigo
(after Ivar Jacobson, Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh, the 3 amigos at Rational Corp.)

..talk about targetted resumes :). Second one in "Primary skills and fields of expertise":

Bug fixing at bewildering pace to meet various milestones on the way to the coveted software release date.

But we will interview him..there seems to be some good content in the resume other than the bewildering one :)..so lets see how it goes :)

Jef Raskin: Holes In The Histories

A very very well written piece. Slightly long but worth the time. Holes In The Histories. Jef Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple. Picked up from Scripting News

Oye bubbly oye oye bubbly..

Got the below joke from a colleague..not the most humorous one i have heard by any standards but posting it just because the stupid bubbly ad rung in my ears after reading this and the lyrics sort of fit into the context :)
------------------------

A new lady teacher came to teach 8th standard students. As it was the
first day, she gave her intro, and asked all the students to introduce
themselves with name and hobby.


She said, "Let's start with the boys first."

Boys start giving their intro...


First boy: "My name is John, and my hobby is to see bubble in the
bathtub."

Teacher was confused to listen but said, "Interesting. Well, Ok. In fact,
we must be honest in telling the hobby. And after all there is essentially
a child in each of us. So it's ok John. Yes next."


Second boy: "Myself Peter and my hobby is to see bubble in the bathtub."

Teacher now got surprised and said, "Good. I like the spirit of supporting
a friend. Ok next."

Third boy: "I'm Smith and my hobby is to see bubble in the bathtub."

Teacher: "Guys are you joking or what? Please be sincere. Ok next."


This continues...
and the last boy stands up "I'm Harry and my hobby is to see bubble
in the bathtub."



Exhausted, the teacher said, "I don't think I will be able to teach
un-grown boys for long.
Anyway, now the girls please."



First girl: "I'm Julie and my hobby is to see birds."

Teacher: "Good. At last I got something different. Ok next."

Second girl: "I'm Ruby and I like to collect perfumes."

Teacher "Now it's like educated grown up girls. Ok next. You sweet girl;
Yes you..."


Most beautiful girl of the class:
"Mam, my name is Bubble, and my hobby is to take bath three times a
day."

Why you cannot enforce singleton-ness for classes which implement eclipse extensions and learning it the hard way:)

Yes, the title should have given you a good idea about what this is about...

So it happened that in my enthusiasm I marked as "private" the contructor of a class implementing some extension..after all a singleton class should only have a public getInstance() method which provides the only instance and the clients should have no other way to instantiate the class.

However, if you do this for a class implementing an extension , there is a slight problem..the plugin framework will try to instantiate this class using reflection and fail. If you are the unfortunate extension writer :) you will dig deep and yet have to dig deeper to find that an IllegalAcessException is thrown during the "Init" of the instance from somewhere near the classloader and only then shall epiphany dawn that the constructor you made private could be the reason.

So singleton or not..keep the contructors public :)

YaGoohoo!gle

Got this from a colleague..YaGoohoo!gle. Simple and cute.

Code generation and partial classes

The world isn't a level playing field.

If you are a vendor providing tools with code generation in Java(and probably some other languages too) then the problem of regenerating code without overwriting the users changes is something you have to take into account. A lot of tools solve the problem by putting markers in comments around the parts of the code that they are interested in and allow changes only to parts outside the markers. If the user wants he can remove the markers and the tool will skip regeneration of those parts. Overall every cursed tool developer ends up writing his own thing and the markers make the code less readable. One way to work around is probably by inheriting the generated class and putting all user added code in the subclass. However this can have performance implications and can also lead to encapsulation breakage.

However, if you are Microsoft where you control both the programming languages and the tools you end up solving the problem by introducing partial types/classes in the language specification, thus taking away the need for the user to edit the generated file at all. With partial classes the tool is happy emitting code in one file and the user is happy coding away in another.

So ye SUN and JCP gods please shower us with your partial blessings :)

This post also has similar comments.

Flux

I got the below mail from Sudeep who used to be a college senior and is now pursuing a PhD in Algorithms at IITB.

check out my partner sreejitha's blog at
http://kinginistar.blogspot.com

This message was sent by Sudeep KS to friends.

The blog link sent by him is interesting and the thoughts expressed in it are probably in the realm of the abnormal as is also procliamed in one of the posts "Responsibility and Society". Can't link to it directly since permalinks seem to be absent so you will have to search it up in here.

Jackwa and Jillwa

A friend sent this today :D

Jackwa aur Jillwa
Gaye upar Hillwa
Paani bhari ke waaste...

Jackwa gir gawa
Uka khopdiya phoot gawa
Aur Jillwa awat ludkan pooore raaste..

"Uka khopadiya phoot gawa" is my favourite line :)

About incorporating bad pointing device habits.

Since the time that I have started using Thinkpads my GUI usage has increased by a phenomenal amount. The reason is the trackpoint. The Thinkpad also has a scrolling functionality using the trackpoint and the middle button just below the keyboard and above the touchpad. I haven't used new laptops from other companies so don't know if they have this too. The point is that it is a very conveneint device which I have started using very naturally even though I like to using the keyboard for most of my interactions.

Now the bad thing about this is that when I switch to my desktop (which is pretty infrequent nowadays) I start hunting for the trackpoint instinctively and don't find it and then have to recall all my old habits. It is one thing that has kept me from migrating my work back to the desktop and even the big 21" screen hasn't been a strong enough lure!

The mysterious document.

Read the following interaction:

Comment from person X: "According to the document that I forwarded sometime back...blah blah blah"

(NOTE that it is "the document" about which I have no context whatsoever)

My response : "I am not sure I have received any document from you..blah blah blah"

Response from person X: "Can you please indicate what document I need to provide? I am sure I knew at one time, but now I do not know ;-)"

What does the above interaction tell you??
Answer: Person X is a manager :)

Prerana take this as a Management-101 and start some professional development on this front :)

Violence in Bangalore-2

I just talked with some colleagues and they tell me that a lot of people were stuck in the office last night till about 1:00 AM. Almost all the cars parked outside the office incurred damage. People also saw members of the mob trying to steal stuff from inside the cars after smashing the windshields which isn't so much of a surprise though..

Violence in Bangalore..

In a city where people are people take up to violence for reasons as petty as their favourite cinemas not playing, a case involving deaths of police personnel at the hands of naxalites is more than a good reason for throwing away the cloaks of civilization. The Hindu has this report today. The torched bus in the picture is at a place where I sometimes wait for waving an auto for getting home. It is reported that about 20 buses were set aflame last night..and some shops near the KSRP quarters were also targetted. Now that is not all. What no report tells is that the IBM building where I sit is just opposite to the KSRP campus and about fifteen minutes back when I stepped into the office I could see that our building has been badly damaged. I do not have a camera right now so can't post any pictures. The front face of the building is almost entirely glass and a lot of it has been damaged.

It is a pity really why people go about destroying private and public property. Amongst the reasons for the protests was the argument that the police station did not have adequate security for handling an attack by some 200 naxalites. Yes similarly the innocent shopkeepers and car owners, who were pelted with stones by the protesters, too did not have adequate security to handle about the same or more number of protesters. I do not understand why every newspaper reports these stories as "acts of protests by angry mobs"..somehow nobody reports or investigates deeper..people can't just walk out of their homes and set fire to buses..it has to be an organized activity but sadly no one has reported anything about it.

Pub review: Legends of Rock

After not so much of a frantic search I have found a good hangout place in Bangalore. It is my equivalent of Apache in Pune. Megha threw up the idea of going there yesterday and I liked the place. It also features on the Wikipedia entry for Bangalore. Another review can be found on MouthShut. The place plays very good rock and mostly it is videos which one can watch on the big plasma screens mounted on the walls. They also have cigars on the menu it you want to try. And as it goes with rock..after a few beer glasses down the musical pleasure shoots northwards :)

Userfriendly..

Today's one is great :)) Choose to read from two days back for more context if you have the time..

And by the way..

if you haven't really heard it by now.. OpenSolaris.org is up with DTrace sources for download for starters. Buildable solaris source is expected Q2 2005.

Deathmatch.

I just quit from a Half Life 2 deathmatch :) Needless to say I got badly bruised both in the game and ego-wise :D Has been a long time since I have played deathmatches and it was especially harder because I was trying to do it from a laptop using the trackpoint for navigation. The net connection here in the hotel is pretty neat and the latency was too low to blame for my ass being kicked :) Anyways it just brought back fond Quake deathmatch memories :)

PS:Check out the HL2 trailer from the HL2 site.

Canada diary 3

Today morning I was angry at someone. That someone is the person who first proposed the idea of wiping asses with a toilet paper. There is a certain feeling of incompleteness if you can't perform the watery ritual :D Maybe the deep pore cleansing effect of plain H2O is merely psychological but I need it none the less and so you have to find workarounds..no I am not going to discuss my workaround..do what you feel is the best :)

The weekend is almost over now. Did nothing special except going out for lunch and some shopping. Went to a mall and then to Walmart yesterday and bought household goodies like "Nice'n Clean moist wipes" which are hard to find in Bangalore ...well life surely changes once you marry :) Had buffet in a small Sri Lankan restaurant in the downtown today...some usual South Indian stuff ..some great rasam, rice chicken, and tapioca pudding (for Marathi people "sabudanyachi kheer" :) )

Came back from lunch and then installed Picasa and Hello and started organizing some of the photos. Suddenly I had this feeling of photographic insufficiency which made me take the rather rash decision of going out across the road to capture some photos. I thought, "well today is warmer (-17 degrees C :D ) and would probably be the last time here when I am free at 4:30 in the afternoon", and so I put on my warm clothing and stepped out and crossed the road over to some open grounds. Then I realised I did not have too much time at hand if I had to make it back alive and so I went click-click-click as fast as I could. After about 10 photos my hands started freezing and the finger tips ached and felt as if they would burst. I clicked a few more times and then prudently put the camera and my hands in my pockets and headed back. The last three posted pictures are some of the fruits of my little trip to what felt like the north pole :)

Fallen tree with snow.

This is what the Holiday Inn looks like from across the road.

Footprints in the snows of time.

View from hotel room.

A vehicle near the hotel.

This is mostly how I pad up for the weather here :)

Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to Sam Palmisano

Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to Sam Palmisano...Interesting..from my knowledge though I don't think the accusation is all that true for quite a few Rational products..The new Rational products have a Linux x86 release available and since Solaris 10 has Janus, running the new eclipse based products on Solaris should not be an issue I think..Rational Rose RT and Rose work on Solaris with MainWin and PurifyPlus is already supported for Solaris. Clearcase servers too run on Unix machines and I assume most corporate deployments are on Solaris. But ya..there are a lot more products in the Rational portfolio and I really do not know about their Solaris support right away.

Canada Diary-2

So to give some updates on my journey and first few days here..
The journey was fine..so was the jetlag but only till one day after i arrived when I did stayed up late at night and sort of overcorrected on the jetlag. Now I am ok again I guess.

I had to buy 6600 Rs of warm clothing for the weather here (my company did re-imburse me most of the amount so the money is not the issue here..) but the longest that I have come in contact with the weather directly is the 30 second or less walks to and from the car to anywhere I have to go..office, hotel etc..and the time in the car till it heats up..everything else is obviously well heated or else I would never have come here :) But those very small periods of time numb the senses :) One of my colleagues had a nice saying to describe the cold..it goes something like the following..."Bahar khade raho 5 minute, to sikud kar mungphalli ban jaayega :)" What shrinks is your imagination :)

The hotel nice..and since we are staying for 2 weeks we have a complimentary upgrade to a executive suite. This is where I am staying..The best thing is the broadband connection..I have encountered download speeds of about 140KBytes/sec..nice indeed. Yahoo voice chat too is working very well for me.

The encounter with the TV here was interesting too. The hotel has a tie up with Galavu and they offer XTV, Naked News and some Howto adult channel amongst other things. You can order directly using a menu on the TV (which has a setback box) and enjoy the visuals till the next days checkout time :) Hmm, such nice integration with the hotels systems..Name of the movie is not shown on your bill :) Haven't ordered this though since it all comes at a cost of about 14-15$..which is not so appealing especially when there are some free channels which show hot stuff sometimes :D

Canada diary-1

So I reached here last friday evening. The most significant happening by far is that it is fundamentally cold here. The wind chill is making today's temperature feel like -42 fucking degrees.

Some left on the plate.

I have been reading some leftist views recently. Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky is recommended. On a related note The Hindu has this article today comparing the amount of aid and war spending by the US and the UK.

Training Day

Some coincidences in life are worth mentioning for their sheer timing. It so happened that some days back I attended a training on "Creative Problem Solving". The training room had computers for each trainee. So I installed Firefox on it and brought up my usual browser desktop which consists of a gmail tab and a bloglines tab for most of the time and was all set for the training to begin. The initial tidal wave of my expectations soon assumed calmer proportions and post lunch I was just about managing to stay on my seat :) I was wondering about the content of the training and the techniques being taught. Most of them revolved around dividing a bigger problem into smaller sub problems and working from both the problem and the solution end and all the usual crap that all self respecting engineers know. And then it happened. Around 3-3:30 the dilbert RSS feed was updated with this VVS Laxman timed gem . Dilbert's last sentence sums up exactly what I was feeling :)