Sandeep Purao’s Blog

National Theatre in London is slated to offer UK’s first professional production of this 90-minute play, which elevates people-watching to a serious play (now, is that not an oxymoron). Here is how FT reports it:

“Peter Handke’s experimental drama offers 90 minutes of wordless action on stage; 450 characters pass through a town square, but not one of them speaks. There is a script, but it consists of 30 pages of intricate instructions from the Austrian playwright (translated by Meredith Oakes) about the way the figures behave as they traverse the space. … In essence, the play turns people-watching into a poignant study of urban life. Characters scurry, slope or stumble across the space, absorbed in their own dilemmas. … The articulation of human experience in language is, of course, one of the core attractions of great drama. But Handke, suggests Macdonald, makes you look at the moments that don’t and can’t reach articulation. There are exchanges between characters, but they are outside of language.”

From the Financial Times, 2 Feb 2008, accessed 10 Feb 2008.

Several years ago, a colleague shared these with me, written in the form of a short essay by Roger Rosenblatt, a participant in Jim Lehrer’s Newshour on PBS. I have found them quite useful and interesting and incredibly difficult to adhere to. See what you think:

1. It doesn’t matter
2. Nobody is thinking about you
3. Do not go to your left
4. Give honest, frank and open criticism to nobody, ever

The essay ends thus: “I know younger people will not heed my advice anyway. So the guideline I offer them is: Don’t. Go ahead and stay awake worrying what people are thinking about you, work on your weaknesses, and criticize your friends. It doesn’t matter.”

A captivating catalog of software innovations over time from David Wheeler that includes, among others:

• Babbage’s analytical engine, Boole’s algebra, Turing machines and von Neumann’s stored program concept
• Bush and Nelson’s Hypertext, Structured programming, Dahl and Nygaard’s Object-oriented programming, Codd’s Relational model and structured query languages,
• Word processors from IBM (and its later evolution into Rubenstein and Barnaby’s Wordstar), and Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s spreadsheets
• Dijkstra’s semaphores, Parnas’s modularity criteria, Hoare’s Communicating sequential processes, and Model-View-Controller from Alan Kay and others at Xerox
• Distributed hypertext via simple mechanisms from Berner-Lee, and Skrenta’s Computer virus
• Goldfarb, Mosher, and Lorie’s SGML as a precursor to XML
• Grune’s lockless version management (CVS)

It appears that there is room for some of the service-based innovations in the list over the last several years including but not limited to Fielding’s REST services.

From the Economist report on Technology in India and China, at The Economist, 10 Nov 2007, accessed 16 Nov 2007

A group of companies including Google has released a set of standards called OpenSocial that will allow software developers to write applications that work with any social network that participates. Current participants include Orkut, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Friendster, Xing, Plaxo and others but not Facebook, which continues with its proprietary lock-in strategy (In Economist 3-9 Nov 2007 visited 12 Jan 2007)

“In one the greatest migrations in history, an average of 31 villagers are predicted to show up in an Indian city every minute for the next 43 years, according to a study by Goldman Sachs – 700 million people in all. This exodus, along with China’s, has helped push the world over a historic threshold this year: the planet, for the first time, is more urban than rural.” (as reported in the IHT, 13 Nov 2007)

I will start off this blog by pointing to a recent bluelist of cities to visit in 2008 from Lonely Planet. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/bluelist/ (visited 12 Nov 07) suggests the following cities: