Moved..

I recently set up an account with textdrive and now have my own site there. The blog is moving to: blog.vikgup.com.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a small user application. I am planning to have it go live tonight, or by tomorrow, depending on how deployment goes. So far, things have been very smooth with Textdrive, and with Ruby, Rails, MySql.

A movie a week: La Communidad

I chanced upon this movie in the fabulous Scarecrow movie store in Seattle. Scarecrow is responsible for helping me find so many of the movies that I couldn't otherwise. It is truly a remarkable store. Coming back to the movie of this week, La Communidad is a less famous Spanish movie, and I could not figure out why it is not more well known.

The movie is a dark comedy, a thriller that entertains you very well. The movie is about a huge sum of money that is supposedly hidden in an apartment, and since everyone in the building knows about it, they all want it. The greed of the people bind them together even though no one trusts anyone, and they rally to not let whoever takes the apartment have any of the cash. It reminded me quite a bit of the other incredible movie -- Delicatessen, a movie where a similar community in a building works together to harbour their secret.

La Communidad was very fresh, and it continued to surprise till the very end. I have a bias for dark comedies, for noirs, and this one very much comes close to being one of the best.

Dracula in Pakistan

Browsing the Virgin music store in the SF city the other day, I chanced upon this movie that I couldn't resist. It's called "The Living Corpse". The movie was a little bit disappointing -- it wasn't as campy as I had hoped it would be. Nevertheless, it was bad enough to have some value. The best was a scene where a female "evil spirit" breaks into a Latin dance to entice a man. The movie had value in just existing -- I don't think there's something quite like this from subcontinent's cinema, and definitely not in the 60s.

A movie a week: Waking Ned Devine

I remember walking out of the theater feeling very happy after seeing Waking Ned Devine. The reason I am talking about this movie today is that I recently ready about a new Hindi movie release that has a storyline that seems suspiciously similar to this movie. The basic premise of the movie is a small Irish village trying to collect the prize on the winning lottery ticket -- when the actual winner dies (of the shock of having won a jackpot!).

All said, the movie is a very funny, heart-warming story told in the setting of a beautiful Irish village. The story starts with two old men finding out that someone in their small village has the winning lottery ticket. They don't know who, but they set out to find out who it is, and how to get a share of it. It turns out that the winner is an old man who dies at the shock of the win -- he is found dead smiling, holding the ticket, looking at the TV. From then on follows a fun ride -- featuring a naked old man racing on a motorcycle, a flying telephone booth and an on the spot improvised funeral speech -- as the old men try to outfox the government and the village in trying to pocket it all.

It isn't slapstick, as the Hindi remake seems to be. It carries a LOT of charm -- despite the fact that the average age of the cast is probably seventy five.

Coordinates update..

Pooja and I just landed in Palo Alto. It's her first day in the office with A9 today, and my first day at home. I just started looking around for deciding where to live, what car to buy and where to play squash. At least the last seems to have more than one decent option in the neighbourhood.

I just heard about Google buying out Upstartle. Interesting.

A movie a week

I had been thinking for a while about using this blog to write about movies that I like or hate. It'll give me a chance to at least update the blog once a week for that. :)

The movie this week is what I have always felt is probably one of the best movies I have ever experienced. To say that I just "watched" Ikiru would be wrong.

I watched Ikiru in the year 1999, I think. I had just moved to Seattle, to an apartment within walking distance from the fabulous Egyptian theatre there. Another theatre I used to frequent then was the Grand Illusion theater. This is where I got a chance to see some of the really memorable movies. One of them was the movie of this week, Kurosawa's Ikiru.

I could talk about the plot or the screenplay or the acting or direction, but that would really be pointless. It is one of the best works of Akira Kurosawa, and that in itself makes it one of the best movies ever made. It stars Takeshi Shimura in probably the most well known on-screen roles of his.

What I want to talk about are different aspects of the movie that really made it so dear to me. The first was the sheer impact of it. I've seen it in entirety only once, but ever since then its imagery comes back to me with a strong force. It makes you want to do something good with your life. The impact is probably accenuated by how the truth unfolds in the movie -- through impressions and anecdotes of people touched by an honest life.

One of the scenes that I felt was particularly interesting was when Takeshi Shimura is walking down the street, after learning about his illness. He is so lost in thoughts that he doesn't hear or see anything around him. And neither do we -- there is no sound. Then abruptly, he gets a jolt and gets out of the way of a truck -- and we hear noise of a busy street. The camera pans out from focusing on Shimura to take in a lot more around him. The result is very effective. These things are what make Kurosawa's movies a treat to watch.

The essence of the movie is about asking oneself -- what have you done with your life? I remember that a friend left his job, has been roaming the world and doing odd things, with the quest: How to live life. It's a question probably impossible to answer before having lived it -- and I don't thing anyone can answer this for you. Lots of people I talk to -- whether successful and rich professionals or young teenagers or older parents -- have been reading Paul Coelho's The Alchemist. Many of these actually express a desire to figure out how to live life. This of course implies that their current life isn't what they have in mind. All these people will have something to learn from Ikiru. It teaches a simple lesson about life much better than the Paul Coelhos and Richard Bachs of the world.

One of the things I did after watching this movie was to get the lyrics (translated in English) of the song that Takeshi Shimura sings in the movie. It is supposedly a much older song in Japan, and is used very effectively in the movie.

If you watch plenty of world cinema, you will slowly come to realize the impact of Kurosawa's movies on cinema everywhere. The best loved Hindi movie of all time, Sholay, is a remake (a most remarkable one at that) of a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Star Wars was inspired by Hidden Fortress. There are countless other such remakes. But you will also find scenes from Kurosawa's movies that seem to have inspired scenes in other movies. Watch Seven Samurai and then watch Lagaan. Scenes where Aamir Khan takes on the entire village to convince them to take on the British is very similar to the argument in the Japanese village over hiring Samurai to fight the dacoits.

Similar such inspirations from Ikiru show up in movies when you least expect them to. My love affair with Korean movies started with the great action movie Nowhere to Hide. The movie itself seemed to draw inspiration, albeit lightly, from a Kurosawa movie Nora Inu. In the middle of the movie one of the characters is sitting in a children's swing in a snow covered field, dwelling on a recent shoot out. The first thing you think when you see this scene is "Ikiru!"

Few movies have the power to make you want to do something with your life. Ikiru is one.

Moving on..

After about 6.5 years of working at my current company -- Amazon.com -- I will finally be saying goodbye. Looking back, I have to say that I had an amazing time here. But staying any longer would have just been complacency on my part.

There are so many friends, so many sweet memories that happened in this time.

Right now, I am in the middle of getting everything closed, packed and shipped back to the United States. It kind of feels strange -- the last one year in India has changed so much in my life in some ways. The time in India was very memorable, though I can't complain enough about the life (or the lack of it) in Bangalore.

Punjabi ghazals, anyone?

When someone mentions Punjabi music, most people probably think of Bhangra, Daler Manhdi, Malkit Singh an the like. Try this
for a change.

I picked up this album by Kiran Ahluwalia because I remember I had seen the album photo online somewhere, and remember that I had kind of thought about getting it sometime. I saw it when browsing in a store, and next thing I was listening to her amazing voice in my car. Her story of leaving her job to go find music is impressive too. But really, her voice, and her rendition of the ghazals, is something you get hooked on to easily.

The Lisp Way

My journey with Lisp continues. I had progressed to the second chapter of SICP, and now Ajit has swiped it from me. So I'll have to get another copy. (The book's a lot cheaper in the Indian edition -- Rs. 400, or about USD 9.)

I managed to find the Common Practical Lisp book in a store in Bay area. This one's a great read as well. I'm actually reading this stuff in flights, lord forbid.

It's getting to the extent where I have been thinking about past stuff I've done and how I could have done them that much better if I had picked Lisp to do them.

I couldn't find Peter Norvig's book I was looking for in stores anywhere, and I was in the US for a short visit and didn't have time to get it from Amazon. But I have plenty to work thorugh for now!

Physics of 15 Park Avenue

The title is a little misleading. I have little to offer on the physics of 15 Park Avenue. But I have some observations. For those not in the know, 15 Park Avenue is a new movie by Aparna Sen -- the director of the amazing Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.

I saw this movie a few weeks ago, and we weren't prepared for the grim mood of the movie. Nevertheless, we came away impressed with the movie. Before you read any further, there are spoilers below -- so if you haven't seen the movie, you might be better off not reading ahead.

From the very beginning of the movie, it seems to have a thread running about questioning reality, and there is also a thread that keeps mentioning quantum physics. Shabana Azmi is a quantum physics professor. She befriends a neurologist who is treating her sister -- played incredibly by Konkona Sen -- of schizophrenia. Together the doctor and the sister have conversations about what is real and what is not. The movie ends where you are left wondering what it was all about -- and it kind of ties these odd ends about quantum physics and reality and alternate worlds, though still leaves a lot of questions.

The other interesting aspect about the movie was how all the characters revolved around Mithi the schizophrenic. Everyone brought their perspective -- the educated sister treats her like a project and a responsibility, the old mother just looks on helplessly, the maid treats her like a pain she has to endure, the deserting lover looks at her with guilt and seeks redemption in trying to help her.

In one of the conversations in the movie, they discuss a sadhu who "hears voices in his head." The mother is an instant believer who thinks this can happen. The scientists are all non-believers and think he is a charlatan. The doctor brings his perspective -- maybe the sadhu is schizophrenic? And this ties the conversation with Mithi, who talks and lives in a world different than the one others around her are living in.

--

I saw Rang De Basanti last night -- another patriotic themed film by Aamir Khan. It was many times better than the damp affair called Mangal Pandey, of course. The movie had its flaws but I thought the movie was quite well done.

Teaching myself Lisp

Whenever I can make some time these days, I try and make progress with learning Lisp. To begin with, I started with a refresher on Lambda. I remembered some of the lambda calculus stuff, but not a whole lot. Google search pointed me to Wikipedia entries, so that's where I went.

Next I searched for some basic tutorials on Lisp that could get me started. This is the one I ended up using: http://www.notam02.no/internt/cm-sys/cm-2.2/doc/clt.html
Once I was through with this tutorial, I started looking for good books. I found the Common Lisp: The Language book online. I've now downloaded it on my powerbook (which is running for hours on battery now!)

I always felt I could learn better if I had programming problems to work through. They make you wade through some basic concepts that elude you when you are simply reading tutorials etc. After I looked around a bit, I picked up the class assignments from a course at Georgia Tech (where I actually had spent 2 years, without taking this course -- what a waste!): Class CS 2360.

I am almost done with the second assingment now. They weren't very tough, but I couldn't stop myself from smiling when I solved some simple problems like swapping the first and the fourth elements of a list, or implementing simple set operations.

I also bought a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. It's been a great read so far -- I am still in the first chapter.

Of soundtracks, Korean movies and Indian copies...

I saw the Sajay Dutt starrer, Zinda, this weekend. I thought the movie was a far superior product than what one would have expected. I think it's also largely due to the ability of the lead actors being able to carry off their roles. There were all kinds of goofs and letdowns, but nevertheless this is a good product from Bollywood.
One of the funny goofs was when a guy whose both hands have been cut off is asked where the girl is, points using what must have been his third hand, "upstairs."

Now, one of the reasons, I am sure, this movie appeals to me is that it is remake of the Korean movie Oldboy. I have a weak spot for Korean and Thai movies, and I end up watching a lot of junk from them just because I want to not miss out on a rare gem somehow. That's how I got to see Attack the Gas Station, Jakarta, The Eye, One Missed Call and so many other very good movies (imho). In any case, Zinda did a good job with the production though they could have easily done with someone better than the leading ladies they actually hired -- one thinks of Shilpa Shetty.

One or two movies every couple of months seem to have really good soundtracks. Bluffmaster did it with its hip hop tracks a month or so ago, and now Zinda with its tracks by Strings. Pakistani bands seem to be the flavor du jour, and fully deserved too. Jal, Fuzon, Strings -- all these guys rock!

Lisp..

I met Ranjit for lunch a couple of days back, and naturally there were plenty of geeky things to talk about. He had made references to Lisp related blogs recently, and conversation steered towards functional programming and like for a bit.

About a year and a half ago, when I started working on a brand new product, the nature of the product naturally lent itself to be implemented in a functional programming langauage -- or so I believe. Unfortunately I can't talk about it in detail, but I was very excited that I might get to tinker in Lisp or ML once again. But it wasn't to be. This time, however, I am a little bit more determined to just work in Lisp for fun, if nothing else.

This led to an exercise of installing CLISP on my powerbook. I have Panther (10.3), and the majority of my pain in getting CLISP installed was in finding how to get the Xcode developer tools installed. It turned out that the whole thing was incredibly simple once you knew where to install from. In any case, as of this morning, I have CLISP on my laptop, and I feel like child again, eager to get back home from work and play!

Bringing the powerbook battery back to life

For some time now, the battery on my 12-inch powerbook had been behaving erratically. I noticed it first some 4 months ago, when the battery went from 100% charge to dead in about 10 minutes. Initially I thought the battery must be close to dying (it has been close to two years of usage). Last week, I decided to at least tamper with it a little bit. With only a little bit of internet research, I figured that the problem is probably related to the memory problem, and I found two ways people have fixed similar problems. I narrowed down the possible things I could try to fix the laptop to these two: boot up open firmware, and try to reset nvram; and try and completely discharge and recharge the battery a few times.

I didn't know how to boot up in open firmware, and this place had some good information to get me started. Other people had written about how they had fixed battery problems in open firmware too.

Once my powerbook was in open firmware, i reset-nvram, and reset-all -- resulting in the latop restarting. There didn't seem to be any effect. The battery was still draining pretty quickly.

Then I started the process of draining the battery completely. In order to do this quickly, I downloaded BatteryAmnesia, but it didn't work -- it kept reporting that the AC adapter is connected when it wasn't. It probably did its best and there was a problem with the battery I needed to fix, but I was a little disappointed with the software -- as a programmer myself, I expect programs to work when users use them.

So I began the process of letting the battery drain off completely, and then recharging it again. After a couple of these sessions I noticed that the powerbook would start reporting only 1% charge left after about 20 minutes of work, but then would stay on for another hour or so at that level. In some ways, the problem was fixed -- my battery was lasting much longer now than it was earlier.

After a few more sessions of fully draining the battery and recharging it, the battery seems much healthier. It is charging and draining at a much lower rate -- which does seem to indicate a "memory problem" as the root cause.

Kumarakom and Allepey

A couple of weeks ago Pooja and I went to Kerala. We planned it at a very short notice, but we managed to still get to do what we wanted to -- which was a day at a lakeside resort in Kumarakom, and a houseboat cruise. We were initially trying to book it online, but decided to go through a travel agent, in the hope of getting better rates. It turned out the buggers charged us the rates we saw online, and added their own margins on top of it. I've seen the same thing now with just about everything in India -- flights, hotels, holiday packages. Probably the best rates you want are already available online now.

I wholly recommend Kerala visit to everyone -- it is indeed a place out of this world. Sitting by the water in Kumarakom in the evening was probably one of most pleasant memories in India. The day and night in the houseboat was great as well. We travelled from Kumarakom to Allepey, but I believe most of the cruises are from Allepey to Kollam.

Hampi

We went to Hampi on the new years' weekend. It was a very quiet new years, but great nevertheless. The city of Hampi was a part of the old Vijayanagar empire till the 15th century, when it was brought to ruins by invaders. This was the first time I saw preserved ruins of a whole city. Cities like Delhi, Udaipur, Mysore, Hyderabad have their own (and even longer) history, but there are layers of cultures that have hidden, or completely erased what existed centuries ago. In most of these cities you can still see the more magnificient pieces of architecture -- the palaces, the forts -- but in Hampi you can look over what used to be an entire city, complete with markets, temples, festival grounds, drainage and drinking water aqua ducts and more.

The city has boundary walls that have gates to come in and go out -- large enough that elephants used to come in years ago, and buses make it through easily now. The moment you enter Hampi, you immediately feel as though you've been transported to a different time. On barren rocks you see beauty in the form of architecture of old everywhere. I found it fascinating to see what seemed like resting places for trekkers in several places -- in the middle of what seemed like nowhere.

The most majestic and impressive of the temples was defintiely the Vithala temple. This temple has "musical" pillars. It is difficult to describe but there are actually different instruments that you can hear when you play on different pillars. Besides this, the Queen's bath was interesting -- one of the times when the good old phrase comes to mind: "It's good to be King!"

We stayed across the river, and getting there by car was quite an adventure. The village across the river from Hampi is now just a row of guest houses and garden restaurants, all catering to mostly foreigners and hippies. Nevertheless, it was not very expensive. I recommend though that you stay in Hampi, preferrably in a guest house or in the Hotel Mayur Bhuvaneshvari that's run by the Karnataka government. You have to take a boat to go across the river, and it stops running at 8pm, and doesn't start till 6am. We were planning to leave Hampi very early morning on Monday, to get back to work in Bangalore, and had to drive some 40 km on very bad roads to get across.

And it was just six years ago...

Today I had to make a call to Bank of America to get the address of the location where I opened my account. While I was asking the CS rep at BofA to help me with it, it occured to me that when I opened my account, the bank was called Seafirst, and so many things were different then. So much has happened since then, it doesn't seem like it was just six years ago. I can almost remember all the months, sometimes even weeks and days, that made up these six years.

Come to think of it, how can human brain just keep cramming up all these memories, and have them so readily available all the time?

We saw King Kong. I had been patiently waiting for this Peter Jackson remake of the 1933 movie, and it didn't disappoint. The New Zealander has put $207 million to good use.

What makes it all worth it in the end...

People talk of crossroads, and the Frosts of the world have extolled the value of the road less travelled. I have been thinking about some drastic changes, some of which are now right upon me (such as marriage), and some I am thinking of bringing upon myself (such as work). There are several different ways one can go, and many different places one could potentially end up at. So I am asking myself, what makes it worth it all in the end?

Blogging has been light of late primarily because life's gotten a lot more mundane (yet hectic) since I came back from my vacation. I was in Chennai on a recruiting trip, and managed to dine at the fabulous Murugan Idli Stall. Besides that, nothing of note's been happening. I am off to Goa for a weekend of party before I tie the knot a week or so later.

Here's to the last few days as a bachelor!

Reality check in Bangalore

I've been back in the office for the past 2 days. I am trying to figure out what I want to be doing now. In the meanwhile, everything about Bangalore only sucks more. Our office has moved to Banerghatta road -- which was supposedly voted as the worst road in India on a TV channel. After a couple of days of long commutes managing to stay alive despite craters on the roads and buses moving around like misguided asteroids, I am questioning why I am here doing what I am doing. Nothing could be worth enduring the shithole that Bangalore has become.

Shopping in Sri Lanka

A bunch of us spent some 4 days in Sri Lanka last week. It was primarily a trip to do some shopping, and also to travel a bit. The only thing going for Sri Lanka, I thought, was that there were probably a lot more beaches to check out.

We managed to only see Bentota beach, and a little bit of the beaches closer to Colombo. Rest of Sri Lanka seemed not very different from India, except that it was maybe a little less crowded, people were a little more well behaved (they actually stop for pedestrians!), and food was not as great. Other than that, as an Indian you would probably feel right at home -- almost to the extent that you would expect these people to know Hindi. It even happened to us a few times -- we blurted out in Hindi to the auto rickshaw driver or the taxi driver, and didn't realize for a second why they didn't respond. Indian Rupee works just as fine in most places, you have to haggle your way through everything, and we didn't look out of place. We felt so much at home that we decided we should be paying the Sri Lankan fares for all parks and temples we visited -- which were of course much less then the charges for foreigners.

We stayed at the Hilton for the first couple of days. I had found out that they have squash courts at the Hilton, so naturally I went prepared. I got a chance to play squash after about 6 months, I think, and loved every second of it. It left me quite sore for the rest of the time in Sri Lanka -- and I felt all of it when trying to jet ski in Bentota the next day.

Our time in Lanka felt like we were driving around most of the time. Traffic seems really slow there. The drive to Bentota took us longer than upwards of 2 hours, and it is just over 60km from Colombo. The next day we drove to Kandy and stayed at the really lousy Queens hotel there. The hotel seemed to have been left behind by the British, and the folks who took it over seemed to have decided that by just letting it be makes it all the better. On the way to Kandy we stopped at an elephant orphanage -- still called that though the original orphans are now grandparents and parents of the rest of the elephants in the orphanage now. We had had some really good time up, close and personal with the elephants in Nagarhole, so it didn't seem that much of a novelty. Nevertheless, elephants are majestic, and command respect when you lay eyes on them.

The third day we were back in Colombo, this time at the Taj Samudra. This hotel was definitely worse off than the Hilton, but better located and decent facilities. Their dinner pricing was quite baffling though. They had priced their buffet at three times the price of the most expensive item on the regular menu -- not surprising then that hardly anyone touched the buffet.

The fourth day was a rare day when I went on a shopping spree for about eight hours at a stretch. We started at Odel (great for clothing, especially t-shirts), moved to House of Fashion (amazing for jackets -- unbelievably low prices!), Arena (which was apparently unceremoniously shutdown for no apparent reason), Paradise Road (really beautiful store, good selection of Dilmah tea, hand paper stuff, handicrafts and more) and then back to Odel to wrap it all up. At Paradise Road I also picked up a book called "Colpetty People" by Ashok Ferrey. I've read half of it now and it reminds me of RK Narayan quite a bit in its prose, and Saki and Roald Dahl in its stories and characters. The book has short stories bases in Sri Lanka, or with Sri Lankan characters. I like it so far.

Back in Bangalore, it seems just like it was before, only worse. The rains have helped make the traffic situation worse -- and I thought it couldn't get any worse. Bangalore seems to heading to some kind of a climax -- one day the traffic will get so bad that everyone will run out of petrol just sitting in the cars, and will have to leave their cars on the road to go home; everything will come to a standstill. It really does feel that way when it takes 2 hours to drive half a km here. And if the people ruling this state would have their way, all of us should soon start farming.