Google and The Story of Search

"The Search" is a book by John Battelle. It talks about Google and its rivals and their supremacy in the internet era. With my trace of megalomania the first thing this story did is of course to spark a tad of envy in me. Why not me? I had written some interesting things in my lifetime but never attained mainstream status etc. But then I digress.

I have found that there are a lot of things about Google that I like. One of the first things I like about them is that there is a lot of "Good Karma" about the company. And by this, I dont mean their somewhat bombastic "Don't be Evil" motto. What I mean is that Larry and Sergey went about building their search engine with no trace of profit motive to begin with. They did not even heed the "Build it and they will come" dictum. (or maybe they did). But their motive was to build the thing for the sake of doing it. And we all thronged to google.com. They benefitted a ton of people by directing valuable traffic to their websites.

All this happened BEFORE they evolved their adWords model (which the book says is based out of the Overture.com business model) I think it was quite natural and inevitable that they succeeded.

The other thing I like about google is their emphasis on technical leadership. This is one topic that I have firm opinions about. I have seen many a startup succumb to the pressure of VCs and Wall Street and delegate its leadership to more "finance savvy" CEOs who may or may not be in line with the founders' mission. The founders think of building a bird and suddenly end up with a dinosaur! Google still emphasizes technical leadership. I would say that is a great trait indeed.

Like many high growth companies, Google has its share of problems. But I can't think of any that is unsolvable.

I also think that the book is written in a very compelling, story telling kind of fashion. This makes it extremely readable and at the same time very informative. Five stars both to the book and to Google as a company!

Beautiful Earth and its people

Did you guys check out this video?



It is one of the most beautiful things that you can ever see. Bad dancing at its best. The guy goes all over the world, encourages everyone to dance with him, has a good time, shoots a video in the process, does a great edit on the video and here it is right there posted on the internet!!

The beautiful lilting song of Tagore's ( makes me want to go and grab his Geetanjali and read it) and the nicely choreographed indian dance from Gurgaon add some unique touches to this shoot. We need more of these world unification videos. Makes us all understand that we are in effect one happy family inhabiting this wonderful planet.

Entering fatherhood

Several things have happened in my life over the past few months that merited their entry into this blog. But I havent been able to put myself into a frame of mind to bring these blogging thoughts onto a computer. So guys, brace yourself for the worst, I gotta announce to you that those thoughts have vanished and are lost for posterity. But let me pull a few of those thoughts from the embers and publish them in this entry.

Rahul has now come into Akila's life and mine as well - her life moreso for the time being than mine. He is of course the expected bundle of joy. The entire family is busy arguing as to who he resembles more and we left it for them to fight it out between themselves - with the express stipulation that they don't say that he resembles the postman or the milkman.

Things have been hectic over the past few months. I have changed jobs, relocated to Hyderabad ( a city in South India for the India ignorant), remodelled our flat etc. But behind this excess blur of activity, things have remained placid. I am still getting sweepstake winning notifications from non existent lotteries, getting spammed in my blog periodically (tho less so now than formerly - see my entry about this in my other blog) and still eating my three meals a day and havent lost a wink of sleep thanks to Akila and my inlaws. And yes I put on some weight in sympathy with Akila who quickly lost her weight gain after pregnancy.

But more importantly, there is this almost obsessive thought that I have become a dad of a little adorable child who trusts in me implicitly. It is almost a repeat feeling to the one that I had after marriage when I realized that there is this girl (my wife of course) who has plighted her troth with me. I think that is the greatest benefit of fatherhood.

And when you see your child sleeping peacefully, I am reminded of the Hangman at home poem that we used to be taught at school. It is almost impossible to resist the picture of a little baby sleeping and if the moon decides to shine on the baby's cheek and make the baby more adorable.. more power to the moon..

Unstated Truths and HR Jurisprudence

I think it is tacitly agreed that HR (Human Resources group) in any company should refrain from using any kind of language or do anything that can even be mildly construed as amounting to a special treatment of an individual. Because, a view that an individual is getting special attention might lead to all kinds of complications. Others might get offended and sue the company for preferential treatment on any number of charges ranging from sexual harassment to racial, religious, gender or any other type of discrimination.

Now this is all good but robs the "personal touch" from the company. One of the greatest promoters of loyalty is to feel wanted by the company. This kind of impersonal tone creates an undefinable wall between the company (as represented by HR) and the individual.

A case in point is the HR manager of one of the companies that I worked for. Whenever she does a favor to me, she goes out of the way to make it clear that this favor was extended to me not because i am special in any way but because i happen to be an employee of the company. No doubt, she was heeding the clearly laid out injunctions of her supervisors. Though I do appreciate her honesty, it would be nice if I can think that people are viewing me specially because of either some skills that I am bringing to the table or due to the position that I am in or due to the goodness of my heart or what have you.

It may be a honest truth that my HR Manager is stating. But it is far nicer if she just did not state it. She does not have to lie and state that she is doing me a favor. But not stating a truth should not be confused with suppression of truth. Every truth in the world does not have to be stated. Let us say I am walking on a street and see a stranger. It is true that since this person is a stranger to me, I won't probably trust him with a $100 note or love him as much as I love my family. But this truth is better left unstated. Going out of my way to actually state it is in my opinion totally unwarranted, irksome and offensive.. What say?

Unconditional Love

As a would be father I am obviously ecstatically waiting for my little one.

Indian retrograde laws that prohibit revealing the sex of the baby,( aimed at nitwits who don't appreciate feminine progeny) have made sure that I am kept in suspense as to the sex of the baby. (By the way, I got to tell you that these kind of laws, though they vary in content from country to country, are still universal. But that is another topic for another day). Despite all this, I am thrilled thinking about the state of my little one in my wife's womb. I know this is fairly symptomatic of the state of mind of expecting fathers and mothers.

This got me thinking about the entire mechanics of love. Viewed objectively, it is odd that I should develop so much fondness for a child whom I know so little about. I don't know whether the baby would think the same way as I would want him or her to think. How will the baby look like? Everything is in suspense. But I still have this real overwhelming love waiting for the little one to come into this world. Isn't it inexplicable? How can you love someone without knowing anything about them? I guess this is the kind of love that falls under the banner of "Unconditional Love". The only other place where I see such love is in Indian movies where the idiotic hero falls head over heels in love with a gal whom he had just seen in passing.

Anyways, I wonder if this is the kind of love that would be required, to make any relationship work. Do I love my wife just because she happens to be my wife? Or do I impose pre-conditions for my love? I love her because she cooked dinner for me. I love her because she is so well read. Or because she is so pretty? I think at some point in time we need to ask ourselves this question about most people around us.

One of my theories is that I love someone unconditionally if they are not around me. After all like someone said "Distance is a great promoter of admiration". This is especially true for relatives. You love them when they are not around you. The moment you see them, you want them to leave! So from all this, I am jumping to the possibly precipitate conclusion that we love anything unconditional if it stays conceptual. I love my brother since he is my brother. The moment I see him, I want him to alter all kinds of behavior. (Won't you stop chomping your food etc.)

Now I know why God does not show himself (or herself) to us. We love God so long as they are conceptual as the benevolent father (or mother) of the Universe. The moment they show up, we are busy judging them. Do you really have to don that kind of apparel, God? Can't you speak colloquial language like the rest of us? ...

I think I understand the world a little bit better now.

Monkey Business

The recent Indo-Australian cricket series 2008 had a series of incidents. Apart from bad umpiring decisions and aggressive posturing by the Aussies there was the the Harbhajan debacle. Harbhajan Singh was accused of calling Symmonds the Aussie cricketer a monkey which was allegedly due to his racist leanings based on the Australian's aboriginal origins. I am not sure as to what happened. As it turned out in fact the ICC judge exonerated Harbhajan from the charges since they could not be sufficiently corroborated.

But what was interesting is if calling someone a monkey indeed constitutes racism. There were all kinds of theories from our ever fertile minds. Some people said that since Hanuman the monkey God is worshiped in Hinduism, it is not a bad thing to call someone a monkey. To me that is the worst argument that can ever be used in favor of Harbhajan or Bhajji as he is sometimes called.   It is like saying that calling someone a "sheep" is not bad since Jesus the Shepherd is worshiped in Christianity.  People mock us for these ridiculous arguments and many times with good reason.

There were others who felt that Indians were always racist. Someone came up with the example of the Indian buffalo. He said that the majority of Indians drink buffalo milk (as opposed to cow milk). Yet we worship the cow and not the buffalo because the buffalo is black. Now it is true that "white" is a preferred color with a lot of Indians. People like to be fair skinned rather than dark skinned. But I have seldom seen an Indian being discriminated on the basis of his being black. On the other hand, most Hindu gods are black. Krishna literally means "the dark one". So a preference to a certain color would not necessarily translate to racism. Americans do like blonde people. That does not necessarily translate to "hair color racism". Or maybe it does...

Transition to Mac

With the increasing popularity of MAC, more and more people are considering a switch to MAC but are still bewildered as to what this would entail. I wanted to share my own experiences in this regard.

First of all, most current hardware works with MAC with very few exceptions.


Also, most software products have their mac counterparts. The first thing to do is to get used to the MAC counterparts for the software that we use in windows. Here are some which I found very useful:

The iCal and Contacts applications in MAC are perfect for their intended needs. The ability of iCal to obtain different calendars even from the internet is awesome. I view my normal calendar with all my appointments along with a calendar of all US Holidays, another calendar that has my wife's engagements etc. all in iCal. When I look at the entries they are color coded differently so that I know which entry came from which calendar.

Many users of ipods are already used to itunes and hence it should not be a big deal to start using iTunes. However to play wmv files i have installed flip4Mac as a plugin to the Quicktime movie player.

Of course the command line tool is different for Mac. The Terminal which ships with MAC is pretty good especially since it is all bash!!! Woohoo! Love the UNIX command line environment. You can also download iTerm(free) for a better terminal. It supports multiple tabs and can be made more transparent. Cool!

Here is a list of software that works in windows and has its mac counterpart:

Yahoo messenger(free download) - which is almost identical to its windows counterpart except for the fact that it does not support yahoo chat

Microsoft Office for MAC (purchased software)- This was essential for me since most of us have standardized on excel, word, powerpoint and Microsoft outlook for documents.

Safari is good for browsing for the most part but you might want to go ahead and grab Firefox for MAC (free software) so that you can have a more "standard" browser. But there are certain websites that work better with Safari for me. Besides, Safari is a much more lightweight browser.

Google Picasa web album uploader (free download) is very useful to upload your pictures into picasaweb. I use it extensively.

Skype has a mac version.

Finally, there are some things that are exclusively in mac and are way toooo cool.

Download pixen(free) for a free picture editor. iPhoto(shipped with MAC) also has a very decent editor but pixen has some cool features like allowing you to work with layers. Picturesque(free download) allows you to decorate your photos with some cool effects such as adding a reflective pool below the picture etc. Very pleasing effect indeed.

The MAC dashboard is an awesome thing. It allows various widgets to be added to accomplish various activities. The widgets shipped with MAC are great. Check out their clock, stickies, calendar etc. One of the coolest dashboard free widget available is the one available at widget-foundry.com. This one allows you to download the album art for any song that is currently being highlighted in iTunes. It fetches the album art from amazon.com and allows the user to set the found album art to the selected song(s). Check it out. I think it is very cool.

Marsedit (purchased separately) is a great software to upload your blogs to various blog sites. Most of my blogs (including this one) are written using Marsedit.

Cyberduck is an awesome FTP tool to do en masse uploads into my website.

TextWrangler is a great text editor. The best feature of it is that it can edit a remote text file (from an FTP server) and save it when the COmmand + S button is pressed as if you are saving it locally.

Growl(free software) is great for notifications. It hooks with most softwares (iTerm, yahoo messenger, cyberduck etc.) to pop up tiny windows when significant events happen. For instance, growl gives you a notification when a user from your yahoo messenger buddy list comes online. It also notifies you when you have uploaded a file successfully into an ftp site using cyberduck.

There are more tools besides these. Will add them as I learn more.