One more effect of recession. Children at school now read "Alibaba and the thirty thieves".

Happy reading.//

Mr Kang, a Chinese gentleman happens to visit the beautiful city of Hyderabad. Guess what the local folks calls him with respect. Guess Guess!

Ans: Mr Kang-garu.

PS: I understand that people not familiar with local lingo will not be able to make sense of this.

Happy PJing.//

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Can you explain the stuff below?

[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# who am i
root     pts/2        Apr 10 13:13 (shuva)
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# ll God
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Apr 10 13:16 God
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# chmod 777 God
chmod: changing permissions of `God': Operation not permitted
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# rm -f God
rm: cannot remove `God': Operation not permitted
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# cp God satan
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# ll God satan
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Apr 10 13:16 God
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Apr 10 13:18 satan
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# rm -f satan
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# ll God satan
ls: satan: No such file or directory
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 0 Apr 10 13:16 God
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# rm -f God
rm: cannot remove `God': Operation not permitted
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# who am i
root     pts/2        Apr 10 13:13 (shuva)
[root@shuvavmrhel ~]# 

Does God really exist?

With all the noise about racism in cricket, I got so confused with what racism actually meant. I went to check the literal meaning of this word and it says that being racist meant discrimination on the basis of race, color or religion.

I wondered if I would be considered a racist if you don't write my program to handle wide characters?

Happy? Happy what?.//

DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY? Having worked with American clients and colleagues, I already know how to appreciate the confusion that could be caused when you document dates like this. As a personal preference I always use dd-mmm-yyyy(23-Jan-2008) in all my project documentation. If the date in question is less than 13, then it is hell of a confusion. Something like 23/01/08 is very clear, it has to be DD/MM/YY. Something like 12/12/2008 is confusing. Considering that its only the first 12 days of every month which causes this confusion, there are 144 days in the year to worry about.

Of course, I would argue if someone says "Apply common sense and put it in context, it would be fairly non-confusing most of the time". Almost everything that is 100% Indian would be DD/MM/YY and if its American it would be MM/DD/YY. If you get a receipt(bill/check) from a restaurant in India, it would be DD/MM/YY. The same applies to other places in India like the bank. Or so did I think, common sense meant!

Today I went to the State Bank of India ATM for the first time in my life, withdrew some money(nothing to do with pluming stock market though). Two bad experiences:

1. They have a yellow sunflower as their wall paper in the touch screen and they displayed my balance with a yellow font on top of it. Am I hearing "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?".

2. In spite being an Indian bank, serving India since 200 years, its the only bank here that prints its date in MM/DD/YY. Even the American Citibank, prints in DD/MM/YY in ATMs located in India. Crazy!



With so much IT out-sourcing from US to India, I can imagine an American product having a mistake of this sort. I wonder whom did SBI out-source/sub-contract their ATM software to? Or did they just pick some re-usable components from some one else and did not know how to configure it properly? Deployment and configuration issues?

NCR Systemedia who handles SBI's ATM system would probably know.

Happy date-formatting.//