After much deliberation and delay, Govt. Of India has increased the retail fuel prices - Rs.5 for Petrol, Rs.3 for Diesel and Rs.50 for Household LPG. Though delayed for long we need to praise the Prime Minister for finally biting the bullet - especially with all the political compulsions of coalition politics he has and for getting the powerful finance ministry to agree for deep tax and duty cuts.

On the other side, I am wondering why Government has to be involved in fixing the price of retail fuel. Other than Household LPG, the fuel price should be left to free market. Just like anything else the fuel price has to be determined purely on demand and supply economics. With Oil prices at record levels of $135 from levels of $30 before 4 years, retail price have to naturally increase. You cannot make Oil Marketing companies loss over Rs.200,000 Crores and make the common shareholders in those companies suffer (Disclaimer: As on date I have no investments in ONGC, IOC, BPCL or HPCL). It doesn't make any sense to buy oil at ever increasing prices and keep selling it at loss, eventually sinking the Oil companies. Leaving it without a price increase the loss would have been ultimately burdened on the miniscule compliant Tax payers in India. Somehow political parties in India are of opinion that increase in taxes affects only the rich and any burden on them is allowed - if you keep doing that, there will be no investments by companies and eventually no new jobs.

There is other side to the need to increase the prices and that is Environment. India is consuming Oil at historic levels that definitely has significant green house effects. The logical answer according to me is to increase the fuel price even more so that people feel the pinch and start reducing their consumption; and government can use the increased income to build on war footing world-class mass transport facilities in all cities.

I am glad to be doing this post. Our INFITT Chair Dr.Kalyanasundaram has been awarded the prestigious "Sundara Ramasamy Award for Tamil Information Technology" on 18th May, 2008, in a function held at the University of Toronto, from the Canadian Tamil's initiative TAMIL LITERARY GARDEN. Sundara Ramasamy (Sura) award citation mentioned few of Dr.Kalyan's numerous contributions in the area of Tamil fonts, development of font encoding standards such as TSCII, Project Madurai and INFITT. Pioneer Dr. K. Srinivasan of Montreal was the first recipient of this award last year.

It was one of several Awards given out that day. Well known Tamil writer and translator Lakshmi Holmström received the main "Lifetime Achievement Award for 2007", also known as Iyal Virudhu. Prof. George Hart III of Univ. Califoria, Berkeley and Mr. Padmanabha Iyer of UK were earlier recipients of the "Iyal Viruthu" awards.

I was in Bangalore the other day, there I saw a different type of Aldrop used to lock the main gate in one of the house - don't ask me why I noticed it!.

Normally the Aldrops (which are bolt latches with a provision for putting a padlock) will be vertical and you lift the handle and move it sideways (mostly right hand side to open) with the padlock in vertical orientation. This one that I saw was oriented differently - you lifted the latch up and down vertically with the padlock in horizontal (lying down) position. Thinking hard with my little brain I couldn't figure out the advantage of this model - please post in the comments if you know the advantage.

While writing this post I had to find out the name of this device, I was wondering whether to call it Gate Latch or Bolt Latch or Gate Bolt. After few searches I found an item in Amazon with the name "Aldrop", then after few more searches confirmed that this is how it is called in India.

Today I came to Bangalore for a meeting. Having heard the horrifying stories of travel from city to the new airport at Devanahali I got booked by train. I should have left by Shadapti Express leaving Chennai at 5:30PM yesterday, but due to last minute business meetings I reached Chennai Central station late. I was in the platform only at 5:32PM, by then all I could see was the last bogie with a giant "X" mark as seen in Bollywood movies. I had to avoid the glaring look of a porter in the platform at me. Missing the train, I travelled today by flight from Chennai to Bangalore and return.

After long delays, several false starts and Protests against closing the old Airport, the New Airport at Devanahali was built by a consortium of Siemens (Germany), Zurich Airport & L&T finally opened itself on May 24, 2008. The old HAL Airport was certainly brimming out of capacity and facilities, Bangalore certainly took a long time in getting a new airport. Is the long wait worth it?. Overall "Yes", but several things could have been done better.

• For one, a Metro (Train) facility should have been planned and executed which could have provided convenient connectivity from City to Airport. Without a train link the new airport is putting pressure on the already crowded Makkri Circle Area and Bangalore-Hyderabad National Highway. For me it took 75 minutes in the morning (9AM) today to reach Jeevan bhimanagar from the new Airport and while returning in the evening (5PM) took me nearly 90 minutes. I was told by the taxi driver that 90 minutes in the evening is good, it had taken him two days before over 2 Hours (120 Minutes) to get to Airport.
• Second, the waiting area and facilities in the departure terminal could have been better, at this moment they are very basic and ordinary. For example as the photograph below shows there is hardly 30-40 chairs for people to sit in each gate. Certainly each gate will have a flight capacity of over 100 passengers on average, so it was more crowded than the old airport. The lack of facilities at the gate made me wonder whether Siemens wanted to recreate in Bangalore Airport, the same poor facilities that you will find in Frankfurt Airport. The last time while transit to USA I was in Frankfurt Airport and I could get to buy only a Bagel and a Donut to eat - I couldn't even find a Pizza outlet.

The best mode of transport to and from new airport seems to be the  A/C Buses (Vayu Vajra) run by BMTC. It costs about Rs.150 for travelling from Old Airport area to New Airport. To know more about Bengaluru Airport you can go to the official website, which unfortunately seems to be down at this moment.

Yesterday I took my son and his cousins to this movie - "Ghatothkach". As Sathyam Cinemas website was down I used their door delivery facility for getting the tickets which was very convenient and you had to pay only Rs.75 extra for the service.

In Mahabharat epic Ghatothkach is the son of Bheema (Pandavas). Ghatothkach inherits immense strength from his father and wonderful magic powers which he uses for good. With this one line story from the epic and inspired by the 1957 live action film Mayabazar, Ghatothkach movie gives a clean entertainment for kids. The movie is directed by legendary director Mr.Singeetam Srinivasa Rao.

My kid loved the scenes where Ghatothkach and his pet elephant utters the magic words "Ambilica Bambulica".  Having seen the Tamil Mayabaazar movie and the song "Kalyana Samayel Saatham" (Same video clip in Telugu here) I expected the scene in the movie to be more grand and entertaining, but it was very brief here. The movie ends kind of suddenly before you expect the end. There is nothing for grown-ups in the movie other than the superb animation and music. My wife slept through the 90 minutes film. Good time pass for kids in the summer.

Last few days I had a firewall issue in my desktop that made web browsing irregular. It was a peculiar problem, I was able to browse few sites like Google, Vishwak.COM but not others. I had to keep running the same diagnostic commands many times to take values to be sent to my support team. Finally I ended up writing this handy tool that copies to clipboard diagnostic informations from IPConfig, Tracert, Ping & WebGet commands. This information can be used for further investigation or email to support. I also added features to FlushDNS, Renew IP & Turn Auto Tuning (Vista and Windows Server 2008) OFF/ON.

• Download the Install: EasyTools Web Browsing Test Installer.zip (192.17 KB)
• Visual Studio Solution (Source code): WebBrowsingTestSource.zip (592.62 KB)

While developing the tool over two half-a-days I learnt quite a few APIs and a bit of C# coding. This included how to call a console command like IPCONFIG /ALL and capture the output to a string from a C# application, get the Internet Explorer Proxy settings, Call Network Properties applet, create an install with VS 2008 & how to paste a code snippet in WLW.

   1: private string DoConsoleAndCapture(string sInput)

   2: {

   3:  

   4: string sOutput = "";

   5: ProcessStartInfo pi = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe", "/c " + sInput );

   6: pi.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized; 

   7: pi.RedirectStandardOutput = true;

   8: pi.UseShellExecute = false;

   9: Process p = Process.Start(pi);

  10: p.WaitForExit();

  11: //p.Start();

  12: TextReader t = p.StandardOutput;

  13: sOutput = t.ReadToEnd();

  14: t.Close();            

  15: p.Close();

  16:  

  17: return sOutput; 

  18: }

The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 was interesting as it has been few years since I coded something end to end. I wish the coding surface to become more intelligent in terms of offering help on discovering commands and APIs that the developer is looking for. When VB6 came a decade or so back the help feature that it had was revolutionary and the wealth of information MSDN provided was without par in the industry. Now with Web & Internet Search prevalent the present IDE calls for a complete rethinking and revamp - unfortunately I don't feel the tools have come there yet. What I am talking here is not about wizards, smart tags or even intellisense but about how the tool helps a developer to learn/discover necessary APIs/solve the problem at hand.

I had a good laugh now by watching this video clip of a recent CSI episode that carried a dialog "create a GUI Interface in Visual Basic to track the IP address". I love "Visual Basic" and it was good to hear it getting prime time media attention!

Last month before boarding my long return flight from Seattle to Chennai, I checked out Borders store for some reading material to keep me occupied. I picked this book  - Think Big and Kick Ass by Donald Trump. I have heard about the US TV Reality Show - Apprentice but I didn't know anything about Trump. So I had no expectations and didn't buy the book for Donald Trump's name. I wanted an interesting lite reading book and found this to fit the bill. I finished a portion of it in the flight, but managed to complete the entire book in my vacation last week in Kodaikanal.

I don't like Copy-Pasting from other sources into my blog, but this time I am making an exception. The below snippet from a comment in Amazon for the book captured exactly what I wanted to write, so even if I had written myself it would appear to be a copy - "...Trump is an egotistical, self-serving man, no doubt. But let's be totally objective, as I was that day: good advice is good advice. And, most writers do not have the courage to dispense such advice in such raw terms as Trump does. This book holds nothing back. Trump lays it all out on the table with blatant opinions, ideas and thoughts about those who've crossed him, helped him, etc. He tells you how you need to be (not just what you need to do - read that again!) to be successful. However - and this is the most important point of my review - there's truth to so much of what he says. It's helpful. You'll look at yourself differently. You'll gain insight, and you'll learn things about yourself that you did not previously know. You might even be vaulted to a new level based on what you read; I don't know - that depends on you, the reader, and your potential application of what Trump discusses. I'm not a huge fan of Trump, the man, but I cannot argue with his success. Forget those who claim he was born into money; that may be true, but he continues to make headlines with regularity..."