Vladimirka – The Road To The Wild East

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2 weeks ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

What the above painting shows? A road through a grassland, a distant church and nothing much.This is “Vladimirka” by Russian painter Issac Levitan.

Vladimirka is the way from Muskova (Moscow) to Vladimir since the middle ages and later became the part of the road to Siberia and that’s what makes it important and interesting.

Siberia, the Wild East of Russia, long stretches of grass, marsh and forest, extreme climates in both summer and winter.

So this is the road trodden by generations of fortune seekers, adventurers,convicts, exiled political prisoners who made the establishment unhappy, all who does not fit well into the mould of the prevalent social structure.

This is the road curved out in this wilderness by the feet of these misfits.

This painting is a hint to that history, where core subject is missing and needs to be felt through your knowledge of the past

Quote Of The Day–22/04/2012

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4 weeks ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through ― Steve Jobs

Dada Is Back !!!!

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4 weeks ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

It’s was great to see Dada back in form and give such great all round performance in today’s match. Some guys never give up and Dada is one of the biggest example of that.

Dada

Quote of the day–20th April 2012

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1 month ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

Competition provides spice in life as well as in sports; it’s only when the spice becomes the entire diet the player gets sick. ~ George Leonard (Mastery)

The Man Who Programmed the ROM of Macintosh

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1 month ago
by Sankarsan Bose in
Andy Hertzfield is “Man Who Programmed the ROM of Macintosh”.
”The ROM of Macintosh”, the soul of the great machine, which housed the Mac Toolbox with key components like QuickDraw, Window Manager, File System, TextEdit etc.
Hertzfield was also the person who overnight developed the program to display a Scrooge McDuck on the screen of first Mac prototype.
He officially became a part of the Macintosh much later, after Steve Jobs took over the project from Jef Raskin.
A true hacker by nature and supporter of free spirited software development Andy is now working for Google( since 2005) and is UI designer for Google+ Circles.
He also maintains an interesting site on Macintosh
http://www.folklore.org/index.py

His Google+ profile can be found at:
https://plus.google.com/117840649766034848455

Les Nuits De Paris–An 18th Century Account of Paris Nightlife

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1 month ago
by Sankarsan Bose in
lesnuits “Paris” was enough,”Nights” more than..Any reference to Nights of Paris always draws my attention.But this time it was along with the blurry images of a cloaked novelist,journalist,or…roaming through the streets of 18th century Paris and capturing his after dark experiences using letters in the volumes of “Les Nuits De Paris”.
Who was he?
It was Restif De La Briton.
A novelist who has hastily written huge volumes of work to his credit(, with sexually objectionable content as par standards of his days.)
The mix of facts and fantasies of his nights can be debated but still it’s a valuable account considering the fact that last two volumes were written during the time of Revolution.

In “This is not the End of the Book” Umberto Eco mentions about two such incidents which Restif might have witnessed along with the crowd of the “The Gala Guillotine Show”.

The first is “The Groper”, a man who gropes women’s butt in the crowd every time a head falls, chopped off by the Guillotine.

The second is the story of man and his dog. The man who pleas to the crowd before his execution to take care of his dog. The crowd pays no heed to that and insults him.After his death the guards found the dig licking blood from the tray and the angry guards stabs him to death. The crowd gets furious at this incident and yells at the guards.. “Murderers! Shame on you ! What did the poor dog ever do to you?.

An interesting book, important from the aspect of time and content rather than the literary values. Google has digitized the book and is freely available in Google Books

http://books.google.co.in/books/about/Les_nuits_de_Paris_ou_Le_spectateur_noct.html?id=UpYtAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

But this is in French !!!

Quote of the day–12th Feb 2012

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3 months ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and immutable "truth" about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past—that is, "revisionism"—is what makes history vital and meaningful.

– James McPherson

Intrigued By Mustapha Mond

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8 months ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

“God in the safe and Ford in the shelves” – Brave New World By Aldous Huxley

Those were the words of Mustapha Mond.

Who is Mustapha Mond? Wait….

I just finished reading “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.Huxley’s Brave New World is a technologically advanced, ideal society controlled through advanced biological/genetic engineering mechanisms.Here humans are no longer born but hatched,engineered and psychologically brainwashed to suit the conditions of this ideal society.Here man lives a happy peaceful life through controlled use of drug and recreational sex.This world is set in A.F 632 i.e. 632 years after the advent of Henry Ford, icon of modern industrial automation,philosophy and culture. Now, Ford is the Lord (The God) and worshipped all the across the world. History,culture and religion that existed before this new world order was established is being systematically destroyed and erased.

Mustapha Mond is one of the ten World Controllers, he is the controller of Western Europe.We first come to meet him in the beginning where speaks boastfully of this “brave new world” and the foolishness and futility of the old world order.At this point he seems to be an ardent advocate of the new order.But his profound knowledge of history, religion and life of the old world was really surprising.How he knows about all these? From where??

We get a more deeper view of Mustapha Mond’s character towards the end of the novel where he gets into a discussion with some of the main protagonists regarding his views on literature, science and religion.He is a avid reader, mostly of the books he himself has pronounced to be banned.He is deeply influenced by Shakespeare.He appreciates the artistic value and beauty of this kind of literature. But he is of the opinion that this should not be made available to general public as they will not be understand the same.This is because the theme and content of these is obsolete in his modern world.He used to be a scientist, interested in pursuing true science,pursuit of knowledge and truth .At this stage he was given a choice between his study of science in some remote island and position in the Council of Controllers. He preferred the second.Now he is the Controller of Western Europe with all his books ,knowledge and longing for art, science, literature and religion hidden in a dark safe behind his shelves.

So, is Mustapha a disillusioned man ?…, compromising coward ?…, pragmatic intellectual ?…, opportunist ?…I think this is left wide open for interpretation.

But we can notice a couple of things. Mustapha has never criticized the modern world and it’s ways. He is very critical human drudgery in the old world driven by love, hatred,war, famine and hunger. He is happy about the new happy world without any of these problems.He also appreciates the art,culture,science and religion of the old order which obviously has some of the vices like emotions,devotion and inquisitiveness.

So he likes all goodness of the old order…So he dislikes all badness of the old order…So he is happy to see all these badness removed in the new order..

But that also implies that he is not happy about the goodness of the old order being removed.But somehow this does not fit in his scheme to solve the problems of the old order.

How can people appreciate Shakespeare if they do not have emotions? But if they do how can you stop them from feeling pain,fighting?

So like most of the world leaders (of both old and the new order), I think Mustapha is also not able to see the problem as a whole but rather as parts with partial unstable solutions leading to a chain of other problems.

He does not have a solution which bridges the gap between his safe and shelves.

Google+..First Look

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10 months ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

I had heard about Google Plus project from few of my friends but did not quite tried it out (reason – another social networking site?? and also a bit busy schedule). However today I managed to create my Google+ account. The Stream is quite similar to Facebook Wall. The interesting thing is the concept of Circles which allows you to group your connections.

googleplus

There are few circles available by default and also you can also create your own.

gpcircles

While sharing something you have got the option of selecting the target circles to whom you want to pass this message.

stram

Though I have not faced much issue in FB without this kind of content/message targeting but I have heard many of my friends struggling with to separate their messages between groups friends & family in particular.

Groups were there and are there in FB but it’s something tedious if you just want to target your messages to different audiences.

So Google+ might be a better place for them.

The question now is are we going to see similar features in FB in near future..May be the new group chat feature tells us something..

fbchat

 

I like the following comments in the mashable.com  article on Google+ (http://mashable.com/2011/07/09/google-plus-plus-one/)

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is right: Google+ is a validation of Facebook’s vision. But, the same could have been said about Facebook in its early days — it was a validation of MySpace’s mission. After all, Facebook took the social network model pioneered by others, tweaked it a smidgen and found a huge audience.

Software Products and Greek Mythology–Few Points..

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1 year ago
by Sankarsan Bose in

For quite sometime I am interested to learn about the NoSQL databases which is predicted to be the next gen thing in the database world.Yesterday was a weekend at home after a month or so and I managed to pick a copy of the book Cassandra: The Definitive Guide from Oreilly in order to get an overview the Cassandra database.This is now made open source by Facebook and converted to an Apache Incubation project.Anyway this is not a discussion about Cassandra database.But the name Cassandra…caught my attention.Greek name? right..I read about in..??

Cassandra is a character from the Greek epic Illiad.She was gifted with exceptional powers to foresee the future and at the same time she had a curse that no one will believe her prophecies.

After the fall of Troy she was abducted by Ajax The Lesser (another term very much familiar to todays Web programmers as AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript & XML) and taken along with Agamemnon and eventually killed.

Now why the Facebook engineers chose the name of this tragic greek character of antiquity for their database is not known to me.
But this is not something very new unique there are several software companies,products and frameworks whose name bears some relationship with Greek mythology.

I did some googling to find out what can be the possible reason behind this. I found the following sites listing the Greek mythological names used in business:

http://thanasis.com/modern/biz.htm

http://www.greek-names.info/companies-with-greek-names/

http://www.ehow.com/info_8122696_products-named-after-greek-mythology.html

The last one tries to provide some reasoning behind these names but not any general explanation. The name of Nike seems to have a very well thought of connection between the business vision and the name.A more detailed explanation is given here:

http://lindaweeks.com/brand_marktg/WK%209%20Case%20Study%20Assign.pdf

But the name of Amazon.com does not seem to have any logical relationship with Greek mythology apart from the word Amazon. The word Amazons was used in Greek mythology for a country of female warriors.However the Jeff Bezos used the name of Amazon after river Amazon in anticipation of huge flow of revenue and online sales.The river Amazon in turn was named after the local word “Amassonna” which meant boat destroyer.

Anyways while searching related to some general for usage of Greek mythological characters I did not came across any complete argument for the same.Only there were some bits and pieces of information as:

http://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110508194356AADfFi7

To me it seems that Greek mythology, philosophy and culture has a profound influence on the Western culture and tradition.In many languages there are words whose roots can be traced back to some Greek word.In fact this is looked upon as something pristine and of high value.Even a very common who does not very deep understanding of history or mythology have come across the words like Apollo,Mars, Aphrodite or Narcissus.Moreover these words short, crisp, smart and catchy.

Enough digression…now it’s time to get Cassandra up and running..

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