Non-Stop Film Festival

If you are thinking that i am going to blog about Cannes film festival or something similar you are wrong. This is about a group of 4 guys who ended up watching 5 films non-stop on a Saturday night. Dont make guesses, its just me,sen,subbi and musi who did that inevitable feat.

It all started by 9 after our dinner at amirtham@ koramangala. after the first film which i am not supposed to name,me and subramani "veerappoda" thoongalammnu ninachoom,but we moved on to the next film starring ajith during which i slept.Then i got up to see the next film by 3:00 which is normally the time when the "flowers used to unfurl" its petals.Then by 5 i thought ppl would atleast consider to have a small nap. To my astonishment some were washing their faces to prepare themselves for the next show!!! Then we watched the madhavan starring film. Atlast ppl went to bed and i saw a part of Indiana jones "The raiders of the Lost ark" After that i had a nice sleep and got up by 10 only to see another film which remained us of our "school".

What a night it was!!! Thanks to Subbi and Prabu anna for providing us this entertainment gala and also for patiently getting the scoldings from their neighbours for we had kept them from sleeping too :)

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What a welcome for new employees!!!

This video is a must see for every software professional in India where a software guy is highly revered and respected. But this company took a step further and made these new joinees cherish the moment forever.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GpPcMVbmtw

Geeks of india you rule the world.Give yourselves a pat.

Solaris to be shipped in IBM blades

A strategic alliance is what Sun tells about this deal with IBM. IBM has accepted to ship Solaris OEM with their blades. So what is going to be the impact in the market? If you have a look at the market share of lower-end x86(blades, Proliants) servers its the HP which leads there followed by DELL and IBM. In an attempt to raise through the ranking IBM has accepted this strategy which might help Sun in promoting Solaris. I do not want to speculate much on this but going through the some analysis reveals that there wont be much change in the rankings.Perhaps the deal might affect the GNU/Linux market especially Red Hat's Enterprise editions as Sun is slowly trying to penetrate the GNU/Linux deployments in the internet arena where x86 & GNU/Linux combination rules.

For IBM its an optional offering with their hardware. For Sun its a new arena where their solaris has not penetrated much.Keeping my fingers crossed i am watching what is going to be the impact of it in both the hardware and OS Market share world!!

It happened in India

One thing that strikes you is this person's inspiration to setup Big Bazaar, Bangalore central and other establishments are not after looking into walmart but after paying a visit to the infamous saravana stores in Ranganathan street,T-nagar, chennai. This Book by Kishore Biyani along with Dipayan Bhaisya takes one into the life of Kishore Biyani, the Rajah of Retail. Though the excerpts by different people who are part of the retail conglomerate are filled up with praise for Kishore which normally irritates you the rest written by him are the ones which pulls you into the vortex.

He recounts how from being an ordinary cloth seller he evolved to such heights. though he was from Mumbai his initial stunt was in calcutta where he setup his first pantaloon store. Later he moved on to mumbai and other cities. Later he went on to setup the Big Bazaar hypermarket customized to Indian style. His attempt to attract the tier-2 people of India (middle-class) was an instant success added to the lucrative offers his retail gives.No Big Bazaar remains the same, because it is customized to the regional taste. His foresight in procuring large enough real estates for building his malls are seen when he setup the 1.4 lakh sq ft Big Bazaar in Noida(The largest in india). He made some bold stunts in bollywood too by producing Na Tum Jaano Na Hum & Chura Liyaa Hai Tumne. His future group is aiming at various prospective areas where they could step into, to channelize the people's spending into their stores. Central is an idea born out of here.

Certain brands like John miller,Scullers, and Indigo nation are owned by them and by obtaining legal rights they are the dealers for puma, mark & Spencers in india. Just a three day offer(sabse saste din) in Big Bazaar during this year attracted people to spend 125 Cr in this shop.His separate unit for churning out new creative ideas lies in the Joseph chemmanur hall, Indira nagar Bangalore. These designers look into people's activities and behavior to understand more about people's need and tapping them. so next time if someone stares at you near indira nagar it could be one among them :)

he palns to own 30 million lakh sq ft of shopping paradise by 2011 with an annual turnover of 30,000 Cr. with the giants like walmart and Reliance stepping into retail business only time would tell whether he achieves his goal.

Trip to Sivasamudra (Bharachukki) Falls

On August 15th we had been to Bharachukki falls which was not a planned one. This is 140 Kms from Bangalore on the mysore road ( not exactly). we got down at anapost and then caught an auto to this falls. We missed the ganganachukki which is some 8 kms from that place.we survived solely on cucumbers and bhelpoori that whole day.Later in the afternoon we suddenly thought of going to somnath temple which we heard was some 30 kms from there. but due to non-availability of Straight bus we abandoned that. we didn't go to talakkad ( the point where cauvery is huge) due to the same reason. Probably a detailed surrounding information before the next trip would suffice to end such dissapointments.

By 7 we reached bangalore totally famished and this prompted us to visit the Maharaja Hotel @ Koramangala where we dined pretty well along with Prabu anna.very soon we all departed in all directions to reach our home.

Visit http://picasaweb.google.com/kpraveen85/BharachukkiWaterfalls
for more pics

A better Xperience

yesterday i went to the HSBC ATM center @ indira nagar. I came to know that the ATM machine is having some problems and i came out of the ATM center without taking the money.I was in for a surprise.The way i had walked through was fitted with granites and marble flooring which was unique in its own way and i easily missed the highlight of it when i came in.
Now i sat down and starting analyzing what design it was. Some architect or the owner of the building seems to have a good taste for the Zodiac signs and it showed off in the flooring. The floor was studded with a patterned granite slabs with the Zodiac signs too impregnated on it. Since i know the difficulty in cutting a marble slab the perfection in the cutting of the granites in various shapes including intricate curves amazed me. The design was somewhat similar to a sundial in the side and the flooring was like the sun flares.

I managed to take a closeup snap of my English Zodiacal sign Leo :) if you pass by the CMH road near the KFC you have this ATM and it is worth peeping in.

It is the creativity of the one and ability of the another to make it into reality, made me to enjoy this art in serenity

The Alchemist

This book by Paulo Coelho is for those who are in pursuance of a goal in life but getting held up in the middle and for those who feel contented with the present state of affairs.Though it has a illogical happenings near the climax like the boy talking with the wind, sun etc the story line keeps you hooked till you reach the end. I read the whole book within a night.

--Spoiler starts here--

Santiago being a shepherd is content with his life until he comes across a gypsy lady who interprets his dream and from then on our boy undertakes an task of unearthing a treasure near the pyramids of Egypt who is helped by the king of salem initially.on his way he meets the englishman and then the Alchemist who guides him to his dreams.The story is written excellently by paulo coelho.

--Spoiler ends here--

Apart from the above lying story the author makes us to understand the way of life and some lines are sure to have an effect on one

"Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested."

"If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it."

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."

"The darkest hour of the night came just before dawn."

Power of Itanium 2 (Montecito)

Itanium has been the most talked about processor even before it hit the market in 2001. it competes with the enterprise server processors like IBM's Power and Sun's UltraSparc. But when it hit the stands its sales didn't soar up as it was expected.This is mainly because of the ignorance of many people about its architecture and how to get the best out of it. some time back when in college some people had sarcastically pointed out for our college going for a itanium processor based Symmetric Multi Processor system(SMP). Now i would like to clear out those dirt out of the Byte-crunching Itanium processor.


Itanium is designed using the Explicitly Parallel Intruction Code (EPIC) architecture which is a completely new design neither near to RISC nor to CISC. EPIC means the that Itanium processor does not have the hardware in its chip for identifying instruction dependencies for parallel execution. By doing so some amount of chip space is vacuumed which could be used for accommodating additional registers.All the parallelism has to be decided by the compiler itself during compiling. The resulting binary could be made to run on the Itanium processor at mind boggling speeds. Imagine having 128 (64 bit)General purpose registers, 128 (82 bit) Floating point register, 64 branch and predicate register, 64 application register etc working on your data. really stupendous!!! Therefore if your compiler doesn't parallelize the code just like for other processors you would find itanium lagging, leading to people doubting its capacity.Itanium is best suited for places where the applications are fine tuned for it and then would one realize its sheer speed in computation.

Itanium could theoritically execute 6 instructions per cycle and practically known to execute 3 instructions per cycle while x86 architecture could do only one instruction at a time.Itanium's latest release Montecito has 2 cores each with 2 threads(coarse multithreading - doesn't run concurrently, one thread chips in when other does memory lookup ) emulating to 4 processor. Thunder and NASA's Columbia supercomputer's secret lies with Itanium !!! Apart from this Itanium has built-in capability to handle virtualization which means it can run multiple operating system concurrently. its huge 24 MB L3 on-die (internal) cache adds to its efficiency in fetching data as quickly as possible.The speculative execution in Itanium is very robust adds to its performance. Itanium 2 has improved a lot in power consumption and in price/performance arena. Itanium's sales is picking up and latest survey has indicated that its revenue is over 63% of SPARC system revenue and over 54% of Power system revenue.

As Tukwila (Itanium's next generation)is round the corner packed with quad core, Simultaneous MultiThreading(SMT- Intel's next Lethal weapon) and Common system interface and other features up its sleeve, i could smell out a competition brewing in the processor arena with IBM's Power7, Sun's Ultrasparc Rock(16 cores with yet to be decided on number of threads) and from AMD's Fusion

ping --duration 2 days Chennai

For the weekend i had been to chennai and the onward journey was by KSRTC mayura which i enjoyed the most. They took the chittoor route and in the midway they stopped at the cool A1 plaza owned by reliance. A1 plaza had a neat parking lot and the traveling facilities provided by them were many and was very clean too.The lightings and the spacious restaurant were worth noting. Reliance have their own knack of attracting people to their bunks by providing such facilities.

For the rest of the two days i had to stay back in my paternal uncle's house except for a quiet stroll to Priyadharshan's. With the glittering hoardings all over the place i got a quick update of the happenings in Tamil nadu. Madhavan and bhavana starring Arya got released the day before and the deserted satyam theatre is enough to tell about its success. Kalaignar Tv is all set to be launched by september 15th as per one of the huge hoardings in the city. Kalaignar Tv actually owned by Raj Tv became the talk of the town as they bagged the rights to air the films Shivaji , Guru, pokkiri and varalaru after three years of release.

i had to miss the class reunion planned at spencer plaza due to one good reason. On sunday night i caught the Corona which was very spacious. Though they put Dhoom in the bus i resorted to peer through the window to have a look at Vestas, Nokia, Motorola, saint Gobian and samsung industries in the sriperumbuthur area. Later by early morning 3:30 i reached my home. These people drive pretty fast and that helped me up for a cosy 3 hour sleep before starting to office.

Getting older year after year

yeah today is my birthday. It was a smooth one as far as birthday bumps are concerned. I did nothing great or special today. But it is really surprising to see so many of my collegemates and schoolmates ringing me up and wishing.I was never a good guy in remembering these important days in others life. probably i have to be more careful next time.Nothing more to pen down for the day.