S Anand

Jason Kottke finds interesting code search hacks, ranging from the WinZip key generation algorithm to programmers who want a new job.

Have a look at this infinite depth painting. You can zoom in forever. At some point, you realise, you’re back where you’re started. Almost like going around in circles, except that you’re zooming in.

I had to screen resumes from a leading MBA school. I’m lazy, and there were hundreds of CVs. So after procrastinating until this morning, I decided on 2 principles: I will not spend more than 45 minutes on this. (That’s the duration of my train ride to office.) I will not read a single CV. (I would write a program.) The CVs were in a single PDF file. I saved it as text (it shrunk from 66MB to 1.6MB without the photos). Then I wrote a Perl program to filter CVs by keywords. We were looking for people with an interest and/or experience in IT consulting, so I picked “technology”, “consulting”, “SAP”, “IBM”, “Accenture”, “Deloitte”, etc. ...

Cool abused amazon images.

Guy Kawasaki on Mumbai via Kaps @ DesiPundit

Netflix has released a sample of its customers’ movie ratings at Netflix Prize. You can download these (700 MB), create an algorithm that rates the training data, run it against the test data, and see if you can get better ratings than their algorithm. If you do, you win $1 million. (Chris Anderson explains why.)

The view from my office is pretty good. Comments Anonymous 30 Sep 2006 7:35 pm: Neat. Is it your office or your current client’s office? Have you guys broken even? Or is it still lifeline from the parent? S Anand 30 Sep 2006 9:20 pm: Thanks! This is the Infosys office, not a client’s. As for breakeven, yeah, we actually have!

Here are words from the middle of 8 songs TMS has sung for MGR. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments sailesh kumar basu 13 Mar 2009 7:20 am: V.V.Good, who can forget Thalaivars Songs Lyrics and Films. Continue the good work. Anonymous 28 Sep 2006 5:06 am: I am RamaKrishnan. I am also from TamilNadu I am not understand the lines above… Its a songs or anyother thing? S Anand 28 Sep 2006 6:46 am: Ramakrishnan, these are 2 lines from the middle of 8 different MGR film songs. You need to guess the film they appeared in. ashwini 3 Nov 2006 9:51 am: Good selection. ashwini 3 Nov 2006 10:17 am: which song is the 6th one pls. Prasanna 24 Dec 2006 5:46 am: Great site & great effort,Anand!Hats Off!Couldn’t crack no.6.Will you post the answers or can email me?Thanks. Murali Kannan. T 20 Feb 2007 12:40 pm: Very nice work! I’m a great fan of MGR. Keep it up. subadra 6 Mar 2007 2:39 am: but fr the nadodimannan song we found everything.appa went to sleep.the first thing he said in the morning is nadodimannan Mohan.C 27 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: I really enjoyed this quiz I remember old songs of mgr thru this quiz GOOD JOB lakshmi 27 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: fantastic job Anand I really enjoyed it. geetha 27 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: i have answered some Meena 22 Sep 2008 1:22 am: Excellent lyrics. Vivacious. I’m flabbergasted. I am from Trichy. I just loved all these lines. Thanks for recalling such a treasure in our life. You have done a great job. Rajagopalan 30 Dec 2008 11:27 am: Good song selection. Did not get two songs correct. K.Swaminathan 31 Dec 2008 5:40 am: Where I can get the lyrics of our Great MGR Songs. Please advise me. I want free download of lyrics of Mr.MGR songs. Regards, Swaminathan Rameshkarthikeyan 4 Mar 2009 2:13 pm: I need a song but i forget the starting of the song. “Ellam enakul erunthalum ennai thannakkul vaithirukkum " S Anand 4 Mar 2009 3:00 pm: You’re probably referring to Ulagam Pirandhadhu Enakkaaga from Paasam. Got it by googling. Rangan 15 Oct 2009 12:55 pm: I really enjoyed this and i love to do for MGR related quizzes. But sad thing is that i am not able to find answer for one question:-(. My evergreen hero is MGR and i love to watch all MGR movies. What a charismatic person he is! Rangan 15 Oct 2009 1:04 pm: Particularly i love to watch movies like Nadodi Mannan, Thirudathe, Enga Veetu Pillai, Adimai Pen, Aayirathil Oruvan, Ninaithadai Mudippavan, Anbe Vaa, Ullagam Suttrum Valiban, Rikshawkkaran, Rajakumari, Arasakattalai, Madhuraiveeran, Mannadhi Mannan, Kalangarai Vilakkam, Nadodi, Kudiyirindha Kovil, Padagotti etc etc. Some movies may be missed out from this list. I have watched all the above movies more than 20 times. I like his bunny cheeks when he laughs. This kind of cheeks only madhavan (maddy) is having after MGR and this is told by famous director Manirathnam. venkatp 12 Oct 2011 1:53 pm: fantastic…… santhosh 6 Apr 2016 6:24 pm: I want song first. I only remember songs middle line . that’s is patta maram paal varuma paagarkai then tharuma devar magal paarviley.. Can anyone help to find that song..

And so, thanks to Infosys Consulting being spun off as a separate legal entity in the UK, I got my new laptop. (Because our old laptops were legally the assets of Infosys Technologies Ltd, and not Infosys Consulting Inc. Weirder things have happened, but who’s complaining?) My old Toshiba Portege A200 has been replaced by a Dell Latitude D420 (which I was dreaming for, after having just read Jeff’s post on big laptops). ...

You can play a video backwards and still recognise the scenes quite well. Can you do that with sound? I tried it on this Bryan Adams clip of Summer of ‘69 (mp3). When played backwards (mp3), it almost sounds like Arabic! Instruments sound weird backwards too, like the guitar played backwards and drums played backwards. It’s seems obvious once you see the wave file. The picture below shows the guitar. The sounds are clearly not symmetric left to right. ...

A comparison of the top 10 bittorrent sites. BTJunkie emerges the winner. Comments Dhar 27 Sep 2006 10:55 pm: Not convinced with the comparison. Looks like the chappie Renald is just using to blog to promote BTJunkie. Checked the features of BTJunkie, they are nowhere close to Torrentspy, yet it gets a rating of 9. No way anyone can confirm BTJunkies claims like Torrents Indexed, Torrents Added Daily etc. Neither does the author specify how he confirmed these points. “At first I thought BTJunkie’s numbers must be fake, but I assure you it is real! I tested the number posted with the number in the actual directory for the day and they matched for a week straight!” Yeah, sure! S Anand 28 Sep 2006 6:47 am: Does sound like a plug, doesn’t it? :-) I’m planning to do a test myself. Why don’t you try one too? Sumit Dhar 8 Oct 2006 12:54 pm: http://torrentfreak.com/the-largest-bittorrent-search-engine-on-the-web/ S Anand 8 Oct 2006 2:50 pm: A solid rebuttal. I tried BTJunkie last week. Wasn’t very impressed. And the few movies I couldn’t find anywhere else, I couldn’t find here either.

Calvin and Hobbes trivia quizzes.

Presentations and videos from Google’s conference on test automation at London. I was at the event, and learned a lot.

Here are words from the middle of 10 songs TMS has sung for Sivaji. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Anonymous 2 Oct 2006 6:28 pm: help out wth the 5th one alone. sounds familiar,bt guessing fails. Anonymous 2 Oct 2006 6:29 pm: hey gt it got it. got the 5th one also.gud one ashwini 3 Nov 2006 9:54 am: Excellent songs ashwini 3 Nov 2006 10:20 am: Found out all songs. deen 16 Nov 2006 9:45 pm: 5th is pakappirivinai pls. mark the numbers for songs arun 13 Dec 2006 9:03 am: i think i have answered most Hema 5 Mar 2007 11:55 am: I have answered most. One or two with the help of your mother. Very interesting and thrilling. Excellent work done. Keep it going. subadra 5 Mar 2007 3:05 pm: appa and i got all correct lakshmi 24 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: all are correct. geetha 24 Sep 2006 12:00 pm: ha got some maduraimouli 8 Jan 2012 4:19 pm: rende rendu theriyalaye…naan enga poven periamma ? yarai keppen?

Google’s dirty little secret talks about how Google determines whether your site appears on top for a search depending on whether you and the searcher are in the same geography or not. So if your server is in Kazakhstan, expect fewer hits.

I mentioned that it’s possible to create variwides using X-Y scatter plots. The video below shows how. Comments sathya 22 Sep 2006 4:08 pm: I can see the video. I use BSNL broadband. Howver Ihave th problm that i cant hear th audio. this is the case even with youtube. looks like BSNL does not allow streaming audio. S Anand 22 Sep 2006 4:40 pm: That’s a pity. Well, at least the video’s OK, and good that I’ve enabled captions. (Hope you can see those?) Ashwin 6 Jan 2007 1:50 pm: Yes Really useful sumesh 6 Apr 2007 10:42 am: i cant see the video

OK, we agree we need to centralise more. But do we really need additional hubs? If so, where? We’d shown that this bank could further centralise 55%. They had 10 regional hubs. We felt these weren’t enough. But how to prove it? For regional activities, the key factor is distance. (That’s why they’re regional and not central.) For example, cheque clearing can be delayed at most one day, to transfer the cheque to a nearby hub. Shipping them all to, say Gurgaon, would take 2-3 days and that’s too long. ...

Employee management at Saravana Bhavan. (via Vadivel.)

Google’s internal subdomains.

Surely we don’t have many activities to centralise? We already have a central hub for processing operations! We heard that from a fair section of our client organisation. They initially had operations spread across their branches. Some years ago, they had established a central hub and many regional hubs. Yet, Only a few prominent operations were centralised. Others were just regionalised. Regionalisation was inconsistent. Some branches still did these at their own premises. Branches still did the bulk of the work. We made a list of activities, surveyed all their branches and hubs, and got a good sense of which activities were happening at branches vs regionally vs centrally. ...