If you can understand the me, I can understand the you

What are we looking for in a partner? What does the word understanding mean? How do you understand someone?

Let me ask one question and yes I don't have an answer to it but still I am raising it. We all expect our partners to understand us and accept us.The question is how can someone understand me when firstly I haven't understood or known myself. Similarly how can I understand someone else before figuring myself out. Is this a realistic expectation ? How can it be and we all know what exceptions do to us. They kill the joy.

I guess we need to understand ourselves before we claim to understand anyone else or even try to do so? What say? Share your thoughts? Will you share your understanding?

And while the thought ran in my head I remember a line from Metallica I heard long ago  ago

"If you can understand the me, I can understand the you"

जाति न पूछो साधु की, पूछ लीजिये ज्ञान

Kabir wrote the famous doha years ago long before this consumerism, advertisement and media industry was created to make us to believe and create need for the things we don't need. Damn the line is too straight forward without any meaning and context and sounds way out of place.

Let me try to raise a point here.

What does a man with a big car say a Rolls Royce and a big beach house indicate to you. Mind it you haven't seen the man yet and you just see him driving out of a mansion into this big car. With our times and our mindset I wouldn't be surprized if a whole lot of us would associate him to be rich and powerful.

Let us take another scenario. Let us assume I have just started to make some decent money and I can afford a nice big sedan with a big engine and nice chrome. Should I buy it? Yes no one stops me. The car companies would be happy to sell me one and would love to project that I would feel more valuable once I have the car. But the key question is should I buy it just beacuse they want me to and condition my mind via advertising to buy.

Hell NO ! This is corrupting our mind.

Yeah it's called marketing too.

Slowly we have all been conditioned by all the advertising and promotion to believe that we need the things. Our wallets, our share of mind, our value system have all been programmed to respect for example big cars and big houses even if they are on loan !

We have been programmed to believe that if we can afford it or if we think we should afford it we should buy it. 

This creates many problems:

a) We consume more than we need and never bother about sharing
b) We often consume directly or indirectly someone else's share
c) We believe and prmote the philosophy that more the better
d) By not questioning the motive ours kids fail to see the difference and the fine print. The conditioning becomes stronger and stronger without questioning over time.
e) For example rich families who can afford food waste a lot of food just beacuse they can afford to do so while millions die of hunger.

So hundreds of years ago Saint Kabir saw this coming and said let us not waste on things that don't really matter and the way it can be achieved is by not associating value with them.

जाति न पूछो साधु की, पूछ लीजिये ज्ञान,
मोल करो तरवार का, पड़ा रहन दो म्यान।

Literally translated it means that one should not ask a holy man about his caste because he has already renounced it and it is his past. What should be discussed with him and asked is the knowledge that he has acquired after he became enlightened. This knowledge is the real value and should define him. This is on the same lines that the real value is of the sword and the casing that holds it and is carried in has negligible utility. However beautiful is the casing and expensive still it has zero worth and value when the real need and time to draw a sword comes.

Review Yamaha MCR-B142

I recently bought the Yamaha MCR-B142 desktop all in one CD player which allows digital music playback from iOS devices including the ones with lightening conductor (the iphone5s and iPad 4th generation). If you are looking for standard features and all this is not the place to look for. Google.

What could be a good buy - check out Sonos - they might be a good buy for $399 too.

So coming straight to the point about what sounds bad on this.

If you like a lot of Hans Zimmer kind of music - Time from Inception sounds so bad that you will regret buying this. However I must add here that I will be surpized if you were expecting zimmer to sound good for $300. Inception and most of Hans Zimmer's music is best enjoyed on headphone and I prefer my Bowers and Wilkins P5 to deliver.

What sounds good - all the new optimized for new recordings and flac sound richer as expected. I have tested with Ernst Reijseger - Cave of Forgotten Dream. Sounds fresh.

What surprised me - Build quality and wood in the speakers. Lot of bass this small unit produces and fill a room nicely. I love the fact that the model allows for the speaker to be separated and hence you can enjoy the spatial arrangement where left and right channels are separated. I hate the design where it is all part of one box - I guess the Left and Right channels have to be at a distance for the music to rightly converge. 

Who should buy -  looking for a music system to fill in small space or living room. Good for bluetooth internet radio (I prefer 8 tracks) or BBC. My wife plays music via Bluetooth and it sounds OK. If you are looking something for your kitchen / verandah or bedroom this is for you. 

Turn the knob to 40/50 and at about 80% amplifier works beautifully. I am waiting to see if the break in will improve the performance. I have done about 25-30 hours and I am waiting to see how it appears after 50/100 hours.

By the way the new music will sound pretty neat - am usually concerned about my lossless oldies more than anything else. Why? Why do you ask am surprised to know that. If you know about lossless and flac or vinyls, have you lately noticed how good the new music sounds on the small commercial players and how lousy the old fabulous recordings from 70s sometimes hear especially when there is no difference in your music quality. 

I wondered why for months after buying my first Bowers and Wilkins P5 headphones. I guess mass production of music to be consumed on small USB speakers and boom boxes, to be played on cheap headphones and to be readily downloadable or streamable from Cloud is causing the music to die. I am not sure if I am the only one but I still prefer my music to be rich. I hate Convergence for this reason and this rampant commercialisation. Call me a cynic but so am I.

Music Recommendation: Ernst Reijseger

Artist Recommendation: Ernst Reijseger.
Check out the soundtrack of the movie - Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Treat for your audiophile equipment

He is a magnificent cellist, and he can do anything, anything on his cello. He could play the civil war, the American Civil war on his cello." —WernerHerzog"

Reijseger's most well known solo album is Colla Voche, which he recorded in a room of a small villa which he was staying in on a trip to Sardinia, this would be the same trip that he would meet the Voches De Sardinia.

More about the him on wiki

Ernst Reijseger (born November 13, 1954, in Bussum) is a Dutch cellist and composer. He specializes in jazz, improvised music, and contemporary classical music and often gives solo concerts. He has worked with Louis Sclavis, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg, Gerry Hemingway, Yo-Yo Ma, Albert Mangelsdorff, Franco D'Andrea, Joëlle Léandre, Georg Gräwe, Trilok Gurtu, and Mola Sylla, and has done several world music projects working with musicians from Sardinia, Turkey, Iran, Senegal, and Argentina, as well as the Netherlands based group Boi Akih.

He has made numerous recordings, both as solo cellist and with other groups, and has been the subject of a documentary film. He has also written several film scores, including scores for a number of Werner Herzog films.

The Running and Cooling Catharsis - bliss

I am new to running. It's an important disclaimer to put because I think I have not even run 300kms till date and am still wearing the same running shoes. I started running because of my wife - she kept on telling me that running in the gym makes her feel strange kind of goodness and she kept on bringing it on until I gave up to try. The running was restricted to the treadmill in the gymnasium of our condominium in Malaysia.

We ran together for few weeks and then I kind of started falling in love with the act of running. Especially because I have never been one of those sports guys - never.

Then I moved to Bangalore as I keep on shuffling between Bangalore where I work and Kuala Lumpur where my wife lives. I have an active group in Bangalore a small group - where people have run marathons and actively do and are always looking for someone to run with. Thanks to Nani, Mithun I started running on the road - and boy it was different.  It was like running again.

And I started running whenever I could find a chance twice, thrice and sometimes even five times a week. My best till date is 30.05 minutes for a 5 KM but that is not what I want to share.

The focus on time and distance sometimes just blocks me and takes away the joy of running. So sometimes especially in KL I have not been tracking anything except for my distance which I check on the map. I run at my own sweet pace.

Yesterday something even more beautiful happened. I came back after my 5.8 KM run and the lights were out in the bedroom and I sat in front of the table fan. I had just finished my basic stretching and done a 5 min cool down. And then unknowingly I moved into the yoga sitting pose and closed my eyes. Sitting in the padmasana I didn't realize when I entered the state and just blanked out.

Awesome meditative state because I guess catharsis kicked in !

Try it out for yourself and if you like the experience - do share it with me.

Oracle Database Charactersets

For a non-dba this a pretty confusing topic. Still gone are the days when only DBA's were installing Oracle. A lot of people now who have very limited knowledge of Oracle are today running databases on their laptops.

First of all what is this all about. This is about loading multiple languages into your application and how to manage it with Oracle. Let's verify your current settings

select parameter,
value from v$nls_parameters
WHERE parameter IN ( 'NLS_CHARACTERSET', 'NLS_LANGUAGE', 'NLS_TERRITORY','NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET','NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS');

Here is the output of the query:
PARAMETER    VALUE
NLS_LANGUAGE    AMERICAN
NLS_TERRITORY    AMERICA
NLS_CHARACTERSET    AL32UTF8
NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET    AL16UTF16
NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS    BYTE

First question - what is the oracle default Characterset for my database?
The answer to that is NLS_CHARACTERSET

What is NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET - in layman terms if you are not using NCHAR, NVARCHAR or NCLOB forget about it. It is not important for you.

What is a unicode?
Unicode data sets allow databases to store asian, eastern european data in your alpha numeric and other columns. In other words, this provides a handle to implement multi language support.

What is the difference between AL32UTF8 and AL16UTF16 character sets?
If I store the letter 'a' in a NVARCHAR2 column, Oarcle would allocate 2 bytes of storage if the NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET is AL16UTF16. If I store the letter 'a' in a NVARCHAR2 column, Oracle would allocate 1 byte of storage if the NLS_NCHAR_CHARACTERSET is AL32UTF8

If you are storing primarily English data, AL16UTF16 will cause Oracle to consume nearly twice as much space on disk and in RAM for that data as would be required if you used an AL32UTF8 character set.
This hold true even for the NLS_CHARACTERSET

What is NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS?
While creating tables Oracle needs to know how much space is to be allocated.
For example when you define COLUMNONE which has data type of VARCHAR2 20. Oracle needs to know how much 20 means - is it 20 Bytes or is it 20chars.
Oracle uses the NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS setting and the value for the parameter is used to translate 20

Why is the Byte and Char difference important?
Well if you are primarily talking about English language (and hence Latin Characterset) every char is one byte. However Eastern European languages and even Russian (Cyrillic) have 2 bytes to represent one char, asian languages have sometimes 3 and there are some others with four bytes.

My Database is unicode but I am not able to store asian languages?
Check your table scripts - the field that you are trying to insert data into is it defined as CHAR or BYTE?
Query  ALL_TAB_COLUMNS and check for the value in CHAR_USED - if it is B it means Byte, if it is C it means Char.
For example in my case I was trying to insert 16 chars of Russian into the VARCHAR2 (30) field on my database table LOCATIONS in the LOCATION_NAME column and it was throwing me and error.
The NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS was set as Byte and 16 russian chars meant 32 bytes which was beyiond the size.

ALTER TABLE LOCATIONS
MODIFY(LOCATION_NAME VARCHAR2(30 CHAR));
After the above change the same 16 chars were loaded successfully.

What is the fix for your application?
I hope your application supports the muti byte chars and all you are looking for in that case is alter statements. The beauty is since you are going to expand the columns Oracle will never create a problem.

Firstly change your DB setting by logging into your sys account on database
ALTER SYSTEM SET NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS=CHAR;

And if you are using SQLLDR it needs to support multiple languages
CHARACTERSET UTF8

Now you need to restart your database. You may do so by logging into sqlplus as sysdba and ussing "shutdown immediate" and "startup" one after the other. Please make sure you understand these and have taken precautions required.

Then login to your schema and run the following query
SELECT 'ALTER TABLE '|| TABLE_NAME ||' MODIFY( ' || COLUMN_NAME||'  VARCHAR2('||  DATA_LENGTH || ' CHAR));' QUERY
FROM user_TAB_COLUMNS WHERE  DATA_TYPE in ('VARCHAR2','CHAR')
and table_name not in (select view_name from user_views);

You may spool the results and run the output as a sql script. Basically for every CHAR and VARCHAR2 datatype in your database it will change the definition from BYTE to CHAR.


Want to read more - here is a beautiful article.

http://orathings.blogspot.com/2012/08/happy-three-friends-varchar2-unicode.html

First Family Photoshoot - Mistakes I Made

There was a casual request from a couple friend to click few of the pictures for them. Well I picked up my 50,85 mm f1.8, 18-105mm and my flash SB910 and spent about an hour taking pictures.

Lightening was awesome - we picked a place where a lot of reflected light was reaching.The focus was always smart on eye in most cases - so what went wrong was something I realized when I processed the pictures.

I was shooting with too wide open Aperture. I was shooting at f3.2 and below most of the times. The pictures looked sharp on the camera but since there were two people they often moved. In lieu of the nice bokeh I screwed up a lot of pictures due to the shallow depth of field setting ! Keep an eye at the aperture especially when there are two people in shot. I know with more it is obvious but I got lost since most of my recent photos have been with just one person.

I rejected all but this and I can say that at least this one looks like created for the purpose.
Click on the image to look at the poor result which you can only see on a big screen.

Second problem as expected was posing. You need to have a catalog of poses for you to work with.


Third was that on more than one occasion I failed to notice the change in lightening. The aperture mode isn't smart enough and I should have been shooting manual especially when I am comfortable shooting.


Four - the auto exposure calculation gets confused when contrast isn't enough. So focus on something that has contrast and them recompose. I didn't do it every time because it was slipping of my mind over an over again.

What saved the day - yes my definition is very lame. I got one picture which I really liked.

Okay now what went right - I was shooting RAW. I think nothing beats that.

दो मासूम खुदा - Gulzar

दो मासूम खुदा
शिमला के सफ़र का एक मंज़र :

सर्दी थी और कोहरा था
और सुबह की बस आधी आँख खुली थी,
आधी नींद में थी!

शिमला से जब नीचे आते
एक पहाड़ी के कोने में
बस्ते जितनी बस्ती थी इक
बटवे जितना मंदिर था
साथ लगी मस्जिद, वो भी लॉकिट जितनी

नींद भरी दो बाहों
जैसे मस्जिद के मीनार गले में मन्दिर के,
दो मासूम खुदा सोए थे!
एक बूढ़े झरने के नीचे!!

~Gulzar 

Interesting Tic Tac Toe Game

One game everyone will like :)