Afazal MUST be hanged

It is definately sad day for India. 5 years have passed since the attack on parliament and the main accused is being used for politacal mielage. Look at the IA IC-184 highjack. India submitted against the highjackers and Masood Azahar was released. He later became the the leader of new wave of terrirism in Kashmir. It would have been better not nogotiating with them at all even at the enpense of all pessenger. Masood reunited the scattered attacked again India Army. Recent Mumbai Serail Bomb blast was brain child of Masood. To save few life India is paying such a high price. and now execution of Afazal is stopped. I infact don't know why. His date of hanging (20th Nov) is well passed. He should be hanged. Including a TV reporter there were 10 personals slained in the attack. Today they submitted a momerandum saying "A pardon means making a mockery of the brave soldiers and civilians who laid down their precious lives while performing their duty for the nation. Hence we have decided to return the medals to the government given to our near and dear ones, which now seem to us like humiliation piled on us". Farookh Abdulla should be hanged too.

Sad demide of CNet News.com Editor

Well, I have not updated my blog for quite sometime. Planned to do it when I reach home and write all the days of lay off and the short stay at Chennai. But wanted to update that missing editor of news.com was found dead. I'm shocked and deeply saddened by this news. News.com has been my defact technology site since I started using computer 7-8 years back. RIP. You can read more here.
James Kim--family man, technologist
Missing man found dead in Ore. mountains

BTW, my stay at Chennai seems to have increased by a week or two as my Sr here had to undergo a surgery. I gotta confirm it. :-)

Three cheers to Supreme Court

Verdict on the MCD sealing came and was very good. These are the words of SC. Read it.

"Government is not powerless to control the situation and none can be permitted to put a dagger on the neck of the authorities"
--> If shopkeepers are rioting, MCD can't say that we could not carry the sealing as the police protection was less. Blood !@#$%^ MCD, If you don't haev protection then ask for it. This is the most common and sadly accepted excuse for not carrying removal of unauthorized construction in Mumbai too.

"No one can be permitted to hold the city and the law abiding citizens to ransom and then seek relief"
--> If someone is having problem then he can make a peaceful protect. WTH, These guys go on striking for asking to not to remove ILLEGAL structure. That's bull**t.

Now let us try to digg into it. The first question that come into my mind it, WTF MCD was doing for 2 decades when these shops were constructed and running. Such act is impossible without palm greasing of MCD. What action MCD or law is goingto take against these officers. This is the roootcause of this problem. Unless action is taken against such corrupt officials, this will go on in all part of India.

@ bittersweet Home

[Saturday 4th]Got up early. Don't know why? Replied to mails and started reading books. But slept back after having lunch. Wanted to reply a mail that I was expecting but the heavy rains had broken the internet cable some where between home and the local server. when called to the Engineer he said that would be possible only following day. It is 12:26 right now. No sigh of that engineer anywhere. These guys have so cheap tactics for asking for payment. BTW, Sunil had asked him to come home and take payment cheque around 4 o'clock, 3 hours before the heavy rains started.

Day at HSBC

Friday the 3rd. Reached to HSBC on time for the interview as told by Krishna. He also confirmed from me earlier to that if I was going there not. Finding the place was not a problem as I had asked HR person from HSBC, Amit, the direction to each that place. Till 11 there was no news of any one and as soon as Amit entered the room by phone rang. It was the 1st round from SAIC. Got a quick 20 minute interview. And again the usual HR promotions. when I reentered the hall, I found a senior person how HSBC Software works and has evolved in last 4 years. Good story. He spoke truth. I know HSBC well as its office is next to Cybage, where I worked for 16 months on MicroStrategy project. The yasked us to fill a form, which clearly indicated that HSBC is not an EOE. I was was my religion, DoB, birth place, parent's address etc. Gosh... who ask all these now days. After having filled this form it was time for analytical and verbal written test similar to GRE (Encircle the correct answer). By the time we all finished it was 1:30 and all were dead hungry. Then Amit called us on 2nd floor which had two interview panels sitting. :-|. Few guys took lot of time to completed. They joined us may be at 2:30 or even late. Then I came to know two people could not clear the written test. didn't like it. One of the person not making cut was from BIS team. I was asked a soft copy my resume a there was no right person to interview me. Not a surprise to me at all. Luckily I had a copy in my mp3 player [Creative Nomad]. Amit copied it to him laptop and sent it across to HR at Pune. Well I came to know HSBC has BI Center of Excellency. Wow.. a great opportunity. All selected people were getting interview one by one. It was very hard to wait. At 4:30 I asked if that was possible to schedule an telephonic interview and I received a call from Pune in 2 minutes. Had a good talk about what I do in MSTR etc and asked me question based on my resume. Probably they scheduled the interview not to disappoint me. Even though the interviewer was not a MSTR person, he was very senior person in BI team. Nice to know that. after the interview I was told that 2nd round would be scheduled sometime in next week. During the day a friend asked to meet him if I coem ot office, but I was dead tired to go. Not to forget that I had nothing other than morning Masala Dosa since morning. I reached Domino's at Krishna Nagar. At very same time I spoke to Victor and Yeshwant about the lay off. Yeshwant had called me up to tell that he got placed in Mastek for a good package, but he had to go onsite for three month. Not happy for onsite compulsion as he became father just two months back and was not willing to go out of India. While having pet pooja at Domino's I told my friend that I wouldn't be coming to office as I was tired. I got a bike wash too after having food. Cool wash for mere 35 bucks. Now comes the worst thing of the day. The Business Developer (read: Collection Agent) of Sify disconnect the connection willfully just to realize that connection had to be renewed. My roomie (who actually owns the connection) had a nice chat (!@#$%&*) with him to get the connection back. I kept a movies for download in night but it seems he disconnected once again after I went to sleep as just 300 MB was left and in one night I can dwonlaod 550 MB easily. Not to forget that connection was not present when I came home.

Second thing Pink that I loved

So well at 10 AM, all technology had assembled for meeting addressed by Tod/BD about the lay offs. They came with dramatic speeches. They talked about that business has gone down suddenly in last week and management had to take this decision and revenue had fallen very much. As non-US contributed only 24% (as per last financial years information busmitted to stock exchange), having maintained about 30% market was damn good. And the losses (or revenue as company was still in green) were same the day US operations were terminated and the day possibility of lay offs were declared. What I can defintely conclude is that, these were already in pippline. No one knows about company financails better then BI, not even CEO and CFO, cause they depend upon information provided by BI team. The data provided by them is submitted to stock exchange :-) when quarterly and yearly results are declared. [Nothing about the company financial health taht I have said is previledged or any act of mine over here are against non-confidentiality contract signed by me. If you think then do let me know] From BIS [in IVY it is called Business Intelligence System which has BI, ETL, WH and Capmaign people] there were total four lay offs including me. Well, I was so happy when I came out of the room. the compensation package was too good. Next day when many laid off employees met at a same off I cam to know that some people went to their manager and asked for lay off and crib for it. But I do say that their was unknown fear in may peoples' mind when we all talked, specially married people. About the reaction of BIS team memeber of their buddeis going was not good. this would have cascading effect on the technology. There are consultants and companies just hunting for people from IVY Comptech. Other than this. One thing that I must say that, IVY has been very professional in laying off people from organization. It happend in a respectful and peaceful mannaer adn the compensation package offer was not bad. LAst but not least, HR
(unka number aayega) people made some sincere efforts to out-place people in other compnay. Team was not happy due to two people leaving, one of them being good and pressure that's going to bring on the rest of the team. I came to home with Keshav. Kept all papers and went to Domino's to eat. It was about 3 when we left the eatery. I had never seen hi tech city even though it was just 4 km from my home. I asked Keshav if is is not busy let us take a look around hi tech city. We went there and saw a beautiful lake. Came back home at 7. Dropped Spent night reading about MicroStrategy. The package offered by IVY were really too good. Read here.

Don't trust your bosses

Well.. something that I haven't been mentioning in my blogs is the meeting about heard of Technology, superior authority and Director of Technology have had taken all hands meeting stating that no one would be laid off in Technology at any cost. The went one step further in saying that in taht situation they would need Tech people more than anytime before, as focussing on non-US market and multi lingual and more gaming products would increase the need of technology. and Today bang at 12:56, there is mail from HR Head talking about layoffs in Technoloy. Worst thing, these guys knew about it before, but still such false claaimes were made. Let us go one step further, 99% I am going to be laid off,

considering less experienced people would be laid off first, I got a leave sanctioned of next Thursday. Now what if I get laid off tomorrow and I the tickets that I purchased are totally useless? Such a sucking feeling. But as fasr as all people are concerend they all wanted to be laid off due to the rumor of god damn high compensation. [Originally written on 1st Nov 2006]

Someone stole LAN wire (It happens only in India)

WTH... I connect to internet and find that their service is down. :((. Soon I hear the schoker from servant/cook that someone stole the wire in night. Quite unbelievable as when doing to bed at 2 AM I had 350 MB of movie North by Northwest to be completed and as per the torrent client, it would have taken time till 7 AM to finished. Thief won't steal so early morning. leave all that. It means I won't be having internet access when I go back home.

Raj ne meri leaves pe paani fer diya

First thing first. Book the ticket, but Prasad (Narmeta) said he has US credit card :( but suggested to ask Prasad (Nayadu) for the same. and to ship the financial documents to Saama for Form-16. Prasad came and said no problem for making a ticket purchase of ticket using his credit card. He bought the ticket for me and didn't even ask for payment even though I was willing to pay him for that immediately.

Now comes the surprise package from Pune with my relocation bills which Victor was sending for more than week and more shocking was the cost of shipping. 185 bucks.. really a high amount, but blue dart charges high. I promptly paid that immediately after the call. Yeshwant told me that Sunil is throwing his party. He was unhappy that some stuff which he could buy in US, he refused owing to NOT HAVING MONEY.

Now Raj told me some changes about the cashier dashboard reports. One formula was incorrect rather not sure. There were lots of mistakes. Not logical but yes... like names of metrics were non-descriptive, objects not reused. and Non-volatile tables. In Teradata. Something that's rarely seen is non-volatile tables. Oh my god.. I was grilled like hell.. That each second of explaining thins was like an hour to me.. Well, I made changes as per asked, but got stuck at Credit Card Approval report. It reports has only one date column (good) but that's how we were NOT designing the prompts. (This dashboard is going to have 4 reports and it there are unique prompts per reports, user would be promoted 4 times to input same.. very user unfriendly. There is a workaround of this BTW) Here comes totally different Raj. He explains to me the whole logic about about two dates, how they have been connected etc very well. I reallied understood few thing which I had not understood before. And explained things to me very well. :) I'm really surprised. and finally, I found the reason behind non-volatile table too. Blame it to Moving Difference. and Raj is getting married on 5th Feb 2007. I have lost my leaves :( for the same week, I know.

I called up the Engineer to get the PCU fan problem fixed and repeatedly found his cell switched off. These guys are like that. Sent him a message asking for a call back.

Mama I'm coming home (Thanks Adi)

Well.. The first things I had to check was if my leaves on 3rd to 6th Nov was approved. I was not even knowing how would I know that, so I went on intranet to see if it is approved. Well, realized taht even if it is approved it would be costly to go. No check air fair :( So I deleted leave requests and I put new requests for next weekend. Time during Shubhangi's wedding (24th Jan), Jaidev's Wedding (4th Feb), Didi's birthday (4th Feb again), my own (9th Feb). So many thing in line. I have planned the travel too. One more thing. I'd also applied for leave for whole week starting from 3rd Sept 2007. (Govinda aala re!!!!!) Coming back to leave. I requested him taht I have applied for next weekend's leave and I have cancelled coming weekend's leave plan. Well, after 5 minues I got mail sayin g leave status changed. So now I know taht I get a mail when my leave is sanctioned.Now people in team got to know that I applied for leave to be taken alomost after a year. They were amused and laughing..... "You have planned for one year...." I believe you can apply for "week with family" leaves twice a year easily. Probably these guys don't know how I used to apply leaves when in Cybage. One day leave 2 day leave with 3 to 6 months notice... BTW. I don't have a credit card :(( Never liked the idea of "credit" and all these sites takes only credit card. Couldn't booko the tickets. I gotta catch someone to book it.

Lastly, I gotta find a Hardware Engineer. PC got some problem with fan. It stopes after 2 minuts so CPU tempture goes high and as soon as it reaches 75 PC reboots. Sounds funny, but I verified it. Vooo...... This is my roomies laptop. Good that he is on phone with some gal.... Ab bhagwan ne chaha to kal blog hoga.. I have seen some ads. Hope to get this problem fixed...

Headline (rumour) of the day
1. 60% employees of BPO have been laid off. Told straight to find a job in 30 days with 90 days salary as lumpsum payment.
2. Finanacial companies have stopped giving leans, credits to employees of IVYComptech.
3. 888 holdings (Company who owns 888.com) to merge with PartyGamin PLC (Parent company of IVYComptech) -----> This one affects me directly.. More chnages to the reports due to merger. More reports. Abe 888 ka ID 888 rakhna.
4. 32 nations of EU to back a law that would make gambling business more answerable to govts.
Quite good. They should be controlled to some slight extent. Player in USA, Server in Gibraltar, one of Top 100 company listed in London stock exchnage and 95% staff in India. Who the hell is contrlling the money transactions...

It is raining Orkut

It was around 4 in morning and I got up due to some noice. I saw my roomie Sunil closing his shelf. Later he told me he had got up to shut the windows. Read forward. Well I just slept back. Now at 8 O'Clock I realize that is chilling cold even though door and windows were shut. I just looked outside, sky was covered by grey clouds. It was a very nice scene specially seeing the whole city from you window. I live at not one of the costliest but the costliest place in Hyderabad. I like the place with slight extra premium price to stay. It was raining whole day. Could not even go out to get the bike washed. In evening went out and had 5 somasas and 2 Cup of tea at New Jubilee Hotel, the frindly neighborhood tea shop :-). Chao!!!!

I met my many friends or school. Probably for the first time after a break of 11 years. Cool.. Orkut rocks....

I hate innocent people

Hey kinda surprising, isn’t it? But this is about the all people who send me invite for sites. Let it be big or small. Generally I have subscription to all type of site that interests me. Still I get mailers from my few friends to register for some sites. I really get irrigated by this. Only Reason, most of them are new so could be in email harvesting. I hate spams. I hate my innocent friend who sent me a flowered to win Nokia phone keeping some spammers/email id harvester in CC. I have not able to counter spam in last 3 years. I had very jolly 4 years of usage. I didn't get even single Spam. I use service of GMX.net as my primary email. I send my personal mails from this id only, if at all. Now I get around 30 spams a day :((. So just ad advice, if you like a service take some effort to send a personal mail, drop an offline or scrap. Don't use ready-made mailer of websites. Do you know that these sites would keep 1 PX image in image to find the authenticity of the address and sell it? Just to tell you Spam is the biggest cost to ISP. Let us see the offline model first. If someone wants to send you unwanted postcards like "40 din mein takdeer badal gayi." My home in Bombay still gets such mails. The spammers have to spend money for that. But in case of online model it is your ISP who pays to mail server-hosting ISP when you open such a Spam. Totally opposite of offline model. Also, now spammers have become damn smart. They would scan Internet for PC with less security (Blame it on evil empire of Bill Gates called Windows, the most widespread but most useless OS) to use as relay for Spam. This way they can even hid the origin of Spam. So just an advice (1) Don't put anyone's mail id in any web page (2) Don't forward a mail for winning something. Those are just Spam. Remember the "Bill Gates is sharing his fortune" that was the biggest running online scam. It originated some 6 years back I still get mail of people expecting money for forwarding money. BTW, the reason I use Gmx.net as my primary email, because it is world's only ad-free POP-3 supported mail service provider.

I love firefox 2.0

Download latest version of best browser here.
Themes here
Extention here

Peter..............

About to finished the report that Peter explained to me. And now Peter pings me about some correction in some report. God knows what does he want!! He changes his requirement every now and then. Chatted with me to do something that he could have had done by just dragging some object (intentionally) hidden from reports. These OLTP guys are really big problem. How much time it takes to write a report on OLTP system. May be 10 minutes. The same would take 1-2 days or may be even more. If not possible then go for Freeform SQLs. Man. how he is chatting with me. I do not know the answers, so ask Ritesh. He was busy with Adi due to last day of week. He asks to ignore him. Well I just did that. 5 minutes later phone rang. That was Mayank asking about the same. Peter wanted a confirmation about the possibility of the same. I was witless, due to not having any information about the table used in the report. He was asking to make that report as he has seen in OLTP system, which we don't see. So can't comment on it. So finally the report guru Sachit comes. HE was the one who made the report about which Peter was fretting. I gave up. Sachit asked me ask Peter to chat with Sachit. Well Peter was still insisting that I should let Sachit know all that. I told his he was the person who created the report so it is better to ask him. Well 1 minute after that Peter said, "When you were not the person having created the report, why were you answering the question?" Bouncer... no beamer....


Just in one day the misunderstanding was cleared…

7 days and 30 Days. 3D Reports (I love myself)

Marketing and Sales are the most ideate guys that you come across in your professional life. Jinx broken with some doubts. Peter had given some reports to be complete ASAP about the user trends. I could say that the main report was very tough. There are total 4 reports. Size keep on decreasing but the difficulty level remains the same. The biggest report was almost completed by Raj. Really very good work. I was given that report in my down time but my approach was incorrect due to set of attributes picking date from different table and it was must to be taken from different tables s that’s how the WH was evolved. Well. I was trying to explain to Ritesh about the second report. They wanted approval % and $ of various card payment methods. Flat report was already present. Btu they wanted the average of same to be compared with last 7 days and last 30 days. After having understood this problem, I explained it to him rotating my finger less in case of 7 days and longer in case of 30 days, as if we were seeing reports. He found it very funny and wanted me to do it again... :)) Well Sriram came to help me out and told me that I can achieve it by "Apply Simple"ing the whole metric. Total bouncer. So He sat with me. Got the SQL. Edited it. And told me to the fine level what to be made "apply simple" [FYI, Apply Simple is the way to use database supported function directly in MicroStrategy. Highly highly NOT recommended by MicroStrategy Inc] Yup. By 4:30 I achieved it. I felt so great. By 5:30 it was tested and found to be correct. Now comes the pick on the day.

I started looking into 3rd report. This has very cryptic column name. I asked Sriram if he knew anything about it. He told me about the entire column he could explain, but he insisted to ask requester of report to verify. Well I pinged Peter on yahoo chat for it. When I told him I could not get 2nd column, rest column were depended upon it directly or indirectly, he just asked my ext. Voila, here is Peter calling you on phone. This thing that I could not get was Monthly Projection and they had written monthly estimates. He explained to me how is that calculated. I could not get it and I could not listen to him well due to my neighbor chatting too much. He is a complete chatter bug. He I just asked him to explain again. Well, He explained it to me all over again. I covered my other ear to hear him properly. (I don't know but this strange thing of not able to talk well happens whenever there is an overseas call, inbound or outbound). Contrary to the feedback I had got about him, I would him excellent.

Sriram and Peter were hero of day for me. Sp. Sriram for making things Simple.

Zero of the Day. Sify Braodband. This blog was supposed to come yesterday but hey someone stole his wire and I was connectionless. Such thing happens in India. My broadband operator in Mumbai had accepted doing such thing.

It is (was) a beautiful day

"Up by 8:00 sharp. Disconnect the Internet. Go back to sleep" funda of a holiday :-). Hey today is Eid so it is off from office. So finally I managed to raise my butt from mattress. Straight to computer. Logged on to net. Checked my shares.. and looked for someone to chat. I and Akhilesh had a good voice chat on yahoo and skype [You can skype me on "a s h i s h 9 2" remove the space] He is just gone to US on H1-B so kinda new to city, just as I'm new to Hyderabad. He told me his plans, good and bad things about US. Not it is time to log off. We chatted till 3:00 AM his time. I let him go when his wife came. So finally had food by 4:30 PM. Again browsing and updating my To-do list of Google Docs [http://docs.google.com]. Use it heavily. I can easily keep my thought/task/docs and access them from anywhere. So now comes the most sucking experience of the day. Dominos. My roomie and I had gone to Pizza Hut. This time I thought to go to Dominos. It was a real bad experience. Hey....
1. You don't wipe clean the table when customer has gone. Most of the table had left over lying just there. Very very disappointing.
2. We took a table, which was clean. Not to forget, it had the food lying there. I had to request the counter for the same.
3. Ordered Farmhouse medium, 2 Coke, 2 Chili Bread (similar names) within 350 bucks. I had to request the guy fro glasses three time. and by the time it reached out table we had finished the food. :((
4. There is no fork and knife provided to cut the pizza. Though it hardly matters but that would help a bit.
5. WTF pizza come packed when I'm dining in?????????????? It is a big puzzle for me.

Anyways, I found a garage that provides service of bike wash. My babe had not taken a bath for so many days. Too bad.

"Add to Percentage" metric added in brain

So here come the ghost of Cashier Dashboard report. Armed with not matching different table heterogeneous for date, 24 metrics.. This gave me cold shiver when I started it. Now having to complete the percentage, it was a tricky part. I added so many derived metrics. Made the report OLAP. Shouldn't be doing that. Keep it Standard Stupid. I played with "Add to ...." is added in my brain.

HR guys .. teri mahima apar hai

I have got so much fed up of job call (Bhagwal kare aise din hamesha rahe), that I made my resume on Jobsahead and Monster confidential. I used to take calls and welcome any mail to forward it across to friends for jobs. But stopped it. But the guys (gals) at Ness, to whom I had replied, ages back realized that I had sent CV????? This opening happened to be at Hyderabad. As usual .. Never said No to anyone in life, spoke to her and she told me that my resume on Jobsahead is search-able. Now I know why I was getting mails (read spam) and sooooooooooooooo many questions were asked by Geeta, the lady who called. My O my...... One thing I can tell you she was so used to searching people for MicroStrategy that she virtually took my mini technical interview. Hey..Ankit she was asking about you man. Tune aisa kya kar diya yaar.... And just 10 minutes past the end of 30 minute interview, another guy from Ness called and asked for the same, in-spite of telling that I had been through this. BTW, No response from Sify about the issues raised... This is what they call ISO certification... :

Sify really really sucks

Sify Broadband definitely sucks. It sucks big time. They're such a cheat. Now they have deducted one more day for having crossed 150 MB a day download limit. Now I was forced to see how come the limit is getting crossed so often in spite of taking utmost care. So I checked the log again. Viola! I download 1435.45 MB between 00:09 to 08:10. So much!!!!!! A speed of 178 MB an hour can be achieved in day dreams. No doubt I get speed of what they promise, but over billing of downloads is too much. They can do a mistake by may be 20% margin. But 300% to 400% error is not accidental. It is intentional. And logged another complaint with them. Their customer care is good for thing. happened to meet a guy who had very little understanding of English. For something which took me 3 minutes last time, it took me 20 minutes to tell him. The customer care executive was someone named Prabhu.

Sify Screw up

Just got up to disconnect the Internet as premium download rate starts from 8:00 AM. But hey... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind just needs 2 minutes to complete the download. So I decide to disconnect after the movie is completed. After the download I checked the usage. Oh my god. 107 MB between 8:10 to 8:50. That's impossible. A phenomenal speed of 3.75 MB a minute. Now I know why I lost 6 days of Internet usage. (Sify decreases your usage be one day for every 25 MB downloaded above 150 MB daily download limit.) Good way of making money Sify. Fudge the downloads and charge the customers. If you use Sify then do keep a tab on what they show as usage on "My Account". Just logged complaint with them. #4212247. There is no doubt that Sify Broadband gives what it promise. I get speed of 25K for 256kbps plans which is acceptable. I used Beam CableSystem when I was staying at Company's Guest House and I used to get same speed for 512 kbps plan. Let us see what action they take for over billing.

MicroStrategy Free Form SQLs simplified

I got up so late today. It was 10:05. I’m supposed to be in office by 10:00. I straight jumped into shower, got dressed, had Idlies in breakfast and reached office by 11:15. There is reason for being extra late. ;-) Working on the report of Game-bookers KPI, I gave some final touches to the SQL. I really enjoyed making final touches, because I made changes to Free Form SQL reports myself alone. I had to depend upon some one knowing the SQL well to do the same. I removed one complete join that was a great achievement. The joy was only short lived. I had to redo that join due to one separate WHERE clause. I spoke to Adi about my planned leaves in November and I didn’t get any positive reply. Ritesh also told me about the rules that I must follow while creating free form SQL report in MicroStrategy, as no other guy would be bale to make or create any schema change till I’m done. I hope I would be able to keep it, because after today’s tweaking the SQL my confidence level is increased very much. I printed the Rent receipt to be sent to Saama Technologies, my ex-employer, and got sign of landlord, Mr. Neeraj Jamwal, too. ;) I took the help of a site for the same. Here is the link. http://www.vakilno1.com/forms/delhirentcontrol/form_b.htm