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Mannil indha kaadhal andri from "Keladi Kanmani"

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:07:00 +0000

Song: Mannil indha kaadhal andri
Movie: Keladi Kanmani (1990)
Lyrics: ??
Music: Ilayaraja
Singer: S P Balasubrahmanyam
Actors: S P Balasubrahmanyam, Radhika

search keywords: "tamil song Mannil indha from movie Keladi Kanmani"
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6DKlaUul1I

Mannil indha kaadhal andri, yaarum vaazhthal koodumo

Is it possible to live on this earth, without love?

literal: On earth (soil), without this love, can anyone live?

ennam kanni paavai indri, yezhu swaram thaan paadumo

Will the seven notes (of music) sing, without the thought of the maiden girl?

literal: Without the virgin girl's thought, will the 7 notes sing?

He says music goes mute if it's not for the thought of the girl. (7 swaram are the 'sa re ga.. ' notes in music)

penmai indri mannil, inbam yedhada?

Where is the pleasure on this earth, without woman?

literal: Without the feminine, on this earth, where is the pleasure?

kannai moodi kanavil vaazhum maanida

(tell me how...you) man who is living with eyes closed in a dream

I guess the poet wants to convey man is living asleep.. unaware falsely believing that he can find happiness without woman/love.

So more than dreaming, the man is asleep/unconscious.

In the next stanza, he sings how the materialistic world with all its beauty is useless and will fail to give pleasure without the girl's company.

vennilavum, ponni nadhiyum, kanniyin thunai indri

enna sugam ingu padaikum, penmayin sugam andri

What pleasure can the white-moon and river cauvery give, without the company of the maiden, without her pleasure?

literal: white-moon, ponni river (the sacred cauvery river), without the virgin's company

what pleasure can they serve? in the absence of feminine pleasure.

sandhanamum, sanga thamizhum, pongidum vasanthamum

sandal (as in sandal wood) and sanga tamil (sangam=a golden age in tamil literature) and raising/overflowing spring (as in season)

sindhi varum pongum amutham thangidum kumudhamum

A lotus filled with overflowing and spilling amudham (a heavenly food/delicacy)

literal: .. spilling and overflowing (it comes) amudham which comes and stays inside a lotus.. and that lotus (..below will fail to give pleasure ..)

kanni magal arugil irundhaal suvaikum

(all these) will taste sweet, if the maiden is next to me

literal: if the virgin girl is close by, they will taste (good/sweet)

kanni thunai izhandhaal muzhudhum kasakkum

If the maiden's company is lost, they fully taste bitter.

literal: On losing the virgin's company, completely (they) taste bitter

vizhiyinil mozhiyinil nadaiyinil udaiyinil

In her eyes, in her talks, in her walk, in her dress

literal: In eye, in language, in walk, in garment

adhisaya sugam tharum anangu ival pirappu ithu thaan

She is the goddess that serves wondrous bliss

literal: that which gives wondrous pleasure, is this goddess/angel (which was created by her birth)

<mannil indha..>

In the next stanza, he praises each of the body parts of the girl.. about her lips, eyes, hips, fingers...

muthu mani rathinangalum, kattiya pavazhamum,

kothu malar arputhangalum kuvintha adharamum,

A heap made of wondrous bouquet of red flowers, pearl like beads of rubies and solid pavazham (another red precious stone)... are your lips.

literal: pearl like beads of rubies and solid pavazham (a red color opaque precious stone)

bouquet of red flowers .. (all these) wonders... (came to make a heap).. heap .. (are your) lips.

kothu malar: I assume it's a flower size of a large rose, with many small red flowers bunched together.. I guess they are called 'idly poo'.

adharam is a poetic word for lips

sitridaiyum, sinna viralum, villenum puruvamum,

the slender hip, slender fingers, bow like eyebrows

sutrivara seiyum vizhiyum, sundara mozhigalum

The eyes that attract, the beautiful voice

literal: the eyes that make one go around (her)

Seems her eyes are so attractive/magnetic that one will be made to keep coming towards her

yennivida maranthaal yedharkor piravi?

If one forgets (these), what's the use of taking birth?

literal: If forgetting to remember, what's the use of (this/one) birth?

ithanaiyum izhandhaal avan thaan thuravi

Only he is a true renouncer, if he loses all these

literal: lose all these.. only that man is a renouncer/sadhu

mudi mudhal adi varai muzhuvathum sugam tharum

Completely from the top to bottom (from head to toe), (you) giving pleasure

virundhugal padaithidum arangamum aval allava?

Isn't she(her body) the stage(/a dining hall) that delivers such a feast

literal: (such a) feast delivering stage, isn't she (or her body as going by previous lines)

Notes:

The guy sings in praise of the glory of woman and love. He sings in praise of the general woman unlike most romantic songs where the lover addresses his specific beloved.

He sings how the natural beauties (like moon, river) are useless and loses their ability to give pleasure in the absence of woman. The other stanza praises the beauty of her body - each of the parts like eyes, lips, hips. SPB sings in a single breath each of the two main stanzas of the song.

I wonder at the rich poetic tamil used in this song; such high density and depth of meanings using so few a words. Specifically the line that extols her lips. I love best the lines:

'penmai indri mannil inbam yedhada?' (where is the pleasure on this earth, without woman?) and

'...yennivida maranthaal yedharkor piravi?' ( what's the use of taking birth, if you forget to remember (her beauty))

Dictionary:

mann=soil (earth), andri/indri=without, ennam=thoughts, kanni=virgin, paavai=girl, penmai=feminine/woman-hood, inbam=pleasure/happiness, maanidam=mankind, kanavu=dream,

venn/venmai=white, nila=moon, nathi=river, ponni-nathi=cauvery, thunai=company, sugam=pleasure,vasandham=spring season, ponguthal=to raise/overflow (as a boiling pot), sindhuthal=spilling (like a overlowing bucket), thanguthal=to stay/contain, kumudham=lotus, kasappu=bitter (taste), vizhi=eye, mozhi=language/voice, nadai=walk, udai=dress/garment, adhisayam=wonder, anangu=god like woman, goddess, angel --- this is a poetic literary word, pirappu=birth, muthu=pearl, mani=bead, rathinam=ruby, katti=solid, pavazham=a red opaque precious stone.. usually used big in jewellery like rings, kothu-malar=a flower size of a very big rose which has lots (100s) of small red flowers inside, kuvindha/kuvippu=heap (like a heap of grains), adharam=lips (this is poetic usage), villu=bow (as in bow and arrow), puruvam=eye-brows, suttri-vara=to make one go and come around (as you do around a temple..circum.(??locate?)), marandhal=to forget, edharku=why, piravi=birth, thuravi=renouncer/saint/sadhu, mudi=top (like mountain summit, here head), adi=bottom (here ..feet/toes), muzhuvathum=fully/completely, virundhu=feast (as a wedding food), arangam=stage/auditorium ..where a performace (like dance/concert) takes place

search tags: Lyrics, Translation of "mannil indha kaadhal andri" from "Keladi Kanmani", "mannil indha kaadhal indri", "mannil intha kaathal"

Vaseegara from Minnale

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:30:00 +0000

Song: Vaseegara
Movie: Minnale (2001)
Lyrics: Thamarai
Music: Harris Jayaraj
Singer: Bombay Jayashree

search keywords: "tamil song Vaseegara from movie Minnale"
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NhKaWr3Mx4

vaseegara, en nenjinikka un pon madiyil thoonginaal podhum

O captivator, it's enough if I can sleep on your golden lap (while my heart fills with sweetness)

literal: O captivator, as my heart fills with sweetness, on your golden lap, if i can sleep -- that is enough

nenjinikka = nenju inikka .. heart feeling sweetness

adhe kanam en kan uranga(a) mun jenmangalin yaekkangal theerum

At the same moment, when my eyes are awake, all my previous birth's longings will get fulfilled..

literal: at the same moment, when my eyes are not sleeping, previous birth's longings will get fulfilled

There are two interpretations.. urangaa=not sleep; uranga=sleep.

I assume it's urangaa and not uranga

Since in the previous line she says,she wants to sleep in his lap, I assume in the second line she wants to lie in his lap and be awake.

naan nesipathum swasipathum un dhayavaal dhaane

Only because of your grace, I love, I breath.

literal: I love and I breathe, it's because of your love/grace.

Only while researching on this line, I came to know that the very common usage 'dhayavu seithu' (meaning 'please') ..literally means "with/using love/grace (anbu/arul)"

yengugirean thaengugirean un ninaivaal naane naan (?or thaan?)

On your memories, I'm longing, I'm being disturbed (with sadness)

literal: I'm longing, I'm disturbed, because of your memories (thoughts) -- I am I am [thaan would mean.. it's only I]

thaenguthal = is to stall; another meaning is mind/heart getting disturbed (manam kalanguthal)... because of sadness.

adai mazhai varum adhil nanaivome

Let's get drenched (together) in a heavy rain

literal: heavy rain will come, in it, let's get wet/drenched

kuLir kaaichalodu sneham

Let us love ..when shivering in cold

literal: With cold (shivering) fever, love

The suggestion being after getting drenched together in a heavy rain, we feel cold and we shiver and embrace

oru porvaikkul iru thookkam

We sleep under the same bed-cloth/comforter

literal: One bed-sheet, two sleeps

Continuing from previous lines, suggest that we feel cold and sleep off together covering us together with the same/single bed cloth (it's a very thin comforter/large shawl)

kulu kulu poigal solli..enai velvaai

adhu therindhum kooda anbe

manam adhaiyeethaan edhirpaarkum

With sweet lies, you win me over; I know they are lies -- but still I keep expecting them.

literal: by telling cool lies, you win over me

Even knowing that (ie you are lying), my love,

(my) heart keeps longing/expecting them

She says she knows he is lying; and with lies he wins her over.. and she enjoys his lies and looks forward to hearing his sweet/cool lies

engeyum pogaamal dhinam veetileye nee vendum

Everyday, I want you to just stay inside home with me, without leaving for anywhere.

literal: Not going anywhere, daily, I want you inside home

Wondering what they will do for 'boova' :) [I guess he logs in VPN and sends a "not feeling well" PTO email to his manager]

sila samayam vilayaataai, un aadaikulle naan vendum

Just for fun, I want to wear your shirt

literal: Sometime, for fun, I want to be inside your garment/shirt

In olden times, in poorer families, girls wear shirts of their brothers; Seems to convey such love.

dhinamum nee kuLithathum enai thaedi

en selai nuniyaal undhan thalai thudaipaaye, adhu kavidhai

After your shower, you search for me and dry your hair with my saree -- that is poetry.

literal: daily, after your shower/bath, you search for me

and with the tip/edge of my saree, you'll dry/pat your head/hair, .. that is poetry.

thirudan pol padhungi dhideer endru

pinnal irundhu ennai anaipaaye, adhu kavidhai

Suddenly like a hiding thief, you'll embrace me from behind and surprise me -- that is poetry.

literal: Like a thief, you'll crouch, and suddenly (as to give a shock)

from behind (me), you'll embrace me.. - that is poetry.

I guess this is a common movie scene, where the wife is usually cooking and looking towards the stove and the guy comes behind and hugs her.

[seems only happens in movies? ;)]

yaarenum mani kaetaal adhai solla kooda theriyaadhe

kaadhal ennum mudi veLiyil

gadikaara neram kidayaadhe

In the land of love, there is no meaning to time

literal: If someone asks for time, we can't answer (as we have no clue what time is now..or how much time has passed)

In the top-land of love, there is nothing like time as a clock conveys

Suggests when they are together in love, time freezes; mudi-veLi= I guess it means top-veLi is like a place (vinveLi=space).. so it talks about such a land of love.

In such a land, time loses its meaning. time doesn't exist. [steven hawkins/einstein can have some explanation for 'time does't exist'] :)

<vaseegara..>

some almost inaudible lines .. like '..mudhaal illa .. ' I can't make out what those lines are.. or if they mean something.

Notes:

The girl sings this sweet romantic song thinking about her lover. Sings about simple sweet acts of love like lying in his lap, getting drenched together in rain, wearing his clothes, his using her saree to dry his hair. The lyricist is Thamarai.. and some of her songs uses rich beautiful almost poetic Tamil. Say in this song words like vaseegara, mudiveLi, thengugirean are words not in common usage. The cinematography of this song doesn't do justice to the song's tenderness... I recall some youtube comment..saying "pole-dancing, WTF?!!' :) And what is the nonsense of the girl/guy taking shower together scene?? I guess someone got confused between love and lust; reminds me of some scene from a malayalam movie in gaiety theater!

Dictionary:

vaseegara=captivator (vaseegaram from vasam.. is to hold/control someone as if in a spell; similar to an insect fallen into a spider's web..we can say the insect has gone under the spider's vaseegaram), nenjam/nenju=heart, inikka/inippu=sweet, pon=gold, madi=lap, thookam=sleep, ganam=moment/instant, urakkam=sleep, uranga=to sleep, mun=previous, jenmam=birth (as in birth-death cycle/reincarnation), yeakkam=longings (deep unfilled desires), theerum=to get fulfilled, nesippu=to love/like, swasam=breath, dhayavu=grace/love/kindness, yengudhal=to long/to pine, theangudhal=to get disturbed in mind due to sadness (manam kalangudhal)..the normal meaning is to stall/stagnate (water/thanni thenguthal).but here the meaning is 'mind disturbance', ninaivu=memories/thoughts, adai mazhai= heavy rain (downpour like monsoon in south india.. note in a hot place like india unlike western countries, people enjoy getting drenched to feel the coolness of the rain), kulir kaaichal= shivering cold fever, sneham=love, porvai=a bedsheet kind of thin cloth used to wrap oneself during sleep (like comforter..but much thinner so suited for warm weather), thookam=sleep, kulu-kulu=a phrase to denote coolness like cool-cool, poi=lie, veL=to win (over), edhirpaarthal=to expect, to eagerly await, dhinam=daily, vilayaatu= a game/fun/sport, aadai=cloth/garment (like shirt, dhoti), kulithal=to bathe/shower, selai=saree, nuni=tip (here the trail/loose end of the saree), thalai=head, thudaithal=to pat-dry/rub, thirudan=theif, padhungi=to crouch/hide, dhideer=expression to show suddeness (interjection?), pinnal=behind, anaithal=to embrace/hug, kavithai=poetry/poem, yaarenum=someone, mani=time, mudiveLi=top-land -- I interpret this as mudi+veLi .. mudi is top (like mudimannan, mudichoodhal), veLi is land/space (as in vinveLi, vettaveLi) .. just to suggest in some space/land of love, gadigaaram=clock/watch (as in wall-clock)

search tags: Lyrics, English translation of tamil song "Vaseegara" from movie "Minnale"

Meow meow poona from Kanthaswamy

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 06:35:00 +0000

Song: Meow Meow Poona

Movie: Kanthaswamy

Lyrics: Viveka

Music: Devi Sri Prasad

Singer: Priya Himesh, Vikram

Actors: Shriya and Vikram [Shriya won best actress award for this movie]

search keywords: "meow meow poona, miyah miyah tamil song from kanthaswamy"

youtube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4J2nS-zg3A

Meow meow.. meow meow

....

heyy.. meow meow poona ada meesai illa poona

* [literal: hey meow meow [the sound a cat makes] cat, a cat without moustache (meaning vikram has no mouche?)]

hey meow meow poona, meesai illa poona

thiridi thinna paakuriya thimusu katta meena?

* are you trying to steal and eat the (fat/sumptuous like a thick wooden block) fish

[thimusu kattai is a thick wooden stick/block of wood, usually used as an excercise equipment? which guys lift up n down like a dumbell. Here signifies how fat/plump the fish is! can't relate it to shirya's ..thighs?? :)]

[cat here denotes the guy, vikram.. and he is trying to get to the plump fish.. shirya... so she is asking if you are trying to do that. "thirudi thinna" is a funny colloquial usage when one steals a food item and eat it

meow meow poona, veeta thedum poona

* meow meow cat, the one searching the home

"choo po" nu veratta maatean, unga appa mela aana

* I won't chase you away as "choo po".. (I) promise you over your father

[wow... already future father-in-law is being used here.... :)]

one: namma idhayam onnu

two: nam udalthaan rendu

three: naam onna sendhaa aavom moonu

* one: our heart is one

* two: our bodies are two

* three: If we join together, we will make three

[In all the following, the 'punch' is in the three.. here of course the suggestion is they'll make a baby to make it three once they come together]

(male)

one: un paarvai onnu

two: adhil artham rendu

three: adhu sollu thoondum vaartha moonu

* one: your look is one

* two: in that meaning is two (ie hidden/double/suggestive meaning in your look)

* three: it's provoking to say three words [ should be "i love you"]

<...hey meow meow poona. ..>

vegathukku naan pazhasu

* I'm used to speed .. suggesting she is fast/active/aggressive [oops.. i guess i'm using double meaning here!! lol]

vetkathukku ada naan pudhusu

* I'm new to shyness .. .suggesting she is not used to feeling shy

modhalukku naan pazhasu

* I'm used to (old to) hitting/banging/fight.. [I guess the word bang is probably more fitting... given the rest of the situation.. ;)]

ada kaadhalukku naan pudhusu

* I'm new to love [suggestion being not new to lust(?!) but new to love?]

one: nam methai onnu

two: adhil thookam rendu

three: adhil nitham venum yudham moonu

* one: Our bed is one

* two: In that there are two sleeps [ie we both sleep together]

* three: In that daily/every-night (we) need three wars/battles [wow.. I guess here we enter the region of R-rated ness]

(male)

one: un iduppu onnu

two: adhil uduppu rendu

three: adhil venum kadicha thadippu moonu

*one: your hip is one

*two: In that, there are two clothes [ suggesting bikini like two piece cloth]

*three: In that, (we) need three bite marks [that he will bite her and make three marks!!]

<..hey meow meow poona ..>

koochathukku leave-vu kudu

* please give leave/holiday to shyness [drop your shyness]

dhegathukku novu kudu

* give disease to the body [hmm.. meaning make the body hot/ or make the body burn with desires]

aadaigalai dhoora vidu

* leave (your) clothes far away [ ..get naked ..]

aasaigalai sera vidu

* allow the desires to come together to join [let mine and your desire join..and not just stand apart]

one: nam mutham onnu

two: adhil etchil rendu

three: andha bodhaiyil marakkum kaalam moonu

* one: our kiss is one

* two: in that there are two saliva [of course..it must be a french kiss!]

* three: In that intoxication, (we) will forget the three times [basically past/present/future will be forgotten.. like we in a trance]

(male)

one: un meni onnu

two: adhil theni rendu

three: ennai kottum naale honey-moon-u

* one: your body/skin is one

* two: In that, there are two honey bees [hmm.. what he means by two honey-bees? not eyes.. something to do with the two-piece cloth?? I will leave it to your imagination.. :)]

* three: The day (the honeybee) strings me is (my/our) honey-moon [here there is no literal number three.. but nicely the word honeymoon is used... so when the above said parts hits him, he says it's honeymoon]

<..hey meow meow poona...>

Commentary:

This is such a fun filled hot sensuous song; I bet if Buddha had seen shriya in this song, he would have renounced his renunciation :) poor bodhi tree can't stand a chance wooing him back!

This style of asking one/two/three is something novel and it's cool to see really funny meanings; I was surprised it was not some junk list of words.. but well thought out list of the one-two-three lines. It's a style of asking something to denote 'one'.. something to denote 'two'..and coming up with a result to stand for 'three'

I love the double/tripple meanings..and so many hidden meanings in the lines...it's clean n naughty at the same time. and no words are needed for the picturization (wondering how one feels seeing this song when not sober! ;) ).

Dictionary:

poona=cat, meesai=moustache, thimsu-kattai=a kind of body-building wt, like dumbell..made of wood (looks like a fat baseball bat), veedu=house, thaedal=to search, aana=promise, idhayam=heart, udal=body, paarvai=look, thoondum=to provoke, 'chu po'=like shoo away, vegam=speed, vetkam=shyness, modhal=hit/strike/bang, kaadhal=love, methai=bed, thookam=sleep, yudham=war/battle, iduppu=hip, uduppu=cloth, thadippu=mark on skin like a bite-mark/insect-bite (raised/bloated skin), koocham=shyness, kudu=give, dhegam=skin/body, novu=disease, aasai=wish, mutham=kiss, etchil=saliva, bodhai=intoxication, kaalam=time (like past/present/future), meni=body/skin of whole body, theni=honey-bee, kottum=to sting (like a bee)

"enna solla pogiraai?" from kandukondein kandukondein

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:30:00 +0000

Song: Enna solla pogirai

Movie: Kandukondein Kandukondein

Lyrics: Vairamuthu

Music: A R Rehman

Singer: Shankar Mahadevan (won a Silver Lotus Award for Best Male playback singer for this song)

Actors: Ajith and Tabu

search keywords: "enna solla pogirai tamil song from kandukondein kandukondein movie"

youtube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40xk9C7Ytdc

enna solla pogiraai?
*What are you going to say?

illai ena solla oru ganam pothum
* It takes just one moment to say "no"

illai endra sollai thaanguvathu endraal..
* to withstand the "no" word
innum enakor jenmam vendum
* I need one more life-time (birth)

enna solla pogiraai?
* What are you going to say?

sandhana thendralai jannalgal dhandithal... nyaayama? nyaayama?
* For the windows to punish sandal breeze.. is it fair? is it fair?

kaadhalin kelviku kangalin bathil enna mounama? mounama?
* For the love's question, what are eye's answer? is it silence? is it silence?

anbe endhan kaathal solla nodi ondru pothume..
* (my) love, it takes just a moment to convey my love..
adhai naanum meipikkadhaane oru aayul vendume ..
* for me to prove it, I need one life-time

illai ena solla oru ganam pothum

illai endra sollai thaangu-vathu endraal..
innum enakor jenmam vendum

enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai

sandhana thendralai jannalgal dhandithal.. nyaayama? nyaayama?

kaadhalin kelviku kangalil bathil enna.. mounama? mounama?

anbe endhan kaathal solla nodi ondru pothume..
adhai naanum meipikkadhaane oru aayul vendume ..

illai ena solla oru ganam pothum

illai endra sollai thaanguvathu endraal..
innum enakor jenmam vendum

enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai

idhayam or kannaadi..unathu bimbam vizhunthathadi..
* (My) Heart is a mirror.. your image fell on it
idhuthaan un sondham idhayam sonnathadi
* Heart told (me), this is your relation [meaning: she is the One]

kannadi bimbam katta kayiru ondrum illaiyadi
* There is no rope to tie the image (that fell on the mirror)
kannadi oonjal bimbam aanathadi
* mirror image became a swing [literal: mirror swing image became]

nee ondru solladi penne
* You tell just a word, lady
illai nindru kolladi en kanne
* Or just stand and kill (me), my love [literal: my eyes]

endhan vaazhkaiye undhan vizhi viLambil
* My whole life is in the tips of your eyes
ennai thurathaadhe uyir karai yeraadhe
* Don't chase me.. or else my soul won't reach the shore

illai ena solla oru ganam pothum

illai endra sollai thaangu-vathu endraal..
innum enakor jenmam vendum

enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai

sandhana thendralai jannalgal dhandithal.. nyaayama? nyaayama?

kaadhalin kelviku kangalin bathil enna.. mounama? mounama?

vidiyal vandha pinnaalum..vidiyaadha iravu edhu?
* Even after the sunrise, which is the night that hasn't finished yet?
poo vaasam veesum undhan koonthaladi
* It's your hair that is filled with fragrances of flowers

ivvulagam irunda pinnum..irulaadha baagam edhu?
* Even after this earth has darkened, what is that which hasn't become dark?
kadhir vandhu paayum undhan kangaladi
* It's your eyes that are filled with rays of light [literal: light that pierces from your eyes]

pala ulaga azhagigal koodi..un paatham kazhuvalaam vaadi
* Let a lot of world beauties gather and let (them/us) wash your feet..
en thalir malare..innum thayakkam enna? ennai puriyaatha
* my tender flower.. still why you hestitate? don't you understand me?
idhu vaazhvaa saava?
* is this life or death?

enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai
nyaayama? nyaayama?
enna solla pogiraai
enna solla pogiraai
mounama? mounama?
enna solla pogiraai

Commentary:

The guy is seeking to know if his beloved is accepting his love or not. And he is pleading her to answer him; he shows desperation. The picturization of the song adds much beauty; the usage of the desert and the parched lands highlight the guy's desperation; the suggestion of thirst and the girl feeding him water relates to the guy's thirst for love.

He asks her whats her reply and in case she says no, he talks about how difficult it is for him to withstand it. The line talking about 'my soul won't reach shores' conveys a higher spiritual meaning -- in hinduism, each soul goes thru' several births to reach the ultimate destination, the Self (or the God/Existence). So one interpretation is he says if this desire of his is unfulfilled, he won't reach the ultimate destination.

The lines talking about bimbam (image/reflection) is a bit intriguing. I'm not fully sure of the meaning of 'kannaadi oonjal bimbam aanathu'; in the previous line.. it says the heart is the mirror (kannaadi). So translating literally, it means 'the heart swing has become image'.. this doesn't make sense.. I think he seems to convey her image in his heart has started to move like a swing/pendulum .. so 'kannadi bimbam oonjal aanathu' is what is implied so it's just a transposition of the words oonjal and bimbam. Let me know if you think of a different interpretation.

It's nice to see in the picturization, tabu does indeed answer "yes" by giving her hand :) she places her palm on ajith's. I like the line which says.. "let the beauties of the world wash your feet" and the shot where tabu looks at the camera (on the line which sings about the piercing rays of light from your eyes, it lasts for a fraction of a second). Also the lines that talk about her dark hair and powerful eyes.

BTW most lines end with 'di' .. it's a very informal/friendly way to address a girl in tamil.. like 'vaa' is 'to come'; vaadi is 'to come' addressed in a very colloquial/friendly way. similary 'po' is go.. 'podi' is go in an informal tone. Note this mode is also used in a disrespectful way in other situations.

Dictionary:

enna=what, illai=no, sol=word, sandanam = sandal, thendral=breeze, jannal=window, jenman=life-time/(birth/death cycle), nyayam=fairness, kelvi=question, mounnam=silence, kaadhal=love, mei=true (meipikka=to make something true)

idhayam=heart, kannaadi=mirror, bimbam=image/reflection (as on a mirror/water), somdham=relation/relationship (like father/uncle/aunt), kattuthal = to tie (as in a rope), kayiru=rope, oojal=swing, kol=to kill, kann=eyes, vizhi=eyes, vizhambu=it's like the tip/rim of say a vessel/bucket (here comparing the eyes to be like a vessel/pot), vidiyal=sunrise, iravu=night, poo=flower, vaasam=fragrance, irunda=to get dark, paagam/baagam=part, ethu=which/what, kadhir=ray (of light), paayum=jump/pierce (as an arrow), ulagam=world, azhagi=beauty (lady), koodi=gather (as a meeting), paatham=feet, kazhuval=to wash/rinse (as to clean/purify), thalir=tender (as a newly formed leaf), malar=flower, thayakam=to hesitate, puriyum=to understand, vaazhvu=life, saavu=death

websearch tags: lyrics and translation of "enna solla pogirai"

English translation of tamil movie songs

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:16:00 +0000

I will post English translation of Tamil movie songs. I search for translations of hindi songs as I can't fully understand the lyrics; I thought there must be people who are not familiar with tamil who face similar needs. I hope this effort helps them enjoy a little more,the beauty of the songs. I'll write with the assumption that you may not be familiar with tamil/indian culture.

I will use English to write out tamil and not use tamil fonts; one it's easier to type out in English; two, people who are not familiar with tamil script can still read and understand the meaning. Of course I myself am not familiar using tamil fonts for writing :)

I will channel the efforts into capturing the poet's intention; as you know Tamil is a rich language and it's hard to translate some of the words. As time permits, in a more appropriate future time, I may subtitle the song and upload in youtube.

I appreciate your comments; feel free to offer alternate meanings/translations; I don't have access to the original lyrics and I rely on listening to capture the lyrics -- so there is a good chance I might have misrepresented the poet's intention (of course this adds it's own charm).. feel free to offer your alternate meanings.

To find the song, I suggest you use youtube/google search. The URL I list may go obsolete; but I'll list a few search keywords which will help you to locate the video/audio of the song on the net.

I will use simple fonts and structure; the English lines will start with a * (asterisk). At the end, I'll give a dictionary of some of the tamil words and my translation. Also I'll have a commentary section where I'll write the background/intention of the song so that you can see the big picture/mood for the song. And lastly, all the writings are my own interpretation and I would avoid prefixing most sentences with "I feel..", "I believe"..but just state them as fact. I would love to hear alternate interpretations and please do leave your thoughts in your comments.

Unix shell pipeline: Part 2 - Using temporary file for IPC

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 19:39:00 +0000

This is a continuation of the prior post. I'll describe some of the findings. Recall the sample problem was doing recursive grep in a directory.

Study Solution:


find . ( -path *obj-ppc -o -path *lib-ppc -o -path *bin-ppc -o 
          -path *\.CC -o -path */\.T* ) -prune -o -type f -print | 
xargs file -- | grep text | cut -d: -f1 | 
xargs grep $pattern

The solution comprised of using find to generate the whole list of files. Then use the 'file' command to weed out all non-text files. Finally pass the file-list through grep to do the actual search. We also used 'xargs' to ensure minimal copies of processes are forked (for the file and grep).

We already did some optimization. The best ones include using -prune of find to cut branches of uninteresting directories like binaries, object directories. The second was using 'file' command to remove non-text files. When I did the measurement this process was really slow. Sometimes it even took more time than the last grep! I expected file to run pretty fast as I had thought it uses some magic number just in the beginning of the file and does not scan the whole file content.

As we saw in the last post, the real killer of speed is the IPC between the processes in the pipeline. I removed the IPC and used temporary files to capture the intermediate results. The performance boost was immense. In fact the same run on 100k files could complete literally under 40 seconds when the IPC based one took forever (I think at least 15 minutes). Moreover the file cache influence was substantial. The first run took about 2 minutes or so; but the immediate next run will complete under 40 seconds. The first run would have a CPU util of about 1% while the second run hitting almost 40% at times. This percentage is the CPU time (both user+sys) versus wall-clock time. I think getting to anything above 25% is impressive.

The next step was I tried to exploit the Dual-CPU and all the 2nd cache resources. Our performance is still a lot I/O bound; but let's try to use all the intermediate caches and RAM. The solution is to take each intermediate temporary file and break it into n pieces. Then feed each of these pieces to n threads of the next stage. Thus we combine multi-threading with temporary file IPCs. The gain was good considering we are still bound by IO. BTW the splitting was done using unix 'split' command (see below in code).

An added bonus of the temporary file approach is re-usability of results from prior run. For our problem, if only the search string changes, say from needle to pin, we can reuse the results of all the prior stages. Thus no need to fire up find or file. Just jump directly to the last stage of the pipeline.

Thus the bottom line observation: File systems with large RAM caches have gone through decades of optimizations - so exploit it. Instead of using IPC through pipes between a producer and consumer, use temporary files. The loss in parallel running of the two processes is well compensated by allowing each to run at its full speed. Each process's output and input are connected to temporary disk files.

Here are some of the code listing.. showing the essential part of using temporary file for IPC and splitting it for parallel processing. Please excuse the formatting.. I had to resort to HTML pre tag.


# command processor using file IO redirection
# A thread which will run a unix command. Objective is to get the
# command complete ASAP. Thus stdin, stdout, stderr are all redirected
# from regular disk files. The guess is with no other process involved,
# the command should be able to run at top speed
# 
class command_processor_fileio (Thread):
    def __init__ (self, cmd, fname_stdin, fname_out):
        Thread.__init__(self)
        self.cmd = cmd        # Unix cmd.. must be string..sent to Popen
        self.fname_stdin = fname_stdin  # stdin redirect fname
        self.fname_out = fname_out    # common prefix to stdout/stderr
        self.sh_output = []           # in case intermediate sh complains
        self.fname_stdout = ''        # set up later in run
        self.fname_stderr = ''        # set up later in run
        self.status = 0               # status of cmd execution
        self.status_is_signaled = 0   # status of cmd execution ..is signal?
    def run(self):
        cmd_run = self.cmd
        thread_name = self.getName()
        self.fname_stdout = "%s-%s-stdout.txt" %                             (self.fname_out, thread_name)
        self.fname_stderr = "%s-%s-stderr.txt" %                             (self.fname_out, thread_name)
        redirection = ' >|%s 2>|%s < %s' %                       (self.fname_stdout, self.fname_stderr, self.fname_stdin)
        cmd_run += redirection
        if options.debug > 0:
            print "Starting thread %s cmd %s" % (thread_name, cmd_run)
        run = popen2.Popen3(cmd_run)
        run.tochild.close()   # all redirec. So we don't expect any input
        # following may be skipped if it aids in performance
        self.sh_output = run.fromchild.readlines() # just in case sh complains

        result = run.wait()   # block wait until cmd is finished.

        self.status = os.WEXITSTATUS(result)
        self.status_is_signaled = os.WIFSIGNALED(result)

# 
# Merge all the output of various threads into one file
# 
def thread_output_files_merge (stdout_files, stderr_files, target):

    fname_stdout = redirection_filename(target)
    fname_stderr = redirection_filename(target, is_stderr=True)

    # just merge all files.. so do a cat f1 f2 f3 ...fn > f_out
    merge_cmd = "cat %s > %s" % ( ' '.join(stdout_files), fname_stdout)
    os.system(merge_cmd)
    merge_cmd = "cat %s > %s" % ( ' '.join(stderr_files), fname_stderr)
    os.system(merge_cmd)

# 
#  Split one file into many smaller files for each thread to work on
# The routine must return num_threads files... even empty ones are okay
# 
def thread_input_file_split (fname, num_threads):

    if num_threads == 1:
        # easiest to just get out early
        return [fname]

    fsize = os.path.getsize(fname)
    bytes_per_file = fsize / num_threads 

    split_prefix = "%s-thread-" % (fname,)

    if options.use_shortcut > 1:  # User gave -s -s .. that means don't
    # do the split of files.. just re-use from prior run even the split
    # files. NOTE: -t value must remain the same as in prior run
        split_files = glob.glob(split_prefix + 'a?') # split.. uses aa..ab.ac
        # must have atleast num_threads elements.
        if options.debug > 0:
            print "Reusing thread split files (%d files) from prior run "                   "due to -s -s: %s" % (num_threads, split_files)
        return split_files[:num_threads]

    # before running the split command, remove any old split output files
    # from a prior run
    old_files = glob.glob(split_prefix + 'a?')# man split.. uses aa..ab
    for old_file in old_files:
        if options.debug > 0:
            print "Previous run leftovers. Removing ..", old_file
        os.remove(old_file)

    split_cmd = "split -C%d %s %s" % (bytes_per_file, fname, split_prefix)
    os.system(split_cmd)

    # Assert: We will have at least num_threads now .. not less 

    split_files = glob.glob(split_prefix + 'a?') # man split.. uses aa..ab.ac

    split_files.sort() # exploit aa..ab..naming.. a is the smallest file
    while len(split_files) > num_threads:
        # Take the last file (smallest one) and merge it with it's prior file
        smallest_file = split_files.pop()
        merge_cmd = "cat %s >> %s" % (smallest_file, split_files[-1])
        if options.debug > 0:
            print "Merging smallest file: cmd %s" % (merge_cmd, )
        os.system(merge_cmd)
    if options.debug > 0:
        print "Multiple thread input split_files: ", split_files
    # ASSERT: len(split_files) == num_threads
    return split_files


# 
#  Run cmd using given number of threads
# 
def execute_child_threads_fileio (cmd, stdin_fname, num_threads, target):

    stdin = file_get_all_lines(stdin_fname)
    stdin_size = len(stdin)

    min_per_thread = 4096 # just some minimum size for a thread
    fsize = os.path.getsize(stdin_fname)

    if fsize < min_per_thread:       # must be * num_threads.. but okay
        num_threads = 1
    
    #split the file into num_thread pieces
    stdin_fnames = thread_input_file_split(stdin_fname, num_threads)

    fname_out = redirection_filename(target, is_prefix=True)

    #work_slice = stdin_size / num_threads; # each thread's work size
    workers = []
    # We are going to chop stdin into equal sized chunks for each thread.
    for i in range(num_threads):
        #start_index = i * work_slice;
        #end_index = start_index + work_slice;
        #if i == num_threads - 1:    # if last worker...take all remaining
        #    end_index = stdin_size;
        #this_stdin = stdin[start_index:end_index]  # this thread's in data

        cp = command_processor_fileio(cmd, stdin_fnames[i], fname_out)
        workers.append(cp);
        cp.start()           # fire up the thread to do the data munching

    stdout_files = []  # collect each thread's output file
    stderr_files = []
    for worker in workers:
        worker.join()                    # wait for each worker to finish
        #TODO. Handle each thread's return status...
        stdout_files.append(worker.fname_stdout)
        stderr_files.append(worker.fname_stderr)
        
        
    # merge all its output files into one.. so that next stage process
    # in the pipeline  sees one file.
    thread_output_files_merge(stdout_files, stderr_files, target)
    return ([] , 0, 0)

Unix shell pipeline: Making it multi-lane, Avoiding stop-n-go

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 23:22:00 +0000

This is a CS technical post related to using unix command-line. Just an early warning so that you can walk away, saving your precious browsing time! :). BTW I am aware of some poor formatting issues.. please bear with it..

Shell pipeline is the concept of attaching the stdout of a process to the stdin of another process. See wikipedia for more. This is one of those beautiful unix concepts that stood the test of time. It's simple and extremely effective. It's a shame that modern GUI designers didn't even think of a way of supporting the pipeline concept.. anyway I guess that's a different topic altogether.

Take the simple unix pipeline
$ ls | wc

It prints the number of files in the current directory (for the purist, the number of elements.. )

Recently I was looking at a way to search for a string in a directory tree. The earliest grep didn't do recursive grep. I am sure the newer ones sport the -r flag to do that. They even taken patterns to include/exclude directories.

I started off with the very basic, home grown rgrep.


karthikg@xyz :>cat ~/bin/rgrep
find . -type f -a -exec grep -l $1 {} \;

You run it as 'rgrep needle' to search 'needle' in the whole directory tree.

I need to do a search on a source code tree containing about 100k files ( that's just text files not counting binary files). When I issued the command from the commandline, it took forever to complete. And thus began the optimization process.

The very first step is the well-known trick of using xargs to avoid the exec in find. With -exec of find, we are forking a new process for every element, as find descends the tree. And this is very expensive. With xargs, it tries to feed as much files as possible to each created grep process.

find . -type f -print | xargs grep $pattern

Even this took forever; I started to move away from solving the generic case by exploiting known special properties. Some points to note 1. Almost always I'm interested only in text files. Thus using 'file' command, I can quickly discard binary files before they reach grep. 2. The directory tree has lots of object/executable file directories, which can be skipped. This is a big gain since 'find' need not descend the whole subtree.

Thus the next solution became


find . ( -path *obj-ppc -o -path *lib-ppc -o -path *bin-ppc -o -path *\.CC -o
-path */\.T* ) -prune -o -type f -print |
xargs file -- | grep text | cut -d: -f1 | 
xargs grep $pattern

Please note shell quoting of special chars (*, .) is not shown above (that's
one other irritating thing.. can't we somehow tell the shell not to do
that??)

Here's what is happening:

In find, we try as much as possible to skip whole sub-directories. -prune helps us there. I had -regex.. but felt it's too big a gun to use; -path must be light weight and for my needs it does the job.
Then -type f helps to cut down the elements to regular files
The second process in the pipeline, gets the file type, the following two, grabbing the text files and the cut gets the file name alone
The last grep does the heavy weight string searching

I thought the above must run pretty fast. But to my surprise, it was crawling and looked like it will never complete.

I was running on a fairly powerful dual CPU linux machine and a top showed lots of free CPU. So why isn't it completing soon? Where are the bottle-necks?

My first guess is that grep is taking too much time (the last process). I was wondering if I can parallelize the search.. why can't I split the input file-list (of 100k entries) into say 4 chunks and feed to four different grep processes. These 4 can run in parallel and must finish sooner. Here is when I thought of a multi-lane shell pipeline.

Let's take this syntax


p1 | p2 |{number} p3

e.g. find .. | ... |4 xargs grep $pattern

Here I'm telling the shell to use 4 processes to do the last grep work. It must split the input into 4 parts and send them to each of the four xargs. Of course none of today's shell can do this. I ended up writing a python version of the above (see end). I'll discuss more on some of the findings in a later post.

Going back to the original slowness, looks like the good old shell pipeline is causing lots of stop-n-go among the processes. The find can't run in full speed as it fills its output buffer and gets blocked before the next process in the pipeline can read its stdin. Thus even with CPU usage so less, chaining lots of processes didn't help in the throughput. (Later using -fprint of find, I realized the find completed at a fraction, less than 10%, of its time with -print and pipeline)

My multi-lane version performed marginally better.. I make the "file ..cut" part use 4 threads and also the final grep part use another 4 threads.. still the response was sluggish. The bottle-neck seemed that the stop-n-go introduced by connecting processes. I experimented with using temporary files for the output.. and the speed gain was astounding. The whole process got done in a matter of seconds (about 40s) where-as the pipeline one took a whole 14 minutes to complete.

It would be good to have a shell feature where you use intermediate files to connect the processes, rather than directly feeding stdout to stdin. In the early days, avoiding large intermediate data would have appeared a welcoming solution; but today with vast amounts of memory and fast file-systems with large file caches, it makes more sense to run each processe at its full speed, rather than do this stop-n-go due to intermediate buffer issues.

Thus in conclusion I see that the real bottle-neck is not the load of the system, it's the IPC buffering issues introduced by the pipeline. So when high performance is needed, try using temporary files for stdout and stdin, which give enables each process to run at it's top speed. Even though, you are using the disk filesystem, speed gains are significant.



--- multilane_pipeline.py ----
from threading import Thread

# a small worker thread to read out the stdout of a child process
# This is used for proceses which generate lots of output as well as
# take in large stdin
# To solve the classic pipeline deadlock -- ie child can't proceed
# unless someone removes its output; but that someone can't wait to
# push in all the stdin into the child.
# So once a child is forked, before shoving all data into it's stdin,
# make a worker thread using this class. This worker thread will
# remove (periodically..as and when child outputs) child's stdout, so
# that child can continue to make progress
#
# Use only on targets where we push in large stdin *and* target generates
# large stdout. Else not needed... set flag 'is_thread_collect' if you
# anticipate this scenario
#
class stdout_reader (Thread):
def __init__ (self,fd):
    Thread.__init__(self)
    self.fd = fd                  # while file object to collect from
    self.data_read = []           # the data collected
def run(self):                   # when giving 'go', pull out all data
    self.data_read = self.fd.readlines()

# command processor
# A thread which will run a unix command and collects its output
# It takes in a list containing the whole stdin (thus different from
# standard module commands)
#
class command_processor (Thread):
def __init__ (self, cmd, stdin_list):
    Thread.__init__(self)
    self.cmd = cmd        # Unix cmd.. can be sequence..sent to Popen
    self.stdin_sent = stdin_list  # What  stdin to feed to cmd
    self.stdout_rcvd = []         # What output collected from cmd's o/p
    self.status = 0               # status of cmd execution
    self.status_is_signaled = 0   # status of cmd execution ..is signal?
def run(self):               
    if options.debug > 0:
        print "Starting thread for cmd: %s" % self.cmd
    run = popen2.Popen3(self.cmd)
    # set up another thread to start reading the stdout ...
    reader_thread = stdout_reader(run.fromchild)
    reader_thread.start()
    # Feed to cmd's stdin
    run.tochild.writelines(self.stdin_sent) # push input into child
    run.tochild.close()

    reader_thread.join()  # wait for the worker thread to finish
    self.stdout_rcvd = reader_thread.data_read

    result = run.wait()   # block wait until cmd is finished.

    self.status = os.WEXITSTATUS(result)
    self.status_is_signaled = os.WIFSIGNALED(result)

# 
# Run cmd using given number of threads
# return output and status
# 
def execute_child_threads (cmd, stdin, target):
    thread_str = target_db[target]['threads']
    # Do any $thread to actual value user gave on '-a -t'
    num_threads = int(substitute_target_args(target, thread_str))

    stdin_size = len(stdin)
    if stdin_size < num_threads:
        num_threads = 1

    work_slice = stdin_size / num_threads; # each thread's work size
    workers = []
    # We are going to chop stdin into equal sized chunks for each thread.
    for i in range(num_threads):
        start_index = i * work_slice;
        end_index = start_index + work_slice;
        if i == num_threads - 1:    # if last worker...take all remaining
            end_index = stdin_size;
        this_stdin = stdin[start_index:end_index]  # this thread's in data

        cp = command_processor(cmd, this_stdin)
        workers.append(cp);
        cp.start()           # fire up the thread to do the data munching

    output = []
    for worker in workers:
        worker.join()                    # wait for each worker to finish
        output += worker.stdout_rcvd     # collect the output it generated
        #TODO. Handle each thread's return status...
        
    return (output, 0, 0)

Seeing the difference: Energy consumption Versus carbon emission

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 20:04:00 +0000

For the last couple of weeks, most part of California is seeing record three digit heat wave. And we hear a lot about global warming and energy consumption. There are continuous preaching to save energy, to switch-off lights, adjust thermostat settings and the like. I see that the media doesn't differentiate enough that energy consumption is not all about carbon emission. There is a big difference between burning fossil fuels on a gas guzzler and setting your A/C to 68. The latter, when done right, will contribute zero to global warming.

Let's refresh some basics:

Earth does not generate energy to heat itself. Sun is the source.
Certain gases are more capable of capturing and storing Sun's energy. E.g. Methane, carbon-di-oxide (CO2), CFCs.
An increase in the amount of CO2, leads to global warming.
Buring fossil-fuels increases CO2 levels.

Some other points related to Energy consumption:

Energy generated using non-fossil fuels or those avoiding buring hydrocarbons (ethanol doesn't fit here), do not increase CO2 level.
Hydro power plants, nuclear plants, Wind/Solar plants do not increase CO2 level.
Coal/natural gas based power plants do increase CO2 levels.

Thus if my A/C receives power from a hydro-electric plant, which let's say captures the power from a dam, there is absolutely no contribution to global warming. Look at the enormous power of a huge waterfall, say Niagara. If I put a turbine down and capture the energy, I in no doubt, increase or decrease the total earth's energy. But when I burn up natural gas to do the same, I increase the CO2 levels. Those increased CO2 retain a lot more energy from the only energy source, the Sun. Thus it contributes to elevated future temperatures.

Thus I feel, we better understand the difference between energy consumption and carbon-emissions. There is nothing wrong and nothing to be ashamed of in consuming more energy. If I don't trap that falling waterfall's energy, it just goes wasted, anyway.

What one needs to do is decrease the producers of CO2 and increase the consumers of CO2. We must use energy source that don't burn up hydro-carbons (sorry ethanol -- at least it is a little better because growing ethanol plant soaks up the CO2 in atmosphere.. so at least there is no net increase in CO2). A way to increase the consumers to conserve forests -- who knows in a distant future we may expend energy (nuclear, say) to soak up the CO2.

I saw Tom Brokaw's recent global warming report in Discovery. I could see only the last few sections.. and it was good to see the term "carbon footprint" being used. But again, they equated the amount of electricity used in home to tons of CO2. There lies the fallacy. Why should the energy I captured from a falling waterfall do anything with CO2? And why that leads any way to increase/decrease of overall earth's temperature?

Yet another solution to VoD rental

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:18:00 +0000

A couple of weeks back, when checking the postal mails, I saw a marketing flyer from a company called moviebeam. It is a new way of delivering movies directly to your home. I thought, probably they use satellite receiver and have enough bandwidth to do VoD. But what surprised me was they use an internal receiver -- that is no need for a dish like in satellite TVs. When I peered closer on the ad, I saw the word 'linksys' on the box! that was a surprise to me; I never knew Cisco was involved in such a VoD rental market.

Anyway later I realized the way it works is that they use some unused PBS broadcast TV signals to continuously send movies. They get stored in a hard-disk like device in the home. You can have some 100 movies always in the disk. You pay for movies that you watch. So in some sense it is not really VoD (Nothing is really 'on demand'), you can't watch whatever you like. But you must choose one from the 100.

In the last few years, since the arrival of Netflix, the video rental business has changed dramatically. Of course it has affected the theater business too. After BBI's arrival, wal-mart's exit, talks of amazon starting the service in US, this rental market has changed so much in the last 5 years. It is all good for the end consumer since netflix/blockbuster online offer some very good deals for the money.

While thinking about this moviebeam's way to getting the movie directly into your home, I got this idea of delivering movies in an yet another way. Note that even though the data networking companies want to send a 100Mbps or 1Gbps fiber to the home and allow VoD to run over IP; it is going to be a while before we have all this connectivity and watch any movie streamed from a server in real-time.

Consider these two ways of delivering stuff to people
1. water, electricity, cable-TV, moviebeam, Netflix, BBI
2. cash (ATM machines), gasoline (gas-stations), groceries (grocery-stores)

The items in 1, come directly into your home. Items in 2 have a large number of distribution centers where people go and fill the stuff periodically. The new VoD rental I thought of falls in 2.

We don't have gasoline flowing from a pipe in our car parking spot. We go and fill it from a nearby shared station. How about doing the same for video? I want to watch this DVD, I go to this ATM like place(let's call it pickup-station) and swipe my membership card. The station instantly burns the DVD and pushes it out. The stations are all connected by high speed data links to backend video servers.

Just like netflix/BBI, I order the movie ahead (say a few hours before) in their website. I also select the nearest DVD pickup-station. The provider transfers the movie to the collection station and it is ready for my pickup. I use a container to transfer the movie physically from the pickup-station to my home. It could be just a rewriteable DVD or some special hard-disk like device capable of holding 5GB or so of the movie data.

The main positives in the approach are exploiting two recent breakthroughs - cost effective high speed data links (>1Gbps) and low cost of rewriteable DVD like media. The infrastructure is needed only on the few select pickup-stations; not in every home like in the direct to home approach. The whole network of pickup-stations and back-end video servers can be extremely automated and thus the labor cost is very minimal. We don't have the shipping cost of today's netflix/BBI online.

Increase your vocabulary using Yahoo My Web

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 21:01:00 +0000

Yahoo has introduced a new service called My Web 2.0. It allows you to save webpages you like. You can also add "tags" -- like the ones in other services like Flickr. Tags are labels/keywords you assign to a page so that you can retrieve/search them later. In some sense, it is a beefed up bookmark management tool. The main novelty is the social nature where you can share your myweb with others. And you can add privacy to restrict who can access your pages.

I found a cool application.. that is when I am reading online and I find an interesting word, I save it in my web pages. I put in a tag "wordlist". When I visit my web later, after a few days, it helps me refresh my mind of the new words. Many a times, this lack of refreshing the word, is the reason you forget its usage. I hope to add more and actually now when I read some quality material, I look for interesting new words! ;) Once I find it, I save a link of its definition from dictionary.com into myweb under tag "wordlist".

Currently the service is still in beta and they don't have a facility to directly see someone's tags (at least I couldn't find it). You should do a search to find it. My id is kar1107; you can take a look. Go to myweb2.search.yahoo.com Click on 'All tags' and enter 'wordlist'. You should be able to find a list of pages and you can find the ones with 'kar1107' and that is mine. This link seems to work now and does point to kar1107; but it may change later if Yahoo updates the links.

Automate your debugging using Expect

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:23:00 +0000

That's right; isn't it cool to see automate and debugging in the same sentence? :)

I think I read this, may be an year ago, in comp.lang.tcl. The poster was trying to track down a memory leak in a C application. He is a tcl/expect guy and wanted to run gdb under expect. His idea is really cool. Basically he wants to connect to gdb thru' expect. Then issue commands to set breakpoints at malloc and free. Every time gdb hits the break point, expect gets control. It issues a bt. Grabs the output and stores in, say a tcl array.

It may collect other data like caller, arguments(like size of allocation) and any other information that can be seen as relevant(say from info arg/frame). After a sufficiently long run, you have this complete history of who did alloc/free when/where. That can be analyzed to lead to the source of the leak. The beauty of the whole process is that, the original C source is never changed. No need to add a printf or any such thing.

I found this idea of automating a gdb debug session very powerful. I haven't yet had an opportunity to try it out; but I believe its power is awesome. That's a great way of throwing a machine's power at solving its own complexity.

There should be various other applications; the real power comes in that, you don't have to change anything in the C program. You stop it, at will with gdb and collect data to store it in your tcl data structures. It does involve a decent amount of initial work in getting the expect script work; but I think for a really tricky problem, this method should come in handy.

IM like stealth settings for cell phones

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 23:07:00 +0000

This is yet again a cell phone feature post; I'll try not to put any more cell phone stuff at least for the near future! ;) I'll add a bit more variety.

The feature I was thinking is how to stay invisible from specific contacts. Exactly like the stealth settings available in the newer yahoo messenger. Consider that someone is repeatedly bothering you over phone and for some reason you can't tell him straight "don't keep calling me". You don't want to be disturbed.

What you do is enable a setting so that you remain invisible to his/her calls. Basically the phone responds something like "the mobile number you are trying to reach is either switched off or inaccessible". The caller thinks you are really away somewhere and doesn't try reaching you often. You are available to other callers just fine. So it is a setting you enable on a per contact basis.

I'm surprised such a feature is not available in most phones; I did a google and couldn't find relevant stuff (that's a pleasant surprise, because many a times, what I think, someone has already thought about it!). I didn't further refine my search lest I may find someone has indeed done that before! ;). In fact there are not many solutions today to runaway from an bothering call, except may be to change your number. Or switch off the phone altogether. I think this faking of "phone unreachable" should work great for mobile phones. It still doesn't help harassment over land-line.

But ofcourse after a while, the caller will get suspicious; but you should be able to reap some benefit till then.

BTW this thought occurred to me in a train trip from Coimbatore to Trivandram. So I put this pic which we (I and Priya) took from the train when it was crossing a river. Priya had borrowed her dad's cell phone temporarily for our use; the phone ran, and she didn't answer the call as it was her uncle calling. She said his uncle will try the land-line and that's good since anyway he is trying to reach her dad. So I thought, may be there should be a way to put a whole bunch of contacts in invisible mode; so you don't even receive the call. And your phone stays fully functional otherwise.

Running servers on cell phones

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 20:12:00 +0000

When I was in India, I was surprised at the number of services available on cell phones through text messaging. Say you want to know the latest cricket score, you send a text message to a special number (with a special message - like a command) and you receive back the information you wanted. Surprisingly such services are not that prevalent here in US.

For all these services, the phone acts like a client. It is the one that initiates the conversation. I was wondering if we could provide capability to run server functions in the mobile phone. On doing a google search, I did find a research project in nokia and they were successful in running a full apache web server on a mobile phone. I guess there should be some problem dealing with the heavy weight bulk transports like TCP in low bandwidth cellular networks. Also marrying the IP network with cellular is not easy; simple issue like addressing is different.

What I would like a first step, is support to run light weight servers. Something like the telnet port 13 time service you find on a unix machine. Any other phone should be able to query my phone for specific information. And initially there is no need to merge the internet world with mobile - so no need to expect direct IP connectivity from a normal computer. Of course once the system matures, it it is desirable to have it interoperable with the traditional IP network; so queries can come from normal computers.

A simple application is querying a phone for its status. Like the topic of my prior post, a caller can query a phone to know if it okay to initiate a call. This is very much like the status message you find in IMs like yahoo messenger. If you see 'I'm busy' you think twice before you send an instant message. Another possibility is querying a phone for its geographical location. A built-in GPS can serve that data. In future, there could be a lot of other data (images, video) that could be served out.

Of course all these servers running on your phone will have necessary authentication to ensure privacy. You share information only with those whom you want to.

Dialer tune to convey "I'm driving"

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 20:21:00 +0000

Some background on where I got this idea. We went to Kallar during our Trivandrum stay. Kallar is a tourist spot about 50km from Trivandrum on the way to the Ponmudi hillstation. Once you reach the spot, you need to take a hike of about 1 km to see the Meenmutti water walls (see pic). The hike goes through a really dense forest; you can even encounter wild elephants. We took a guide and the place is very pristine. I think that is a good outcome of lack of development; nature still not robbed of its beauty.

Okay, back to the geeky stuff. We had hired a car from Trivandrum and the drive up wasn't easy due to the curvy roads and bad road conditions. The roads were damaged quite a bit due to the recent heavy monsoon. Our driver was a skilled man; but he was constantly getting phone calls on his mobile. Being a passenger, I wasn't comfortable seeing him manage those difficult curves with one hand. I thought of ways to reduce the hazard of cellphone usage while driving.

There are legal steps like mandating hands free usage while driving. I think quite a few states (like New York) already implement such steps. I believe the serious risk is not that you don't have an additional hand on your wheel; but it's about mental diversion. Your brain is being distracted while you are talking. And to compound the issue, your caller doesn't know that. Usually a fellow passenger in the car doesn't distract you at difficult driving conditions, because he/she can see the surroundings. But that is not the case with a phone caller. The caller can tell something really exciting (and hence very distracting)at exactly the same time when your car needs your full concentration. So how about letting the caller know before you pick up the phone, that you are driving? This can help the caller avoid the call altogether or at least keep it really short.

So the phone provides a feature, like a profile selection, to say "you are driving". You select that profile before you start your drive. Any body who calls you will hear a message like "I'm driving now.." along with the normal ring tone. You can still pick up the call; but we at least we know the caller isn't going to keep you distracted for too long.

BTW after a week from our trip, I did read a post in slashdot elaborating future phone features very similar to the above. But it was more fancy -- like detecting that you are in a theater (thru' GPS say) and automatically switching to a vibrate mode.

India trip: $5 ATM fee rip-off

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 19:45:00 +0000

During my India trip, Priya and I spent about 3 days in Trivandrum. By the last day, we were running out of cash. I didn't want to use my Bank of America ATM card as I was a bit afraid about the service fees. But we really needed the money; so decided we'll use an ICICI ATM. Since ICICI is supposed to be one of the best banks in India, I thought it is a much safer bet than any of the tons of other company ATMs.

After a couple of days of our return, I checked my online account and was shocked. There were two service fees; both mentioning ICICI. One for about $0.91 and another for $5. During all my previous use of ATMs in India, the service charge was $1.50. It was never $5. The worst part this time is, the ATM did not inform me of the service charge. It used to say 'there will be a $1.50 fee.. do you want to continue?'. Nothing of the sort; I punched in Rs 4000 (about $90 and few cents) and there came out the money. No notice whatsoever about any service fees. I think they should have at least informed me of the potential service charge.

A couple of days back, I called up Bank of America to try to waive or reduce the charge. The lady who answered told me that it is all stated in the policy when I opened the account. Do they expect me to read something that was given to me in 1998? I told her that at least the ATM should inform me of the service charge. She said sorry and nothing can be done. She also said the $5 was charged by my bank and not ICICI. I was cursing ICICI until then. I realized I can't do much; I just told her that it is a real rip-off and asked her to put those in any customer feedback form if she can.

Some lessons learnt for getting money oversees.

Credit cards are still one of the best methods. Citibank master card charges about 3% total. It seems master card charges 2% and citi another 1% (it may be the other way; but the total is 3%). I read Master cards give some of the best exchange rates. I do see that in my credit card statements. I saw American express charging only 2%. But overall I am not fully sure amex gives a better deal with exchange rate. So overall I think credit card is still the way to go.
Most banks charge 1% on the amount withdrawn and a flat service fee of $5. So unless really needed, avoid this method. If you really have to do, make a few transactions of bigger amounts. In some countries (India is not one of them) like UK, Cananda, you can use a specific banks network to avoid the fee. For bank of america, it is Barclays in UK, Scotia in Canada (Global ATM alliance). Google or check your banks website. The customer service lady told me that even if I use a Scotia bank ATM in India, I will be charged. There was one in Coimbatore which we had planned to use. BTW, if you are betting on going to the bank of america office in Madras, you will be surprised. There is no ATM there. The security person there (the office was closed that day) said BofA in Madras handles only corporate accounts these days.
Convert US bills ($20 or higher) through your "local" contacts in India. I guess, by and large, this is where you get the best deal. Of course it may not be totally legitimate.
I heard on Michael Finney's show on KGO, that traveler's check is no good. You don't get good exchange rates.

I wanted to try 3, but didn't carry sufficient dollar bills. I think that is
something to try out on future trips.

Being miserable with jet lag

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:39:00 +0000

It's been a week since my return from the India trip. I landed here last Sunday night. I went through a terrible jet lag the whole of last week. It's only now, I'm slowing limping back to normalcy. I never felt this big a jet lag in any of my previous trips; the last one being in May 2004.

I woke up at sharp 5:30 AM and just couldn't go back to sleep. I really didn't know what to do since I am not usually out of the bed anytime before 9 AM. This year the winter in bay area is breaking some 50 year old records in lowest temperatures. That didn't help a bit for my miserable times in bed from 5:30 AM to 9 AM. I realized there are some interesting programs in KTEH channel 17 at such early hours in the morning. But after a day or two, I didn't like watching TV that early in the morning. I have read how some old people suffer from insomnia; well I did experience that. And it is terrible.

By 3 or 4 PM in the afternoon I felt so sleepy at work. I was lucky that work wasn't that demanding and I could take off early. Around 7 PM or so, I felt such an irresistible urge to sleep. I just can't stop it. I had to sleep for 3 to 4 hours. I know this won't help my body to adjust to the new routine. But I was helpless.

On Thursday, after 4 days of misery, enlightenment struck me. I went to the oracle (read google) and asked "How to reduce jet lag". That turned up a few interesting articles; mostly for sportsmen and athletes to cope up with jet-lag. One of the suggestions really helped me. That is don't sleep too long when you get the sleeping urge; use an alarm or a friend to wake you up. I did that Thursday night; and slept for just about an hour around 7 PM. That did help.

Some points that can help to minimize jet lag.

Jet lag is more pronounced on west to east travel than vice versa. So for most of my India trip, the return trip (always across pacific) is going to be problematic. So this is something to remember on any future onward trip to East coast, Europe or a return from Hawaii (which are probably the only remaining items on the "to-travel" list)
The more routine your life style is, the more pronounced the lag is. I think this is one of the main reasons for my jet-lag this time compared to my previous trips. There is nothing here that can be changed.
Take plenty of rest the day before the journey. I made the common mistake of trying to be awake, so that I can get easy sleep on the plane. This was a big mistake. You need plenty of sleep, the day before you travel. I traveled on a Saturday morning train from Trichy to Madras, reaching Madras in the afternoon. I went to the IIT campus on Saturday afternoon and then to a wedding reception on Saturday evening with my flight being on the Sunday morning. I think this lack of rest prior to the journey contributed significantly.
Drink lots of water inside the plane. The body gets very dehydrated in an air plane environment (6000 ft pressure and very low humidity).
No alcohol immediately before/during/ after the flight. There was some suggestion about food intake; I didn't pay much attention because I don't eat a lot in flight anyway.

But the bottom line is, it seems the body takes 1 day to adjust for every 1 hour of time-zone change. That means for a India return, it take 12 days -- that is way too much time. But it has already taken me a whole full week. I hope some of these tips should serve well to not ruin the first days of a future vacation trip.

Positive/negative feedback loops in natural processes

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 21:22:00 +0000

Positive/negative feedback loops that occur in nature fascinate me. So I started looking for them and collecting such phenomena. I'm not 100% sure if some of these are really due to the presence of positive/negative feedback loops -- so take it with a pinch of salt.

In simple terms, a positive feedback loop makes a thing larger and larger until a breaking point. The larger it gets, its tendency to get larger increases. The reverse of getting continuously smaller can also be the result of a positive feedback.

A negative feedback tends to resist a thing's current course of change. If it is growing, a negative feedback till tend to pull it back. So growing more becomes harder and harder as the thing grows big. Hence a negative feedback system normally has an equilibrium point. Any big swing away from the equilibrium will tend to pull the system back into its equilibrium.

Mathematically positive/negative feedback loop systems can be described as below. Note that I may not be 100% correct here. Let the thing that is growing/shrinking be y. If dy/dx is a polynomial in x and has a degree >= 1 (or <= -1 for shrinking positive feedback), we can say there is a positive feedback. In simpler terms, the rate at which the thing increases is directly proportional to the current size of the thing. Probably a more accurate description is that, the change in the thing (rather than the rate of change) is directly proportional to its current size. Imagine a forest fire. Larger the forest fire gets, the more rapidly it spreads. So we can say this is a case of positive feedback loop at work. I couldn't exactly quantify what x is; but intuitively it is something whose little change can dramatically affect y's change as y gets larger. Usually most spectacular phenomena (like a stock market boom/bust, current fashion craze) would have a positive feedback loop working for it. Here is a list of feedback loops I collected. I'll update as I come across interesting cases.

Positive Loops:

Nuclear chain reaction, nuclear explosion
Hurricane formation
The growing crowd at a road side accident site. More watching people attract still more people. The reverse is also true -- a shrinking crowd, shrinks faster. As more people leave, it becomes less of a crowd puller.
Anger bursts. This I read somewhere; the way human anger response works. Once it gets started, it keeps growing until it reaches a maximum point. I, for one, would bet on that theory having had first hand experiences :).
Investment growth using compounding returns. Think of the growth of an initial investment in 401k over say 30 years.
Popularity of already successful books/shows/ideas/etc. Usually people talk about book sales "taking off" or reaching "critical mass". It is when the book makes it to the top sellers list. I think this is a classic case of starting off of the positive feedback loop. There is no stopping of the runaway success.
pumping and dumping of penny stocks. It is similar to the above case of book reaching the top seller list. Once a stock has been artificially pumped up (by a select few), others jump in pushing it further up. Again a start of a positive feedback loop.
Stock market/ Real estate bubble build up. The reverse burst. Once an asset is seen growing more, more people want it. Higher demand drives value up. Again a start of a positive feedback loop. A crash in prices too gets into a positive feedback loop -- though here the effect is in making the value smaller and smaller.
Trust/emotion building among people/groups. Includes cases of trust, love, hatred.
Growth of a monopoly. Take Microsoft in late 80's, early 90's; or Walmart. In Microsoft, the explosive growth of windows can be seen as a result of positive feedback loop at work -- more apps for windows leads to more windows adoption. That triggers more developers to produce apps for windows (instead to say Linux or someother platform).
Formation of black holes. More mass leads to heavier gravitational pull -- leading to more attraction of other mass. A cycle is established. It is an interesting comparison to see the way a monopoly works with this sucking effect of a black hole. Lets consider the introduction of a Walmart superstore in a community. It just sucks up all the mom-n-pop businesses and that leads to attracting their customers. Walmart just grows bigger in sales; now ready to swallow bigger guys -- I think the fall of Levis, RCA, rubbermaid to walmart can be seen as instances of such big guys falling.
Population growth of self-reproducing entities. Includes all living things, computer virus, successful memes (like religion). For living things some examples are rabbit population, water hyacinth growth in a lake, cancer proliferation, biological epidemics (flu virus spread). The spread of successful ideas (memes) also employ positive feedback loops. More people exposed to an idea increases the chances of the idea spreading more rapidly. I guess gossips/rumors are a good example.
Economic boom/depression. Similar to the stock market boom. More activity creates more jobs and a cycle gets established. The reverse happens in an economic downturn.
Technology adoption. More technology adoption feeds innovation, leading to birth of newer smarter technology. Growth of Internet is an example.
Drug addiction. Cocaine mimics the naturally occurring happiness hormone endorphin. On drug intake, the brain sees a sudden flood of endorphin like substance and shuts down the endorphin receptors. When the drug is digested, the person can no longer feel good since the naturally occurring endorphin is not sufficient enought to plug on to the available open receptors. He takes in more drug to achieve a prior state of well-being. That triggers closing down of still more receptors and reduces the available open ones. There starts the vicious cycle.
Becoming obese: It's lot easier for an overweight person to add on more pounds -- bigger body demands more food. It also results in lesser exercise/physical activity. Both can setup a cycle. The good part is losing weight can also exploit the workings of a positive feedback loop. Once a few pounds are lost, it may need lesser effort to reduce further. There are many unknowns here and I may be off the mark.

Negative Loops:

The classic spring example. It takes more and more effort to press/expand a spring from its natural equilibrium position.
Steam power control in old steam locomotives. A valve opens/closes to regulate steam output based on the current steam power output. More power reduces the valve leading to power reduction. Less power opens up the value to increase power.
Predator prey population. Think of lion-deer population. More lions implies reduction in deer population; that implies starvation for lions. This leads to an equilibrium state. Less lions implies population growth for deer leading to more food for lions helping their growth.
Classic case of price stability due to supply-demand balance. Lets take oil price increase. Higher cost drives demand low (due to less driving, say) and that pulls back the price to an equilibrium state. The reverse happens when oil prices drop.
Human body homeostasis. The body tries to maintain an equilibrium; lets take temperature. If too cold, the body shivers to bring up the temperature. If too warm, the body evaporates to cool down.

Smart traffic signals with WiFi + GPS to prevent red light running

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:31:00 +0000

Running over red light at a traffic signal is one of the serious causes of side-impact collisions. Today the only way to avoid such an accident is in the hands of the driver who approaches the signal. He has to be alert. If he does run over, he puts the cross traffic in grave danger. In a typical US express way, that amounts to a 40-55 MPH collision. The method described here alerts the driver about the state of the approaching traffic light.

I'm sure this idea would've been reached independently by others. With the advancement in WiFi and GPS, the solution is pretty simple and cost effective too.

A high risk traffic signal gets a WiFi transmitter and continuously broadcasts its state. The state could convey information like which roads are getting what light, how long before the light changes and other related information. It also sends its GPS coordinates. Any car within the WiFi range (which is about 300 ft) can know the state of the signal and can alert the driver if the speed is inappropriate. Note that the station (located at the traffic signal) does not really need a GPS receiver; since it is static, its location can be hard-coded.

The approaching car using its GPS knows if a particular signal is of interest (the approaching one). Without knowing which signal is of interest, the car can get signals from lots of stations in a crowded in-city kind of location.

Once the car learns about a signal state, it can alert the driver through visual/audio alerts. The overall cost is reasonable. The cost to install a transmitter at a signal is one time cost; it does not need to scale with the traffic. Note that the car does not talk to the station -- it is a passive receiver of information. Even a car without GPS can use the system; it's just that it may get some false positive alerts. The minimum the car needs is a WiFi listener.

A more futuristic version can enable the station to update its state in real-time to a central server. The car could talk to the server in real-time (using some other network connectivity, say the Internet) to get the signal state data using its current GPS coordinates (this eliminates the Wi-Fi).

Why heat/cool the whole car?

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 22:44:00 +0000

At this age of skyrocketting energy costs why can't we just heat the front portion of the car alone? A whole majority of the cars on road carry just a single person (the driver) or utmost one additional passenger. So can't we have a movable separation (like the ones in some cabs or the cover of a convertible) that slides behind the two front seats? At the push of a button we can close this "door". This way we just need to cool/heat only the portion where the occupants are present. No need to waste energy heating the back row of seats and avoid heat loss due to leakage associated with a larger area.

Are images SPAM's latest avatar?

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:07:00 +0000

I'm seeing more spams using images. Basically the spammer embeds the text in a .gif file. So most of the spam filtering software cannot make out from the text portion of the mail, if it is spam or not. See the spam picture that I got today.

I think the spam software these days use some form of AI -- machine learning using known patterns of good text and bad ones. So when an unknown mail arrives, it matches the text to the nearest known "point" in the "good mail space" and in the "bad mail space". If it is too close to the bad mail, it flags it as spam.

But can software handle spam inside images? We know computers aren't (yet) good at image recognition. In fact Amazon's HITs and mturk are built over this fact. Considering machines can easily generate images which they can't understand but humans can, is this the next step in bypassing spam filters?

Wondering how yahoo/gmail are weeding out such stuff... btw google image search on 'image spam' turns out lot of eatable spam pics! ;)

When will S&P hit 900?

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:38:00 +0000

Call me a permabear but I'm hoping to see S&P go below 900 or at least 1000 soon. I was one of those who got out way too early (around 1075, Aug 2004) and I've been waiting to get in. The cyclical bull started in March 2003 (800) and as per Bob Brinker the cyclical cycles last on average 1 to 3 years. But this bull seems to be going stronger and stronger and seems it will last over 3 years. I should've just stayed in the market..but after seeing much red since 2000, I was happy to see my numbers back in black and thought I shouldn't get greedy and got out in Aug 2004.

Considering the long time horizon, I should've stuck to the basics and stayed in equity. I am surprised at how S&P P/E continues to remain low (16) -- its all about outstanding growth in earnings. I guess the enormous cost savings and productivity boost (due to technology, world flattening) could be the basic driving force. Anyway its hard if not impossible to predict the future; I'm looking for an opportunity to get back into the market. And stay put for a really long time. It is not that nice a feeling to be out of the market and see it go up and up (was that 1263 recently?).

I was lucky to learn the bubble lessons just by watching CNBC in 2000.
That permanently pushed me into indices and never run behind individual stocks. The lesson didn't cost me financially; but this premature exit is costing me dearly..in terms of lost time. I'm just wishing the end of this cyclical bull sooner than later so that I can just get in and not think about getting out.

Outsource my driving?

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:20:00 +0000

I am reading 'The world is flat' by Thomas L. Friedman and was surprised at how more and more work are being done remotely. There was this instance of McDonald's drive-ins using a remote call-center to take orders. The operator sits thousands of miles away in a different state and the customer doesn't even know that. They not only saw a reduction in operation cost, but also in error rates.

As we are seeing in the outsourcing boom, anything that can be digitized and
worked on remotely, will tend to get done that way. There was also a mention of hiring personal assistants in India for busy professionals in US. The Indian at Bangalore can be hired at a fraction of the US cost.

So here I was commuting back from work on Stevens Creek and there was bumper to bumper traffic. It is a 35mph stretch and doesn't demand the extra caution of a freeway driving. It is a tedious stop and go traffic and I felt wouldn't it be cool to just relax and allow someone to remotely drive my car?

There is enough technology today for someone to be sitting in, say Madras, and control my car here in California. The basics -- high quality video transmission, low latency wireless network connectivity are already available (I think a related buzzword is 'Telepresence'). There is lot of research on self driving cars -- using smart lanes and software to replace the human totally. What I'm thinking is why not just hire a pair of eyes for the time of the drive?

People may not feel the same level of safety as a physical chauffeur; after all an accident doesn't harm him physically. So at least in low risk driving environments (like low speed, less congested in-city driving), the approach seems to have some merit. And how about just having someone to watch over you on a long drive -- say to ensure you don't fall asleep. The aging population and people incapacitated (say DUI??) can hire the service.

There are also applications in other transportation areas -- trucking, railroads, even flights (I read recently the spy drones over Iraqi villages are in fact controlled and flown from Nevada, US -- in real time).

It would be fun to hire a driver just at the push of a button in your car. How about helping your friend in his long drive while you are sitting at your home and driving his car! Who knows we may see a 'push to drive' button sooner in future cars.

Just started...

noreply@blogger.com (Karthik Gurusamy) — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 21:44:00 +0000

I started this blog primarily to get a blog id so that I don't have to comment as Anonymous in replying to other blogger's post. Though I heard about blogging for a long while; I never cared to start one till now. Considering the ease with which one can create a blog (not to mention I don't have to shell out any money for it), I thought its time. In fact the last push was on seeing Priya's (my wife) blog (http://dailygirlblog.blogspot.com/). I'm planning to scribble thoughts -- mostly my opinions on things.

Most of my views are extreme left to give you an idea. I'm primarily a left brain guy (a CT-Scan
during my high school days shocked doctors as I was missing the right half ;) ) and driven by logic.

Thanks for stopping by... I hope to put some of my thoughts in near future

Karthik