• Chana : Chickpeas
• Methi :Fenugreek Leaves
• Matki : Earthen Pot
• Basmati Rice: Basmati Rice

The main ingredients

• Tomatoes – Deseeded, diced
• Red onion
• Methi Leaves
• Mint leaves
• Chana – soaked overnight and boiled
• Saffron – soaked in warm water
• Briyani Rice – washed and soaked in warm water
• Yogurt

Spices:

• Cloves
• Bay leaves
• Black Cardamom
• Cinnamon Sticks
• Green Cardamom
• Black Cumin Seeds
• Raisins
• Green Chili – Sliced vertically
• Star Anise
• Chopped Ginger and Garlic

Making the Chana “Masala”
Heat some ghee, add the spices (Cloves, Bay leaves, Black and green cardamom, cumin seeds and star anise). After a couple of minutes add chopped onions, chili, chopped ginger and garlic. Sauté for a 3-4 minutes. Add Chopped tomatoes. Once onion and tomato become soft add Chickpeas and Methi leaves. Keep stirring and keep cooking on medium heat.

After 4-5 minutes of cooking add yogurt and mix thoroughly. Reduce the heat and cook for a couple of more minutes. You don’t need to cook it all the way, since it will be put into the oven in a Matki.

Spread the chana masala as a thick layer in a Matki (Earthen Pot), and spread soaked rice on top of it as a second layer. On the rice sprinkle saffron water, a pinch of gram masala and some mint leaves. Add another layer of Chana Masala and Rice continue till you fill up the Matki.

Place the pot in the oven pre-heated to 200° Celsius – cook for 1.5 hours. Enjoy with Raita.

The Map

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The Route
Name: Scheveningen to Haarlem
Date: 21-Aug-2011 12:18 pm
Map:
Distance: 48.8 kilometers
Elapsed Time: 2:41:38
Avg Speed: 18.1 km/h
Max Speed: 41.3 km/h
Avg Pace: 03′ 19″ per km
Min Altitude: 0 m
Max Altitude: 61 m
Start Time: 2011-08-21T10:18:43Z

Start Location:
Latitude: 52.113917º N
Longitude: 4.293781º E

End Location:
Latitude: 52.387354º N
Longitude: 4.639324º E

Photos

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And here are the iKiva download stats:

I received pretty cool farewell gifts – Pepper Grinder, Balsamic Vinegar, Extra Virgin Olive Oil and super tasty Buffalo Mozzarella.

And I made some nice & tasty Pesto Pasta today using all the ingredients, and the mozzarella was the best so far I tasted in Holland.

I’d like to thank my great colleagues and it was great working with you. I do believe that Hippo CMS has the potential to become very great product and hopefully I’ll continue to contribute albeit in small amounts.

Hippo was a pretty exciting place to work at. My next job is with Lunatech, and I’m equally, if not more, excited to start working for.

Within a span of 3 years I closely witnessed a dear one’s death and a dear one’s birth. The fascinating tree of life continues to grow.

It has been just over a month since iKiva has been released and it is time for an update! The app has been successful beyond my wildest imagination, I never thought It’ll have more than 100 users. But the popularity of Kiva helped and the app seems is used by many users. I think the purpose of the app – helping people who want to help others – is served.
Thanks to everyone who downloaded the app, I’m still behind schedule for the iPad app, but I promise that it would be even better than iPhone app! So here are the numbers …

Summary

• Total Number of Downloads — 1,652
• Average Number of Downloads per day — 51.62
• Number of Countries in which the app is used — 64
• Total Number of Sessions — 5,279
• Average Session Length — 9.0 minutes

Top 10 Countries by no. of Users

1. United States — 863 (53%)
2. Canada — 116 (7%)
3. Australia — 90 (6%)
4. United Kingdom — 88 (5%)
5. Germany — 81 (5%)
6. Netherlands — 66 (4%)
7. Sweden — 47 (3%)
8. Switzerland — 24 (1%)
9. France — 23 (1%)
10. Finland — 20 (1%)

Top 10 Countries by no. of Sessions

1. United States — 2484 (47%)
2. Germany — 545 (10%)
3. Canada — 395 (7%)
4. Australia — 371 (7%)
5. United Kingdom — 270 (5%)
6. Netherlands — 229 (4%)
7. Switzerland — 148 (3%)
8. Sweden — 137 (3%)
9. Denmark — 70 (1%)
10. New Zealand — 58 (1%)

Graphs

Downloads over time No. of Users over time Users per country – Darker color show more number of users

Here are some quotes from the users who liked using iKiva so far

I used the app today to fund four projects which means that you created a great app!

Very intuitive and easy to use to find loans, then it passes off to Kiva to complete the transaction. Great stuff!

Allows one to see all the regular information available on the site, aside from joining new groups , this is nicely designed and pleasant to look at. Allows multiple options for filtered searches. Great on the go view of progress on loan repayments as well as making new loans via checkout on KIVA site. An overall great app for KIVA iPhone users.

간단하고 편리해여 사랑해요 키바

(I don’t understand Korean, but this does look like nice comment, as per Google Translate).

Great for On the go Kivaing!

Love the app – outstanding design!

Normally I carry my Canon SLR with a couple of lenses, but this time I resisted my urge, left my SLR at home and came to Venice with just iPhone 4, which restricted me to the small 5MP camera. Of course there were times when I missed my SLR, but the photo quality was surprisingly good and satisfactory.

When I take a photo with my SLR, I put more effort into taking photo than thinking about post-processing, but with iPhone 4 I was always imagining about post-processing and which filters I’m going to apply to the photos. I took all the photos in HDR mode, which made some of them look good but left others looking a bit pale. Though the photos will not be good for printing they seem to be pretty fine for sharing online.

Here are some photos from trip to Venice.

Rather than feeling I’m competing with others, I can appreciate, enjoy, celebrate and encourage the work I see them doing. When I take this approach, it encourages me in the process, inspiring me to be my best while enjoying others’ success. It’s also a net positive, because those who are celebrated are encouraged to do the same for others.

Via Becoming Fully Who You Are – Rohdesign Weblog – Designer Mike Rohde.

But for some reason, the machine was getting slower and slower over time, and I showed my anger a couple of times on the desk. Then this dude (me!), for whom I have a lot of respect for, came by and told me “You need to Upgrade!”. I thought how can I make my machine better? First thing that came to mind was more RAM. Currently the machine has a meager 4GB RAM, which was only reasonable for reasonable tasks. So I thought I’d bump it up to double the amount, that should make my “running” programs swap less and be faster. I bought 8GB RAM.

That was not enough. The main bottleneck seemed to be stupid hard disk blocking me every time and throwing these beach balls in my face. Then after spending a little amount of thought-seconds I figured that I need an SSD. So I got one. After these two upgrades, all of a sudden the Mac is unbelievably faster, unpossible!.

The MacBook Pro feels like it has been fitted with Infinite improbability Drive. Now for some numbers to prove that claim. First up is the sequential test of the data read/write in 4k/256K blocks. Here are the results:

Next up is Random read/write test of 4K/256K blocks.

Now I need to throw more work at my computer. It was a waiting game before, but now my computer is staring at me with a smug look and asking “That’s it? that’s the speed at which you can work ? HA! HA!”.

All the benchmarks are measured using Xbench.

Here are the details of the hardware which I bought from Other World Computing

• 8.0GB(4.0GB+4.0GB Kit) PC8500 DDR3 1066MHz SO-DIMM Memory Upgrade Kit
• DIY Upgrade Bundle: 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro Solid State Drive, OWC On-the-Go FW800/USB 2.0 Kit + Includes OWC 5 Piece Tool Kit.

Here’s a quick video of launching some apps with this new setup:

The basic premise of the book is that the ideas are not born like “eureka” moments as popularized in culture, but they start as slow hunches and take time to develop. And through various transformations ideas cross boundaries of the domains and help an innovation in a completely separate domain. By analyzing different innovation’s histories, the author also provides suggestions on how to create environments that encourage innovation and cultivates ideas.

Here’s one interesting paragraph from the book about Apple’s innovation:

All the groups [at Apple] – design, manufacturing, engineering, sales – meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional product cycles – and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

Clearly this is what goes wrong with most of the software companies the gap between the different groups like sales, engineering and of course management.

A must-read book for anyone who’s interested in the whole “knowledge business”.

Update: Here’s talk by the Author’s TED Talk (Thanks to Ferny!)

The Path of a Doer’ is a pocket guide to helping you to achieve more. To help you understand the ebb and flow of making something happen.

via The Do Book Co. – The Path of a Doer.

Some time ago I wondered what language do I really think in ?

This is what Paul. R. Ehrlich (in his book Human Natures) says in this matter:

Steven Pinker believes that we do our thinking in a deep, rich, built-in universal language, which he calls mentalese. Mentalese presumably lacks the ambiguities introduced by the demands for efficiency of communication in the slow “channels” of speech and gesture (as compared with The much faster channels in the neurons of the brain).

My guess (I emphasize guess) is that we all use a mix of surface and deep language, depending on the topic and speed of use (for example, a warning to “watch out” may be formed entirely in subconscious thought- call it mentalese if you wish – and instantaneously translated into shout, whereas I may be thinking about this parenthetical expression entirely in English).

Though I couldn’t observe my instantaneous thoughts, I think agree with the author. As far as other comparatively long-running thoughts are concerned it seems I’m almost always thinking in the language I need to communicate them in.

So what language do you think in ?

If you have read any programming books they have a similar boring pattern of beginning with hello world to appendices on how to setup install, except of course the fantastic why the lucky stiff‘s creations.  And once you read one book, you can pretty much predict all other books – just like bollywood movie plots. But I figured that my lateral thinking and cognitive ability to look at life in different perspective started to become almost next to nothing. As a programmer I live in my own small world like every other computer professional. Wolfram|Alpha thinks only 2.37% of US workforce work are computer professionals, so extrapolating to the entire world, I guess it will be pretty insignificant.

Anyway, the point is I was too wrapped up in my field of work to notice the amazing knowledge out there in other fascinating fields. If I get any question in my brain for brief flash of time about evolution, psychology, mathematics, physics and other plethora of subjects, google and wikipedia were helping out giving the direct answer to the question. But what I missed was a proper treatment of the subject and clear understanding of the context. So the digital age was helping to get the answers quickly, so I got the illusion of feeling empowered with knowledge while lacking the structural thinking or background knowledge to reach to that answer. This was kind of depressing.

I figured that this can be cured by reading books on different subjects. A random walk in the library aisles reminded me how much of knowledge was stored in those books. After finishing a couple of books I loaned from the library, I started to miss my old days of reading and learning in a structured way. Learning using google and wikipedia was more perforated and atomic than I thought. It provides answers to quizzes but it doesn’t provide any context for the answers. I was missing the “big picture” of the topic.

Information in the digital age has the illusion of perpetual availability, which was discouraging spending more time on learning more about the problem at hand. This is what I found out after reading a couple of books recently and comparing my understanding from the online resources. Of course, I’m sure that all or most of the knowledge and information is available online somewhere in fragmented form. But I still needed some one to group it into a coherent piece and explain it in staged step-by-step manner, which is what books are for. And books are more like conversation and I tend to sit down with it and discuss with myself while reading the book forming a better idea of concepts that sink into my brain.

I guess that Google was creating this illusion of availability of all the information on the finger tips, which was in fact making me lazy and end up with half-baked understanding of life, universe and everything. Or may be I’m just getting old.

Image Credit: David Orban

To never follow a dream because you don’t think you’re good enough or don’t have the skills, or knowledge, or experience is a waste. In fact, these projects where there is doubt are the ones to pursue. They offer the greatest challenge and the greatest rewards. Why bother doing something you already have done a hundred times, where there is nothing left to learn?

via The first step is to start – (37signals).

In short, ownership dampens your happiness and burdens you psychologically. Being able to leave your home and not worry about a pet adds to your happiness. Keeping your housing costs low and not accidentally accumulating stuff allows you to spend time and money on things that matter more. Riding the bus frees you from mechanic’s fees and being worried about “that squeaking sound the car makes when starting up.” And avoiding very nice things allows you to avoid the “good china” problem where you don’t want to use something for fear of damaging it.

When you are young and don’t have a family, the extra freedom you can derive from not owning tons of stuff enables you to go to Europe for 3 weeks on a whim, quit your job and pursue your passion, invest all your energy into learning a skill, or build/strengthen relationships. Surely these things are worth an extra few hundred a month for a few years.

via Be Happier: Rent Everything

The Hardware

iPad has gorgeous screen with very nice 1024X768 resolution. The screen looked pretty amazing – considering that all this time I’ve been using the tiny iPhone screen. The detail is amazing and it is super fast. I got so much used to the screen rotation, that now and then I try to hold my iPhone in landscape mode and wait for it to switch.

iPad has only 256MB, which made the calendar and Mail etc. crash occasionally. The logs show that the iPad’s memory is maxed out. The in-built speaker(s) are surprisingly good, and they make the iPad work like my radio during cooking in the kitchen. The microphone audio quality is also very nice. I’ve been using Skype exclusively on iPad, and it worked pretty well.

And the battery life is simply unbelievable. Even with my heavy and continuous usage, the battery didn’t die for almost 2 days.

The Apps

These are the apps I use daily on my iPad

• OmniFocus
• Reeder – RSS Reader
• Twitterrific
• Dropbox
• Mail
• Mobile Safari

After I started using the Reeder, I didn’t even open my usual RSS client on Desktop (NetNewsWire). This is one of the most thoughtfully designed app I’ve ever seen. OmniFocus on iPad fully syncs with my desktop application. It works perfectly as a standalone app too. I love the “Forecast” view on it. And I wish that this feature is also added to the iPhone and Mac versions. Twitterrific also replaced my desktop twitter reading on Itsy. All these apps are great and I didn’t miss my MBP even once.

With Mobile Safari and Mail apps, I survived the whole weekend without even opening the Mac. That’s great. So I’ve moved all the Internet consumption and productivity applications to iPad. Now I don’t need to open them on my Mac at all, less distractions and of course, more memory to sacrifice at the Maven’s altar.

The Games

I’m not much of a Gamer, but I downloaded a couple of games to play on iPad. I love the Angry Birds HD on this gorgeous screen and the free Super 7 HD is also a very beautiful game. All in all iPad is one of best Gaming devices. Its fast and got some pretty decent resolution.

Ebook Reader

I read a lot – but mostly on the Web. I haven’t used a proper eBook reader, so I can’t really compare iPad’s reading experience with them. The iBooks app is pretty good for reading the PDFs I have and mostly I read the books on Safari Library, so it is more or less a browsing experience – which I can say really usable.

The Cons

My three main gripes about are – Typing, Weight and Glossy Screen.

The on-screen keyboard is an okay kind of solution if you just want to send tweets, and write moderately long emails. But typing something like this blog post is a horrible experience. I consistently hit on the ‘n’ or ‘m’ instead of space bar. I also have to keep all my fingers in the air all the time, otherwise. I guess for real typing you need the bluetooth keyboard.

The iPad feels heavy if you continue to hold it in one hand. My hand started to ache to hold it in one hand for too long.

The Glossy screen is very smudge-prone and generally I hate glossy screens, mirroring everything – lights and all. But it was solvable by adding the screen protector which changed the iPad to feel like Matte Screen.

But all in all, the iPad was just the device that I needed to reduce clutter and distraction on my Mac. Now when I’m in front of a Mac, I’m doing the real work, and iPad for communication and consuming the Internet.

Kids from school somewhere here.

The school is basically  a simple shack, as you can see in the background. A couple of classes actually happen under the trees. Some of the kids attend the school because of the free mid-day meal, but most of them are genuinely interested in learning new stuff. I brought a bunch of Mars for every one in the school – and their faces were lit up with joy.  Reminded me of my school days in a Govt. Primary School.

I’m sure someday more than one of them will be blogging and hopefully they’ll remember the fun time we had.