I got my first SSB call when I was in 11th (I appeared for it thrice, but that's a different story, some other day). That time I was very very excited about our Armed Forces. While studying about Indian Army at that time, I noticed something about the Army ranks. Let me list the ranks in the top-down order. I learnt them by heart and I still remember:
---------- Officer Ranks ----------
1. General
2. Lieutenant General
3. Major General
4. Brigadier
5. Colonel
6. Lieutenant Colonel
7. Major
8. Captain
9. Lieutenant
---------- JCO Ranks ----------
10. Subedar Major
11. Subedar
12. Naib Subedar
---------- Other Ranks ----------
13. Hawaldar Major
14. Master Hawaldar
15. Hawaldar
16. Naik
17. Lance Naik
18. Sepoy

Ok, now I always wonder about the sequence of these ranks. I see a problem at one place. Look at the pattern:
> Before Captain, there is Lieutenant
> Before Colonel, there is Lieutenant Colonel
> And before General, there is Lieutenant General
All fine till here. Now see this:
> Hawaldar Major is after Hawaldar
> Subedar Major is after Subedar
> But why is Major General before General?

This question might be really absurd, but it just never goes out of my mind. I asked some people about this here at AFMC but didn't get any answer. Responses were like:
> "I don't know"
- Grrr!
> "I know the ranks but I never realised this pattern"
- Thank You!
> "Oh! is it? I never knew that General is after Major General"
- Dumbo, General is the highest rank in Indian Army.
> "Why should we bother?"
- Oh dear! there is nothing to bother about. This is just a question.

Someone wants to help?

Yeah! it went off track last friday. With so many things to do, I was not finding time to prepare for PR 301. Weekend helped a lot and I managed to clear it yeasterday (84%).

The life is normal now with my exercise routine in place :)

Hopefully, you'll find me more active in this space now.

Ah! this is going to be my fastest blog ever.

I have to take PR301 certification (it's Infy's internal) in this month only and damn! I am not finding time to prepare for it.

If any of you is not aware, let me tell this: "Infosys Employees have to undergo a certification process in order to get a role change (promotion)". Yeah! that's true. Those who fail to clear the certification exams for their respective roles and the tenure in Infosys do not not stand eligible for the role change process, or their promotion process is derailed. Here are more details (official announcement): Infosys employees to undergo certification for promotion

Every year an infoscion has to take at least 2 certification exams - one technical and one domain. The certifications also play a role in the annual CRR (Consolidated Relative Ranking) process. This year its PR301 in technical bucket for me. Four advanced courses:

> Advanced UNIX - Kernel Programming

> Advanced C Programming

> Advanced Oracle Tuning

> Advanced Database Tuning

Hell! I haven't worked on "C" for a long time now and adding to the my misery, it's the advanced course - Variadic functions, locales etc... which I have no idea about. Plus, the passing % has been raised to 70%. Earlier it used to be 65%.

I am having completely packed days in office - no time to study for all this. The weather here in Pune is at its best currently. No time to enjoy that even. Past 3 weeks were completely soaked in work. Scripts being released to production almost every alternate day.

Somehow, I have started preparing for PR301 - after reaching home. But I am not happy with the pace. I get just one hour to study at home. With this pace I won't be able to finish all of it till June end. I am getting just 6 hrs of sleep everyday. I think I need one more hour of it. But I want to get out of this state of despair, quickly.

Note: I managed to write this because I have set a data load script running and I know it would take 8-10 minutes to execute. This is a superfast blog entry. So, sorry for the spelling / grammatical errors, if any.

I like these and am sure you will enjoy too:

• Comedian Ron White's philosophy on life is simple: "I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. And try to find someone whose life gives them vodka, and then have a party."

• Don't tell your problems to people: 80% don't care and the other 20% are glad that you have them.

Nice na!

I tried to change my language Preference for Google. Just wanted to search in Hindi :) Have a look what I went through.

I saved my "Preferences" after changing the language to Hindi. This is what I got:

Ok, I enjoyed the Hindi Look of Google Pages, though its not actually "Hindi Search". The search still goes English. You can't type Hindi in the search text box. Though you can paste हिन्दी after transleterating it through Google Transliterator, and carry on proper हिन्दी search. Now usually when I want to search something again, my first lookup is the drop-down of google search box. But, I was again disappointed when for my Hindi searches, I found this:

Alphabet blocks? Grrrr... What I do now?

After this, I thought to switch back to English Google (I was fed up of this Copy-Paste thingie). So, I again changed my वरियताएं (Preferences) to get my original Google Page. As I clicked on the "वरियताएं सहेजें" (Save Preferences) button; oops, what is the pop-up saying? Again Alphabet blocks...

Alright, we all know that Google is a wonderful organisation, but lately did I realize that there are a lot of issues with the Google applications. Look at the following links to see what issues my friends have found till now. I have an intelligent set of friends, I must say ;)

1. Picasa Private Albums (By Ankur)

2. Some more (By Vaibhav)

3. One more issue that I have experienced is: You have several Google applications opened on your system- Blogspot, Picasa, Google Search etc... You log out of any one of these, you are thrown out of all other applications as well. Irritating, isn't it?

But, needless to say, Google is no innovation deficient. It has always been developing new, fancy innovative apps. One of them I got to know from Priyanshu is the unofficial google shell, which I just loved. This is the command line search engine of Google : Goosh.org

So, UNIX lovers, LINUX likers can enjoy this big time. There are some good features in this new application which are not there in the original Google search. One of them, as I have already pointed out: Search in Hindi. When you change the language to HINDI in Goosh (Google Shell), you get the transliterator at the command line itself, so the real हिन्दी search is available.

Though I found some problems with this application:

1. No Copying of text avilable. Usually shells in "Quick Edit Mode" give this option.

2. If you migrate form the Google search page using "go" command and then hit the "Back" button, you won't find the results that you had on the earlier page.

3. It displays 4 search results at a time. You can see the next result set using the command "more", but you never come to know how many results were returned actually by the search. There should be a display like: "25-28 of 1800 search results", what we see on the top right corner of the actual google search results page.

4. Surely, there must be more which I couldn't catch for now. I leave it to my genius friends :)

Inspite of these problems, the application is good to go rolling. Afterall its GOOOOOGLE :)

करीब ६ साल पहले मेरे दोस्त वैभव ने मुझे एक बात कही थी जो उसकी माँ ने उसे बताई थी:

संकल्प की दृढ़ता १ / उपलब्ध विकल्पों की संख्या