Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

Well, for the record, I liked the movie. Now the difficult question is, why did I like it? Its not a great horror movie, neither is it much of a thriller. The basic story of the movie seems a bit weird too. But you have to hand it to Shymalan, he knows how to tell a story. He really does. In a scary movie, you always go about anticipating what will happen next, you always try to predict, to prepare yourself better for the time when it actually comes. But out here, Shymalan beats you fair and square. What you expect never happens and more importantly, you never expect that what happens. A typical Shymalan movie otherwise, with great cinematography, good dialog delivery and excellent use of sound. As usual, there is a message in the film. Whether or not you agree to it is upto you. If you have an eye and liking for implicit details, book your ticket now.

I felt it was just a matter of time before the Indians found their form. Actually, it doesn't really look like they have found their form yet, but they certainly have found their tempo and their spirit. The urge to win seemed to be missing for quite some time, but yesterday it was there. Right from the time when Saurav Ganguly came out to bat the Indians looked like they were going for the kill. And when Rahul Dravid scored 25th run by running his 25th single, it was certain that the pitch was not good for batting. I missed the opening spell of Nehra and Pathan, but from what I heard after the match, it looks like the pace bowlers are back in business. Vaughan and Giles did put up a fight, but they were not really going to be able to lift the tempo when the required rate crept up on that pitch. And thats where they faultered. A good victory for India after a long wait!

Sigh! Another semifinal, another loss for the Infosys football team. Its the fifth loss in a row in the semifinals, I think. We have always come up against really strong teams consisting of renowned club players. But it has always been a close fight. Three of the five matches have gone into penalties, one into sudden death and we have been beaten in regular time just once. I think what is lacking is the finishing. Our strikers need more practice ... as simple as that.

I've been working quite a bit on x3270 recently. Adding in some enhancements, helping its deployment in Infosys. And the efforts have started to pay off, literally. We are looking at savings of a thousand US dollars per license. Personally, I'm at the threshold of another milestone. I'll be sending my enhancements to Paul Mattes, the current maintainer of x3270 ver soon. Lets see whether the changes make it into the next release. That, as hackers would know, is the ultimate reward for your work!

Whoever designed this SQL language is a nut. That was the opening statement of "Close encounters of the Fourth kind" and I still stick by it. It was about a year that I wrote that story, and my opinion has still not changed. After a year I had to actually read and understand an SQL query. I was unhappy that I had to read tripple nested queries of 10 lines then. Now I have queries that span 2 printed pages each. Yuck! How on earth is any human supposed to make sense of it? And how the hell did that author manage to write it? Probably must have had a fight with his/her girfriend/boyfriend/spouse. And to think I have to bear with one whole week of this. I shall overcome someday!

When you go for a movie that is based on your all-time favorite book, you obviously expect a lot from it; and 'I, Robot', the movie doesn't disappoint. Special effects are no longer a benchmark to measure English movies. What is good about the movie is that it maintains the spirit of the book intact. Asimov fans will like this movie. Contrary to what the trailors suggest, the 3 laws of robot have not been compromised at all. Also, a lot of issues raised by Asimov have been touched upon in the short span of 2 hours. Also prominent in the movie are a few hints taken from 'The Bicentenial Man'. Even though Donovan and Powell don't feature here, there isn't a shortage of humour. Just one point that I don't agree with ... Dr. Susan Calvin should *not* have been shown to be pretty at all! All in all, I rate this movie very highly.

This is perhaps the best example of a community effort - power of the people. This almost makes me believe in socialism. A mammoth work created by the cumulative effort of perhaps thousands of people across the globe, transcending all barriers of region, language, religion and all such others that we tend to raise between us and our neigbours. For the English version, check out http://en.wikipedia.org This project started on January 2, 2001. It basically uses a system based on wikis (a wiki is web page that can be edited using your web browser by whoever has rights to do so and the name 'wiki' is derived from the Hawaiian word 'wiki-wiki', meaning 'quick') to create an encyclopedia. The inspiration behind this idea was Richard M Stallman . This is an encyclopedia that you can modify if you want to (unless you have been blacklisted for vandalism). By now it must be the largest repository of knowledge in the world ... and it is still growing a...