Can I code day and night for 4 days, like how I used to do during college time or even in the first 2 years of my career? A big no.

Can I still read a technical book non-stop from cover to cover? NO!

Do I still have that passion to learn everything? Probably yes. But I don’t care about that anymore.

Other commitments apart, even if I had everything else setup for doing the above things, I’d not, because of the laid-back attitude I picked up over time in this industry. After some years, I guess you become numb and dumb. Numb, because you stop enjoying/appreciating all the beautiful things in the world around you, become too insensitive to non-professional things. Dumb, because the mechanical work style you are forced in to makes your brain cells commit suicide and there is no sure-fire way to bring them back.

To visualize what I am saying, look at the graph below. I plotted my competence/commitment over time (from 2000 to 2008). Click to open the original image in a new window.

For anyone who has been in this industry, the graph should not come as a surprise. Like all the college grads, I was brimming with enthusiasm and positive energy (I’d even call it “too much optimism”!) when I came in to this industry back in 2000. Soon, I realized things didn’t work the way you thought they would, or the way they were projected to work. My motivation took a big hit. It went up again when I switched companies around Q2 2003 and Q1 2004. Do you see that dip in commitment/competency around the period Q4 2005 – Q3 2006?? I got married then I’d rate both my commitment and competence are at a record low now.

Trend line shows that over these 8 years my competency had stayed more or less equal, while my motivation/commitment quotient has decreased steadily! This is scary, because I don’t know whether I am doing the right things now to keep my motivation at the same level at least, if not make it go up. If you ask me, I guess retiring from computer industry when I am 35 or 40 yrs old is the most interesting option I have. I doubt its feasibility though

Have you faced such a “mid-life”(?!) crisis in your professional life? How did you cope up with it?

As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! ), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?

Does this show that Yahoo’s technical pool lacks the depth usually associated with Google’s? I believe not. I think you will find dumbos everywhere. I am pretty sure I can find at least one Google engineer who was not aware of dynamic programming before he got hired. With 16,805 employees worldwide, statistically it is impossible for Google to have everyone in it’s payroll to be the best or even above average. Oops, I am digressing…the topic of the post is not “Hype behind Google” (but that is a nice title…may be I should make a post on this topic one day…hmm!) anyway.

I see a similar trend here in Intel. Intel is huge. Worldwide, it is around 86,000 in number, which is understandable because of all the cool fabrication units and ATMs that Intel owns and operates. Though the average standard of the Intel employees (persons involved with SW/HW) looks good, I have seen some Intel groups really lacking the depth. I have met lots of brilliant and really talented engineers here, and an equal number of (or more!) dumb engineers too. I think when a company grows, especially by acquiring other small companies, it’s initial talent pool will keep getting diluted till it becomes just another company. I believe that is what has happened to Yahoo and that is what will happen to Google (or any other, for that matter) one day.

BTW, the above image is from this link (note that the results may vary now, new reqs get posted daily; Yahoo! India is hiring a lot recently. If you want to dilute the pool, do jump in…just kidding! )

Dear Sir/Madam,I am Mr. G. Bertino, STMicroelectronics Company. GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.Our company deals on the importation and
exportation.

Such as we mainly manufacture & export all kinds of micro and
electronics,who has it worldwide headquater s in GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.

My company is currently recruiting Representatives/Agents
that will assist us with some logistics jobs as well asreceiving
payments on our behalf and remitting back to us.Please contact
us for more information if you are interested in being an agent
of my company. You will be given more information about the job
and your remuneration.

I expect your favorable response.

Regards,
Mr. G. Bertino
STMicroelectronics Company
website: http://www.st.com/stonline/

Why?? Because, I used to work for ST Microelectronics (Noida) & this is the first spam mail I get with ST mentioned in it. So, I took a peek in to the headers (naturally!).

Received: from leopard.it.wsu.edu [134.121.1.32] by mx252n.mysite4now.com with SMTP;
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:25:22 -0800
Received: from www.mail.wsu.edu (joy.it.wsu.edu [134.121.1.113])
by leopard.it.wsu.edu (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.11) with SMTP id m1CK6ftB025744;
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:06:41 -0800
Received: from 41.204.226.111
(SquirrelMail authenticated user jrmcmahan)
by www.mail.wsu.edu with HTTP;
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:07:16 -0000 (GMT)
Message-ID: <11401.41.204.226.111.1202846836.squirrel@www.mail.wsu.edu>
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:07:16 -0000 (GMT)
Subject:
From: “STMicroelectronics Company” <info@st.com>
Reply-To: stmec01@yahoo.es
User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1
X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-milter (http://amavis.org/)
X-Rcpt-To: <kannan.ramanathan@jumbledthoughts.com>
X-SmarterMail-Spam: SPF_None, Surriel.com

See the “From IP” (41.204.226.111)?? It is from Nigeria. Quick look up turned up this :

41.204.226.111 is from Nigeria(NG) in region Africa

query for 41.204.226.111…

OrgName:    African Network Information Center

OrgID:      AFRINIC

Address:    03B3 - 3rd Floor - Ebene Cyber Tower

Address:    Cyber City

Address:    Ebene

Address:    Mauritius

City:       Ebene

StateProv:

PostalCode: 0001

Country:    MU
ReferralServer: whois://whois.afrinic.net

NetRange:   41.0.0.0 - 41.255.255.255CIDR:       41.0.0.0/8

NetName:    NET41

NetHandle:  NET-41-0-0-0-1

Parent:

NetType:    Allocated to AfriNIC

NameServer: NS1.AFRINIC.NET

NameServer: NS-SEC.RIPE.NET

NameServer: NS.LACNIC.NET

NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET

Comment:

RegDate:    2005-04-12

Updated:    2005-07-12


OrgAbuseHandle: GENER11-ARIN

OrgAbuseName:   Generic POC

OrgAbusePhone:  +230 4666616

OrgAbuseEmail:  abusepoc@afrinic.net


OrgTechHandle: GENER11-ARIN

OrgTechName:   Generic POC

OrgTechPhone:  +230 4666616

OrgTechEmail:  abusepoc@afrinic.net


# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-02-15 19:10

# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

Results returned from whois.afrinic.net:

% This is the AfriNIC Whois server.

% Note: this output has been filtered.

% Information related to ’41.204.224.0 – 41.204.227.255′

inetnum:        41.204.224.0 - 41.204.227.255

netname:        DIRECTONPC-Wireless-ISP-NETBLK

descr:          Dynamic IP pools for Direct on PC Ltd

descr:          Fixed wireless broadband

descr:          wireless Internet services for Abuja and PH.

country:        NG

admin-c:        IP1-AFRINIC

tech-c:         IP1-AFRINIC

status:         ASSIGNED PA

mnt-by:         DOPCNG-MNT

mnt-lower:      DOPCNG-MNT

source:         AFRINIC # 

Filteredparent:         41.204.224.0 - 41.204.255.255

person:         IP Administrator

address:        Direct-on-PC Limited

address:        Plot B, Block 1

address:        Illupeju Industrial avenue

address:        Illupeju

address:        Lagos

address:        Nigeria

address:        NG

phone:          +234-1-2701700

fax-no:         +234-1-2713554

e-mail:         hostmaster@directonpc.com

org:            ORG-DOP1-AFRINIC

nic-hdl:        IP1-AFRINIC

mnt-by:         DOPCNG-MNT

source:         AFRINIC # Filtered

The user name jrmcmahan is quite common in spam mails (remember 419 scam?), and is a blacklisted one in many servers.

I guess, spamming (mass mailing) has become a big profession in Nigeria and other African countries. Though IT is well developed in India and Indians don’t just have to depend on spamming, I know of atleast one full time spammer in India who earns like 10x of what I make through my day job BTW, there is a spam fan site & a collection of more scam than you can read here.

One crazy online-ification of a common real world activity is the bunch of confession sites that have popped up in the recent years. These sites carry thousands and thousands of confessions (petty ones to the really sick ones, sometimes with lurid descriptions) by real people. The idea of providing an online space for public confession sounds like a good idea. But, the problem starts when you start reading others confessions, because 90% of them are related to carnal activities or activities that create an yuck feeling deep down in your stomach. The lurid descriptions can rival Playboy or Hustler anytime!

These sites offer the confessions categorized in to a neat list of containers. For example, look the left pane in one site:

How nice of the site owners to provide us with a “Top rated” and “Most read” lists I guess, the top rated list items are determined by the number of “I like it” clicks by the readers, but the question is why would anyone read another person’s confession and say “I like it“? Do they like the confession content or the fact that the other person was bold enough to come online and confess?? These sites just cater to the voyeuristic basic instinct in each one of us.

One other effective online idea is the cyber begging. I am not referring to those sites setup for collecting donations for some natural calamity or something, but these are for covering personal expenditures. Some interesting links:

• Yahoo directory has a section under “Societies and Culture” for E-Pan handling
• Tom Locke sent a snail mail to 100 companies asking for some freebies. Results are listed in his site.

According to Wired, this trend of e-pan handling is dwindling, which may be true. But, that’s what people said about spam too.

Bottomline: you don’t have to be an Einstein to make a quick buck in the internet!

Demonoid, one of my favorite trackers, is down again. I was not running my torrent client last week, as it was used for doing “important” things like playing “Super bounce out” and “Half-life” by my relatives. I saw the “CRIA blocked us” message in Demonoid.com only this morning, a bad start to the week, I’d say!!

Demonoid.com lately has been giving lots of problems – site won’t load, blank pages, torrent files won’t download – all these irritating stuff, and now the site itself has “officially” gone down. Luckily the trackers are up, so your current downloads won’t be affected. Lets pray Demonoid finds a nice home in some country where people have other jobs than shutting down the torrent sites. How about Sweden?

Talking of Sweden, I read Prince is trying to curb Piratebay with the help of Web Sheriff. What a joke! Read this “fan article” to understand why Websheriff is such an interesting personality.

[Snapshot: Tool output]

[Close up of the message]

The tool very helpfully said “Your platform is dead & have a nice day!”. “Have a nice day”??? Though, now I need to take the flash, go to the lab and program it using a flash programmer, I couldn’t help laughing at this cheeky message!

Who is going to reset the ATM when Windows crashes?

Above is an ATM of the famous VTB bank of Russia, powered by an unactivated copy of Windows XP. Look at a closeup of the activation dialog box below.

I wonder why ATMs don’t have their own OSs! When we talk so much about security / WORMS & malware stuff, does it make sense to use a general purpose OS for something so critical as an ATM? Even a cellphone costing a mere INR 4000 has so any OS flavors to choose from, why is the ATM you withdraw that INR 4000 from is stuck with a most-often-unpatched version of Windows? As Obelix would have said – “These ATM makers are crazy!!”

Check out these interesting links related to Windows Crashes:

• Windows crashes on Flight information screens and ATMs
• ATM crash here and here
• Slot machines too…
• Gallery full of Windows crashes on ATMs/slot machines
• Oh no! Even trains are not spared & other Public computer errors

The site took sometime to load, but the thing that got my attention was - The interface hasn’t changed at all.  I guess the store name is the only thing that has changed (kinda like selling the same shampoo in a new bottle with the tag “New formula”). The site looked neat, though I personally hate fixed-width layouts. Why can’t they make use of all of my 19″ monitor space? A simple fluid layout would have been nice.

“Cut the crap, do what you came here for”, I thought. Since I couldn’t find something like  “Personal care” or “Beauty products” (?!) in the available products section, I decided to do a shop-wide search. The real irritation started!

[Click the image to open it in a new window, enlarged. For convenience sake, I have put a dim filter on the image, except for the areas of interest.]

As you can see from the image, the top bar lists out more product categories than the items in the search drop box. WTH? Doesn’t Indiaplaza know how to search in the other categories? Or probably it wants us to manually go through all the product listing pages to find ours. This made me very curious, I decided to check out the other famous (or atleast, whatever shopping stores I know!) online shopping sites.

[Click the image to enlarge it] 

Indiatimes shopping has a decent search bar, prominently on top.  Whew, a good start. I typed in the name of the product I was looking for. I got a plain screen telling me that the search didn’t return anything.  

Ok, it couldn’t find my product, but why can’t they show me a helpful screen of related products? Or atleast, how about giving me other options for my search string, in case I misspelt it? Hmm…

My next stop was rediff shopping. It has a nice search box and wonder of all wonders, when I started typing it automatically showed me a list of possible search strings. Wow! I felt kinda optimistic, I was not sure why.

[Click the image to enlarge]

My search returned the following screen. It showed the results for “800is”, not for my product. Where is the product I searched for????? I pressed back, thinking probably I mistyped in the search box. With the correct product I was looking for, in the search box, I did the search again.

[Click the image to enlarge]

The same page X-(

Why cannot Rediff tell me at least that the product I searched for was not found?? Rediff.com looked to be in the other extremity of Indiaplaza.in, when it comes to reporting the search results. After having spent close to 1.30hrs in all the sites (Indiaplaza.in, Rediff, Sify & eBay) fruitlessly, I still haven’t found what I am looking for. And, with the sites in such a state, most probably won’t ever!

If you don’t see the image above, click here. Some more of my images are availale here.

We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me

FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.

The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!

I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.

Becoming famous online has become very easy, thanks to interesting sites like http://www.fakeyourspace.com or http://www.mydynamicspace.com. The former stands out, because of its ability to sell you *virtual* friends, for a small amount (0.99c/mo). Now, this is what I’d call as a great idea, a good money-making mechanism. It’s bang on target, feeding those socially deprived persons who crave for online stardom. No breaking-the-head over deriving a solution, no deadlines, a simple no-brainer idea, but still you make millions, if not billions. What else can you ask for?

Whenever you see such an obvious, simple idea like this, making millions, don’t you feel bad/low that it didn’t occur to you !? Of course, when you have a day job, sweating it out for some MNC, trying to just survive amidst the fierce competition to keep the bread/butter (or dal/roti) coming month after month, you won’t even have time to breath, forget thinking, but still……

BTW, fakeyourspace is down, the domain has been parked by Godaddy! I don’t know why the site is down, but am pretty sure the creator must be enjoying his/her ass off in a distant island!

More links

• Interesting articles on FakeYourSpace here and here
• Google Cached copy of Fakeyourspace

define MONTHS_SIZE 12

typedef struct __monthNoPair
{
char *strNoMonth;
char *strMonthName;
} monthNoPair;

static monthNoPair months[] = {
("1", "January"),
("2", "February"),
("3", "March"),
("4", "April"),
("5", "May"),
("6", "June"),
("7", "July"),
("8", "August"),
("9", "September"),
("10", "October"),
("11", "November"),
("12", "December")

};

char *getMonthFromData(int noMonth)
{
int i;

for (i=0; i < MONTHS_SIZE; i++)
{
if (atoi(months[i].strNoMonth) == noMonth)
return strdup(months[i].strMonthName);
}
return NULL;
}