The Weather Man

I recently saw this movie called "The Weather Man". The movie is a beautiful piece of art. It stars Nicholas Cage as David Spritz, a successful weather guy, who desperately keeps trying to get his personal life back in order. Cage's character suffers from Low self esteem which is reflected in various scenarios. The movie is a slightly dark comedy, and has a motif of random people on the street throwing fast food at him. The archery theme is also very well done. It has pearls of wisdom strewn all over. Some of them seem to be so correct, that it both frightens and enlightens at the same time

- "In Life you will have to chuck some things"

- "When you are young, you have this view of yourself in the future with many positive qualities. With each passing year, the qualities keep on decreasing, until you are left with - yourself."

The End of Outsourcing?

Outsourcing has been a boon for many third world countries. It changed Wealth creation in many fundamental ways in China and India. Many detractors of outsourcing point out that US is losing jobs fast, and is piling on debt due to this globalization of manufacturing. However recent events show that these trends might soon be reversing.

Recent jumps in Crude Oil prices have been pretty disturbing. The $4 oil is cutting into consumer pockets and hence some analysts are predicting that this will push manufacturing of more and more goods to low cost manufacturing destinations like China. But there is something missing in this whole theory. The cost of outsourcing is not constant. Manufactured goods from China have to come to the US in shipping containers, the cost of which have proportionally increased due to the oil price increase. Given a weak dollar, China's rising costs and this added transportation cost - the outsourcing of some class of products might soon be coming to an end. Business week reports that this is already happening with products like batteries etc, which cost a lot to transport.

Coming to the Indian story of IT and IT enabled services outsourcing we are seeing the rapidly increasing wage bill of the Indian outsourcing firms which is cutting into their profits. This is affecting India's ability as the destination of choice for the IT related outsourcing areas.

Although this is a blow to Outsourcing, there is no denying that outsourcing is here to stay. But the outsourcing industry as we know it might soon be gone. The outsourcing bubble would have burst.

Firefox 3 is Here!

FF3 download record is a big hit, albiet notwithout some hiccups with the download servers crashing initially. Already 5 million downloads completed, and still 12 hours to go... Firefox 3 Rocks..

Here is my "certificate" about contributing to the record :)

Compiz Rules

Recently installed Compiz-Fusion on my Thinkpad T61, and it rules... ok ok.. what is compiz-fusion? I would say it is the next best thing since the Linux Kernel itself! It is a 3D window manager which started as Compiz, then it was forked into Beryl, only to be merged back again.

Anyway the effects that are possible with compiz are not just cool, but extremely effective too... Imagine you had 10 windows open, and want to go to the one you need. How many ALT-TABs can you do? now with Compiz, you dont have to do any of that painful stuff...

Detailing the features is difficult, so I will let you watch it yourself in this video I made..

T61 - The Thinkpad Chronicles Part 1

I recently bought a Thinkpad T61 with, god forbid, Vista pre-installed. I thought that I would use my Desktop as the Linux machine, and Vista as the laptop one.

One day into using Vista, I ran into this wierd issue where the packets would go only to machines in the local network. Although I set the gateway etc, and no firewall was installed, the packets refuse to move beyond the gateway. It must have been some wierd "user-friendly" setting I guess. But 3 hours down the lane, no luck.

I thought of installing Linux on it. But the Lenovo guys install one big fat C: and thats it. I have to download partition magic - but again no gateway for that.

So I went ahead and formatted the entire C: broke it into 5 pieces and installed Fedora 8 on it. I was using FC3 earlier, and going by the common "knowledge" about hardware support, I assumed I would have half of my functionality not working in Linux. But that was no reason to take crap from Vista.

After installing Fedora 8, I was totally surprised by how well it was designed and how all the laptop functionality was working. Linux has come a long way in the past few years. I would go to the extent that it is just the perception that remains that using Linux is difficult. But it got so much easier.

If you love Firefox...

Download firefox3 on the first day, and be a part of a new world record... OK that sounded too much like the spam you get daily... But I have been using firefox 3 Beta for 2 weeks and I can say its the best piece of software that I ever used for browsing...

Enough Talk now go to this link and pledge to download firefox3 - http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/ :)

Trip to Yosemite National Park

This weekend Rags, Deepu and Rags Friend Kranthi and myself went on a trip to Yosemite national park. It was a 4hr drive from Bay Area. Yosemite is the first national park in the US established in the 1800s.

We started at 7AM and picked up the others. Around 10PM we saw a beautiful reservoir by the freeway - 152 - the San Luis Reservoir. There was a small side road to it, and we went on it and stopped there. It was very beautiful. However we could not stay for long as that would cut down on the time in Yosemite.

We arrived at the Yosemite Southern entrance from Freeway 41. Just after entering, we saw the Mariposa Grove closed to traffic, and covered with snow. We parked our car there and started walking on the Mariposa Grove for some time. We could not reach the grove itself and turned back after sometime, but it was my first experience with touching snow :)

After that we went to the Yosemite valley. The mountains around were majestic. We also got down by the side of the road and climbed down on rocks, almost 1 km downhill. From there we had a nice view of the waterfalls. Later we went to the Yosemite store in the valley and bought a cake to eat, as there was no other food available :)) Then we stopped by the side of the Merced river, where there was lots of people with grills and other stuff enjoying in the pleasant weather. By 4:00PM we started back by I120. The roads were under construction so we had to stop for almost 15 mins since only one lane was open.

Overall it was a very nice trip. I plan to visit it once again in the future and this time try to make a night stay at Yosemite to explore the valley completely. I have heard that camping here is so popular that they open these camp sites for reservation almost an year in advance, only to have them gobbled up in a few hours.