Parenting

Interesting insight on this blog entry in Freakonimics - http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/the-paradox-of-parenting/
The crux is that parent's don't seem to enjoy parenting is a strange conclusion made by almost all studies in this field. I am not sure I fully subscribe to this theory as I oscillate between happiness and despair when parenting. Maybe its more despair than happiness, but one thing I am sure about it is that happiness definitely has a longer lasting effect than despair.

in reference to: iGoogle (view on Google Sidewiki)

How organizations are scared of talent

Recently got the following mail which uses a story from Hindu mythology to analyze corporate behavior.

Rishi Ashtavakra was called Ashtavakra because his body was deformed and twisted in eight areas. He was cursed by his own father, Kahoda. While he was in his mother's womb, he had overheard his father converse with his mother on the nature of Vedic truths as expressed in various Vedic hymns.
Even before he was born, he had understood the secrets of Vedic hymns so well that one day, from his mother's womb, he spoke and corrected his father. "Perhaps," he said, "the same hymn can be interpreted in this way, father." Rather than being appreciative of his son, the father was annoyed. "May this over-smart child of mine be born deformed with eight twists in his body," said the father.

Kahoda went to the court of king Janaka to participate in a public debate. The condition of the debate was that the loser had to die. Kahoda, who thought greatly of his wisdom, participated in the competition but he lost the debate to a sage called Bandi and was forced to kill himself. When Ashtavakra grew up and learnt about the
fate of his father, he decided to participate in the same public debate in Janaka's court.
He won the competition and Bandi was forced to bring Ashtavakra's father back to life. Thus Ashtavakra not only avenged his father's humiliation, he also brought his father back to life. Janaka commented that Kahoda was lucky to have a son as brilliant as Ashtavakra. To this Ashtavakra said, "While you, Janaka, appreciate my wisdom, that very same wisdom had made my father insecure."

This ancient story draws attention to the envy of the father for his son, or the envy of a teacher for his student. Kahoda is the boss, the coach, the mentor, who nurtures talent under him. Ashtavakra represents that unusually bright student one sometimes gets to coach or mentor. It takes a lot of self-assurance for a mentor to admit that the student is better than him. By the law of averages, such brilliant students are few and far between and when they make themselves known they usually face great hostility from those around them and especially the mentor. Few mentors like Janak can handle a student who is better than them.

The best minds come to his court and thrive. In a world of corporations, when a junior can overtake his senior, coaches and mentors are often threatened by team members. The result is an organization which is full of many more Kahodas than Janakas, to the detriment of Ashtavakra. Organizations have to constantly ensure that leaders are more like Janakas and less like Kahoda because the future fate of the organization depends on the brilliance of Ashtavakras

Fuel subsidy in India

Read an interesting comment from the Minister of State for Oil & Gas Mr. Jitin Prasada in today's Economic Times (Delhi -

"Those who can afford it should pay the full fuel price"

Noble thought. Difficult or maybe impossible to implement across the country. But how about implementing it for just the Government (including State Govts) and its organizations. The Govt organizations raises tenders for fuel supply for its vehicles and whosoever is the lowest bidder, gets the contract for fuel supply. So the total requirement is always known. Instead of paying the bidder by the prevailing (subsidized) market rate, why not pay the bidder by the unsubsidized market rate.
Lets see if it makes sense or not.
This news article says that the first three quarters of FY 09-10, the petroleum ministry demanded a subsidy of Rs 20,872 crore to take care for the losses of three Oil & Gas PSUs. Extrapolating the annual subsidy could be assumed to be around Rs 28,000 crore.
Govt of India have more than 50 lakh employees assuming an average of 1 car per 10 employees, the Govt will have around 5,00,000 cars. A typical govt official's car will run for around 40,000 kms per year (including transit from office to home and tours). Assuming a mileage of a 6kms (ambassadors won't give more than that). Diesel cost would be
500000 * 6700 * 36 = Rs 12060 Crores.

Difference between actual and subsidized price of diesel varies depending on the global crude price. At the price of $75 the loss for Oil companies on Diesel was around Rs 9/litre.
So if the Govt were to buy the fuel at market rate the loss of Oil companises will be reduced by around Rs 3000 Crores which is more than 10% of the annual loss.

To me this seems a good way to reduce the subsidy bill.

Using Outlook's After Sending rules

Found this interesting post to configure Outlook to complete the thread view. By default the thread does not show your mails. So in effect it has a lot of information missing.

Using Outlook's After Sending rules

Improve Microsoft Outlook Performance

I have been facing a big slowdown in performing any actions in MS Outlook - be it reading mails, trying to reply. Then I found that my personal mail folder was around 3.5GB and I have only 512MB of RAM on my laptop (I know its primitive) so most of time Windows was doing paging.
Then I found this brilliant article Improve Microsoft Outlook Performance on how to have more than one personal mail folders. Ever since I created a new data file, using Outlook is much less painful.

Ways to extract data from a space delimited string

Ways to tokenize a string if you cannot use the space character as a field delimiter in an input where the fields can have spaces:

1. create the input with the delimiter as some other character as the delimiter. The delimiter character should be non-printable. This would reduce its chances of occuring in the input and thus reduce handling of special cases.

2. If the input was generated with space as the delimiter then we have a problem at hand. For such cases there are two approaches and both require the knowledge of the format of the input.

If the format of the input is known then one can use regular expressions to search for the tokens in the string. (Typical scripting languages, like Perl, TCL support regular expressions. C++ user can use the Boost library for regular expression support).

However using regular expressions can be expensive if the number of searches during the program execution are large. So these can be used only when the number of searches are small.

For programs that do such search more often, let us understand the other approach using an example:

// input format:

char* inputStr = "12 abc def 14";

char* firstSpaceChar = strchr(inputStr, ' ');

int firstInt = 0;

int lastInt = 0;

string midStr = "";

if (firstSpaceChar != NULL) {

*firstSpaceChar = '\0';

firstInt = atoi(inputStr);

char* lastSpaceChar = strrchr(firstSpaceChar+1, ' ');

if (lastSpaceChar != NULL) {

lastInt = atoi(lastSpaceChar+1);

*lastSpaceChar = '\0';

}

midStr = firstSpaceChar+1;

} else {

midStr = inputStr;

}

Tech: How to find the existence of a thread

To find if a thread created using pthread_create exists or not use phread_kill with signal number 0
on the thread that needs to be tested. If the return value is 0, then the thread is alive.
If the return value is ESRCH, then the thread is not alive in the system.

Sample code may look like:

bool is_thread_alive(pthread_t thread_id)
{
 int status = pthread_kill(thread_id, 0);
 if (status == ESRCH)
     return true;
 else
     return false;
}