My inner self

SAP HANA: Simply Explained

2012-03-06T02:12:00.006+01:00

This article is for SAP HANA beginners, who don’t really understand what it is about and are lost in all the marketing and technical jargon.

What is SAP HANA?

SAP HANA is the latest in-memory analytics product from SAP; using HANA companies can do ad hoc analysis of large volumes of data in real-time.

What is in-memory?
In-memory means all the data is stored in the memory (RAM). This is no time wasted in loading the data from hard-disk to RAM or while processing keeping some data in RAM and temporary some data on disk. Everything is in-memory all the time, which gives the CPUs quick access to data for processing.

What is real-time analytics?
Using HANA, companies can analyze their data as soon as it is available. In older days, professionals had to wait at least few hours before they could analyze the data being generated around the company. To put this in perspective, let us take an example – suppose a super market chain wants to start giving you discount coupons when you visit them based on your shopping habits. Before: they could only mail them to your address or give you coupons for your next purchase. Now: while you are checking out, your entire shopping history can be processed and discount could be given on the current shopping. Imagine the customer loyalty for such a chain!

So is SAP making/selling the software or the hardware?

SAP has partnered with leading hardware vendors (HP, Fujitsu, IBM, Dell etc) to sell SAP certified hardware for HANA. SAP is selling licenses and related services for the SAP HANA product which includes the SAP HANA database, SAP HANA Studio and other software to load data in the database. Also, as already announced, the vision is to run all the application layer enterprise software on the HANA platform; that is ERP/BW/CRM/SCM etc /etc will use HANA as their database.

Can I just increase the memory of my traditional Oracle database to 2TB and get similar performance?

Well, NO. You might have performance gains due to more memory available for your current Oracle/Microsoft/Teradata database but HANA is not just a database with bigger RAM. It is a combination of a lot of hardware and software technologies. The way data is stored and processed by the In-Memory Computing Engine (IMCE) is the true differentiator. Having that data available in RAM is just the icing on the cake.

Is HANA really fast? How is it possible that HANA is so fast?

HANA is fast due to many reasons. The following picture¹ depicts a very simplified version of what’s inside the In-memory Computing Engine.

Column Storage

While the traditional databases store the relational table one row after another, IMCE stores tables in columns. Hopefully the following figure explains the difference between the two storage mechanisms easily.

Frankly, storing data in columns is not a new technology, but it has been not leveraged to its full potential YET. The columnar storage is read optimized, that is, the read operations can be processed very fast. However, it is not write optimized, as a new insert might lead to moving of a lot of data to create place for new data. HANA handles this well with delta merge (which in itself is a topic for an entire article coming next), so let us just assume here, that the columnar storage performs very well while reading and the write operations are taken care of by the IMCE in some other ways. The columnar storage creates a lot of opportunities as follows:

Compression: As the data written next to each other is of same type, there is no need to write the same values again and again. There are many compression algorithms in HANA with the default being the dictionary algorithm, which for example maps long strings to integers

Example of dictionary algorithm: You have a Country column in your Customer table in your database. Let’s say you have 10 million customers from 100 countries. In the standard row-based storage you will need 10 million string values stored in memory. With the dictionary compression, the 100 country values will be assigned an integer based index and now you need only 10 million integers + the 100 string values + the mapping of these values. This is a lot of compression in terms of bytes stored in memory. There are more advanced compression algorithms (RTE etc) which would even reduce the 10 million integer storage.
Now imagine a scenario with 100 tables and a few thousand columns. You get the picture. Less data is exponentially proportional to fast processing. The official tests show a compression of 5-10x, that is a table which used to take 10GB of space would now need only 1-2GB of storage space.
Partitioning: SAP HANA supports two types of partitioning. A single column can be partitioned to many HANA servers and different columns of a table can be partitioned in different HANA servers. Columnar storage easily enables this partitioning.
Data stripping: There are often times when querying a table, a lot of columns are not used. For example, when you just want the revenue information from a Sales table which stores a lot of other information as well. The columnar storage enables that the unnecessary data is not read or processed. As the tables are stored in vertical fashion, there is no time wasted trying to read only the relevant information from a lot of unnecessary data.
Parallel Processing: It is always performance critical to make full use of the resources available. With the current boost in the number of CPUs, the more work they can do in parallel, the better the performance. The columnar storage enables parallel processing as different CPUs can take one column each and do the required operations (aggregations etc) in parallel. Or multiple CPUs can take a partitioned column and work in parallel for faster output.

Multiple Engines
SAP HANA has multiple engine inside its computing engine for better performance. As SAP HANA supports both SQL and OLAP reporting tools, there are separate SQL and OLAP engines to perform operations respectively. There is a separate calculation engine to do the calculations. There is a planning used for financial and sales reporting.Above all sits something like a controller which breaks the incoming request into multiple pieces and sends sub queries to these engines which are best at what they do. There are separate row and column engines to process the operations between tables stored in rows and tables stored in column format.
Caution: Currently, you can't perform a join between a table stored in row format and a table stored in column format. Also, the query/reporting designer needs to be careful about which engines are being used by the query. As the performance reduces if for example the SQL engine has to do the job of the calculation engine because the controller was not able to optimize the query perfectly.

What is ad hoc analysis?
In traditional data warehouses, such as SAP BW, a lot of pre-aggregation is done for quick results. That is the administrator (IT department) decides which information might be needed for analysis and prepares the result for the end users. This results in fast performance but the end user does not have flexibility. The performance reduces dramatically if the user wants to do analysis on some data that is not already pre-aggregated. With SAP HANA and its speedy engine, no pre-aggregation is required. The user can perform any kind of operations in their reports and does not have to wait hours to get the data ready for analysis.

I hope the above information is useful to get a better understanding of SAP HANA.Please let me know your comments/suggestions.

1: The picture is obviously a much simplified version of the engine and there is much more to it than represented in the picture.

Disclaimer: I am an SAP employee and a certified HANA consultant. All the opinions expressed here are completely my own and have no influence of my employer.

All about SAP HANA Certification

2012-02-25T20:26:00.001+01:00

Last year, SAP introduced HANA based on in-memory technology with which customers can analyze large volumes of data in seconds. This post is about the available certifications on SAP HANA.

As of Feb 2012, SAP has made available only one Associate Consultant certification with code: ~~C_HANAIMP_10~~. (there are two certifications available now: C_HANAIMP_1 for application consultants and C_HANATEC_1 for technical consultants). C_HANAIMP_1 certification tests knowledge on all aspects of SAP HANA 1.0 for the profile of a SAP HANA Associate Consultant.

The topics in the exam include: Business use cases for HANA platform, loading data into HANA database, modeling and creating views on basic tables to make meaning of the data, creating reports using various tools such as SAP BusinessObjects tools on these created views, optimizing the performance for these reports, user management, security and data access privileges.

Below I have gathered all the information available to the best of my knowledge related to the certification exam:

Q: How many questions are there in the exam?

A: 80

Q: What is the duration of exam?

A: 180 minutes

Q: What are the types of questions asked?

A: As from the sample questions provided by SAP, the questions have single choice or multiple choice answers. Also, as shown in the sample questions, the number of correct answers is indicated for each question.

Q: What is the passing percentage?

A: 59% - which means that you must get all answers correct for at least 48 questions.

Q: If a question has 3 correct answers, and I answer 2 correct answers, will I get partial marks?

A: No. You MUST answer all the correct answers to get marks. The scoring is binary - either you answer a question right or you answer it wrong. Nothing in between. On this note, make sure to pay attention on the indicated number of correct answers to make sure that you have chosen correct number of answers. Choosing less or more answers than indicated will directly get you 0 points irrespective of the correctess of your choices.

Q: What are the available trainings?

A: The following trainings are available and recommended:

TZHANA : It’s a 2 day classroom course. Gives a very good overview of all the different components in HANA. The best part about the training was – there were a lot of exercises for the students which gave us a good feel about the overall tool.
RHANA : Personally, this is just TZHANA compressed and available in an e-learning format. If you recently did TZHANA you can skip it. Though it’s an awesome way to do a revision of TZHANA (if you did it long time before the exam date).
OHA10 : It’s a self paced training; all the material is provided online. Obviously some content overlaps with TZHANA but extra and latest content is available. I would say this is nice to have (and not a must have) training for passing the certification exam. Of course, I would recommend going through it in the long term.
TZH300 : I passed my certification before doing this course, so clearly its not a must have. The course contents includes: how to do transformations using SLT, advanced modeling with HANA Studio, importing-exporting objects, join types, advanced SQL Scripts and CE functions etc.

Please note HA100 will replace TZHANA and HA300 will replace TZH300 in near future.

Q: Which topics are tested in the exam and how is the exam distributed among all the topics?

A: The following tables gives a good idea on where and which topics to focus on (source) . I have added here the approximate number of questions from the percentages given at the certification page.

Topic	% of exam	Approx no. of questions	Primary	Alternative
Business content	<=8%	6	TZHANA, OHA10	RHANA
Data Modeling	>=12%	19	TZHANA, TZH300, OHA10	RHANA
Data Provisioning	>=12%	15	TZHANA, TZH300, OHA10	RHANA
Optimization	>=12%	15	TZHANA, TZH300, OHA10	RHANA
Reporting	>=12%	19	TZHANA, TZH300, OHA10	RHANA
Security and Authorization	<=8%	6	TZHANA, OHA10	RHANA

Q: Is going through the trainings/material enough or do I need hands on experience of data modeling/provisioning?

A: As they say, if you read, you might forget but if you try, you remember for a long long time. Having said that, hands on experience will surely be helpful and is recommended to pass the exam but don’t waste too much time just trying to get access. If you really understand the overall concepts you would have a decent shot in the exam.

Q: How much expertise on BO tools is needed?

A: It’s an exam about HANA and its interaction with BO tools. Expertise on BO tools is not expected, just the overall understanding of the tools and how and when they are useful. To stress my point and not cross any legal boundaries, I will just copy-paste the course content of TZHANA on reporting: SAP HANA Interfaces to BI Client tools, including SAP Business Objects Explorer, SAP Crystal Reports, SAP Business Objects Dashboards and SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence.

Resources:

Go to https://www.experiencesaphana.com/ and play around. Go to the “Try” section and spend some time playing with all the “test drives” available. Might not help for the exam but definitely gives an idea of how stuff works.
Some really useful videos: Hana Modeler (29 mins, gives very good overview of data modeling in HANA), Demo of Business Objects 4.0 tools consuming data from HANA (13 mins, if you are not used to Information Design Tool (IDT), its a good watch).
Training: All HANA related trainings are listed here with sign-up links.
If you have access to an HANA system and some extra time, a lot of guides especially for reporting tools are available here: http://help.sap.com/hana_appliance . The best guide to get started on that page is the Modeling Guide, using which you can try out work flows for all aspects of Data Modeling. (Don’t be disappointed with the locked files available only to Partners and Employees; there are many open-to-all guides as well).
SAP employees and partners can access the OHA10 course by going to: http://service.sap.com/okp
If the left hand menu doesn't open automatically, go to: SAP Consultant Education -> Early Product Training -> SAP Online Knowledge Products and search for HANA
You can also request access to an HANA system from SAP. All FAQs related to this access are here.

Extra resources (not directly useful for exam, but useful in the long term)

Documents: The business case for Hana and a good overview of SAP HANA Architecture.
Some very informative documents are available on https://www.experiencesaphana.com/ Go to Browse -> Content -> Documents. Note: the filtering doesn’t work properly, spend some time to find relevant documents.

Please let me know if I have missed something or if you like/dislike the information above in comments. Also, the notes are from February 2012 and the course/exam contents may or may not have changed since then.

Please note that as an SAP employee I cannot share any documents and all the exam participants have to sign an NDA promising not to share any exam contents.

Disclaimer: I am an SAP employee and a certified HANA consultant. I have just gathered all the information available freely on the internet. All the opinions expressed here are completly my own and have nothing to do with my employer.

Gmail still sucks!

2012-02-23T15:19:00.003+01:00

In the name of new design layout, the new Gmail restructuring is a big letdown. This entire wait for a more "cozy" look is ridiculous. I have been a loyal Gmail user since 2002 and the interface more or less has remained same. Gmail was a breakthrough in its time due to the concept of conversations and of course the 1GB space but nothing much after that. A big overhaul is required because the way users use their mail has changed significantly over years.

All the emails we receive can be broadly classified into three categories:

1. Mails I would never look again (notifications, signups, evening plans, informatory etc etc)

2. Mails I would need in short term (for reference, to reply or read later etc)

3. Mails I would need to refer in the long term

Even with more than 10 labels and 25 filters, I have to search for any email older than a week and thanks to amazing search functionality this works quite well. Google needs to harness this capability to fullest. With the current layout, my eye concentration is something like this:

The important point to note is a lot of space is wasted in the current layout even with my gigantic screen. The whole concept of listing emails needs to be forgotten because nobody looks through them or goes to the third page to find an old email. They search. It works!

Another point to wonder is : How are the current users using email? Or What is the most important activity they can't do without emails? With all the facebooks and twitters, my conclusion is - attachments. There is no other platform currently to securely exchange documents. This needs to be highlighted and given more importance by placing a box in the front showcasing all the recently exchanged (sent/received) documents. With a little imagination, I came to a layout like below (which I am sure can be improved):

Remove pagination, remove earlier mails, if I need it, I would search it. Show me the things I would need the most after logging in. The next step would be to add the possibility to add widgets in the email interface such as calender, maps, documents and all the other google properties. (Sidenote: goolge tried it long ago with igoogle, but that concept was opposite, that needed your email to be taken out and used with widgets. Here the idea is to make email more powerful but bringing in more and more tools to make them more useful).

Priority email is a step in the right direction but it's too little too late. Some time ago, a Google engineer posted a big rant about how Google is missing on building platforms. Gmail with its millions of users could be a good starter!

I may be wrong, but I don't think I lot of Gmail users worry about the latest HD themes.

Sri Lanka

2011-01-06T00:57:00.001+01:00

India and Sri Lanka had defense bilateral talks last week and India offered 1,400 training placements for the Sri Lankan Army.

If I were the President of Sri Lanka, I would definitely not take this offer. So this got me to thinking on what I would do if Sri Lanka were a corporation and I were the CEO* of it. Here are some non-conventional things I would do, apart from doing the best for the people in health, education, infrastructure etc etc.

No Government hiring: The war is over. The country do not need such large military base anymore. Stop hiring for government jobs and use the qualified candidates from the military by moving them to appropriate government jobs where possible. Reduced government spending could be used for other development work. Rather than doing security training deals with India, do educational deals and give training to the currently non-qualified candidates.
Postpone Excellence in Education and Research: Right now the country needs more educated people who will eventually become policy makers and great teachers for next generation. Otherwise excellent students will run away to West. The country needs more it's intelligent people right now than few hundred thousand dollars in remittance money. India is a huge country, it could survive the brain-drain, but Sri Lanka's population is too little to take the risk.
Rather than investing millions in finding a new medicine or the next big thing, prefer MoUs with other developed countries. No need to reinvent the wheel. Damn, there is no need to invent anything!
Piracy and Somalia: For once, Sri Lanka is at a right place at the right moment. All the Chinese, Japanese and other Asian ships destined for Europe pass somewhere close to Sri Lanka. This is a really great business opportunity. Be the next hub for exporting countries. Invest money to buy ships which can provide security to the huge ships carrying goods. Sri Lanka is geographically closest and hence can provide the needed security, cheapest. In fact, don't take money in exchange for this, but knowledge and other non-mensurable resources from the powerful exporting countries.
Have Double Standards: Seriously, every developing country must have double standards. Give preference to countries and cooperations that are more beneficial. Don't worry about others getting offended, everybody will forget once you are rich and developed. The first time I saw Indian museums charging more (almost 25x) for foreigners, I was upset, but now, 5 years later, it makes perfect sense.
Tourism, Tourism and Tourism: There is a limit to export of agriculture when you have only 65,000 km2 of land. Other industries take a lot of resources to set up and have returns in the long term. Whereas, tourism is the easiest and fastest way to make money . With millions of working Indians just few hundred miles away always looking for a weekend get away, Sri Lanka could be the next destination. Build honeymoon resorts, have flight timings suitable for working class that are cheaper than what they have for neighboring islands in Andaman Nicobar!

A big photo op! Look at the current Google maps view of Sri Lanka or Google images. They suck. Most of the tourists search for these things before choosing a destination. They need to feel the excitement. Invite nation's best photographers and may be some internationals. Nothing speaks more than a nice red sun setting in the ocean. No painting or artificial sketch can match that. This is serious business. While we are on this, invite some brands to make yearly calender with hot-shot photographers and models.
Movies: This is a small point I realized after being in Europe. Every single Indian I know, that comes to Europe visits Switzerland (there was a famous movie in 1990s). People prefer Greece over Croatia (famous song). Thats ridiculous but it happens because of the social acceptance of these places. People like to visit places that they can brag about. Spend some money to invite the directors from Hollywood and Bollywood and give them complete freedom.
Fact: I know at least a couple of thousand working Indians who are making decent money and go for regular vacations. Out of these few thousand, I know a few hundred have already spent more than Rs. 25, 000 (500$) on a single weekend for a party or a vacation. Not a single of them has been to Sri Lanka yet!

Fishing: It seems ridiculous to talk about fishing in this list. But fishing contributes far less to the Sri Lankan GDP when compared to Agriculture, Industry and Services. Again, a small investment in buying huge ships and make it a government business could do wonders. Don't leave this to local fishermen. Government should enter this without effecting the fishermen by fishing in the deep ocean using huge ships. Develop/buy technology so that these fishes can be exported at the latest in the best condition.

*This is to keep it simple, being a elected President complicates everything.

Hey Minister, Save Trees!

2010-12-29T21:38:00.004+01:00

Dear Union minister for Civil Aviation,

While traveling in India recently, I understood that I must have my domestic flight ticket printed on a paper to enter the airports.
Initially, I thought this was a security requirement so that bad elements cannot enter our beloved airports. However, I noticed that anybody can pass this step with a visitors ticket that can be bought only for INR 30. (0.75$ cents). Also, with my little knowledge of computers I can assure you that the required printout at the front gate of airports can be produced with-in 5 minutes. So if bad elements want to enter the airport, they will.

The only conclusion I could reach is, this is done to stop over-crowding airports and only let the passengers inside. I completely agree on this arrangement as I myself know, my entire family comes to drop me at airport every single time, and if allowed they would certainly drop me till the aircraft. (and would not leave till the aircraft is ready to go).

So, my problem with this is the "printout". The airport security were not even willing to look at my smart phone where they could actually read everything. They strictly demanded a printout. I tried to convince security at various Indian domestic airports but had no luck.

According to DGCA, we had 50 million domestic travelers in 2010, which means we cut approximately 8,500 trees to only pass the first step at the airports. (please find the calculation at the end of this letter).

I think there is a real possibility of saving trees. I believe we can fix this.

It would be unreasonable to assume that every traveler will have a smart phone to show the e-tickets at the airport. However, it is equally reasonable to assume that each traveler will have a simple phone*. Can we use the mobile revolution to save some trees? If the aviation ministry can regulate air fare prices, I am certain that, they can also dictate airlines to send a SMS for every booking. I am also attaching a possible format for the said SMS with this letter which contains all the information available in the e-tickets which I used to enter the airports.

The airlines do NOT need the print outs. For them, piece of identity and PNR is more than enough. If this information is enough to enter an aircraft and fly, then why can't this be enough to enter the airport.

Also, this 8,500 trees are the direct saving. There is another few thousand trees/CO2 saved which was spent in making paper from these trees, transportation of these paper and waste management afterwards etc etc.

This small measure will definitely make a big impact and moreover make the Ministry of Environment and the minister, your dear friend, Jairam Ramesh happy :)

I believe we have a real opportunity to lead the world by example!

Yours truly,
An average Indian citizen

* The travelers without phone can of course use print outs. There is no easy way around them.

Suggested SMS Format: (100 characters only)

Name: (40-char-name)
DoT:dd/mm/yy
PNR:123456
ToF:hh:mm
FNo:AL123
ETC:ARL:PoB:PoA

(if-needed the remaining 60 characters can be used for advertisements-VOILA)
DoT: Date of travel
PNR: Unique code used by airlines for a particular travel.
ToF: Time of Flight
FNo: Flight Number
ARL: Airline code
PoB: Port of Boarding code (Example: DEL)
PoA: Port of Arrival Code (Example: MUM)

Calculation for number of trees:

50 million passengers per year.
One A4 sheet weighs 10 grams.

So thats: 50,000,000 * 10 grams = 50,000,000 * 10 / 1,000, 000 tonnes = 500 tonnes
It takes 17** trees to make one tonnes paper so thats: 500 * 17 = 8,500

8500 Trees per year.

Source:
DGCA website: http://www.dgca.gov.in/reports/pass_data.pdf
Number of Trees per tonne: (Everywhere on internet it is almost the same figure) http://www.tappi.org/paperu/all_about_paper/earth_answers/earthanswers_howmuch.pdf

Assumptions:
1. Every traveler will have a A4 sized printout. Honestly, there is no other way. Few will even take more than one copies.
2. Visitor pass prices may vary across India, but they are not a lot. Maximum around Rs. 100 (2$)

The Great Indian Story

2010-12-28T19:40:00.001+01:00

When anybody in the world thinks about India, one of the first thing that comes to their mind is cheap labor. After my month long travel in India, about one thing I am sure is, there ain't any labor available, forget about being cheap.

Skilled and non-skilled people should be available in abundance in a country with population over a billion.

Non-skilled Labor
These are the people working below the poverty line, on minimum wages. Of all the medium-scale industries I visited, every owner has the same problem. They have set up
almost automatic factories and need a very little number of hands to run the factories, but they can't even find those bare minimum hands. The problem is not money. They told me, if you pay them more, they are going to get drunk and not return to work next day. It is a big catch-22 problem with no solution in sight.

Skilled Labor
We have heard stories but multi-national companies complaining about not being able to find enough talent. This could be attributed to the lack of "quality" higher education. We do not have enough high-quality institutes to keep up with the pace of industry consumption of talent. At least this problem has a solution: Open more institutes of excellence.

And The Rest
And here lies the main problem. There is a big chunk of population that are enough educated to decline minimum wages jobs in factories but are not qualified to work in big competitive environments for multi-nationals. They are best suited for specific industries like manufacturing, distribution, textile, petro-chemical etc, where they can develop a particular skill over time and have a happy life thereafter. But the problem is supply is much higher than demand and we will always have these people who are very well capable of achieving great heights but will never get an opportunity.

I wish we find solutions to these problems soon, otherwise the story won't be so great after all.

Facebook photo album view still sucks

2010-12-28T02:30:00.002+01:00

Point:

Give more space to user to showcase his personal albums and less space to photos he is tagged in.

I upgraded today to the latest Facebook profile view to see if they updated the photo album view. Sure they did. But it they could not get over the old thinking.

Finally, my personal albums are on top of the tagged photos of me. Finally. With this change, at least they agree with me that albums are higher "priority" than tagged photos. Then, why are only 6 albums shown on the landing page and an unlimited number of tagged photos.

Let the user show as many albums of him as he wants. (or worst case set an upper limit).

With the new trend of people tagging others in photos that have nothing to do with the tagged friend, but to notice it. It will be a nightmare to scroll through all the photos the user is tagged in. There must be a grouping of these photos.

And, don't even get me started on the links between pages. There are some redundant links and there are some missing links. They should really focus on this: How a user would like to jump around the pages?

New Travel Policy

2010-12-26T20:26:00.005+01:00

It is really disappointing to travel to the most beautiful cities in the world and not being able to enjoy the most because of how we perceive time. A lot of countries (for example in Eastern Europe) set up their time zones not entirely according to the sunrise and sunset times but are influenced by other countries that bring them a lot of business.

After all my travel experience I have discovered a trick:

Adjust your watch such that sunset happens at 7PM.

This works great, especially in winters. For someone like me, who hates to wake up early during vacations, I used to get only 3-4 hours of sunlight. But now I get a lot more sunlight and also escape the tourist crowd at restaurents. In summers, I just get a lot more sleep with this, which is again perfectly fine :)

Try it!

Cities I have visited!

2010-02-28T23:53:00.001+01:00

I list of places I have visited so far.

Mumbai (Bombay), India

Paris, France

Create your own travel map or travel blog

Tale of Two Brothers

2010-01-15T13:31:00.002+01:00

An excellent piece my brother wrote a few days ago about his favorite monsoon story.

My story is a bit different from the usual romantic ones. I remember being in the second standard when it rained heavily in my hometown, Anjad, a small village in MP near Indore. My mother was pregnant and we came to know that she had given birth to a son. I was the second kid in the combined family of three brothers and my happiness knew no bounds. I sat behind my grandpa's Rajdoot and went with him to the
hospital in the torrential downpour. When I reached the hospital room, I was first dried with huge towels by two nurses. Finally I was allowed to hold the baby in my arms.

I can still hear the rain falling in the background and me holding my brother and looking at his tiny face. I absolutely doted on him and pampered him to a great extent. Years later, my brother shifted from a small village’s Hindi medium school to a reputed English medium school. He was facing difficulties in studies and tried to run away from it. I was away from home for my higher education and subsequently
work. I came down from Indore, discussed with parents and brother, tried convincing him and finally took him with me and put him in a good school cum IIT preparation institute in Kota.

After I had him settled in the hostel, I left. I could clearly see the pain and repentance in his face, but held myself strong for the sake of his career. While he looked out from the first floor hostel window, I kept looking at him and leaving while waving to him. Then it rained! I saw the same woebegone, ready to break into tears but conscious of being a guy expression on his face. My tears dissolved in the rains...

I am very pleased to share with you that, today after completing his B. Tech and M. Tech from IIT Mumbai; he has started his career with SAP Labs in Paris (France).

Miss you Bhai.

Aman Ki Asha

2010-01-10T03:23:00.003+01:00

I think there are more rockets planned like the ones this morning. Full report here.

Pakistan wants India to fire back. A little mistake on India's side and they will make a big issue out of this. That is, India is not keeping quite at the border and hence they have to move their forces from Afgan border to the east to avoid any casualties caused due to India.

One thing will lead to another and the final decision would be to get more funding from the US.

An act of provocation. Really. I imagine, there must be huge pressure on Indian army right now to NOT reply back strongly to such attacks.

Incredible India

2009-02-12T21:20:00.002+01:00

So the other day I was in a cafe with some french friends (watching BBC news) and this ad showed up. After about 30 seconds I said (pr)loudly INDIA, and few of them were ready to bet some serious money that it was some "world tour" ad.

Really, really a wonderful ad. The directors cut below is even more better:

Jai Hind!

Thought of the day

2008-03-01T11:02:00.002+01:00

Nothing comes for free, and in case it does, either it'll be too late.. or too lame :)

Cheers!

PS: just said it to a friend, so some rights reserved :)

You Know You're Old When...

2007-09-27T12:56:00.001+02:00

Inspired by Guy Kawasaki's post on his 53rd birthday. Remember Guy, you're still 50, you're just looking at it from a different angle ...

From: RowanManahan, SlideShare

Orkut: The Road Ahead

2007-09-26T08:08:00.000+02:00

The new look-and-feel of Orkut is not at all appealing, not just to me but to everyone I talked to about this since the change. When all their competitors are coming up with new features everyday, all they could do was to put more colors wherever possible (and brighten the already used colors making it even worse). On this occasion I thought of writing what all I miss on Orkut:

1) Search in scrapbook: There is no doubt that the highest % of time spent on Orkut is spent on scrapping friends and other "wanna be friends". This is clearly led to exchange of information over scraps and where there is information, it needs a search tool. Though I think allowing searching through others scrapbook will be a security threat but searching on own scrapbook will be a real treat.

2) More number of Photos: Why in the world have they limited the no. of photos to 12? With Googles resources in place, there can't be a problem in terms of digital space available to them. When facebook is recording huge no. of images to be uploaded and MySpace buying photo sharing platform Photobucket, this is surely a big drawback. Also, I see a lot of "New pics uploaded" screen names, clearly indicating how much time we spend on checking others snaps. For me, this is the second highest activity I spend my time on (first is of course, scrapping).

3) Fan: Its too much trouble to become someones fan. Suppose I'm visiting a friends profile and I want to become his fan. The only way I can do this, go back to my profile, go to manage friends and then search him and then become his fan. (And with people changing their display names its tough to find, on a no. of occasions I couldn't :( )

Why can't there be a marking area in each of my friends profile? Simple? Isn't it?

Since past three years, when I joined Orkut, I haven't seen many big feature additions. A small poll app, or a blog or a change in their news section won't will make the road ahead tough and tough.

4) Messages: The most important of all the messaging in Orkut is almost useless due to the unlimited SPAM. I've seen a number of other sites where messaging is the strongest means of communication and I hardly read my messages on Orkut. This seriously needs to be revamped. Everything about it sucks as of now.

5) Communities: Many surveys have shown in past than most of the users (including me) have joined communities just show their interests/attributes and very few are actually active on them. Tagging would have done this for me. They seriously need to think some way to make it more useful.

India Aha...

2007-09-13T07:53:00.000+02:00

Interesting pics.

Cheers!

Living room of the Future from the 1970s

2007-09-12T09:12:00.000+02:00

The one thing which really caught my eye was:
Television is changing from a box to stare at into a two-way tool.

(Un)Surprisingly, this was predicted in the 70s. Image source.

This post is a part of an experiment.

How Projects Really Truly Work

2007-09-11T08:10:00.000+02:00

The truth of most of our lives :)

Cheers!

Google Vs Facebook

2007-09-10T13:17:00.000+02:00

Facebook: These guys know everything you are okay with telling your closest friends.

Google: These guys know your dirtiest secrets.

By Sam.

See You Soon, may be.

2007-09-04T15:17:00.000+02:00

Not long ago, during the college placements, while interviewing for a company one of my friends cleared all the tough initial rounds and was just left with a HR interview.

When we came out after the HR interview, he couldn't believe he didn't get the job. On asking, he explained to us what happened. (He actually didn't know why he didn't get the job). The "relevant" part of the interview:

HR: Why do you want to work for Sybase and not Googles/Yahoos/Microsofts?
Friend (Being completely honest): Actually sir I tried, but couldn't clear their interviews.
HR: OK, fair enough. But why not Oracle?
Friend: Actually sir, I don't want to work for a database company.

HR started laughing and I suspect he must have told him: See you soon, may be.

Those of you, who still don't know why he didn't get a job: Sybase is "actually" a Database company.

Best Wishes :)

Beauty + Brains = Constant

2007-09-04T12:35:00.000+02:00

Watching the following video made me realize how much I've missed being in a institute with YouTube banned. Sigh!

Q: Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the United States on a world map. Who do you think this is?

A: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future for our children.

Chhor-Police

2007-09-04T12:31:00.000+02:00

Policemen: Tum kiske aadmi ho?
Chhor: Sahab meri to shadi bhi nahin hui hai ab tak.

:)

Thought of the Day

2007-09-04T08:25:00.000+02:00

Grow your kids like Serena and Venus Williams of 2002, who meet in finals of all the events they participate in. And never ever differentiate between the two.

Still far from parenthood, just happen to have this thought after meeting an aunty with cute twins :)

I'm losing faith in the system.. whatever small I had...

2007-08-31T13:43:00.000+02:00

We run court cases for 14 years, convict the criminals and then set them free in few days. Yes, I know the media will have once again have an happening day when Dutt Sahab once again goes back to jail but the reason for which he is out is simply ridiculous.

Today another celeb got bail. I don't know if they committed the crime or not. But if they were in there that means there was something they did wrong. Why does declaring someone guilty takes years and getting a bail takes just a few days? I'm not advocating to forcefully make getting bail a longer term but can't be make some effort to shorter the time it takes to solve a case.

With Sibhu Soren acquitted just because “the prosecution has miserably failed in bringing home the charges against the accused persons.” I feel sad. Still media would put their effort in finding out whether Sanju Babu has visited toilet since morning or not than to cover Hyderabad blasts.

I feel so insecure.

Finding Nimmo

2007-06-25T01:06:00.000+02:00

A friend of mine who is 30 touching but in his words still most eligible bachelor in his colony has lately developed a strange habit. Whenever he sees a temple (and is difficult to reach), the first expression from him is:
Chalo yaar madir chalkar, "sawa rupee" ka parsad chadate hai. Bhagwanji se ek "hot babe" ki request karni hai.
[Lets go to the temple and make our offerings to god with 1.25 Rs and ask for a hot babe]

I could not resist myself long enough and had to tell him this one day:
Aree "sawa rupee" mein hot babe to chhod, hot babe ka wallpaper bhi nahin de payenge tere bhagwanji.
[U can't even get a wallpaper of hot-babe in 1.25 Rs]

I wish him best of luck in his search of Nimmo :)

Title credits: Thakkar.