Top 10 Songs - Rated by me

Here is the list rightaway

1. Way i are - Timbaland & Keri Hilson feat
2. Say it Right - Nelly Furtado
3. That ain't Right - Sean Kingston
4. Hips don't Lie - Shakira
5. Umbrella - Rihanna feat Jay-z
6. Beautiful Liar- Beyonce feat Shakira
7. Sorry Blame it on me - Akon
8. Give it to me - nelly furtado, Timbaland
9. In the Morning - Gwen Stafani
10. Whenever wherever - remix (Shakira is a dancer) - Shakira, jirob
Lately i got some material to hear other than the Tamil songs and popular tracks from Michael jackson, BSB, etc.I got inputs that there are some great music being produced by groups other than the well known singers. The names i got after some research and hearsay helped me to locate the best hits of them and i started hearing them.The above list that i have released is what i consider as really good. Try hearing them @ www.deezer.com

Ideafest '07

Time passes on...The transition happened from science exhibition in schools to technical symposiums in college and now i attended the Idea Fest in my Company by wearing the audience tag :) This grand Tech mela consists of the people coming up with innovative ideas with implementation.Ideafest '07 - Monsoon session was conducted for 2 days and some 200+ ppl exhibited their wares.Some ideas really touched me as i have faced the same problem but not even once had i thought of finding a solution for them.Though i was able to cover just 10-15% of the stalls i learnt a lot in these two days than any other week.

As a part of Ideafest'07 a quiz competition was conducted, myself, vineet and sathya prakash formed a team and participated. We could not cross the written test itself but had a nice time watching the finals. thankfully we were not on the hot seat!!! It was a full-blown IT quiz and i understood that i have to learn a lot in that area. In short the whole 2 day grand gala rocked and i am looking forward for the next IdeaFest.

Headset gear adds to my arsenal

Yesterday i attended the PCQuest Best IT Implementation awards ceremony @ Hotel Grande Ashok, Bangalore as TCENet Bagged the best innovative product award. Attendees include Mrs.Shalinie Mam, Stylesen, Ranjani, smartsara, Senthil, subbi and myself. while myself and stylesen were wearing jazzy jeans and T-shirt, every other person in the conference hall were in Formals and some in suit :( Our jubiliant nature made many to turn their heads.

The Master of the ceremony kept the function on the roll by asking GK questions in between the awards distribution. After my 2 year winning streak in quizzes during my school days i maintained a low profile by not participating in any of the quizzes during my college days. For two questions the opportunity evaded me. Atlast the finale moment arrived and the MC quoted "Name the other countries that have their independence day on August 15th apart from India" Though i was not sure my basic instinct made me to raise my hand and my mouth squeaked "South Korea" The MC asked my name and congratulated me and very soon a ramp walk model walked her way through to hand over the "Logitech Mobile Express Headset" worth around 3000 :)

I finished my dinner at the same place and returned home holding the headset which has entered my sophisticated gadgets arsenal. I realized that luck sometime favours me too.kudos to those old GK books that i read during my school days which made this happen.

Trussed like a Chicken on seat no 43

It is the passenger's most avoidable seat, that too on a Worldclass A/C Volvo bus and evidently i fell for the trap last weekend.To make ppl understand the location of the seat, it is located in the middle of the last row in the bus ie, the seat at the end of the pathway.

Here is how the plot unfolds :)
The conductor paid a personal visit to my seat to ensure that i have strapped the seat belt(exclusive for seat no 43 passengers) properly. By having this seat belt around i could not even budge a little.My neighbour understood my plight and made the best use of it by conquering my seat little by little.All night i had to wage a war to keep a small part of my hands on the handrest.it is a pity that i had to share the handrest on both sides :( The A/C slits are available only for the two ppl on either side and a cool breeze would hardly make it to the passenger on seat 43. Being a volvo, where the engines would be on the rear side and i became the prestigious person to sit over the whooooooooooring engine all night with the heat waves flowing in.Hot sauna bath for free!!!! Added to that is the glaring headlights of the vehicles coming in the opposite side peeping through the gaps in the curtain.And at situation such as these you would be blessed with a stinking snooring neighbour falling over you all the time!!!!!!!

The HP way

This book was handed over to all the new recruits when we joined HP. This is written by David Packard, one of the founding fathers of the Company. The HP way is a set of ideologies which was framed by the founding fathers as early as 1957 when no other company had even thought of it.hp way considers both the employees and customers as equally important and one of the speeches given by Bill Hewlett in 1960 to a set of new joiners states exactly that.

The book starts of with David Packard recounting his childhood days and his friendship with Bill Hewlett during their college days at stanford.The group consisting of Bill, Dave, Ed porter and barney registered for the class by fred terman which eventually turned out to be a turning point in life. After the college days Packard joined GE for a short stint while Hewlett did his masters in MIT and both started their company officially in 1939 in a small garage in Palo Alto.This garage now has become a historical monument and is called as the birthplace of the silicon valley.


HP initially concentrated on oscillators, High frequency counters, video/audio parts and microwave products. The HP desktop calculator marked the beginning of the digital era and later it plunged into the computer industry. Some of the path breaking HP's invention at that time includes the usage of caesium for accurate measurement of time pulses,LED's, very High frequency counters, etc.Since this book is written way back in 1995 not much information about computer development is given.


When the company grew the founding fathers came up with many management styles which have become the benchmark of many companies these days. Some of them like sharing the profit with the employees, Management by walking around, Management by objective are a path-ahead in the 1950s. HP's Open door policy resonates even today as even the Managers or VP sits in open cubicles without any door like every other employee in HP.It is said that the Legacy, the founding fathers left behind is not just the 100 billion dollar company but the HP way.

SRK's Magnum Opus

Add Chakde India to Shahrukh Khan's best performance list and believe me it would top it all.Though he had a variety of roles round his buckle from a romantic romeo to vicious villian, the NRI and the Kabir Khan character suited him the best in Swadesh and Chak de India respectively.Many wouldn't have imagined that this baadshah would ascend to the top when he first showed up in Fauji, a serial in Doordarshan long time back.

These two film's baseline or the underlying story were pretty strong which added gravity to the lead role.Chak De India is a neatly compiled flawless picturing of how a disgraced hockey captain after a gap of 7 years comes back with a sole aim of coaching the undisciplined and egoistic women's hockey team to win the world cup thereby to redeem his pride.Some say that the story is similar to Miracle, a Hollywood film but i don't mind as long as i could watch some worthwhile films like this.The director's skill lies in clearly evading any romance or song sequence from the film thereby keeping the tempo on the go without any disturbance.The matches that are played are damn real

The film also delineates the sorry state of the affairs in the sports authority board and also the mindless cooking-up of stories by the media people. SRK's acting touches the heart when he leaves the home with a heavy heart and also in the end when his team wins. It would be great if other actors too tries something different like this rather than playing the same monotonous roles.After a long time i am seeing a film that is both gripping and inspiring till the end.I came out of the theatre wondering why SRK didn't coach the Men's team, only then it struck me that if he had done that perhaps his team would have won but this film would not have been a blockbuster!!!

Naanum Nalla Paiyan than

This weekend i turned out to be good boy and started visiting temples (Plural because i went to 2 temples :) Saturday evening i went to the Maha Shiva Mandir in Kemp fort(Airport Road). The walk from 100 ft road through domulur to the temple was pleasing in the evening.The forest cover inside NAL, HAL, ISRO which could be seen from the road on one side and IT parks like Diamond District on another side strikes a contrast.

The entrance to the temple is very small and one would find it hard to believe that a huge statue of Shiva is inside that. For any tourist or a resident of Bangalore it is a must watch.There is a small cave kind of setup through which one could find all the Famous Shiva lingas and also stories about them.

Next day morning i went to the Iskon temple in Yeswanthapur. Instead of taking the straight route i went through hebbal with the BMTC daily pass tucked away in my pocket.The serene and clean surrounding speaks high of the temple.The grandeur of the structure makes one spellbound.Inside the Iskon there are sweets stall, Hotel, book store & Art emporium kind of. It is heartening to know that Iskon temple feeds 42000 children everyday. Iskon temple is one of the places which requires regular attendance.

South Indies - truly South Indian

This time i happened to chip in to this restaurant (south Indies - 100 feet road, Indiranagar, Bangalore) with Vineet and sarit to experience new things. If the receptionists in sarees are surprizing you in bangalore wait till the waiter pops in with a cool HP iPaQ to take orders from you. Then one of them hands over wet scented towels to clean your face and hands. What thoughfulness!!

The Menu card would stike you with awe because its nothing like anywhere else. The exotic thing with this is everything has been designed with some creativity from dishes to menu card to interior decor. Here you could have foods from all the 4 south indian states (Thats why its south indies!!!). we started of with the murungai charu(Drumstick leaves) soup with fried onions ( really nice combination!!!). Then we went on to kal dosai with karuverpilai poondu kuzambhu. This combination is smashing. Then we ordered neer dosa which is yet another delicacy. We finished off with besi bela bath. Infact the waiter told us that there is some 8 - 9 course treat for 500. since we did not have that much appetite we ordered individually. Surely i would go for that one day.

Comin to the wallet part, the bill was around 650 which is really worth. The hospitality of the waiters would amaze you. I would surely recommend people to this restaurant. This provides not just food but rich experience. GO Xperience it!!! For more details visit http://www.thesouthindies.com

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.

looking through the pensieve

Happy Birthday Harry Potter!!!! i saved up my blog on you for this special occasion. "To buy or not to Buy" was the dilemma which i had for the "Deathly Hallows", the last book in the Harry Potter sequel. Harry Potter series is the best book that gripped the hearts of the people of this era. It is hard to come across such treasure in ones lifetime with the last being TINTIN. Saying all these i pre-ordered this book for just 633 @ indiaplaza.in while the book on the stands was about to cost 975.

Though i ordered this book i went to my native for the weekend and got the book in my hands only on monday morning. It was followed by a two sleepless nights and atlast i finished reading the climax of the gripping story which encompassed 7 books across 10 years. I have no words to explain my experience with it. Never had i read any story so very engrossed all through the night and sometimes dodging my mom's call to sleep and sometimes leaving the studies behind in 12th standard :)

It all started like this. i never knew what it is some 10 years back. it was my good pal Bharathi who handed over the philosophers stone book. it made me feel as though its all realistic and i started living in the potter's world from that day on.Then i got the chamber of secrets game on my PC which thrilled me to read the second book. From then on there is no stopping me, i jumped straight to the Goblet of fire which as per to me is the best of all classics. Then i read Askaban courtesied from Bharathi again. similarly i laid hands on the 5th and 6th book during my college days.

Atlast when the final book was released i made up my mind to buy the book on the day of release itself.The deathly Hallows ended on a happy note.Truely J.K rowling made a difference in the literary arena which created an impact on many including me. With the 7 years of Harry's school days over now i wish that he had not passed the O.W.Ls at all so that there could have been two or more books on him :) Really i miss Harry and the Hogwarts. Ending this post with a hope that Rowling continues to write such magical adventures.

Starting a new Thread

This is nothing to do with POSIX thread or kernel threads. As the days go by i find myself in a similar situation as i was some 4 years back. that is when i joined my college in madurai & i used to go far and wide to try out new hotels out there and sometimes i used to recommend people about which recipe is good at which place. similarly after been here in bangalore for some one and half months i have been to quite a lot of hotels and more joints are yet to come.Therefore i thought of recording my new discoveries right here.

Three Quarter Chinese
This fully chinese style restaurant is in the AMOEBA complex off brigade road.Though the entrance to it is not grand, once you are inside it strikes you with awe. The service is at its best. I was offered a non-smoking zone with two menu books(liquor & food) of which the first one i clearly evaded.I ordered for a LAT-CHE noodles veg and it puntured my purse by 170 (145 + VAT + all TAX) Though expensive its worth the experience and i would recommend it for atleast once.

Ambience : good
Service : Excellent
Taste : good
Bottomline : not exactly one of the places to throw a grand party.