Natarajan's blog

Hi,

I was given the privilege of giving away a Gmail invite today. I gave it to my best pal in office, Prashanth. He was stunned by its features. The only complaint that people might have with Gmail is that, it does take sometime to load the first page. Sometimes it even fails. Hope the Google guys are listening.

Natty

Hi,

I happened to attend a training programme on Cross-Cultural sensitivity in my organization. My initial opinion about the whole course was that, it would be a discourse on how to conduct oneself in various situations in a land that follows a culture significantly different from ours. In fact, I went to the classroom with a rather closed mind.

I had missed the crux of it. Half-way through the class I realised I hadnt understood the topic. Though the class had its share of do's and dont's, it was mainly about being sensitive. Why people of a different culture are the way they are? That was an eye-opener. By observing, reflecting, investigating and enriching ourselves, we will understand people better and relate to them better.

Above all it was a fun filled learning day.


Natty

Hi,

Me back with a blog relatively quickly. Two software products that amazed me recently are

• Firefox
  
• Gmail
  

Firefox

I was blown over by its looks and performance. The looks have been made simpler since the previous release. It's said to be 3% faster and I found this to be very perceptible. Added to it there are a whole lot of plugins/extensions that are really cool. The ones that are a must have are the Web-developer one and the All-in-one-gestures. The second plugin lets you go back/forth in history by right-click and simultaneous drag to either the left/right side. This really is great thinking, why do you need to move your mouse till the top left of the window to go the previous/next page. The Web developer plugin has a lot of features for people who deal with websites: converting GET to POSTs(vice versa), view form details, outline tables and lots more. I am sure you will give this a try. I bet you won't go back to IE.

Gmail

This is one product into which tremendous amount of research has gone. Did anyone question the fact "Why do you need to submit a web form to compose a reply to a mail?" All the necessary information is available at the client side, why not use code on the web-client side to achieve the same ends. Address book completion, relevant ads, threading(which other webmail service offers this facility??). Hoping the folks at Google will pack in lot of mail-client like features into their webmail service.

Have a nice weekend folks.

Natty

The last two weeks have been pretty eventful. Eventful enough to prevent me from blogging I suppose. I am just listing down a few of them

• I got confirmed in my company. The feeling of getting confirmed and getting a pay hike felt great.
  


• I got a gmail account courtesy BK. In fact I asked my Trilogy mates for more invites so that I could pass it on to the poor and the needy ;-)
  


• I have been trying pretty hard getting Zope to store its objects in a traditional RDBMS rather than Zope's own database ZoDB. We were running into scalability issues with ZoDB on our servers. All that I had to do was to install a product called Ape.
  


• We are gearing up for our CEO's visit to our Linux lab on July 5. All the Linux User group volunteers are pretty excited about it. I will post about the event surely.
  

I desparately want to blog as frequently as possible. I have also noticed my fellow mates Palani, Suri blog frequencies drop.

I am just remembering that England meets Portugal in the Euro 2004 quarters in about an hour from now. I have never been a soccer fan. For me nothing can beat the charm of the Championships at Wimbledon. Rain and work at office have played truant to my watching the telecast of the matches, though I was able to catch a glimpse of Henman and Ivansevic in action.

Keep visiting for more blogs. Hope I won't disappoint you.

Hi All,

I was previously blogging at natarajan.blog-city.com. My friends Palani, Suri were blogging at blogger.com. The interface was far better than the one I was using at blog-city.com. So I decided to switch over. I have copied my blogs from my old blog site. The comments are yet to be incorporated. Hope you enjoy my blogs over here.

Natty

I got to see the Tamil version of Maniratnam's bi-lingual extravaganza Aayutha Ezhuthu on May 29th. To sum it up in a sentence. Great film by a great film-maker. The film focusses on youth entering politics. Maniratnam has made it look as realistic as possible, with the students winning the by-elections rather than sweeping the elections across the state. Mani treads the same path as in Alaipayuthe, taking the viewer back and forth in time to describe the lives of three people with diverse views on life.

The star cast of Surya, Maddy and Siddharth have performed admirably well. Surya seems to be improving with every outing. Rahman is at his best as usual in Mani's movies. Meera Jasmine's expressive acting was refreshing. The actresses played their roles to perfection, though they had little scope to perform except for Meera.

The surprise packet was director Bharathiraaja in the role of a politician. His tiffs with Surya were thoroughly enjoyable. His histrionics are worth watching. Sriman as Maddy's friend excels in the support role. (Looks like he is getting stereotyped. Remember Sethu).

Above all a great movie from Mani. A must watch.

Natty

Have you watched Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu campaign? I got the witness a glimpse of her campaign through the southern districts of the state courtesy NDTV's programme: Follow the Leader. Here is a small description of how her campaign looked like.

She would get on the dais and hurl charges about the Democratic Progressive Alliance's opportunism, Sonia Gandhi's foreign origin. Very little of what governance would be provided can be heard in her speeches. All through this anti-Opposition rhetoric one could witness the candidate standing as a mere puppet on the dias with folded hands. He would never have a say. Amma says it all. The same spectacle could be witnessed on the road with the AIADMK chief on a closed Tempo Traveller vehicle canvassing and the candidate being a mute spectator on a jeep beside. The whole sight was disgusting to watch. The crowd-pulling capabilities of Jayalalithaa remains a mystery after watching all of this.

Jayalalithaa is waging a lone political battle against some seasoned politicians in the opposite camp. Judging by general public opinion Amma would be facing a drastically different political future than the landslide victory which propelled her to Chief Ministership in the 2001 Assembly elections.

Natty

PS: I have touched politics in my blogs too !!!!