end of the year ritual..

It's end of the year ritual for us friends to share our favorite 5s of the year.

5 memorable things this year:
1. gave birth to 2 lovely babies
2. spent quality time with my mom, something I hadn't done in last 10 years
3. been a good listener and support to a friend
4. learnt many many nursery rhymes
5. reconnected with 2 friends with whom I had lost touch

5 things I did this year that I have never done before:
1. well #1 above applies here
2. did not have any alcoholic drinks this year
3. made more online purchases than I have ever before
4. stayed indoors for 3 days without stepping out
5. had dental work done on 5 of my teeth(!!)

5 favorite books:
1. What's going on in there
2. Rishis, Mystics and Heroes of India
unfortunately the pregnancy books do not count so that's all I have.

privileged audience that we are!

Being part of a fairly visible non-profit software foundation like OSAF makes us privileged audience to quite some prominent speakers. Last year we had Vice President Al Gore who gave us a truly enlightening talk on Global Warming which is now made into a movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth' - a must see if environmental facts interest you. We had no media, no cameras just some 50 of us between OSAF, LPFI and Creative Commons and him. Even though most of us have heard of the alarming effect of global warning, pure statistics presented in his slides were staggering. We all came out pretty shocked at how little we are doing to fix this. Eventually something was done about it - OSAF office became the only green office in all of San Fransico city. We use only recycled products, we recycle all unused food items into compost and use vendors and restaurants who adhere to environment friendly standards. It feels quite rewarding being part of such an environment aware organization.

Next was Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. An eloquent speaker who walked us through how he founded Wikipedia and how it became the biggest free encyclopedia on the internet. He also gave us some insight on how it is a self-governing organization managed by a handful of paid employees and hundreds of dedicated volunteers.

Later part of the year we had Mayor of San Francisco city, Gavin Newsom who had come for a student fund raiser hosted by our sister organization, LPFI.

Well, with the new year only a few days away we eagerly await the new list of prominent speakers who might walk the ramp of 543 Howard Street.

sometimes it's important to remind ourselves..

A recent news item making it’s rounds in the blogs, describes the experience of a well known Kenyan author, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, being kicked out of Hotel Vitale, in the SF bay area. It just highlights how very different peoples’ realities are based solely on skin color – yes, even today. Ngugi was here to promote his most recent book. Here’s a post that made it around in the blogs, describing Ngugi’s experience:

“…What happened next could have been a scene from a pre-Civil Rights Era of a Black man caught in a “White Only” section of a hotel. A hotel employee approached the Professor and said:
“This place is for guests of the hotel. You have to leave.”
Handling the matter calmly and intrigued by the assertion of the man, the Professor asked
“How do you know that I am not a guest of the hotel?” ..”

Here's an interesting article on that.

Here’s another post that also prints the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality response, which begins “Prejudice still exists in America. It is real and palpable…”



And finally, here’s one of the comments from a staff member at the hotel, which reveals the distance we need to travel to clarify the insidiousness of bias to people that consider themselves rational, logical, and only ‘doing their job’.

our little adventure to kauai

We had little hope of making this trip anything close to a relaxing vacation but to much of our surprise it was quite so. Taking the twins on a 6 hour flight from SF to Honolulu to Lihue seemed quite daunting at first but turned out to be manageable after all, not pleasant but manageable. I have to agree with Viral that most important thing about traveling with kids is Planning, Planning and Planning. We had a good checklist of things we had to take - their everyday items, emergency items, medical items, play time items etc. Of course we also took our nanny along which is what made this easy. Viral and I actually got to spend some time together. Also the ensemble of 8 other friends were a great support around. While the reason for the trip was to cheer one of our dear friends Rakesh who ran the Honolulu Marathon, we didn't quite make it to the event. We cheered him with our enthusiasm and support remotely from Kauai. The weather switched between being scorching hot and humid in the day time to being cold in the evenings and night. The sunset on the Poipu beach was breathtaking. Here's one for a starter..

Open Source, Open Standards

Time and again this has come up in various discussions with people - how are open source and open standards related. Most people think they are entirely complementary. Finally here's a blog post from a fellow colleague who has done a great job addressing it.

after a long hiatus...

This has been the longest hiatus in my 9 years of work life and if I may add, one that has sped most quickly too. I was away from work for the last 6.5 months resuming work only last week. Even though initially I had some withdrawal symptoms, I have to admit I soon got so entrenched into mundane activites of the day to day life taking care of the twins that I did not miss much being without my laptop and or the daily staple of online news, blogs and rss feeds. My twins are exactly 6 months old and with the luxury of having a full-time nanny, I am happy to rejoin the work force with renewed vigor.
Development of Chandler has come a long way in the past few months with a working dashboard and an almost usable Calendar. We are closing in on the alpha 4 release. For us intrepid dogfooders, it has some big advances including background synchronization and performance enhancements.

Why we do what we do?

What's this working for a non-profit foundation all about?
I have been asked this same question a hundred times in different gatherings and parties and I have tried to answer it to the best I could. But here's a more pertinent response to that as posted by Mitchell Baker from Mozilla. Here's her blog post.

Sunshine is finally here..

..and so is the update to my blog. Sorry friends for not having reported anything the last few months. Being pregnant with twins has taken it's share of toll on me. Being 5 weeks away, I am so big and bulky, I can barely drive, walk or even stand for more than 10 mins straight. And I have been told that life is going to change in even more ways once the babies are here.
As for the bay area weather, it has been depressingly cold and rainy the last 2 months. Finally we are getting some sunshine and everyone's keeping their fingers crossed. It's nice to see little flowers blooming in the backyard, people running in their shorts, mothers taking babies out for a stroll, kids riding their bicycles etc
It feels like the spirit of summer is finally here and I better get out and get some sunshine rather than being confined in a room with a computer.

New developments ...

in our backyard

A milestone reached..

Well specifically in the bay area, buying a house is considered more than just a milestone. It's a life time of savings put down on a mere 1600 sq feet of land that binds you for 30 years. Yes, if buying a house is an 'American Dream', that dream has been fulfilled. Now comes the real nightmare of maintaining the house, maintaining the backyard, making the mortgage payments, property taxes etc etc. Having said that, the pleasure of living and decorating your own house is a truly enjoyable experience. Well, we consider ourselves settled given the bare essentials have been unpacked and stowed away. The rest still lies in the garage, which is a real spoling factor. Garage is the prime real-estate in a house. You suddenly have this whole another area for your storage and I mean storage since the cars can stay in the drive way. Suddenly, you shop at Costco and all extras land in the garage, all the unnecessary furniture, all the shelves of Engineering books that you never read etc etc. It scares me when I talk to people and they say they haven't unpacked stuff from their garage in more than 5 years now. I hate to imagine being in the same state 5 years from now and I know I will be exactly in that state. Well that's for later. For now, a new beginning....in a whole new house.

iPod Nano

I just happened to chance upon the latest iPod Nano unveiled by Apple and I am so completely fascinated by it. That makes a regular iPod look like a brick in comparison(no offense but seriously!). I can't wait to offload my iPod mini so I can jump on the nano bandwagon. Any takers?

The Half Blood Prince..

I finally finished the 672 page Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, the latest in the Harry Potter series. This has definitely been a more interesting read than any of the previous ones with more twists and turns that keep you asking for more. As the story unveils, the plot surely gets darker preparing readers for the final gruesome battle between Harry and Lord Voldemort. I think the most fascinating part of the book is how delicately the author deals with emerging romantic relationships and hormonal behaviours as the students enter their teenage years.
Surely this one has left me eagerly waiting for the next one....

I feel so small..

Literally speaking, I have felt small many times in life...all those years in school being resigned to sitting in the first row, traveling in a crowded train at peak hours dangling my head between people's shoulders or watching a street show and having to push myself right in the front to get a clear view of the entertainer. Life is full of such instances when you are 5 feet 1". Well for once, I feel so small and it really isn't about being 5 feet 1" at all. It is about feeling small and vulnerable in wake of nature inflicted disasters. We spend all those years securing ourselves for our futures and all it takes is one wild slap from nature and we are reduced to smithereens. Makes you wonder how vulnerable we really are. While the media has been flooding us with continuous images of New Orleans since the disastrous hurricane Katrina struck the coast, it has been hard to evade some of these bothering questions. Is the earthquake in San Fracisco next? If there is one, are we really prepared for it? The people of New Orleans had a 7 day warning before the hurricane hit, SF won't even have that luxury. Well, for once I plan to take some action and get a earthquake survival kit this weekend, if there is anything like that at Target or WalMart I hope.

Are you an interesting person?

Today at lunch time there was an interesting discussion on kinds of people that others classify as 'interesting'. This came up in reference to various interactions people had at OSCON with many prominent and industry leading specialists as well as other seemingly common people they met. For e.g. they refered to this one guy being very interesting because he had written the cartoon series on some obscure and abstract topics like Einstein's theory of relativity, big bang theory etc, something along the lines of Larry Gonick's History of the Universe series. There was this other person who has traveled to 13 countries researching on how cultural aspects play a big role in the adoption of the design principles. How coke had to change its traditional red can to a different color in some countries because it was considered inauspicious. And then there are all these other people pursuing obscure hobbies like origami and create wonders with it (someone brought a big cuckoo clock made with origami for a demo at OSCON). This and many other similar tales really made me wonder. Would my life sound anything this 'interesting' when mentioned?

OSCON this week..

Most OSAF people are off at OSCON this week. I had to cancel out last minute due to other competing priorities. I was just reading people's blogs and reports on various tutorials they attended. Anthony Baxter's Effective Python Programming seems to have been a hot favorite. Today was Ted's tutorial on Programming in Chandler where he covered how to extend Chandler to add additional features. We now have 3 extensions prebuilt in Chandler; an RSS Reader,a Flickr parcel to look up photos based on tags and the Amazon wishlist parcel to query someone's Amazon's wishlist based on the email address. There was also a Cosmo (OSAF's WebDAV server implementation) demo by Brian Moseley at the CalDAV panel where we also demoed interoperability with other CalDAV servers like Mozilla's and RPI's. Overall looks like all the presentations and demos from the OSAF side went well. Last 2 months of work has finally paid off!

End of an era..

Yes, I finally got around watching the entire Star Wars series in sequence. I waited all this time before watching episode III just because I needed to refresh parts I and II. I enjoyed watching the series this time given the continuity. Took me almost 2 months to finish all the 6 parts but it was worth it. I have to say, my favorites were parts 1, 3, 5 and 6. Somehow the others seemed like fillers. Well, unlike a generation of people who grew up with Star Wars, I have to admit I can't call myself a big Star Wars fan. Let this not sound like a blasphemy! I hope I don't lose friends over this confession.

Moor's Last Sigh...

After my trip to Spain and having visited the enchanting 'Alhambra' in Granada, quite coincidentally there were references to it in 2 of the books I have read since then. The one in 'History of the Universe' series part III as they discuss the history of Spain and how the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille conquered Granada and drove the last of the Nasrid Sultans/Moor Kings from there. The beautiful Alhambra was the palace or the royal court of the Moor Kings in Granada. The Moor dynasty bore 20 kings until King Boabdil was forced to surrender to the catholic kings. To avoid humiliation, he escaped from Alhambra in the nite on his horse through a tiny pass which is still called 'El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro' (the last sigh of the Moor). It is believed that the King uttered his last sorrowful exclamation as he turned his eyes from taking their last farewell gaze from Alhambra. Coincidentally, Salman Rushdie's 'Moor's Last Sigh' covers some of the same ground in the historical context of the novel. The story revolves around the protagonist, Moraes Zogoiby or Moor, who is a direct descendant of King Boabdil and whose ancestors fled Spain to avoid persecution and generations later found themselves in India. Truly riveting how Rushdie weaves the story around history of Spain and more modern India. I guess I enjoyed the book a lot because I could relate to both the references now.

Traveling to Dallas and Houston..

I am traveling to Dallas and Houston for a week, coming back next wednesday. So blogging might be light to none. Have a good long weekend!

'You've got to find what you love', Jobs says

This is the text of the Stanford Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. I found this extremely moving and inspiring and worth sharing with all friends.

"I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much."

OSAF in the Boston Globe..

A great front page article about Mitch and OSAF, along with the lunchtime picture!
A non-flattering side of me in the picture ...sigh!

Software knight Kapor takes up new quest