Calvin and Hobbes in Chennai. The posts between 10-13 March 2006 have (pretty good) doodles of Calvin & Hobbes eating idli and visiting the Marina beach. Comments Doodler 1 Apr 2006 5:11 pm: :) hi anand..great blog with something new everyday!well am frm infy too..do u blog in the infy blog? S Anand 1 Apr 2006 7:20 pm: Wow, you’re from Infy? Amazing cartoons you had there. My Infy ID is subramanian_anand. Drop me a line, if you can?

My Calvin and Hobbes index is current up to June 1993. Two-and-a-half years left to complete.

Hilarious articles from Ramesh Mahadevan, including the exploits of Ajay Palvayanteeswaran.

A software services firm once asked us, “How come we are not able to staff projects quickly, even though we have a lot of people on the bench?” There were a bunch of reasons, but among those, we found something interesting. They were implementing two policies that were logical on their own, but disastrous together. (The bench is where programmers sit when they are not on a project.) Here’s how they work. When a project starts, the project manager requests resources (people) for the project. HR passes on matching CVs to the project manager, who approves or rejects them, in consultation with the client. ...

I had declared 30th May 2005 as my longest day. Air India proved me wrong. My longest day was 18 Feb 2006. I didn’t plan to fly Air India to Chennai in the first place. British Airways had more convenient timings and a similar fare. But I clicked on the wrong button, and didn’t realise until a few days before the flight that I was on the Air India, and that the flight left at 8:45am. ...

Good guidelines on improving pagerank. via LazyGeek

New from Google: Google Finance, and Google Mars. Comments Sathya 22 Mar 2006 8:30 am: Welcome Back !

Once, we were looking at whether banks made money on demand drafts (DDs). DDs are costly. 90% of a bank’s costs are people-related, and it takes a fair bit of time (hence people) to process DDs. If you pay for DDs in cash, it costs even more because the teller has to count the notes. To recover this cost, banks charge a fee. The fee increases with the size of the DD. A DD for Rs 10,000 may cost Rs 50, while one for Rs 100,000 may cost Rs 200. ...

I am on vacation, and probably won’t update until 20th March 2006. Comments Madhu 20 Feb 2006 10:04 am: Happy Holidays:) Sai 22 Feb 2006 4:58 pm: The new colour looks better! Krishna Shirali 8 Mar 2006 10:10 am: Have a relaxed time PP 14 Mar 2006 10:48 am: Simpler; better. ravi 21 Mar 2006 2:30 pm: looking forward to hear ur holiday escapades

At what bitrate should you encode your MP3 files? Listening tests show that at 256kbps, you can’t tell the difference. But that’s with 2 amplifiers and big speakers. What about headphones? I tried an experiment with my cousin, who has the best ear for music that I know. We ripped a good audio CD of his at 128 kbps. He put on a pair of headphones (the kind that fit into your ear) connected to my laptop. I played the first half a minute of the original and the ripped version 10 times, in a random order, asking him to guess which was which. Result: 5 correct and 5 wrong. He couldn’t tell the difference. ...

Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine implemented in Lego.

Malcolm Gladwell on how homelessness obeys the power law distribution, and its implications. Comments bharani 10 Feb 2006 12:39 am: u got a new look! cool!

Americans have more leisure time than before. But why do Americans feel so harried? Weirdly, prosperity may be to blame in two ways. First, thanks to rising real incomes, an American’s time is worth more now. A walk in the park is more expensive than it used to be. (When people complain to him about being too busy, Mr Hamermesh tells them that their real problem is too much money.) ...

Hikaru Dodorango is a trend in Japan to polish balls of mud until they shine. More on Hikaru Dodorango.

Keep headphone wires from getting tangled. Comments sLaSh 8 Feb 2006 4:37 pm: the old layout was classic,,,,, this looks likka kids work RT 8 Feb 2006 4:52 pm: Agreed.. This looks like one of the millions out there.. older one was signature!

How to make XP run faster. Advice ranges from the very practical to the very advanced. Comments Sai 4 Feb 2006 6:29 pm: First impressions, i like the old look better. Maybe it’s just because i’m used to it! Anonymous 4 Feb 2006 11:46 pm: looks cool!; feels like a windows next version…looks like a win 98 –> win xp makeover Chitra 6 Feb 2006 4:19 am: Hey Anand…good post. Jagjit 31 Oct 2006 10:46 am: good post Chitra :)

I’ve changed the site layout and some code behind it. Weird bugs are likely – so do let me know of any that you find. Comments ritzkini 4 Feb 2006 12:07 pm: No…no..no..first up: look not great..too much light blue..i dunno..my 2 cents..:-) jake 5 Feb 2006 7:36 am: yup. looks more like ..candy. the thick blue bars.

Data visualization. Examples of charts that convey a lot of information in a visually obvious way.

Google web authoring statistics. An analysis of over a billion pages to see how people use HTML markup.

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises but I am unsure if the drive is failing. How can I determine if the noises are due to a failing hard drive? By listening to hard disk noises – available as mp3s.