Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is a poem hidden away under beautiful prose. It is a short story, about 55 pages, yet it is profoundly heartwarming, with a subtle flow of true emotions and comes across as a refreshing, cool, light rain showering on your heart but comes back to haunt you and touches your soul in the deepest way.

I had seen the movie last year. It was kind of slow, but the beauty of the story was uniquely brilliant. So when I saw the book at the library I instantly grabbed it and read it within a couple of hours. It is all about 2 guys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, coming to know each other while herding sheep on Brokeback mountain. It is the sad story of their difficult lives, separate yet entwined, and your heart reaches out to them. It is a remarkably enchanting story of forbidden love and longing.

The prose is astoundingly elegant and beautiful. Annie Proulx, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer prize winner, writes as if painting a beautiful picture. The story flows like a serene river – quiet, beautiful, calm and exceedingly sure of itself. See a couple of excerpts to get a taste of her eloquent prose-

“They stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still usable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go”.”

“Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

Sure enough, I never get enough of stories as beautifully told as this. Never enough.

5 stars, if not more.

Hacking for Dummies

I couldn’t help laughing aloud reading some of the “hacking tips” on a blog post here.

Tip 3 is the most amusing:

There are a couple of commands in DOS for refreshing the BIOS password. These stuff stuff works only on windows earlier than XP where direct DOS boot was allowed. Sorry I don’t remember any of the commands now.

The blog is aptly titled “ignoramus musing“.

P.S. Yes, that was pretty mean. Sorry dude.

Salary for different jobs in the US

Most of the hits on my blog come from people searching about salary for jobs in the US. So finally, here is a list created by Salary.com from the data collected from the top 20 metros in US.

Google Calls for Increasing H1-B cap

Quotes from an article on Information Week:

Google executives on Wednesday called on the U.S. government to raise the number of foreign worker visas — or H-1B status — by illustrating the plight of one of its founders.

In congressional testimony, Google VP of people operations Laszlo Bock cited the emigration of the parents of company co-founder Sergey Brin from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1979 as evidence that admitting foreign workers into the country benefits the U.S. economy.

…

Bock said that Google is not the only Silicon Valley company to benefit from immigration. “Intel, eBay, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, and many other companies were all founded by immigrants who were welcomed by America,” said Bock.

…

According to Bock, some 8% of Google’s U.S. employees are in this country on a six-year H-1B visa…

…

The current annual cap of 65,000 H-1B visas isn’t enough, according to Bock, who urged Congress to increase the cap.

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Over the last year alone, the artificially low cap on H-1B visas has prevented more than 70 Google candidates from receiving H-1B visas.

The full article can be read here.

There is a related post on the Official Google Blog  – What U.S. immigration policies mean to Google.

Modern Life

Modern Life (posted on Reddit).

So true !

Microsoft Threatens Its Most Valuable Professional

From The Register :

As a hobby, Cansdale developed an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio. TestDriven.NET allows unit test suites to be run directly from within the Microsoft IDE. Cansdale gave away this gadget on his website, and initially received the praises of Microsoft.

In fact, Microsoft was so pleased with him, it gave him a Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) award, which it says it gives to “exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others”.

However, his cherished status did not last. In December 2005, he started getting emails from a Microsoft executive called Jason Weber. The problem was that TestDriven.NET supported the Express edition of Visual Studio. Express is the cut-down version that anyone can download for free from the Microsoft website. It is limited in various ways, and is intended only for hobbyists and students. Everyone else is supposed to shell out for the paid-for versions.

…

and in the last few days has hit Cansdale with a flurry of lawyers’ letters, also available on his website [see here and here]. Cansdale now has until 4pm Wednesday 6 June to disable the Visual Studio Express features of his product.

We await the deadline with bated breath.

Read the full story here.

P.S.

This story was SlashDot-ed. It is fun to read the comments.

P.P.S

Another issue which rubbed the tech community in the wrong way was the licensing of the Ribbon UI which comes with MS Office 2007. Microsoft is not providing you any components to help you create the UI, but if you decide to create your own UI component which looks like the Office Ribbon UI (which is nothing more than buttons, drop down boxes and menu items on a tabbed container), then you need Microsoft’s permission. Funny old Bill ! Don’t forget to read the comments on this blog.

Quit Infy If You Want, But You Can’t Join TCS, Accenture, IBM, CTS or Wipro

I feel we are going back in time.

From The Economic Times :

WHEN Infosys employees accept their annual hike letters this year, they will sign on more than just their annual salary rise. Alongside the hike letter, Infosys has also asked its employees to sign a non-compete agreement letter saying they will not join any customer or competitor for a period of six months after their job termination at Infosys.

The competition has been specified – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Accenture, IBM Global Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions and Wipro. The letter also adds that the employees cannot accept a job offer from its clients (which they have serviced in the last 12 months) for a period of six months.

…

Despite the rising popularity of non-compete clauses, its execution and legal enforcement remains a grey area.

….

Under Section 27 Indian Contract Act, an employer cannot deny you the right to work for competitor. In high-profile lawsuits like Pepsi-Coca-Cola in the past, employers who sued have lost the case in favour of employees. But at large “these non-compete clauses certainly work as a big deterrent factor,” says Som Mandal, partner, Fox Mandal.

Read the complete article here.

P.S. I got the link to this article from a comment to this post. Thanks Suresh.

Why is Software Development Hard ?

Foreword:

I started to write this post immediately after reading Dreaming In Code. The book forced me to think why developing software is hard and I decided I need to write a post about it.

Frankly, even after reading that book I couldn’t figure out what really went wrong with Chandler. Was it too much up-front design ? Was it going for a desktop application instead of trying to develop Chandler as a web app ? Was it lack of initial time pressure? Was it some internal politics not documented by the book? I cant say for sure.  After writing a little on this I saved it for future elaboration. I wanted to collect my thoughts and analyze the data which I got from the book. After several weeks I still don’t have any additional point worth writing about. So I just posted it.

Here you go :

 Why is software development hard ?

I think it is a tad unfair to think that Software Development is the only thing that we don’t know how to do. A lot of people, mostly management assholes, seem to get all fired up when talking about software development. Why aren’t we delivering on time? Why are there so many bugs? Why isn’t our zero defect program not working? Why isn’t the CMMI process(or insert your favorite software development process here) helping us do better? Why is all this so hard? Haven’t we doing software development for years? Why aren’t we learning from our mistakes?

After working in the software industry for 5 years, I really don’t know why software development isn’t getting any easier. Certainly the tools have improved. But the increasing complexity of applications, security issues, the development model in a flat world, an increasing amount of people choosing to be developers just because there is more money in it, etc might be reasons why there is so much bad software out there.

People have been raising kids since time immemorial. Still we haven’t figured out the best way to raise our kids. Should we let them be or should we discipline them as we wish ? Should we let them make the decisions or should we make it for them ? Should we teach them life’s lessons or should we let them learn it on their own? A similar argument can be made for the field of personal achievement. What makes a person successful? His genes ? His environment? Can the traits of a successful person be cultivated? Can I copy a successful person and be successful myself? Successful people come from well-to-do background and also from ghettos. There are hard workers and then there are take-it-easy types. There are short ones and tall ones. There are PhD s and high school drop outs. If we really think about it, there are no easy answers and no reliable patterns for this.

If we cant figure out the answers to one of life’s most common happening repeating itself over every generation from the beginning of human life, then why are we so frustrated about being unable to know how to develop useful, quality software on time?After all, software development is only a few decades old.

If you think that the above mentioned cases are not science or engineering related, I should say that the most critical parts of software development are not really Science but Art. Team co-ordination, Estimation and Design are examples.

Senate votes to Hike H1B Fees

From InternetNews,

The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to increase H1-B visa fees for employers to $5,000 per application, $3,500 more than the current fee. Proceeds from the fee hike would be used to fund scholarships for Americans seeking degrees in math, technology and health-related fields.

The 59-35 vote came on an amendment to the current immigration bill being debated in the Senate. The new fee would be imposed on new applications and renewals.

Read the full article here.

Please continue to hold or write a blog

I bought a Sansa Sandisk MP3 player just before my trip to India so that I could have a little more entertainment than staring out of the window and eating the healthy and tasty food served on the plane. I found the player to be pretty good and I had got a pretty good deal on it. There was a free subscription to Rhapsody To Go, worth $14.99/month, for 30 days. This was a pleasant surprise and I immediately used the coupon to start an account with Rhapsody. They do have a brilliant collection of mp3 and worked flawlessly with Sandisk.

On my return from India, I decided to check out their collection. I like to listen to music at work, so I decided to try Rhapsody at work. Unfortunately they dont support Windows 2003 and I have Windows 2003 on my office machine. I did some search on Google and found that they dont support Windows 2003 because some Digital Copyright management components are not available on Windows 2003. Urrgh !

So I decided to cancel the Rhapsody account. I went to their website and clicked the “Cancel Account” link, which took me to a page where it said I should call a particular number to cancel the account. I hate it when they do this. Their aim is to try and do some brainwashing and persuade the user to continue the subscription. Why cant I cancel my account when I want it to? I find it very irritating when the Customer Service Rep tries to ignore your pleas to cancel the account and goes “But Sir, this is a very good option. You should not cancel it. Please try it got a couple of months before you cancel the subscription…. Pleeaaasee…”.

I couldnt find any other option to cancel the subscription, so I called the number and waited. I was put on hold saying that “we are experiencing unusually high call volumes currently. Please call at a later time or continue to hold”, followed by the crap, “Your call is very important to us…”. I think their strategy is to put people on hold until they quit and decide that keeping the account and paying $14.99/month would be less painful than trying to cancel the account.

Having nothing else to do, I started to write this blog. I am still on hold

Update :

I was put on hold for approximately 45 minutes before I was able to talk to a Customer Service Rep who did the canceling for me, but not before trying all tactics to make me continue the subscription.