Dollar Rupee game...

Sriram headed out with his wife on a Sunday evening to shop things randomly. He had wishes and plans to purchase a new digital camera and probably upgrade his cellphone. The dailies were flooded with advertisements on holiday sales that nobody could resist. Sriram reached to an electronic store that displayed digital cameras with special prices for the festive and holiday season. When he picked the camera in hand, his mind calculated and converted the price on the tag to its US dollars and realized it was still 50% higher than the prices he had seen on US retail websites like amazon. He quickly decided to give up buying it and instead ask his colleague, Ashwin, who was returning home from the United States to buy the same model from there.

Ashwin was living his final month of his deputation in the United States of America. He somehow managed the five months with the Indian spices and the cereals he had brought from his home. One day, he wanted to eat nice Indian food at a restaurant. On a weekend, with so much eager and admiration that he had ever had, he visited one such Indian restaurant and walked in to have his meal. He looked slowly at the menu one by one and looked at the prices against each. He calculated and converted the prices to its Indian equivalent that ended up at a number that is about ten times, if it had bought the same in his home. He decide to pursue the dinner but, wait until reaching home to have his desirous Indian food.

Four (or more ) years back and now...

As a college boy, I stepped out of the university, watched several city buses go as I waited for that single bus that connects my college and home. There were days I used to stand for an hour or more ! Apart from typical reasons for college guy to have a bike, I used to think how much time I would be saving if I had a bike for commute. Well, after few months, I did buy one.

Couple of years later, the bike I had, as well as ,I aged. After losing couple of "knowns" and friends to fatal road accidents, I slowly refrained myself from using bike. No need to mention the weekend parking woos in Bangalore. Then, I started to look at (pluses of) cars and think how good it would be to take the family and ladies in it. I would not say, I enjoyed driving bike much then.

When it was the time, I got hold of an entry level hatchback and immediately, I started feeling I was finally there. After a year fighting for space on roads, avoiding roads during peak hours, thinking and planning for parking space everywhere I went, car became an overhead most of the times. I gave up taking car most of the times and have started using city buses and trains during week days and weekends. I know it is subjective. My house and office were nearby to bus stations.

I wait several minutes for the bus and forget the pressure to handle road space or parking space. I look at cars and the lonely commuter in them. Sometimes I watch few cars "hanging around" to park somewhere. I walk past happily towards the bus station.

Well, have several years passed by ?

How many lacs is crores in INR !

This is rather an evidence of what used to be a funny liner in Tamil - 'oru Kodi/laksham kku evlo zero theriyuma?'

Oscar(s) for AR Rahman !

This is going to be one of those million posts that come from Rahman fans across the country and the world. Many have been expressing their joy and pride on FM and television channels already. I just want to take a moment and praise this genius for the honor he has brought to our Country and its music.

I will restrain from writing how big a Rahman fan I have been. I wanted to write a post since last two months after a string of musical hits he has delivered in the last couple of years. Jodha Akbar, Jaane Tu, Yuvraaj, Ghajini, Delhi -6, Sakkarakatti and this world known Slumdog Millionaire - all gave him a versatile scope for music. Rahman in an interview said, they (SDM crew) wanted to keep Slumdog millionaire music or movie under wraps until oscars are announced. I am sure they had known the destiny of the film themselves.

I and many other million fans of Rahman out there feel great pride and joy on this occasion.

Stone abutment on Roads..

This is sure peril for motorists and in cases for even passenger cars. There are crucial roads where one can easily find such misplaced bricks lying on the road, making already arduous "city drive" a dangerous one too. Observing a little more, I realised these stones were put just to shift the traffic hotspot to a farther spot.

Taking wrong side drive for a shorter distance or driving through one way is common for our country men, one can not be surprised to see such behaviour these days especially at the record high gas prices and scorching subcontinent summer. Concrete bricks that are small enough to be moved by just limbs of a two wheeler rider, forms the mode of abutment between lanes.

Will the concerned department take care to atleast put steel barricades instead of such dangerous stones, despite the increase in steel price (Start believing life is costlier than some cheap steal) ? Even the traffic officials who redirect or stop such violating vehicles are disdained by drivers. What is holding officials to charge a ticket to these violators when they could catch helmet defaulters so vigorously. Can one wearing helmet being hurled by such a violating vehicle overcome life danger ?

It would have been applaudable if choosing flyover/overbridge spots happened effectively - in terms of time and place. Also, with about almost 20,000 individuals commuting per day on average to various software companies on the IT highway/OMR, it would be wiser to have some sort of mass transportation like Metro or express highways/busses.

I could hear the reader uttering when I would stop fretting about pandemic traffic woes.

Ridiculous, Mr. President !

Certainly, the comment of US President Mr. Bush over raising food prices, has kindled controversy - in the Asia, in particular . Earlier, US President reasoned increasing prosperity of the Asian countries viz., China and India, has caused in soaring food prices in the world. In detail, he explains it as the increasing demand of the "quality food" from the India and China as the leading cause for the global inflation.

Supporting facts of this argument could be : 1) More airline users in India since the last decade, leading to increase in demand for turbine gas 2) More cars on roads, there are still many nations believing Indians ride on bullock carts 3) Increase in education level, leading to nutrition awareness.

This is infact an unnecessary comment in a situation of US Economy recession that had resulted due to millions of US $ spent on Wars and measures to check and fight terrorism. States is still one of the leading nations using bio gas and hosting leading manufactures of cars that use bio gas. It is surprising how Mr. President has not taken into consideration, the increase in bio gas utilization. There is an unpredictable change in local weather conditions due to reasons like Global warming that had affected in the food production globally. Considering the age and importance, still agricultural industry is growing at a much lesser pace compared to technology or communications industries that it is fighting to meet the ends up, which is proven by the UN food reserves.

BMC (Vendor) Backup for DB2

IBM delivers Imagecopy(Backup) feature with utilities suite. But, there are some amazing innovations and obvious "should have done" features are covered in BMC Imagecopy. Some of the features (I might have really missed any, in my study) that is going to make the buyers happy for this BMC Copy Plus are:

1) Inline statistics - This is an important functionality IBM missed to cover. BMC collects/updates the information pertinent to tablespace. Sure this is going to be a rocking feature in partitioned tablespaces.

2) Copying index (Defined with COPY NO) - BMC overrides the IBM's protocol and manages to create imagecopy of index that are not copyable as per IBM/definition. Though index could be recovered by REBUILD against using naive RECOVERY, during disaster of huge objects,this is going to fasten the recovery, provided table, index copies are intact.

3) Dynamic syscopy choice - This feature is going to be loved by DBAs. By OUTSIZE and BIGDDN/BIGDSN, BMC lets the choice of syscopy file to be made dynamically at the execution time considering the size of the file to be copied. This could help DBAs to put bigger tables on Tapes and smaller ones on DASD. Think of the case when table grows in size where you do not realise a huge table being copied on DASD later. Isn't this sweet ?

4) Syscopy files according to IC Type - Are you running CHANGELIMIT (m,n) ICTYPE AUTO ? Not sure how to name incremental and full image copies differently ? With IBM, all the copies (whatever type !) gets created in similar files. FULLDDN/FULLDSN and COPYDDN/RECOVERYDDN could be used together wherein full IC (if chosen) goes to FULLDDN while incremental IC (if chosen) goes to COPYDDN.

5) Incremental copy, still changed pages intact - RESETMOD yes/no is going to tell BMC program whether DBA likes to reset the modified pages flag on taking incremental copies. In case incremental IC is corrupted/lost, he could just rerun to create another incremental one. Also, BMC lets an option (MAXINCRs) to escalate a incremental IC to Full IC if a certain number of incremental ones are done after a full IC. This would sum up the backup strategy for a week.