Attitude of a Dabbawala

In the recent New York Times article, one Mumbai dabbawalla, Dhondu Kondaji Chowdhury, quoted

“There is a service called FedEx that is similar to ours — but they don’t deliver lunch”.

Their sheer confidence is appreciative.

getopts() problem in perl

Recently I was working on a perl script and had issues while getting command line parameters using function getopts(). I have perl version 5.003_07 installed on my machine.
The script was

use Getopt::Std;
getopts(‘u:p:a:o:f:’);

I spent lot of time analysing this issue. Finally I was able to fix the problem and want to post it somewhere for others who may face similar problem.

There was problem with .pl file association in Windows. You have to tell Windows to use the entire command line as arguments to the interpreter.

Follow following steps :-
1. Open the Windows Explorer and click on Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types.
2. Find the PL extension, and highlight it. 
3. If you see the Restore button, click on it.
4. Click on Advanced.  Find the action that runs the script (“Run” or “Open”) and click Edit.
5. Under “Application used to perform action;”, type:
C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe “%1″ %*
6. Click Ok out of all the boxes.

The problem should go away now.

Google Trends

Do you want to know what the world is searching for?
Google Trends displays top 10 searches on the front page. The objectionable search items (read porn) are removed from the results.
So go and see today’s trends.

Fastest Growing Religions

Foreign Policy magazine has an analysis of World’s fastest growing religions and the main reason behind this growth is high birth rate in India.
As if we needed more proof of high population growth in India.

Sleepless in Seattle

Any reason why the story that Microsoft has Acquired aQuantive (online advertising firm) is not on any news or not a hot topic on blogosphere. After all, this deal is much more expensive then Google-Youtube deal and  Google-DoubleClick deal.

Is Microsoft really losing its ground so as not to get anybody interested anymore about what’s happening in Seattle.

Tasteless Cartoon

Has India Media gone too far when Hemant Morparia published following cartoon in Mid-day.

Marketing India

Seth Godin is a A-List blogger who has a take on Indian Consulate in New York. I like his practical suggestions to Maximize benefits rather than minimize cost. I sincerely hope somebody from “India Shining” reads the suggestions and do something about it.

The more important issue is this: this is a business. They take in more than $20,000 a day in fees, but even more important, the way they market themselves has a direct and important impact on travel decisions. No visa, no trip. Big hassle, no trip. Given that every single person traveling to this vast country must deal with the consulate first, think of the leverage… Just a small influence on the quantity or quality of travel to India would be huge.

As an Indian, I am looking forward to his India visit and hear his observations about my country. How he contrasts cow grazing on highways against posh IT parks of Bangalore.

And while we are on subject of A-list bloggers take on India, read this interesting piece written by Scott Adams on incidence when a groom in India showed up drunk and his little brother ended up marrying the bride.

Technical Interviews in big software companies

In India, all it takes to get a technical job is basic knowledge of languages like C++, java and some OS concepts. I have personally attended atleast 10-15 interviews during my career and came to conclusion that getting into Indian Software company doesn’t really require great knowledge or skills. I am not saying that any Tom, Dick and Harry can make it but if you know your basics, Infy/Wipro/TCS is not far.

I have always been intrigued about the recruitment process in top notch software companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. Today I stumbled across Justin’s blog wherein he has described his interview with Amazon which had a happy ending. It’s really a fabulous piece of writing which I recommend to everybody on job hunt.

Justin has also written about his interview with Microsoft, which unfortunately didn’t go as planned but it did prepare him for his interview with Amazon.

This piece really made me think where I stand in terms of going for an interview with such companies. Hmmm… got to brush up my C++ skills, algorithms and data structures knoledge.