Just trying to see whether this web log is still working
Book list for 2014
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I want to read at least 12 of the following 30 books in 2014 (well, I can’t really classify Proust or Knausgaard as one book, but this is a bucket list for 2014 and I do want to get started on both this year).
- My struggles
- Proust
- Magic mountain
- Three comrades (reread)
- Appointment in Samara
- Crossing to safety
- Tender is the night
- Brothers Karamazov
- Anna Karenina
- If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)
- A bend on the river
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Milan Kundera)
- Slaughterhouse 5
- Maughm’s short stories
- The lowland
- The savage detectives
- Speak, Memory
- Autobiography of an unknown Indian
- The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos
- 500 years of Western civilization
- Guns, germs and steel
- The whole shabang
- The coming of age in the milky way
- Reinventing Bach
- Bach: Music in the castle of heaven
- Sophie’s world
- On the origin of species
- Danube (Claudio Magris)
- The old ways – a journey on foot
- Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa
Invictus
Mandela’s recent death brought back my memory of Morgan Freeman’s recitation of Invictus in the movie. I had very much liked it.
Here is the poem:
Invictus
BY William Earnest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Here is Wikipedia on the poem.
France trip
Here is what we did. I’ll write up more detailed posts eventually.
Paris
Day 1: Eiffel tower
Day 2: Notre Dame cathedral. Walked across the bridge to Ile Saint-Louis and kicked around for some time there afterwards. Walked across Pont Des Art to Latin Quartier and ended the day in Jardin du Plantes. Couldn’t make time for Sainte Chapelle .
Day 3: Palais Garnier. Rainy day in Paris.
Day 4: Versailles
Day 5 Jardin des Tuileries (Wikipedia page), Orangerie and Musee d’Orsay (NYT story – a bit dated).
Day 6- Train to Colmar
Day 7-10: Colmar, Egusheim and Strosbourg
Day 11-13: Dijon
Day 14: Flight back to Dallas
A poem for the weekend
TWIGS
Taha Muhammad Ali
Neither music,
fame, nor wealth,
not even poetry itself,
could provide consolation
for life’s brevity,
or the fact that King Lear
is a mere eighty pages long and comes to an end,
and for the thought that one might suffer greatly
on account of a rebellious child.
My love for you
is what’s magnificent,
but I, you, and the others,
most likely,
are ordinary people.
My poem
goes beyond poetry
because you
exist
beyond the realm of women.
And so
it has taken me
all of sixty years
to understand
that water is the finest drink,
and bread the most delicious food,
and that art is worthless
unless it plants
a measure of splendor in people’s hearts.
After we die,
and the weary heart
has lowered its final eyelid
on all that we’ve done,
and on all that we’ve longed for,
and all that we’ve dreamt of,
all we’ve desired
or felt,
hate will be
the first things
to putrefy
within us.
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Stray thoughts on building sustainable advantages in IT
– McKinsey Quarterly recently published a report (unavailable without priced membership) about the comparative advantages in IT industry for India and China. The report concluded that Indian IT industry’s economy of scale, established ladership and business practices provides India with powerful advantages. Chinese IT industry – because of its highly fragmented nature – would take a long time to catch up. It seems to have gotten wide coverage in Indian media.
– I recently read news coverage of an interview with Narayan Murthy (Infosys Chairman) in which he talked about the infrastructure burdens of the cities (power, roads, water, transportation) and how these are limiting the growth of IT industry in India (I lost the link).
-International Herald Tribune has a story about how Wipro is trying to widen its talent pool:
” By hiring Prity Tewary, Wipro, India’s third-biggest software exporter, may have found the key to expanding the engineering talent pool that Indian universities produce in a year …. She and 1,100 others, many of them plain vanilla science graduates, are studying for a four-year master of science degree in software, telecommunications and microelectronics on Saturdays. Wipro is paying their tuition, providing them with classroom resources on its sprawling, university-type campuses, and giving them stipends that start at 6,000 rupees, or $137, a month. In turn, the student-workers are helping the company go beyond the limited universe of 184,000 fresh engineers available for hiring as programmers each year.
“We build our own engineers,” says S.K. Bhagavan, who oversees Wipro’s in-house “talent transformation” team of 70 faculty members. In a year, Bhagavan’s team conducts 150,000 hours of training, and that includes coaching in “soft skills” needed by a work force that interacts with clients globally.
… At an aggregate level too, India needs to convert more of its generalist scientific talent into software professionals to sustain the industry’s competitiveness. Of a total population of 7.7 million science and technology professionals in 2000, about half, or 3.8 million, were science graduates. Only 970,000 were graduate engineers, according to an estimate by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in New Delhi. While India does need more science doctorates to carry out research, it doesn’t need more unemployed physics graduates.
Seven out of 10 employees hired in the last three years by Infosys Technologies, Wipro’s slightly bigger competitor by market value, were fresh graduates. In order to raise the quality of the talent it hires, the Bangalore-based company has released some of the course material it uses to train employees to universities under a $2 million “Campus Connect” initiative.”
“We build our own engineers,” says S.K. Bhagavan, who oversees Wipro’s in-house “talent transformation” team of 70 faculty members. In a year, Bhagavan’s team conducts 150,000 hours of training, and that includes coaching in “soft skills” needed by a work force that interacts with clients globally.
… At an aggregate level too, India needs to convert more of its generalist scientific talent into software professionals to sustain the industry’s competitiveness. Of a total population of 7.7 million science and technology professionals in 2000, about half, or 3.8 million, were science graduates. Only 970,000 were graduate engineers, according to an estimate by the Institute of Applied Manpower Research in New Delhi. While India does need more science doctorates to carry out research, it doesn’t need more unemployed physics graduates.
Seven out of 10 employees hired in the last three years by Infosys Technologies, Wipro’s slightly bigger competitor by market value, were fresh graduates. In order to raise the quality of the talent it hires, the Bangalore-based company has released some of the course material it uses to train employees to universities under a $2 million “Campus Connect” initiative.”
– Joel Spolski gave some interesting advise to computer Science graduates in USA a few weeks back (via Kingshuk). They are as applicable for Indian developers:
Would Linux have succeeded if Linus Torvalds hadn’t evangelized it? As brilliant a hacker as he is, it was Linus’s ability to convey his ideas in written English via email and mailing lists that made Linux attract a worldwide brigade of volunteers.
Have you heard of the latest fad, Extreme Programming? Well, without getting into what I think about XP, the reason you’ve heard of it is because it is being promoted by people who are very gifted writers and speakers.
Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that.
Have you heard of the latest fad, Extreme Programming? Well, without getting into what I think about XP, the reason you’ve heard of it is because it is being promoted by people who are very gifted writers and speakers.
Even on the small scale, when you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that.
Catering to the BPOs in India …..
According to Nasscom, India has around 8.13 lakh IT professionals , which amount to at least 8.13 lakh meals per day. Taking Rs 30 as the minimum cost of a thali, you can earn a mouth-watering Rs 244 lakh per day!
With many BPOs serving two square meals a day, 8.13 lakh meals is a much discounted figure. The delectable dal makhani and palatable paneer can earn you lakhs. Those who smelled this inviting opportunity early on are now earning big money.
With many BPOs serving two square meals a day, 8.13 lakh meals is a much discounted figure. The delectable dal makhani and palatable paneer can earn you lakhs. Those who smelled this inviting opportunity early on are now earning big money.
Here is the whole story
Interview with a blog spammer
Thanks to people like these, I eventually decided to turn off comments in this weblog. (via comment in Crooked Timber).
I had over 50 trackback spams yesterday. But MT 2.6x makes deleting spam much simpler. But wading through this stuff is still very irritating and depressing.
Communication history trivia
It does give you a sense of proportion:
On Feb. 10, 1825, a young man named Samuel sent a letter from Washington, D.C., to his ailing wife Lucretia: “I long to hear from you,” he wrote plaintively. The next day, Samuel received word that his wife had died the day before he mailed his letter. By the time he got home to New Haven, Lucretia had been buried for three days. The man’s full name was Samuel Finley Breese Morse. He eliminated the possibility that such a tragic irony would ever darken anyone else’s life by inventing the telegraph in 1844.
And on July 14, 1846, a young U.S. Army captain was posted from Charleston, S.C., to a new base in Buena Yerba in the Alta California territory. How long do you think it took him to arrive in what we now call San Francisco, as fast as the U.S. Army could muster? The trip took six and a half months.
The captain and his wife wrote letters to each other every day. In April 1847, he finally got his first letter from her; she had written it in October 1846. When this soldier, William Tecumseh Sherman, became famous for his March to the Sea in 1865, his two priorities were to destroy the railroads in the Southeast and cut the telegraph lines. He knew exactly what he was doing.
In three breathtaking years from 1866 to 1869, travel time from the East Coast to California dropped from six months to roughly two weeks?and nearly everyone who crossed the continent survived. Suddenly, food and medicine could traverse immense distances in time to save lives. Suddenly, today’s New York Times described what happened in Europe yesterday, instead of what had happened two or three weeks earlier. Suddenly, people could learn that it was a matter of life and death for them to get somewhere immediately; and they could actually get there.
Now how could anyone claim, as one venture capitalist did in early 1999, that the Internet is “the greatest invention in the history of the world?” It’s simply an incremental improvement in the high speed at which we already share information by phone and fax and FedEx. It’s a big deal, but the telegraph and the railroad were at least as big.
And on July 14, 1846, a young U.S. Army captain was posted from Charleston, S.C., to a new base in Buena Yerba in the Alta California territory. How long do you think it took him to arrive in what we now call San Francisco, as fast as the U.S. Army could muster? The trip took six and a half months.
The captain and his wife wrote letters to each other every day. In April 1847, he finally got his first letter from her; she had written it in October 1846. When this soldier, William Tecumseh Sherman, became famous for his March to the Sea in 1865, his two priorities were to destroy the railroads in the Southeast and cut the telegraph lines. He knew exactly what he was doing.
In three breathtaking years from 1866 to 1869, travel time from the East Coast to California dropped from six months to roughly two weeks?and nearly everyone who crossed the continent survived. Suddenly, food and medicine could traverse immense distances in time to save lives. Suddenly, today’s New York Times described what happened in Europe yesterday, instead of what had happened two or three weeks earlier. Suddenly, people could learn that it was a matter of life and death for them to get somewhere immediately; and they could actually get there.
Now how could anyone claim, as one venture capitalist did in early 1999, that the Internet is “the greatest invention in the history of the world?” It’s simply an incremental improvement in the high speed at which we already share information by phone and fax and FedEx. It’s a big deal, but the telegraph and the railroad were at least as big.
From Jason Zweig’s speech to Morningstar Investment Conference in June 2001