You disappointed us, Tharoor.

When you became an honorable MP, many of us rejoiced, not because we thought that you will modernize the way democracy is implemented in this country. But we thought you will do better with your background. We thought a person like you with an elite background will try to strike a chord with the poorest of poor people in this country for whom democracy is still a sham. And, all you did is "mentoring" a bunch of filthy rich people to procure an IPL team. Do you really got any experience in running a sport body? If not, what kind of mentoring is this? Having personal calls with the politicians is not really mentoring. Have you ever thought why politicians like you need to "mentor?" Answer is simple. We are following a system that is not all transparent. If you are cricket-lover, you should had been a whistle-blower for that.

People say when you have a bad time, your mind goes wrong. That's what exactly happened when you stated that your intention was to make Keralites proud. You made us disappointed. Good that you stepped down. We are ready to wait for the "Tharoor" we dreamed of. And, we are sure many of them will emerge to take the center stage of Indian politics (in future that’s not so near).

Getting the aperture right

Getting the aperture right is very important to capture the right picture. The aperture controls the depth-of-field of a photograph. To put it down simple, see the following picture:


You can see the spider and, to certain extent, the web. Nothing beyond the spider is visible. This photograph has a shallow depth of field. Got it? The aperture that I used for this is F5.6. It's called a high aperture. (I will explain why it is called so later.)

Now look at this one:


You can see a hut. Behind that there are trees, and beyond, you will see the clouds that are far away. This is called high depth-of-field. This picture has low aperture. The aperture that I used was F18.

Now, let me explain you what an aperture technically is. Aperture is an opening through which light falls into the digital sensors when you "click" a photo. If you use a bigger opening, more light falls into the sensors. Technically, the number in which aperture size is defined is the focal length of the lens divided by the diameter of the opening. Assume that you are using a 50 mm lens. If your aperture is F5.6, it means the diameter of aperture is 50mm divided by 5.6. That is 8.9 mm.
If the aperture is F18, the diameter of aperture becomes 2.8 mm (50/18). Means higher the number, lesser the light falls into the digital sensors.

Yes, it's a bit confusing. But you don't need to know this when you capture a photo. Every lens will be associated with a high and low aperture. The photographs you have seen are taken using a Canon 50 mm lens. The aperture can vary from a minimum of F5.6to maximum of F21. You need to know when a high or a low aperture is used.

The Children of Heaven

Last week, I watched an Iranian movie - The Children of Heaven. I loved it. I like movies and books with children as the main characters. In children's world, there is a logic for everything. I think as we grow, we tend to lose this logic.

The movie is about two kids. Ali, the eight-year-old protagonist, lost the shoes of his sister while bringing them back from a shoe repairing shop. Kids know that their father does not have enough money to buy another shoe and they start managing going school with a single pair of Ali's shoes. (They both attend school at different timings). Movie is all about of Ali's struggle in getting a pair of shoe for his sister.

I love Iranian films that use children as main characters to tell a good story. And, they are very successful in communicating what they want to tell.

All about photography

Thanks a lot, Ree.
Guys (& galls), see the pioneer woman.

Me and financial markets

In 2000, when I was trying to open a savings bank account with one of the nationalized banks, I was told to submit many details, that made me to think that the intention is to make me not opening the account. When I got my first job, I could easily open an account with a multi-national bank. I have been an ardent fan of liberalization from then onwards. But, nine years afterwards, the melt down of global financial leaders made me to have a re-think. Do governments need to regulate the way financial markets function? Are the financial markets capable enough to manage themselves? Are all of us exploited by the market because of our lack of knowledge?

I found an article about Joseph Stiglitz, an American Economist and Nobel Laureate, interesting. Read more about him here.

Control your expenses; it’s recession

thesimpledollar: I recently visited this blog. You also get a guide on personal finance management for free. (It’s titled as Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance
On Just One Page.) Though all the points explained by Trent Hamm are not applicable to Indian readers, it’s a good read.

Get your fundamentals right from the open source technologies

The takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle arises a question: Is it the end of open source initiatives? It's is very clear that Sun's open source initiatives failed to generate enthusiasm in investors. However, the story could have been different, if its operating system, Solaris, could catch a major share of Windows market. I am not going to evaluate the future of open source market here. I just want to emphasis the opportunities that open source technologies provide to students. As long as one gets the software for free, the way it generates money is irrelevant (if one's intention is to study a technology). And, if you are comfortable with the technologies such as Java, MySQL, and so on, I will say that, as a programmer, your fundamentals are right. You will not take too long to be comfortable with related-technologies, such as .Net or Oracle.

Let us take SQL as an example. Are you comfortable with the database concept? I am sure you will get plenty of information from Internet on the concepts and query you use in database. And, Sun provides you a wonderful database, MySQL, at free of cost. Let us see how you can use it for studying the way a database works.

I hope you know about NetBeans, a freely available IDE (Integrated Development Environment) from Sun. The latest version of NetBeans is bundled with MySQL. If you have an old version of NetBeans, you could download MySQL and a driver (a .jar file) that will allow you to connect to MySQL from NetBeans. Try using Google; you will get plenty of information. I have not explained those tasks here. I found the following articles helpful: for NetBeans 6.0 and for NetBeans 5.5.

After you install NetBeans and MySQL, do the following:

1. Open NetBeans.
2. Click the Runtime tab.
3. Click Database.
4. Right-click the mysql schema and click Connect.
If you had provided a password while installing MySQL, you need to provide the password.
5. After getting a successful connection, right-click the schema and click Execute a Command.
In the right pane, a page opens where you can execute a command (query).
6. Let us create a database, emp, first.
Execute the following command:

create table emp (name char(50), salary char(8));

(Type the command and select it, then click Run SQL - the first button from the left.)
A message is displayed that the command is executed successfully.

7. Now let us insert a data into the table. Execute the following command.

insert into emp (name,salary) values ('sunil','1000');

8. Let us view what we created by executing the following command:

select * FROM emp;


You can view the table that you created. This link provides a lot of information about SQL commands.

I found this methodology really helpful when someone learns a new technology. There are many open source products. You may hear a lot about the bugs in the products, their incapability to perform a specific task, and so on. But they really can help you to learn.