The flawed Indian way of Town planning

Recently I have been looking for plots in and around Chennai and was utterly shocked, about the way the streets and routes are in a state capital.  The longer version of the story is, I found a seller listing a plot in Pallikaranai and decided to give it a visit. After travelling in the Velachery main road for a while, I couldn’t find a road where I can enter into Pallikaranai. After enquiring, I found a path about 20 feet wide (seems to be the widest road in  the whole region) with half embedded stones (someone might have thought it’ll give good grip), must be the worst path I’ve ever travelled.  The streets in Pallikaranai were even worse, they’re lesser than 10 feet wide, only a car can pass through it, at a time. All this in the area, where a ground of  land costs around 40 lakhs, because of it’s proximity to IT high way.

After investigating  about why a region, that’s almost at the center of the state capital, is in such a state, I found that the administrative body was a panchayat.  The root cause seems to be the planning board. They have no clue about the expansion, the city is undergoing for years. They have a poor scheme, in which they designate a poorly populated region as a panchayat, where not many  rules are enforced for construction and 10 feet roads are the norm and once the population increases they promote it to a higher status like municipality and start enforcing 20 feet roads.  The question that remains unanswered is,  how do we expand the 10 feet roads to 20 feet, after the population increases.  The organisation has been negligent of this, for years and will remain so. India is a victim of this poor scheme.

The region is first planned for the poor who can’t afford cars and vehicles. Even then how do bullock carts pass through those narrow streets?.  Even a 10th standard kid would have anticipated that lorries and trucks will have to pass through those streets for construction purposes, but the so called engineers in the planning board, have missed this point. We had good town planning even when we were ruled by the kings. What a shame?,  it’s in a country where town planning existed even during Indus valley civilization. These bigger flaws lead me to the bigger question, do only fools inhabit India now?.  The poor town planning makes the rich-poor divide in the society, much more visible. I don’t agree that we deserve such a poor planning.

To the people who still wish to settle in Chennai, the plots in a CMDA approved layout seems to be the best choice, inspite of their ridiculously high costs.  Needless to say, the builders and real estate companies, who sell CMDA approved plots, are laughing their way to the bank.

Indian judiciary

GRE Again – 1

GRE Again

Disclaimer:The above cartoon is meant for fun only and it doesn’t intend to hurt anyone

Chrome vs Firefox – Pursuit for perfection

The advent of Chrome marked a important phenomenon in software industry. Before Chrome, software companies firmly believed the fact that rewriting  from scratch is nonsensical and waste of time and resources.   But it was such a painstaking work for the programmers to debug millions of lines of code with almost no documentation. It sometimes spoils the minds of the programmers and gets reflected in their personal life. Take a look at http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.html if you had the patience. Also have a look at the article http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html which asserts my point.  Chrome proved all of them wrong.   Old field tested code is  no more to be obsessed if it has become a unmanageable behemoth. A rewrite can definitely give peace to the souls of the programmers.  Chrome proved that a complete rewrite can make the code slick  and it’s very much near firefox in functionality. And time it took for a decent version of Chrome, was very much lesser than imagined.  Despite the dramatic advent of Chrome, I  acknowledge the fact that Chrome still has to improve to compete head-on with firefox.  There were rumors that Google is now making a OS to compete with Windows which I heard, Steve Ballmer laughed off.  But going by the Chrome’s stint, I’m expecting OS from Google next year, which could even be an upgraded version of android.

I was comparing  Chrome 3.0.195.27 and firefox 3.5.4. Chrome was slick when I just had 3-5 web pages open. But above ten tabs, it becomes sluggish. Firefox had better support till 20 tabs. The memory occupied by both the programs at this juncture was more or less same with Chrome being more sluggish when I alternated between the tabs.

Firefox obviously supports the most websites as it had been around quite long. There were times when I would have filled a lengthy form and had trouble in submitting it in Chrome. I had to switch back to Firefox many times since certain bank websites doesn’t yet work with Chrome.
And then comes the lack of plugins. Firefox has a plethora of plugins to give it ammo for the next 10-20 years. Following are the plugins I miss in Chrome,
1)Dictionary Helper
2)FireShot
3)FireBug
4)DownloadHelper(FreeDownloadManager is doing a good job for Chrome)
5)Zooming Image
6)DownloadHelper

I’m sure many would miss even more. The only issue,  I have with Firefox is the initial delay in loading which I hope will get fixed soon.  It’s pleasing to know that Firefox has  matured in stability now and crashes are very very rare. Based on the pace at which Chrome is being developed now, I believe that  Firefox will lead the race for perfection followed by Chrome and then Internet Explorer.

GRE

Chennai rentals

Good Code vs Bad Code

I’m going to compare coding with film making, though they differ in one way. Coding is a long and continous process compared to movie making which is a one time effort. But still, they can be compared, since adding to the existing code is analogous to a film remake. So here we go,

Good code has the characteristics of a good movie. It has a clear message/purpose. The entire code revolves around that message. The code can be broken into characters/classes. Each character is important for getting the message across to the audience and they have a well defined role to play. There are no unnecessary characters(code).  And the communication between these characters(classes) is meaningful and is something that has some context to the message the movie delivers.  Summing up, a good code is like a good movie, the story can be remembered and passed on to future generations easily.

Bad code has the characteristics of a “mega” serial. There isn’t any clear message or the message itself isn’t apparent at the end of the work. They start with something in mind and end up with something totally different.  Here again the code can be broken down to characters/classes. New characters appear and disappear as the story goes on. But the existence of these characters, doesn’t add any meaning to the  story. There are  multiple sub plots and characters involved are different.  The story can’t be remembered and passed on, because of the haphazard way the characters communicate. In short, it’s a mess.

What ails DD Direct+?

We recently moved to the outskirts of chennai. The local cable operator demanded more money for the same channels, we used to view.  So I was left with no choice but to go for Dth. The popular being sun direct. It had an installation cost of Rs.1250 and  the cheapest package costs Rs.499 for 6 months. The only concern was that the equipments will remain the property of sundirect. I felt Rs/1250 was too much for installation charge. Then I had to look at the free DDDirect+ telecast by doordarshan. The term “free” was more luring so I decided to go for it. The equipments costed 2200Rs.  And I personally installed it on my house top. I was all set and  was quite happy when I got all the 50+ channels.

A week passed by  and I found that I could only watch 3-4 channels of those 50+ list. Yes, the rest are all junk or target a different audience. Those 3-4 channels where either Tamil or English channels. I hate watching Hindi and other language channels. Having known Hindi, I still couldn’t count more than 3 channels that aired meaningful and viewable programs in Hindi. The problem is DDDirect+ wants to  cater for every indian, but it failed to understand the reality that number of channels a particular person views (based on his taste and language) is very less. And one feels cheated/frustated by the end of the day.

DDdirect+ should have copied the strategy used by SunDirect , which also caters to all sections of the country. But they have packages that are language specific. They have a freedom Tamil package with 145 channels in Tamil,English and few Hindi and Freedom Telugu with 145 channels of Telugu,English and few Hindi. Thus people of particular region can subscribe to the package of their choice and they’ll feel satisfied.

Since DDDirect+ wanted to give all channels to all people, it had to stick with a single satellite, the number of channels that can be telecast becomes less. And even if space is available one can imagine the amount of redtape before a channel is allowed to telecast. With multiple packages as sun direct, they would have been free to put each package in a separate satellite. Adding new channels wouldn’t have been so hard.

All this just shows that it wasn’t a well planned exercise. And with channels disappearing all of a sudden, I’m quite concerned that I might even loose those 3-4 channels that I watch.
~

Web 2.0 and Indian films

The proceedings in the Web 2.0 world are quite comparable to that of the indian film industry.  Ever since its inception the indian film industry has been making films revolving around “love”. The films differed in just the way they portrayed love. And its almost a rule in indian film industry that every film that has an actor and actress, must have them unite in love. And the western films are no exceptions, but the love theme is more over-reused in indian film industry. Even this over-reuse didn’t bore a larger section of the people as the directors were atleast innovative in adding their own twist to the same old love story. But as time wentby, the indian audience became experts, that they could predict the entire story within just 10 minutes of watching the film.

Now coming to the web 2.0 startups, it’s very much analogous to the indian films. Their services revolved around internet – the new found love. In the beginning, I had signed in for a yahoo email cum chat account and then a few groups. That was enough for meeting most of my needs and sure most of anyone’s needs. I do appreciate services like blogs and forums that did help a lot of people. And then the advent of social networking sites, which were just a mixture of all of the above. But beyond that I see the difference between indian films and web2.0 services getting diminished. Making a web 2.0 startup is becoming as simple as making a love story. I do acknowledge that a lot of combinations of email,chat,groups and forums are yet to be tried out, but making web the central theme(like love) doesn’t make it quite attractive to the budding computer science students and is limiting the scope of computer science industry. There are a lot of developments still pending in key fields like artificial intelligence, robotics and communication etc.,.

Let’s make computer science more interesting!