Kumaraparvatha or KP as its fondly called by a lot of trekkers is one of the most beautiful peaks in Karnataka. Situated in the Coorg district, this place is awesome and is as amazing as nature can get. And for this reason, it’s frequented by a huge number of people… And for this reason, this place is sh*# screwed up…
Nisarga is organizing a backpacking program called “Trek to Clean” to Kumaraparvatha with the intent of enjoying nature in the best way possible and also cleaning up the place enroute…
This is happening on 15-16 December, 2007. Participants will leave from bangalore on 14th night and be back in bangalore on the morning of the 17th so that they can get back to work… 
As I mentioned previously, the trek is a complete backpacking trek, so, everything is taken care of by the participants… From Cooking, to cleaning up the vessels to cleaning up the route and dumping the garbage collected. We will be providing the the tents and carrymats for you to rest yourselves during the night… So, rest assured, you will sleep with a satisfaction of having done something good… 
Oh! And, Nisarga will also provide you with the ration, vessels, the stove, gas and the likes for you to get your hands into the cooking department…
We expect each participant to pick up approx. 2kg of garbage in bags provided and we will ensure the safe disposal and cleanup of garbage once we touch the town limits… The collection of garbage is on you, the cleanup and disposal is on us…
The total cost of the trek inclusive of travel will be Rs. 1600 /-.
Those interested in the trek call me at 99453 94216 / Rajendra at 94480 38220 / karthik at 99800 17105 or mail us at info (at) nisargaindia (dot) com for more details.
The post is a bit late on the page as I’ve been quite caught with a lot of stuff to organize and lot of camps to take care of… But then, here it goes, Trek to clean!!! Keep your environment clean. And as we say at Nisarga, we have one planet! Lets not dig graves for our own future…
Disclaimer: This is a rock-solid rant!!! Read on…
The Situation:
We had to give our client an interim delivery on the project we were working on. A phase that involved testing third party code to ensure it was “without defects” so that we would be able to integrate it into our mainstream systems in the coming phases. And guess what… I was completely wrong about the “without defects” part of the previous statement.
Not only was the application badly written, but the third-party team changed the requirements doc without informing us. And to top it all, their build that was delivered to us did’nt contain a properly filled up “Known Issues” document! And my client intends to make it to the market before spring!!!
The Rant:
This is a case of really bad coordination and mismanagement. When there are three entirely different teams working out of 3 geographically different locations, it is IMPERATIVE that everyone is on the same page! Why on earth do we have E-Mail??? Why on earth do we have VOIP??? Why on earth do we have Phones???
If it is still badly coordinated, it boils down to only one thing: “The organization that wants to sell that code doesnt care about the customer!“ When you have something that you intend to sell, the first and foremost expectation should not be to make money! It is to give something valuable in order to get the money you intend to earn!
And in this project that I’ve been working on, there have been some things that I’ve definitely been shocked to observe. And I’d take them as stepping stones in handling things in my life here on…
- You cannot work for just money! You have to work because you love it. Working just for money kills the output. And you will get your money, but someone else will suffer. And it will boomerang back to you! Sometime later… But, definitely!
- Realise that someday, you may have to eat your own cake! That you made for money!
- Please take pride in your work! Life IS full of shit! Nevertheless…
- When you make something for your customer, make it with a sense of respect. It’s called duty. Not JOB!
- People want to pay! Believe me! People want to pay. But they also want something of more worth than the money that leaves their pockets.
- The best guys in the market thrive because they give the customers an experience! Not a commodity! And there lies everything about money.
- A customer would shell out a lifetime worth of savings to have an experience. Steve jobs gave people an experience with the iPhone! Nokia gave people experiences with the N-Series! Sony Ericsson gave people experiences with their Walkman phones! People love experiences. People cannot love a product. It is an inanimate piece of sh**!!!
Now, coming back to the crux of my post, organizations become market leaders with the right perspective of a customer experience in mind. And then, where does it go??? A lot of companies strive to push the envelope in providing a better and a more fruitful experience… And a lot more dont!!! They just start looking at the big bucks! No more quality, no more happy customers.
And their organization is now thriving just on old relationships in business, and on scale that they have as a market leader. But for how long? When people that are part of the organization fail to attach themselves to it, and they just do their “JOB“, we’re in for a landslide into the abyss…
Wake up big guys, wake up!!!!
Banner for BCB5! Uber kewl!!!
3 more days and then, its 2 solid days of networking, catching up with the latest crazy things inside of people’s heads, hackdays, gr8 entertainment, cool discussions, hallway talks, and the list is endless…
The BCB5 Winter edtition @ IIM-Bangalore is where you have to be this weekend! Looking forward to the collectives. Looking forward with more eagerness to those hallway conversations and networking that happens there!!!
Catch u there. Look for my live updates on twitter, and the photos on flickr!
Chao…
Tags: bcb5, barcampbangalore5
The big guy there is opening up the curtains very very soon… 56 hours, 20 minutes to go and counting down as I type in this post!!! Is this the sweet N82??? Or is it some new new thingy???
2 more days to go for another biggie in the phone industry eh??? 
Engedget has the coverage of the news here…
Tags: Series60, Symbian, Engadget, NSeries, Nokia
This blog is slowly but steadily turning into a Nokia and Symbian cult blog… But then hey!!! It’s Nokia!!! And its Symbian!!!
Getting ahead, ARM, one of Nokia and Symbian’s longest standing partners (A partnership of over 10 years) recently announced their Multi-core Processor chains to be released in the near future. Called the ARM® Cortex™-A9 MP™Core, this processor is intended to provide the much needed extra juice to rocket nokia mobiles ahead of the other guys in the race. And, not to mention, enable the user with a truly richer experience of TV, games, entertainment, 3D, music, internet and more…
Symbian is apparently beginning to rework their kernels and other allied software to enable the required multi-core support for the new Cortex series of ARM processors.
Talking of the actual technology behind the Multi-Core thingy, it goes thus:
In traditional mobile phones, the Application Core is usually one ARM processor handling the heavy-duty data crunching. And all these days, the core was single but continuously getting powerful. Starting off from a paltry 65MHz to a trailblazing 369MHz in the recent days…
To take it to the next level, the Cortex series aims to achieve much higher performance by integrating multiple cores into the application processor and enable the OS to control the processors in an On Demand mode. So, putting it, Symbian would now be able to extract power from the processor whenever it has the need to. And this leads to heavy duty performance ondemand. And when we talk of a multi-core CPU, we can imagine Nokia coming up with ads which show mobiles doing stuff similar to what the intel core2Duo ad shows ;) But then yeah, talking of the actual news, Symbian says that these mobiles are due in 2010… Pretty much the roadmap when Nokia is planning to come out with their Symbian 9.5 based devices…
I’m waiting for 2010… This is gonna be a hell of a device when it hits the market… Multicore CPU, newer Communication technologies read Super3g, Wi-Max and what all and what not…, demand paging, true seamless mobility (talk to me… i’ve seen people create this!!!), and then yeah, also a phone… that can call and do sms… if sms technology is still alive!!!
I’m waiting Nokia, I’m Waiting… Hit me!!! The future is coming… Run!!! Competition… Run for Cover…
Vinay has a detailed description of the stuff here…
Tags: Nokia, Symbian, ARM, Cortex, Multicore, Demand+Paging, Symmetric+Multiprocessing
Posted: October 18th, 2007
at 12:21pm by The Cruisemaniac
Categories: Tech Zone
Comments: No comments
Nokia just launched their 8GB loaded N81 at London today. And guess what, it’s got the click-wheel equivalent of Apple’s iPhone called navi™Wheel. And, to add more, they have a touch screen with Tactile Feedback… Sounds very “iPhoney“!!!
But then, yeah… This is Kickass stuff… Nokia’s own patent this… The naviWheel is manufactured by Synaptics… And that means it’s gonna be really sleeky and perfect in operation… Nice to know about it…
Other features on the phone are the sweet Symbian 9.2 with Series60 3rd Edition FP1, a fireblazing 369MHz Arm 11 core, and all the usual goodies of BlueTooth, stereo speakers, dedicated music keys, et. al…
But coming back to the main focus of the post, Nokia is taking on Apple seriously, much similar to the way it attacked Microsoft when MS came out with it’s Windows Mobile 6.0 OS. And yes, the dent has been made in Microsoft’s Smartphone market share with the new E-Series phones coming out. Now, Nokia seems to be gearing up for war against the big Pirates!!! Apple!!! 8GB storage with music, with touch screen, with tactile feedback, sounds exactly like the iphone…
Nokia Rocks!!! Vinay has more on that here…
And, on that note, I delved into the act of getting myself an E61i!!! A little late in the race because of my pockets, but then, hey, I got the coolest latest colour in town!!! Shiny Black!!! And it simply Rocks!!!
Image Copyright e-series.org
Tags: Nokia, Touch+Screen, Tactile+Feedback, Apple, iPhone, E61i, N81
Until a week ago, had someone asked me if I blogged, I would have perhaps completely denied existence of the word… But then hey, life has been too hectic… or should I put it, exciting!!! It’s been extremely stressing out for the last month and a half…
The dream of continuing in Symbian on their multimedia project dint come true, but then, I did get another lovely project with Motorola. Nice to work on their latest series of mobile phones… And this project is fun… Integrating Voice Recognition into the phone… Basically, your phone can be operated on voice commands… Now, the fun part is that, we’re Indian, and the phone, “phoren”… EN-IN IS NO WAY CLOSE TO EN-US and not even an iota of chance with EN-UK!!! And this has been giving us real fun and it has been ROTFL for us at work!!!
And hey, I got to go really wild with Nisarga taking customers to Bheemeshwari… And yeah, conducted a complete outbound-learning programme for Oracle… A first for Nisarga and a definite First for me!!! Which now puts NisargaIndia in the elite group of organizations imparting Outbound-learning programmes in the city…
Take it this way: Standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a lovely valley, getting blindfolded and asked to bank on your colleague’s to get you back to safety… Give it a thought and imagine how much you can learn about yourself and your team…
And for those Wildlife and trek Hungry, Nisarga is just out to announce a set of Open Camps this month-end. All OpenCamps will be on weekends and will be on a first-come first-served basis… Keep a lookout on the website for more detail. I’ll try to get the camp details published via RSS once I’m done cleaning up all the old stuff that’s been closed and done with…
And the highlight of the last one month, Mom chose to celebrate her 50th birthday with me!!!! She came down to Bangalore with a shopping list and another list of temples to visit!!! But hey, it was awesome fun… watching her bargain with the shopkeepers… They must’ve had the day of their lives!!! Took her to Chamundi and to Srirangapatna… Which was fun… I LOVE YOU MOM!!!!!
And on that note, I close this post…
The Cruise is definitely On…
Havent blogged at all in a while… and a whole lot of reasons that have kept me busy!!! Wings to be exact!!! An event that NisargaIndia conducted for differently-abled people from Bangalore.
Phase 1 of Wings kicked off on 30th August with Parasailing for partially blind, fully blind people and then the second slot happened on saturday, 1st September with deaf, dumb and autistic children participating in the event.
For us (Karthik, Rajendra and I), it was a really special event for this had been in our minds since over a year and finally, we got a chance to execute it and it went on perfect to the “T”.
And for me, I realised how pathetic a life we all live when I interacted with the students from the “National Association of the Blind“. I realised the true meaning of the term “differently-abled”. It’s basically called so because, when you interact with these people, you realise that they’re the actual people that are abled and we’re not!!! It was so amazing and gratifying to see the students enjoy themselves thoroughly when they were given their first open-air flight!!!
And for us, the breathtaking moments were one too many!!! A capture of some of the expressions:
For more pics, check out here…
And on other very interesting terms, I completed one year at Sasken counting 307 days on bench, and the rest 58 in a valid project!!! Where I actually did productive work!!! Hoooot!!! Yaaaaay!!!
Chao…
And finally… the Phase - I of my project at Symbian ends today… The last few mails flying to and fro before the final sign-off and acceptance.
The last one month has perhaps settled my score for action that I’ve missed in the last 10 months at my job. And it has been a massive learning phase for all of us. Some of them, perhaps the most crucial learnings for our team have been thus:
- Work only when ‘you‘ want to. Not when you have to… And this is a gospel at Symbian. Two hours of working with commitment produces a far more gratifying result than 2 weeks of bitching around because you are asked to. This is an absolute maverick style compared to the way people work back at my company!!! True freedom…
- Document the code: I REPEAT WITH A LOT OF COMMITMENT!!! DOCUMENT THE CODE!!! People here dont write separate documentation. Tools like doxygen pick up the documentation in the source code and convert into the SDK documentation that we see as reference manuals. (More on this in a dedicated post). This process maybe quite time consuming, but nevertheless saves time on the overall project deadlines… I have seen people here documenting a function for about 10-15 lines before they even write the function signature. It’s part of their culture… Not their process…
- I had to mention this… NOKIA IS GOD!!!! No one can, will and I repeat further again, ever will shake NOKIA from the top!!! The reasons are perhaps very evident and simple - Having gotten to see the source-code that the people at Nokia have written, I have no reasons and needs to substantiate the statement. The coding is perfect. The technique a.k.a. approach to design and architecture is absolutely immaculate… and the guys out there are definitely waaaaaay more committed than we are… (We as in, atleast us that have looked at their source-code)
- And I have the answer to why the Symbian documentation still sucks… We can discuss this in greater detail sometime later…
As of now, one more debrief meeting and then we’re off… And we’re just keeping our fingers crossed and praying that Symbian let us do the second phase of their project from the Symbian dev-center… Wish me luck!!!
Chao… and out…
