Monday, June 13, 2016

Should career be more than a degree?

How often do we have the career discussion with the children with "Do you want to be an engineer, doctor, scientist, journalist....". This is what we were asked as kids and it is time we changed the discussion. We have to start thinking careers beyond the degree (and also colleges).

If we look at ourselves, after having spent 10,15,20 years of our lives working, how much is driven by the degree? So what are we doing everyday? We are solving problems and the problems could be engineering problems, social problems, personal problems, management problems. Also while there are big buckets and categories, all of them are related to one another. So a good way to have a career discussion would be, what are the kind of problems your kid wants to solve. Once you do that you open a whole wide world of opportunities. Your child really cares about cancer?, let him/her go work on that. Someone wants to generate green power, sure. What about saving the coral reefs (or the mangroves) from getting extinct, why not. Clean the Ganga, fix the religion, help kids learn, make the government work, travel faster, go to space, make a movie, spread the Indian culture....and the list is endless.

Does the goal sound too big for children to understand. I doubt it. Children can understand a lot more than we think. The place we fail is that we ourselves cannot understand that, this is where we need to do our learning. Rather than limit them by our knowledge, we need to learn with their vision. The key is to give them data points. Understand and explain to them what it will mean to get there. Get them ready for the journey. Connect and get them connected with folks who might have traveled that path.  They have the vision and we have to connect the dots.

Equally important is to ask the question "how". If we were to take an example of say "Travel faster", the pertinent question would be "How can I make people/goods travel faster".  In this, there is an engineering problem, there is a communication problem, there is a design problem, policy problem and many more. So help the children decide on, how you want to contribute, based on their skills and interest.

Is this system without faults, of course not. The children could be limited by what they see around them and that could be both good or bad. The key is to give the children exposure to the world and the happenings. With the internet, there are channels available to explore things that were impossible in the past. There is an information deluge on the internet you say, well that is a key skill for them to acquire too, get loads of information and then filter it into knowledge. Will the jobs pay? I don't know, but getting a job should not be a milestone of success. There is value for excellence and it is better to be excellent at something and get paid meagerly than to be average at something else and get paid handsomely. 

For a very very long time we have limited the next generation's vision, it is time to give them flight.

Monday, September 21, 2015

The Experiment: OpenStreets Bangalore



There has a been a lot of heated discussion around the Open Streets Bengaluru's event at the HSR Layout on the 20th of September. Haven't seen such a heated discussion around a "citizen's" initiative in Bangalore for a long time. So thought I will add my views to the discussion. Why me, because I am a part activist and part business operator in HSR Layout.

While Bangalore Mirror has declared the event as a success, I do not see a criteria defined for success. If you have to deploy "225 traffic policemen", "200 law and order officials" and "75 home guards" to keep the vehicles out in about 6 sq. KM area and a population of 24749 people, that makes it a policeman for every 50 people in that area, I would call it a curfew and nothing else. In addition to this, there were 200 volunteers and BMTC staff to help with the event. So you decide whether you want to call it a success.

I haven't seen a statistic for the number of people who participated but I would like to take a wild guess (from my experiences in helping/participating in some of the Cycle Day/Kere Habba events in my neighborhood), the participation would not have been more than a few thousand people through the day. Out of this, how many were local residents and how many came from outside of HSR Layout would be interesting to know. Considering that it was such a big deal among the activist group, I would guess at least 50% of them were from outside of HSR. Now how did they get there, I am sure a lot of them took their cars (I have friends who braved it in a cycle but I think they are exceptions) since they cannot get the family/children to ride on the Bangalore roads. I can say this with confidence because I would not have mustered the courage to take my daughter cycling to HSR from Arakere where I live, of-course I did not go cause I am sitting at home with a fractured ankle.  If we take the remaining 50% as local residents, there were at very best 1 or 2 thousand people. Would 1-2 thousand people have not walked around in HSR Layout without the OpenStreets initiative, the answer is for you to keep.

And before I start sounding all negative, let me double clarify that I am a great supporter of this initiative, but I think this one failed on one count. In the overzealous effort to make it a success, it became and event of exclusion instead of becoming an event for inclusion. As a lot of people pointed out, in an attempt to assert the freedom, it did encroach on others freedom.  Why did it end up becoming that way, I do not know, but here are few thoughts collected from various discussions, interlaced with my "deep" insights :-)
  1. It blocked too large an area which was not required. It was disproportionate to the number of people participating/supporting the cause.
  2. Just because you block the road one day, people are not going to buy cycles. They are just not going to go out. Effectively that is what happened. There is too much learning to do in terms of understanding the BMTC and the route and the stop etc for that one day. The easy thing is just stay put where you are.
  3. Not everyone wants to go out and cycle, skateboard, run, dance on the street. So we need to have more reasons for people to come in an join the initiative. Unfortunately in India, we grow up and once we do that we don't do stuff like the above "which is mostly for kids/teens."
  4. Although RWAs were on board (not sure now many have sway over residents anyway), I am not so sure about the local businesses were taken into confidence. Businesses rely on the weekend for 80% of their sales and that suffered. The businesses should have been integrated into the event. 
  5. The information was not adequate for an event this size where a 6 sq km area was completely blocked to traffic. There was a confusion about emergency response, airport shuttles, timings of the event, areas in which the activities were happening and a lot more.
While the activist in me wants to say that these are all excuses for the people who don't want to change, the businessman in me stops me from saying that. If we have to get these initiatives to succeed, we have to make friends, not enemies. From this experiment, we have gone close to being branded as extremists and we should definitely address this issue next time around. 
all the packets of instant noodles tested in the state-run laboratory were contaminated - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/food-inspectors-order-recall-of-maggi-noodles-say-it-contains-excess-lead/#sthash.VYGafolG.dpuf
all the packets of instant noodles tested in the state-run laboratory were contaminated - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/food-inspectors-order-recall-of-maggi-noodles-say-it-contains-excess-lead/#sthash.VYGafolG.dpuf
all the packets of instant noodles tested in the state-run laboratory were contaminated - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/food-inspectors-order-recall-of-maggi-noodles-say-it-contains-excess-lead/#sthash.VYGafolG.dpuf
The Food Safety and Drug Administration (FDA) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh said high lead content was found during routine tests on two dozen packets of instant noodles, manufactured by Nestle in India. - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/food-inspectors-order-recall-of-maggi-noodles-say-it-contains-excess-lead/#sthash.VYGafolG.dpuf
The Food Safety and Drug Administration (FDA) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh said high lead content was found during routine tests on two dozen packets of instant noodles, manufactured by Nestle in India. - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/food-inspectors-order-recall-of-maggi-noodles-say-it-contains-excess-lead/#sthash.VYGafolG.dpuf

Saturday, May 9, 2015

7 Personality traits that will stress you out

There are a lot of stressors in life these can get further enhanced by your personality trait. Here are some personal traits, that will get you stressed out.

1. Making and meeting commitments: If you are one of those guys/gals who believes in making and meeting commitments,  then get ready to be stressed out in life.

2. Punctual: If you believe in being everywhere on time, this is sure to stress you out. If you are this type then you will also expect others to be punctual as well, and this will stress you further.

3. Problem Solving: If you get an urge to fix any problem that you see around you, then you are in for a lot of stress.

4. Helpful: If you have a kind and helping nature, you will always be stressed out managing people's expectations.

5. Perfectionist: You will spend all your time worried about making things perfect. Perfect as you know does not exist.

6.Diligent: If work is something that keeps you worried, then you will continuously stay stressed since there is no end to work.

7. Rational: If you are all the time worried about the reasons you are stressed out, it will stress you out further.

So, if you see, if you brain is functioning right, you will have stress. It is like a by product of your brain working, exactly like the smoke coming out of the exhaust when the engine is working. The option you have is keep the exhaust open and let the smoke go out.

Monday, September 24, 2012

The heat is on

Next time you want to go buy a super smart phone, ask one question, what is the "Thermal Envelope" for the phone that you are buying. It will be expressed in terms of watts. The higher the number the better it is.

Taking a typical value of 3W (fairly aggresive for a lot of the devices), lets try to allocate this to the various components on the device. The LCD screen takes an order of 200-400mW of power. The modem can take about 600-700mW. That leaves you anywhere between 2.2W -1.9W for the rest of the system. If you allocate about 200 to 300mW for other peripherals like the eMMC, SD Card etc then you are left with a 2W to 1.6W for the complete SoC which includes the CPU, Memory, the Graphics engine, the audio engine and video encode/decode.

Applying the 80/20 rule for power taken by Graphics & CPU vs rest of the SoC, you will have about 1.6W to 1.3W of power that can be allocated to the CPU and graphics combined. Since the graphics nowdays take about the same amount of power as CPU iteself (Snapdragon Krati takes about 0.8W of power while the graphics can take upto 1.2W), you see that the CPU gets about 800mW to 600mW it can take most.

So even though you have a big honking CPU dual core/quad core etc, the performance is really limited by the thermal envelope of the phone you are buying. Also the phone performace depends heavily on all the components not being loaded at the same time. Which means you should know what your usage is going to be and how that will change the power equation. A quick benchmark for that will exercise most of the components together is if you can stream a HD video clip over the air for about 20min and see how hot the phone is getting, or try video conferencing.

Disclaimer: The numbers are typical and change from one phone to another. An OLED display will give you a little more headroom where there are more black pixels than white.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Why this Kolaveri

I know this theme has been beaten to death, but I wanted to conduct a poll on FB as to what are their favourite versions of Kolaveri (now that there are so many) and it will not let me put a link to the video in the options. That is wierd and that is what causes the Kolaveri. So I decided to put the list here instead. This is not an exhaustive list cause some of them that are out there are pretty lame. So here is my list.

The original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR12Z8f1Dh8
The Punjabi - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kzHxat-wMk
The Kid version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z1DGPIafIs
The R&B Mix - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6gHlK-Mm2Y
The Female Version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z1DGPIafIs
Happy Sing's Version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWEjbam6F0g
The Exam Version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dfwh71KUEQ

Now if I missed any good ones, please do drop me a note.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Look at it this way

Have you heard thousands of people traveling from all over India to Sri Lanka to listen to Ram Katha? By comman sense it would sound pretty lame. The greatest Ram Katha gurus are all based out of India, and if you are not the Sanskar Channel types then let me tell you Morari Bapu is a quite a star in this field. Then why Sri Lanka?

Well here is the sales pitch. The Ram Katha is happening in Ashok Vatika. And again for the non mythological types, this is where Sita was kept by Ravan after abducting her. Interesting pitch indeed. The Ram Katha is starting next week, I think, and the organizer is running a full house. Reservations were all full at least a month or so agao. The Sri Lankan govt is supporting this and why shouldn't it, it would bring in a lot of moolah. It typically translates into 10-12 day per person package (Ram Katha's take close to 7-8 days and add a 3 day site seeing), not sure how many touristy folks would go to SL for 10-12 day vacation.

And here we are in India trying to destroy the Ram Sethu to bring in ships instead of people. Forget the sentimental reasons, I think keeping the Ram Sethu makes more economic sense than dredging it.

BTW, another tit bit on religious tourism, a couple of months ago, there was a 7 day Bhagwat Katha on a cruise liner and folks paid over a Lakh each to book their seats.

Friday, June 18, 2010

Death of code design

Maybe I am old and nostalgic. Or maybe I am just at the wrong place but from where I stand I don't see a whole lot of design happening. The last bation in good design the system software as well with the evolution of Open Source Software. Before the OSS fanatics pounce on me, let me tell you that OSS has enabled a whole lot of people to do great things, but the fall out of that is now any dude who can read english thingks s/he can develop code. Speed has clearly overtaken good design as a criteria to take your code into Open Source. If you are the first to submit your code the chances of it getting accepeted are lot higher than if you are the second guy.

Now if you talk of a design, folks think you are using it to buy time. If your code runs, it does not matter how many hacks you have put in there. Nobody really cares if you have a root cause for your problem or not. If you can get the code to work by adding an extra line of code, nobody questions why that was necessary and why the fix required the change. Imagine doing the same thing while building your house.