I've noticed this happen to me and several other coders I've worked with. Especially when you're dealing with new processor architectures or poorly documented ones, you run into black holes and suddenly things stop working. The normal tendency is to rev up and go at it again and again till it gets working. Only to notice the same old result cropping up again - hardware lock ups, system hangs or worse still "nothing happens..." (ever played SpaceQuest?) I've been sucked into this quicksand of blanking out more than once, and I've tried to get out of it the same way only to find myself drawn deeper inside; and frustration aggregating.

Drawing the analogy, the best way to stay afloat quicksand is supposedly to stay as still as you can to slow down the process. After about two days recently of hammering away at a problem, I finally decided to try Sherlock Holmes' method of dissociation. I started concentrating on something else entirely and left this at the back of my mind. The third day, I just had one go at it, after having formulated the best means to wriggle out of the situation and it worked. I wonder where Conan Doyle found an association between music (playing or appreciating) and subconscious thinking to have captured it in Holmes. This is something that'll be worth the try the next time I find myself in a fix.

There are several clubs and organisations operating in my town, enjoying good membership. At least three of these organisations are built to propogate universal brotherhood and charity. Each of the organisations I am referring to have their principles (which remain unknown, unfathomed an unexplored by over 85% of members and are slowly being lost for ever; I have had the sad opportunity of seeing this happen before me.)

So why join such an organisation at all? The most common reason for people getting together in such organisations is to enjoy many a drink with comrades in a neutral location (many a time, at someone else's expense.) Intellectual conversation is a regular absentee, more frequent then regular absentees. Slowly this makes the intellectual person either lose faith and leave or lose his intellect to a liquor. This deranged following of alcoholic fellowship once led a Doctor to talk about how a male hip is different from a female hip during a meeting. Partially it was a joke, but on the other part it was frustration vented out.

Charity and Brotherhood are farce definitions to these people, the only time I can see people uniting is when they are ganging up to trouble, irritate or derail a common foe. I call this ganging (not unity or brotherhood.) Any similarities to Nazi Germany here? The resultant is a slow injection of disbelief in morality, ethics and principle into strong advocates and followers of them.

Well, what's the answer? I'm coming to set ya right and you're not gonna like this one bit! It'll be like setting a dislocated shoulder, it'll hurt. - IATIA (This volcanic venting has been inspired after reading Wittgenstein; although I don't quote him here.)

Here's a list of things that have been occupying my mind recently:

• Water for Borewell digging to be delivered in time.
• Car remote keys to be replaced.
• DSL Internet connection to be restored after ISDN switch/port misconnection (at telcom service provider).
• Roads in town dug up in a haphazard manner to lay sewers that obviously wouldn't work due to lack of capacity.
• Getting Repairs done at our house in Bangalore.
• Viewing promised channels on Direct to Home TV setup and a Cable TV setup.

On all the above accounts, I notice one thing in common. The lack of delivering in time and complete disinterest in satisfying the consumer. One might wonder if I am dealing with bullish monopolies (geographically) in these areas. The answer is no, the lack of QoS pervades everybody; each as bad or worse than the other.

Digging a borewell for water requires approximately 4000L of water a day for a planned quantum of work. This needs to be delivered at a specific time every day. "Arbitrary Time Dilation", a pervasive disease in the Indian psyche has made this impossible stalling work, causing a backlog of water reserves for the next day.

The "Authorised Maruti Service Station" (who sold me my car) in my town has been regularly promising to fix my car remote keys. (One key in the pair has a fault that drains the battery in less than a week, and the battery ain't rechargable.) I have suggested to them at least two(2) months back that they could replace the remote control system which they fitted in the first place and has been faulty since day one. I hardly see one bothering to listen, finally I had to have someone purchase an alternate kit and fit it to the car. These people claim to be ISO 900x certified and "Maruti certified" (automaker certification), I am convinced that certification and accreditation provide no credentials and QoS and don't work. Earlier, they did a fiasco with fitting up a Maruti Van (the first ever Maruti-Suzuki model launched in India) by underestimating effort involved in changing the headlights. The same company, while I was about to acquire a car loan for buying a new car from them put a gentleman in charge of liasing with the Bank who confidently told me that my loan would never get approved (it got approved the same day he said that, after a chat with the Bank manager.)

After a moderate thunderstorm, my ISDN telecom carrier went poof and that was the end of my DSL access. In India calling Telephone or Electricity Departments for support is akin to screaming at the wall. You need to know someone inside who will request staff to attend to the problem. (Yes, continuation of service is a restrictive privilege.) After I explained the problem that my DSL router was not seeing the router outside, they still couldn't fix the damn thing; and on shifts, the second person informed through the contact was unaware that the problem had been reported to her counterpart earlier in the morning and insisted that I should have done that. Finally, the contact (being a higher level manager) sorted it out early next day using a team that was on special duty (the day being a central holiday.)

The roads in my town have been dug up recently, the work having been disparately contracted to different contractors without an overall linkage and management plan. The resultant is horrible - roads that have caused my dad to have his car exhaust pipe [on a car with low ride height] attended to at repeatedly. The abysmal 2ft diameter pipes to be laid as sewers have necessitated these contractors to dig 6ft under operative roads with little or no traffic warnings. Worse, during a recent tropical shower, any existing signs fell into the pits causing injury and death to citizens caught unawares. During a recent visit by the CM, part of the roads were laid in astounding speed in acceptable quality levels. The work is back to a standstill with half the town dug up and there is no hope that this sewer system will ever be networked and function in the near future. Further, roads laid a week earlier by the National Highways Authority (who took no trouble to collaborate with local authorities) were dug up immediately after. Commuting within the small town has become a nightmare, even if you're walking. The malhandling of the situation goes on despite newspaper coverage with a separate item on the same (apart from letters to the editor.)

We proposed a plan for repairing and slightly restructuring our house in Bangalore where my grandparents lived for over 3 decades (of retired life.) Getting a contractor in the "Software Capital" [bah!] who promises and delivers what he promises is a pipedream. The local authorities are very friendly with people from other states (sarcasm: full). They are almost impossible to deal with when you aren't a native of that state. This is a direct ill effect of linguistic state creation (thanks to the "architects" of India.)

Due to lack of sports channels in the Cable TV setup (allegedly a political ploy as a certain politician owns stake in a MSO distributor) throughout my state, I decided to get a DTH service from a firm that has an awful selection of channels except for two(2) sports channels. They had a premium movie channel (MGM/Zee/Select) which they discontinued without notice one silent night and despite angered viewer feedback, aren't bothered to do so. The Cable TV setup frequently disconnects service or changes channels at will. Despite the fact that all Cable TV setups are controlled by a local alliance, nobody is assured of any quality of service. Most technicians are even unaware of the type of cable or boosters or basic microwave theory to help provide better service (analog television). A combination of the lack of interest in providing customer service and technical incompetence.

Be it the government or a private service firm, gross lack of curt towards customers, coupled with indifference and incompetence dominate Indian companies. Once a delivery date/time is promised, Time delays are a norm, rather than the exception, and delays of delivery from one day to several weeks are quite common (after the salesman acquires his initial/advance payment.) Report a problem, and the first thing they say is "There's something wrong on your side." In a country where some business institutions have the line "The customer is always right." written in their offices (authored by M.K.Gandhi, creator of the "Gandhian Philosophy/method".) I had the same problems with a commercial Mobile Phone service provider from whom I took service for Internet access, and my connection was cut with no apparent explanation and never restored thereafter despite dozens of phone calls where they don't take the trouble to greet you by your name or even phone number.

I believe that this would persist because of public appeasement of all the ills that span both public and private sectors. Chauffers, maids and almost anyone you would want to employ are by default considered unreliable with an attitude towards pilfering. Even these people along with their ills are incompetent (and in many cases illiterate.) I am sick of hearing about the Indian economy boom; a side effect of Foreign Institutional Investment(FII) and not reflective of any growth. The bust is here to come, because all the required factors for it are deep-rooted and no one has any plans of working about it. Recently someone complained about the credentials of an educational institution and the credentials of its very founders, and got slapped with a defamation suit with no attempt made to answer the questions asked. I ask around and people tell me, "that's the way things work here." It is time someone woke up and changed this, and I don't care even if this is a dictator coming out of the masses. (reason: During the last war with Pakistan, due to a country-wide emergency alert, strikes were banned and services were perfect with the Government institutions. Workers could get fired for not reaching offices in time!)

Daniel Craig is the new James Bond for the upcoming film "Casino Royale" (James Bond [21]), a re-make of sorts (as the earlier Charles Feldman production was more of a comedy.) I doubt he has the poise and the style to succeed Pierce Brosnan. I hardly think anyone could give so much charisma back to the Bond character as he managed in Golden Eye. The next two were also worth watching for his Remington Steele style. He even had the same poise for Taffin. While Craig at best has played the bad guy (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Road to Perdition) and IMO doesn't suit the looks or the charisma one would want to see in James Bond. Being a Bond fan, I seriously wanted to have the likes of Clive Owen or Hugh Jackman playing this role. Sort of a disappointment, no matter how stylised he can look; I'll miss the uncanny style of Brosnan. Next 3 Bond movies (incl. 'Casino Royale'[21]) are a no no for me. This MTV story seems to confirm that a sizeable number (at least half of all) 007 fans are unhappy about this decision.

The Telecom industry has grown to adopt several reliability standards. Most devices including terminals (mobile phones) and switches enabling their networks, and servers providing the critical services are supposed to follow extremely high reliability standards. The Five Nines Reliability standard is close to the high reliability requirements of the telecom industry.

However looking at recent natural disasters, terrorist attacks, where telecom networks either are blacked out or are overloaded, the whole "reliability" count goes for a toss. A thunderstorm frying a power transformer supplying any network/telecommunications equipment is a smaller example of what might happen. To back-up the high reliability of these "essential" services, newer cabling standards (powerlines with cabling) are being introduced, so that node failure is not the cause of a blackout. Employing a restorative grid at such scales (switching entire underground cables and switches to embedded grid-like systems) doesn't seem too feasible; although IMO undoubtedly necessary. If powerful natural phenomenon (storms, thunderstorms and earthquakes) are going to persist, besetting the destruction I believe that we should be changing the way we want reliability of "essential services" is provided. In the "Information Age" (preceded by the "Industrial Age") communication has always been a vital tool in any activity; hence its reliability in this age is a major concern.

Geologically and Metereologically the earth goes from phases of stability to instability in cycles whose periodicity is unpredictable with the data and models we presently have. Global warming according to some can start an ice age, and according to some can actually cause a predominantly marine environment. Either way climatic patterns and weather of today is no longer similar to models laid down. Almost every part of the world has been experiencing climatic anomalies, swelled up storms at a far higher frequency than recorded earlier. It might take us years to find all the influential factors to mathematically model climatic and geological behavior which would be vital to human survival; as the "essential services" would be too.

The Linux Standards Base (LSB) was started with an intention to allow Linux users conveniently share packages across distributions. Presently even if you have an RPM compatible distribution, you cannot install one from, say SuSE to Mandriva. This has been due to a lot of issues of incompatiblity (including libraries, paths and dependencies that need to be standardised.)

The First strong effort that succeeded in getting compliance for pathnames was the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which eased the way distribution maintainers had to patch packages to fit their different path requirements. It served its purpose and slowly grew detailed to include more paths within the standard and most new distributions at least provide FHS compliance to some extent. This means you can create your new application without bothering too much about whether you will overwrite other app files or other apps overwriting yours.

This Itworld article attempts to cover the initial motivations of LSB. I was enthusiastic about participating in the effort, hoping that it would go in the right direction in letting people cross-install packages across distributions and make Linux ubiquitous. But after attempting to participate and contribute, I realised the wisdom of Ulrich Drepper's comment that the LSB is not bound to work. The reason although it appears simple enough to me, didn't hit me before. Without community and ISV participation, one cannot work on a unifying standard. It's as simple as that. Drepper points out to bad coding as far as the test-suite goes, and he is disinterested in working with bad coding (a community feeling, it's been in all community/Free software projects before.)

Further, due to the lack of community involvement there are the wrong people chairing subprojects and projects. There are people involved who've just started using linux less than a year or two ago. These people are going to find it too difficult to work with community developers and ISVs who have been involved for at least 5 or more years and are tuned into the way the community operates. Even a rational argument from these people is not going to be accepted as they would be alien to the community.

No single body or team (however technically adept) can create an adoptable standard. I believe the only way linux standards can be reached is the community working from developer to the distribution (grassroots->top) rather than (top->down). The Debian derived distributions have been able to adopt a Debian Common Core(DCC). This is probably what could grow into a more widely adopted standard in the future rather than disparate attempts like the LSB. If the LSB really wants to achieve its goals into the future, it has to work through the distributions and the community rather than away from them and actually create a similar common core. And then there's the argument between "standards" and "choice" (the freedom to keep things one's own way that has driven the Open Source Community so far.)

I have encountered (perhaps indirectly) phenomenon that was very close to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson. Having read this classic as a kid, I always wondered how RLS had landed on a dual-personality (classical interpretation) almost forgetting that the trigger had been chemical. I never really thought along the lines of modern intoxicating drugs such as LSD. This was until I did some lookup of the behavior of people before and after consuming alcohol (or in some cases controlled substances.) It then occurred to me that RLS himself might have had a personal experience that inspired him to write his all famous novella. I turned to the most-resourceful Wikipedia and found a match. RLS was under treatment with ergot during the time he wrote this book. Historically ergotism has been associated with diseases (in cattle - ergotism) in humans - like "St.Anthony's Fire". And further, LSD itself was first synthesised (though much later) in 1938 from Ergot. The link goes further suggesting that Kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries was an ergot infected hallucinogenic drink. The closest link that could have played a role in inspiring RLS was the Dancing Mania. Although the reasons for this are speculated (to be Ergot intoxication), foaming of the mouth, intense convulsions and violent behaviour were common symptoms of this, primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and the 17th century.

The usage of both intoxicating drugs and liquors have been common throughout the known timeline of human history and have always created distinctive changes in behaviour which were superficially observed; and most importantly contradicted moral or social inhibitions. The creation of civilisation allowed man to have "fermented" drinks (the very early alcohols.) There are also biblical references were the God of the Old Testament is thanked for "herbs" [the closest reference perhaps is II Kings 4:39 (there are more)] (which many modern scholars believe was marijuana.) I remember a conversation with a few friends of mine who debated with me that our behaviour is a reflection of what we consume (referring to our diet in the most part.) Their referalls were to vegeterianism, consumption of red meat and alcohol, each having its own behavioural effect. At that point, I wasn't too convinced as I believed that one's mind always had the tether to control and regulate behaviour. Now I am convinced otherwise. It is possible to experience intensive behavioural changes based wholly on ingested food alone; and in the case of intoxicants, violent or irrational behavior or both that the all powerful mind is weak at tempering. RLS in his novella also points out a habitual addiction to the mode of behaviour (of Mr. Hyde) that finally is inevitable even without requiring the chemical itself. This is extremely common in those who have been addicts or victims of substance abuse - where an instant relief from the abused intoxicant is impossible without substituting and disengaging its neurochemical effects. The insight one can draw from this work of 1886 is indeed intriguing and verily applicable to similar substance abuse by a far wider spectrum of population in modern times.

I get into these moods at times. I've tried to keep myself out of the traditional "office environment", and do the same coding and a bit of 'remote control' management. All this in the hope of escaping Job burnout. It has been good in a way that it has worked all along, keeping stress levels low and letting me concentrate objectively on the problem at hand. Many of my friends who left prior jobs for newer ones due to dissatisfaction, either were experiencing something similar or wanted to get out of "overpromising/underdelivering" cycles usually trickling top-down.

The big advantage of working remotely or from home is that you can easily dissociate mentally from the problem (remembering Sherlock Holmes' amazing intellectual strength of dissociation) and concentrate on something else. Even if this were a short while, it's easier to do this when you're away from the _buzz_. Despite all of this, I find that things can actually get to your nerves once in a while.

In my case this happens when I get the right information in place to let someone take a decision, so you can start hacking away at code. And when the decision doesn't happen because the decision maker isn't able to understand it, you get stuck. In short, you're in a situation where you (at least in your mind) have a clear path of things to do, however someone else deciding this (inevitable when a community or organisation or company is involved) ends up being a speed breaker. Ulrich Drepper's recent rant that the Linux Standards Base (LSB) project was going nowhere, points out to the lack of shouldering responsibility by people involved. Looking at these Meeting Minutes (the list itself being sporadic), one clearly understands that nothing much is achieved and yet nobody steps up and says, lets stop these agenda-skewed low-achievement meetings and work offline using email to its fullest. Software project failure and abandonment still continues to happen, and I believe it's closely linked to this inability in management & decision making, rather than Alan Cox's comments that modern software is not as thoroughly tested as the hardware it is to run on. (It's easy to keep dissociating intertwined elements for the sake of argument, yet in practice software and hardware go together.)

I find that teleconferences, videoconferences and face-to-face meetings many a time, do not achieve much. Unable to list out result-oriented agenda (but rather agenda for agenda's sake) for a meeting or open discussion with goals to be achieved is sufficient (and too common) creating rifts. I still do not understand why offline email discussions (though they too require objective goals) are less often used and people try and settle issues in realtime. Add to this, I see a dearth of people documenting what is being discussed or decided (or writing the "minutes" which hardly even addresses a problem statement.) The element of structured thought seems to disappear in a meeting room, when (at least in the IT industry), the item discussed involves structured engineering of a software component.

All of the above seem superficial edifices of a completely different problem. The inability at a very early stage to love what you do, do what you love and work with a team who are as passionate, enthused,objective and identifiable with oneself is at the heart of the flame of dissatisfaction. Add to this, the whole world seems to force into everyone a caring for oneself above others (while every religion or theosophy or spiritual philosophy teaches universal brotherhood). Everyone is expected to accept a rift between the "ideal" and the "practical". Those who refuse are deemed idealists and in the extreme of cases weirdos.

Before I tried out a "remote working model" (not just working from home, but far away from work or rather geographically dissociating from the team you work with), many suggested that I use weekends to "dissociate" from the problem/job at hand and "socialise" or "chill out". Essentially we believe all of us primates should ape other primates (you notice this from childhood, at junior grades, at school, and take it with you to work); a fervent belief and practise of stereotypism. From my perspective, that's akin to postponement. It just lets you meet the same elements and conditions of inertia later, which affects your self assessment of progress and almost everyone else involved. Everyone who creates an organisation or company or team start working on a goal. When they haven't documented it as they go about it (or made it extrasomatic or created a tangible resultant) and have stopped achieving it, they slowly seem to fall into the same quicksand that stereotypically affects a good number of people and organisations alike.

The big difference between achieving "Peak Performance" and the all important "Self Satisfaction" seems to be everyone willing to compromise with what they do, just to stay adrift on a survival raft in an overtly complex economy. Modern industry seems to be an extension of the factory phenomenon of the industrial age. It seems we are still not too far away from Henry Ford's great achievement (Fordism) of making human automatons. I am still searching for a way to keep structured problem solving and delivery of solutions whilst not deterring from providing as much personal freedom as possible. It seems we have all the necessary resources and technology, it's just the locked mindset that need to be freed.

Enough said, we all seem to have created a "Brave New" dystopic Orwellian world around us without realising the very consequences we face. The boastful Indian software industry is criticised for being an outsourcing wing that geographically displaces jobs, and now is slowly becoming more of a software sweatshop. We just don't realise that Big Brother(s) is(are) everywhere. It is high time we start believing that we can all make the world a better place just by doing a bit more and placing ourselves behind the rest of us in priority; yet not compromising with health and fitness (mental and physical) and personal satisfaction. Idealism is deeprooted from the Greco-Roman perspective pervading our thought process; and yet it has been the one thing that has let us change perception and remodel society. At least I'm happy I have a chance to mould things differently, not just for me but for quite a few others while I can. In most part, writing this long winded journal entry has been inspired by Steve Jobs' 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' speech.

I see people around, a lot of people I'm connected with, and the ape that we are; we seem to love aping other apes. Stereotyped living has probably been what we keep calling "civilisation". Every leap into a new cultural generation is created by an oddity (or rather an eccentricity) within the earlier generation.

I think the one piece that needs to be seeded into culture, is the freedom to be different; to avoid being a stereotype, to avoid doing what others have done or are doing. That's the only way evolution (or memetic evolution or whatever you choose to call it) could progress. Every earlier civilisation or culture that vanished without a trace tried to get organised, classified into specific types. Yet, we have to both diversify, build that into our mindsets, and still achieve interdependent living; now seems to be the right time to try and get it right, without trying to create a whole new romanesque world. If we don't start doing this now, science, technology and civilisation is all bound for the next loop by whatever might stop it.

We no longer need fear Nukes, there's Nature, Toxic Life forms, there's the Cosmos, anything can make an organised and settled civilisation disappear. We can't plan for everything if we just sit back to make a better world.

I had the opportunity of accompanying my Dad on a visit to Kerala. The monsoonal rains have persisted well over a month this year. I could see the place in its full splendour from the aircraft with green carpets over its beautiful hills and a lush mangrove forest covering the coast interred with backwaters.

Calicut was the town I was visiting, which had educational institutions, a thriving textile industry and yet the town was filled with people who seemed to hate urbanisation. It was a large town, but nothing close to city settlements elsewhere in the country. Owing to the recent rains that hadn't yet stopped, every building had moss covering the stone walls of its compound. This, being my first visit to Kerala and particularly this part of the western coast, impressed me enough, though I had almost no time except while driving between the hotel and the meeting hall.

I was most curious as to the reason for the beauty and such rich & lively terrain. It turns out that the western part of the plateau has been most affected by the very volcanic activity that created it. The soil and its richness are a resultant of this phenomenon. The people who have lived here for generations, have been directly influenced by the richness of the soil which seems to have passed on to them a passion and glow in all their activities. It was a pleasure interacting with them and joining them for a weekend meeting.

All the while, I've been impressed and drawn to the idea of hive minds in fiction - be it Star Trek's Borg or Stephen Baxter's Coalescent or the spiders from Stephen Spielberg's Arachnophobia or Orson Scott Card's "Formics". One might still call it flights of fancy or dismiss it as one of the surviving (though not super-evolved) relics of evolution (in ants, bees, their insect cousins and even in mole rats [mammals].)

But the eerie thought has crept through my mind, that civilisation today is almost one great hive. The direction of civilisation, subdivisions and the problems are suddenly beginning to unite. Pack structures (as we refer hierarchy in most mammals including wolves) are prevalent in primates, but so far no one has seen strong evidence on the emergence of a hive mind like behavior.

Yet the formation of tribes, and then of nations and their further aggregation into a global village (as an ongoing process today) seems to suggest that we humans, although not living in caves, or ant-hill or bee-hive replicas; are showing signs of hive behavior. We are all trying to unite into one hive, which effectively would have its own purpose and further not require telepathy or chemical transmitters, but merely work through our present sensory framework.

Part of my feel is heavily influenced by reading Baxter's Coalescent. Partly it all seems to be so real, the drone-like attitude and stereotypism that is prevalent even through changing cultural waves. The family structure, even it's breakdown and an undeniable similarity to a 2000 year old past, be it Roman or Historic Indic roots. Perhaps the problems of the present will be dealt with by our coalescent nature; and maybe I'm just dreaming; but it's too real to be a dream. Even the Gaia theory (of the earth as a living consciousness) seems to hint this way. Religious ideas and clues within them also reveal that our ancestors seemed to realise this. Perhaps it is more comforting to feel that you are part of a greater being, a hive and still can keep your individuality (I don't know whether classified hive creatures have the same perception.)

The evolution of new generation communication technology, the internet, convergent communication, anywhere/anytime connectivity seems to be creating a new backbone for a unifying hive. The one thing that bothers me most is that hives rather pejoratively create stereotyped classes (humanity has insofar never been able to shed hierarchy and probably never will.) I fear that our individuality might slowly be lost as something else takes over - The religious second coming of the Lord maybe the creation of a new hive! Right now it scares me.

I've been dealing with some people who are really "busy" (involved in hundreds of issues, but still find time to attend to each at the right time and place.) Everytime I've placed a query to these people, I found that they replied relevantly on time or that they would do so at an appointed time. It has always been nice dealing with such organised people as you learn something from them (that you can emulate.)

I've also been dealing with people who're just scaling up to get more "busy" but have no knowledge on handling themselves; nor how to swim the sea of time. The only answer I get from these peope are that they've been "very busy" and will do it as soon as they can. I've started hating this ASAP acronym (As Soon As Possible). I see it as an excuse meaning, "I've other important things to do" and indirectly meaning "You're issue is not on the 'important' list right now."

Worse still, I see this happening with haphazard people who sometimes are "businessmen" holding key roles in a corporate organisation, responsible to themselves and other stakeholders. Primarily I see this lack of respect for time as a serious issue. It seems rampant in "India" and is definitely a heavy impediment to any growth that is planned for this country.

This happens with

• Automobile service agencies
• Software Companies (I deal with quite a few of them.)
• Maintenance and Support Staff (for any equipment you own.)
• People attending meetings (turning up as late as an hour later after the appointed time is considered quite normal.)

I am reminded of longfellow's lines:

Art is long, and time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.


No one really has enough time, we all swim in the same complex ocean of time and space; and we need to set our directions and our priorities right. I hope to promise less and offer more and not get sucked into this spiral of "overpromising and underdelivering" both in time and space that seems rampant in society around me.

Beyond the poverty, beyond the lack of intellect, this lack of a sense of responsibility is probably what will take India (and many companies, organisations and nations with a mindset likewise) to their graves.

I have recently found a trend of increasing tele-evangelism on TV channels available in India. In the most part, I find it a bit annoying; religion being preached and "advertised" (evangelised) over Television media.

In my opinion religion has always been a personal and individual part defining the relationship between man and his quest to solve the 'riddle of existence.' While there are significant socio-religious issues, the fundamentals of religion remain moral, spiritual & philosophic and therefore very personal.

Annie Beasant, a founder of the "Theosophical Society", comments that "As civilisation evolves, religion must graduate to meet its objectives." In similar lines, Walter Leslie Wilmhurst suggests that the declension of interest in religion in modern times is not due to irreligiousness, but rather the unsatiated need of human intellect for deeper religious philosophies and understanding of the mysteries of the universe.

While religion at a superficial level seems to address the general spiritual and socio-religious needs, the deeper philosophical needs of unsatiated intellect have always spurred the creation of alternative orders and religious cults(none of them completely addressing the need).

Tele-evangelism seems to sell "prayer" as a remedy for the "distressed." Such generalisation does not address all of them, but a good majority. "Prayer", a component of religion does help in calming down people in distress situations and is also necessary for a good spectrum of the population. However, in most of these programs, religious morality and philosophy in entirety are slowly getting ignored in the attempt to gain media time and revenue (for charitable trusts, prayer funds, ...) in the name of religion.

The whole question of religious evangelism in any form of media is still a sensitive issue. Many countries have drafted constitutions (including the new 'democratic' Iraq) labelling themselves in the name of a religion. This lack of graduation of religious philosophy and more so, communicating it to those who follow the religion is also a factor in terrorism today.

During the recent week, I have been spending time, getting my TV Tuner card installed on my favorite Linux desktop. Installing has been a rough ride of sorts - requiring me to guess tuner chipsets and wiring GPIOs. Fortunately BTTV Gallery hosted by Gunther Mayer had the necessary information to help me out.

Then came the task of watching and recording Television. I found three applications suitable to my needs, MythTV, tvtime and XawTV. Each come with specific features that are useful. The first two offer postprocessing, recording and Alpha blended OSDs. All three of them provide support for remote controls.

Despite the availability of these applications, I found that the use of non-standard frequency bands by the CATV operator made it difficult to scan for channels. Existing channel scanners from tvtime (tvtime-scanner) and Xawtv (scantv) supported scanning of the entire frequency range, however due to unresolved bugs did not render the scanned output useful. CATV operators multiplex digitally decoded channels into frequency bands convenient for transmission. However this differs from operator to operator and town to town making a simple patch of my favorite tv viewing applications infeasible at present. (I would require to modify them to read xml frequency tables, though tvtime does support this, there are bugs.)

This led me to try and write my own set of scripts to use "mplayer" as my tv player (having used it extensively for video playing prior) and a modified version of "scantv" for scanning frequencies. This took me at least 5 days, and now is available on public domain as tveasy. I must say, that this would not have been possible, without Open Source products, for I ripped off pieces of scantv for my own usage with ease. Having benefited so from "Free Software", I obviously had to give something back, and hence wrote a set of scripts for the same. I love "Free" Software.

Taking a look at Intel's immediate roadmap it is now evident that they are decidedly not revving up the clock speeds. Their whole strategy seems to be going multicore. That's not all, these new multi-core processors are derived from the "Low Power" Pentium-M core (the one engineered at Israel and marketed with the Centrino chipset.) The Intel+Apple marriage is a direct resultant of this low-power strategy.

I infer two critical points from this heading.

• Intel has taken the AMD-64 blitzkrieg in the desktop market as a serious threat and resorting to secure other markets [laptops,handhelds,...] (by concentrating on low power).
• Intel is learning that there are fabrication limits and there is a possible 3-5 year lull before adopting any technology (molecular transistors, ...) that might help continue Moore's law (or rather its traditional interpretation.)

The buck doesn't stop here. Intel is attempting to go the multi-core (multi-microprocessor-per-core) way, but is stepping in rather cautiously without over-doing it. Traditionally, the multi-core trend seems to have evolved from the embedded SoC following. Network processor companies in their eagerness to exploit data/control plane parallelism this way, have made power hungry behemoths (rather toasters).

However, the problems faced here are dissimilar. Bus speed bottle-necks, Higher penalties per error [in both design & fabrication] and fundamental Operating System Software abstractions are a hindrance to go massive multi-core. The STI alliance's 'Cell' that was originally designed to be massively multi-core hasn't turned out so on the first shot. Clearly, Intel's caution in venturing here seems to have given them some time (to probably learn and avoid mistakes.) Even the 'Cell' seems geared on low power CPUs and higher power GPUs which seem to tell the same story. It finally seems (that until some major breakthrough comes up), processors aren't about to rev-up faster. I'm thinking, ain't it time ARM tried their hand on the desktop/laptop market? (with their great track record on power-saving.)

What is to be noticed is that revving down the clocks is something AMD has done already. Dynamic processor clocking (Speedstep for Intel) is also following AMD who could synchronous clock their CPUs without stepping between specific frequencies like the Intel counterparts. The only catch here is that AMD is yet to come up with the power friendly chip. So, can they pull out a rabbit out of the hat?