Stunday Afternoon

Chocolate, No. Happiness, Yes. Something good will come our way, yes. frowning, no. Yelling, yesterday. Stress, last night. Headache, last week. Hope, today. Genuine affection, yes. Understanding all your talents, yes. Wasting a minute, no. Wasting two minutes, no. Wasting 6 months, no. working always, yes. Sleep is for the dead, yes. disrespect, no. False sympathy, no. Lazy people, no. Stupid people, maybe. tolerance, yes. Snobbery, no. Pedantism, no. Poetry, yes. Life, yes. Contradictions, happens to the best of us. Perseverance, always. Mom’s food, sometimes. Appreciation, yes. Cockiness, sometimes. Arrogance, no. Self stupidity, sometimes. Acknowledgment, sometimes. Acceptance, always. Contentment, never. Colors, pretty. Fatso syndrome, temporary. Bluish green, maybe. Greenish blue, never. Admit you are wrong, sometimes. humility, always. giving an inch, only when weak. Pay people on time, always. comfort, never. Peace, sometimes. Discontent, perennial. Disillusionment, temporary. Comedy, all around. Gratitude, always. Obsequious, never. wonder, always. reverence, sometimes. pusillanimity, once in a while. perseverance, always.

eWorld Column

What drives mobile app design?
Dr. Anu Vaidyanathan

The author is CEO of PatNMarks, an Intellectual Property Consulting firm with offices in Austin, Bangalore and Chennai (www.patnmarks.com) and can be reached at anu@patnmarks.com

This two-part article describes several key technology trends that will influence the design of mobile phone applications in the coming years.

It is important to understand the proliferation of different kinds of cellular phone standards, handsets and hardware parameters that affect the compatibility of various applications across various demographics. Various applications specifically for the mobile phone market that are gaining ground include the traditional mass markets of mobile banking, gaming and location-based services.

In the year 2002, a set of papers detailing records of the original GSM task force were compiled. In this set, a study by Josef Huber methodically deconstructed the market model, traffic trends and the technology parameters classified by services, and offered predictions of the same between years 2005-2010. This study was carried out primarily to arrive at an appropriate methodology for spectrum allocation. These predictions are shown in the table accompanying story.

Both usage statistics and technology parameters, especially bandwidth (owing to the increased role of packet switched networks) have far exceeded initial expectations and predictions.

Furthermore, the success of such technologies as VoIP has, in effect, validated the push towards 4G networks, with a predominantly IP backbone. In addition to this, the least common denominator when it comes to features, even in low-cost handsets, is pretty exhaustive, thereby enabling various new applications.

Four generations of mobile telephony

The earliest version of mobile phones was the two-way radio, primarily used to communicate on set frequencies, not utilising the telephone network. Between 1910 and 1973, the technology saw several steps in its evolution. In 1973, Motorola demonstrated the DynaTAC prototype, which was probably the first commercial version of what is today smaller and lighter by several orders of magnitude. These were still analog devices and the introduction of the 2G standard, which was the term used for TDMA and CDMA systems, came about in the 1990s, to introduce digital, circuit switched transmission. The phones in this generation still weighed about 200 gm at their lightest and saw the introduction of several commercial services such as the short message service (SMS), downloadable ring tones and roaming.

3G networks saw the introduction of competing standards including WCDMA and CDMA2000. Although these standards had to stay cohesive with the IMT-2000 specification (standards of data-rates around 384 kbits/s outside and 2Mbit/s inside), they introduced a lot of heterogeneity. Intermediate standards such as 2.5G networks were also introduced to buffer the transition between 2G and 3G such that at the end of 2007, the subscriber base for GSM had reached nearly 300 million.

Although the proliferation of mobile phone technology has far exceeded expectations, the data-rates on circuit-switched digital networks have not scaled as well. While the main driver for 2G networks was voice, newer applications such as video and digital television are predicted to be the drivers of what has been termed 4G networks, as the limits of short-range communication evolve.

The proliferation of handsets

While network technology progressed in supporting higher data rates and more features, one of the greatest leaps in subscriber base occurred when the Asian continents started to engage with mobile phones. Given that the population density in this part of the world is unparalleled, two driving factors determined the success of both handsets and network technology, first movers and price.

Even though GSM was adopted early in India and China, the handset prices drove the subscriber base, in the initial years. There were many reviews that brought out the fact that even though 2.5G and 3G services were available to subscribers, the price of the handset forced them to choose 2G phones, thereby rendering a lot of the services redundant. Pricing services based on customer requirements has bridged this gap and instruments are more capable, even at the lowest prices, in the current market.

Features of the handsets include price, memory, image-resolution and ability to connect to the Internet. In profiling these parameters for 42 handsets from the leading brands, based on various price-points, it is observed that the most basic handset still has a camera and is Internet-ready. The price-points and concerns about majority of subscribers in the Asian countries using 2G instruments by reason of price are slowly being bridged. It would be interesting and relevant to perform a fine-grained analysis on how the predictions by the GSM committee and studies on spectrum provisioning translate to the Indian market.

In part two of this article, trends in the application space will be explained in detail, including traditional and emerging applications such as gaming, finance, location-based services (such as Foursquare) and E-911.

This data was obtained from Josef Huber’s paper on Spectrum Aspects in the UMTS Related Work of the European Commission, UMTS Task Force, UMTS Forum and GSM Association.

Copyright © 2007 Anu Vaidyanathan. All rights reserved | webdesign

Ummeed

I wish blogger would publish in Hindi, wait, better still, that I knew how to write as fast in Hindi… Seemingly, the older we get, the farther we run from the basics. I had an opportunity to visit Punjab via Chandigarh…… The highlights of our trip were a whirlwind tour of rural Punjab and a visit to Anandpur Sahib, a big Gurudwara. Having never been to one before, I realized how little I knew about the Sikh religion. They are a very brave clan and the place of women in their rhetoric is commendable. Something in my heart just went on a trip.. not very different from being on a bike ride in a new country, without health insurance to cover a high-speed crash.

I was travelling with two other South Indians and so, we had to make our mandatory stop at an awesome restaurant to lay our hands on some super-expensive dosas (65 bucks a pop!) and lassi.

The green fields completely blew me away, I was reminded of my travels to my dad’s hometown in Mannargudi which rests literally between nowhere and never-again.

The road-signs seemed to point in the right direction, capitalism ahoy! Maaza aa gaya..

The visit to the Gurudwara was the highlight of my trip with my new friend Harpreet giving us a detailed tour of the place and his encyclopedic knowledge of his religion blew me away.

Unlike most temples, the place was very clean and everyone had covered their head.. me included…….

For some reason, I kept thinking of Rajbir Gujjar, from a book I read, an athlete turned policeman who suffers “the universal affliction of all athletes: struggling to level with the infinitely more complex rules of life outside the playing arena.“

And onwards we go..

The Inheritance O’Floss

After eating enough Paav Bhaaji to kill a small Elephant, I ventured off to the pool after 5 hours of hard work on submitting a paper that was long overdue. Completing my PhD 10 months ahead of schedule came with a big downside, not getting all my ideas published. Academic egos are tied very heavily to publication list-size. So much so that I even had an academic (whom I thought was cute for all of three weeks) tell me “Solving a real problem for ***** may be good work by an application developer. This does not make it the type of novel research that is expected from an academic?” This statement made me cry last week but it made me laugh today……. Hilarious!

According to me, research is the brain-space to think and implement ideas without the corporate or production atmosphere whose only bottom-line is money, not creativity or good engineering… anyway, what do I know?!

As I was swimming and admiring the blue squares at the bottom of the pool, I was thinking of an article I wrote in happier times and I thought I would share that with ya!

Here goes…

4/27/2009
I had two flats on my ride today and the usual lack of ambition that follows one after promptly forgetting water bottles on a 5 hour ride start in 30-degree weather with a dry wind blowing in my face. There also seems to be construction any which way you ride here and this began my morning’s parable “season of gists and conely gravelness”. There were about two-dozen cones on the main road and nope, I didn’t imagine that. The morning had started mostly normally. A big backache and inability to roll out of bed. The new training program is definitely working! I had a 5K swim off the blocks and by the way I ooh-ed and aah-ed before getting in, I knew it was going to be a long swim. In 3.5ks, it was mass delirium. I was still pretty sore from the previous day and had a lot of funny thoughts apparently. So funny that I looked like a mass turbine under-water as the bubbles percolated to the top as I giggled ceaselessly for 100meters. Try it! It ain’t as easy as it looks!

As all good stories start, this one too starts with “I knew a man back in 2006″… He said to me that if I swam any slower, I would sink. I still cannot stop laughing when I think of this comment but, I am getting better with the whole flotation habit. I used to take two times an hour to swim 4Ks (yes, that IS possible and NO I am not talking about water-jogging.. still talking swimming) but now it takes a lot less time to do 5Ks than 2 hours. As I parted water, I was thinking of all the funny chicks I had met in triathlon whose blogs I love to read. I was thinking about my friend who got an order to “cease and desist” from her marine bodyguard at a recent Half Ironman.. I was thinking of this girl whose last name sounds related to Mark Knopfler who told me about breaststrokers in Bohemia… I was three months behind on life and papers but this was normal. I was two months behind on the no-carb diet, this too was normal. I was a few days behind with dental hygene and decided that I should seriously consider the inheritance of a serious floss-ing program. Teeth are so important in triathlon. Tearing apart tape to pack the bike at the airport. Filtering water bacteria when swimming in exotic locations. Smiling like a deer in the headlights for sports photos.. and on the rare occasion, a million dollar smile can also win one a date!

Of course I search my soul everytime I have a bad race. Where IS that little stubbly piece of rock that ruined my ENTIRE day even when I was not wearing my shoe? Where IS IT? I was thinking of all the excuses one could make for a slow time or a bad race… “uh yeah, a typhoon hit right as I exited the first warm-up lap and I was worried about my new swim goggles and decided to sit this one out”… “oh.. that day I had this weird intestinal problem that did not show up until race morning”.. “ah yes, I forgot my matching knickers”.. “oh that race, man! I’ll never forget it… I was on this caffeine cocktail on race day and boy, did it not work!”. As with all normal people, I wonder if I just train to be a training queen or whether I will have my breakthrough race sometime soon. Where is that breakthrough when you need it? There is a break-even, a break-out, a break-in, a break-fast, a break-dance but, no break-through yet.

I ended the day with a three hour walk on the beach and made sushi for dinner. Now, that’s what I call a break-away! Onwards with that training log.

Anu Vaidyanathan is busy trying out new Chinese mopeds for her expanding automobile empire. Check out her unimportant ramblings at www.anuvaidyanathan.com.

Black Baloon

Pretty domestic Sunday in the ranks… two weeks ago, I met some crazy people. When you are down, its best to wait to recover.. instead, i seem to have a penchant for punishing myself. So off I went to get my technical work deconstructed and looked at.. The pronouncement was not pretty. I meet a lot of people that tell you that your work is one way or the other, but, while I am no einstein, I did not like what the undertakers of creativity had to say to me.

So, I came home and sobbed for about ten days. I couldnt do this in public but, between client-meetings, writing people to ask for critiques and methods to better my work, my two runs all week and joining the gym, i managed to shed a lot of saline solution. I managed to miss about every appointment and not take my phone to the only one that seemed a remote possibility at reparation…. on 4 hours of sleep, I came home and fell into a dead sleep, only to have my wrist slapped by my parents for taking on too much, for letting people’s words get to me..

In the last two days, the treadmill and i have started to talk again. My only friend, my only non-judging companion… just objective feedback into how I need to get back in shape. Baby steps are in order, no point in crying over spilled tears, milk or whatever else. The Goo goo dolls are on the player today. I am done with one run and about to head out for my second workout… I am almost feeling human again.

I used to have a sign on my office door when I was teaching, an age ago. It said ‘no whining’…..

I am off to practise a bit of what i preach.

Comin’ down the world turned over
And angels fall without you there

Of Goals, Goalees and Gatekeepers

Well, just two days ago, I got a mysterious e-mail from my boss, pertaining to this blog. It simply said “Auld lang syne!” While I dont speak Klingon, I intuitively knew what it meant.. something along the lines of “get your lazy fingers moving”…….. With all the highs and the lows Im currently stuck in, this seemed like a garangutan task. No, the word “garangutan” is something I just made up! In my dictionary, which is from the language Klingon-meets-Anu-Version-2, this stands for “simply huge”, not to be confused with “immense”, “vast”, “gigantic”,”colossal” or “mammoth”.. simply huge.

To confuse my depression-meter, I first set out to spice things up with a little bit of grinding activity, in the kitchen. While I used to love my kitchen, even as recently as upto March, this sudden self-imposed road-block, as my buddy Meera would put it, my kitchen and I have not been communicating. So, after mashing all the spices up into some mix of what they could not have been, in their whole forms.. I proceeded to watch copious amounts of TV. Now anyone who knows me, knows that I do not watch TV. In fact, I hate TV. Television, yes, any version flat screen, big screen, whatever, is the bane of my existance. I even go so far as to hate the ones in the gyms where people seem to walk less and be transfixed on this little blue screen…. Anyway, back to the confession, yes, I watched COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF TV for about what felt like a week but was indeed just three days. I love this show called “Castle”. Although the actors seemed theatrical and boring at the beginning, it is actually quite bearable, given that I have watched three whole episodes now…

Post the spice-making and the televisioning, I decided to look up some random chaps that I have been trying to convince to give me a project, more like a long-term commitment of sorts……. All my projects are long-term commitments. When I dont get the project, I get depressed, anxious, moronic, sleepless, tv-orientated, spice-grinded and oh, its 1am, sleepless.. wait, I said that already. In this case, I did not get the project and that made me very very sad…………

Someone told me last night that I must acknowledge the gate keepers to every dream of mine.. somehow I feel that fences, gates and anu vaidyanathan dont go so well together. As a child, I jumped out of every “camp” my parents tried to send me to and when I was 16, even a despotic hostel (that my poor dad enrolled me in unwittingly, he hates fences even more than I do) when I was determined to study for the IIT-JEEs in a different city than my hometown Bangalore. Anyone who has been to Chennai can tell you that they dont exactly think like Bangaloreans……… scary people. They had a rule about going to bed at 8pm at that hostel and phone privileges only if we behaved ourselves (which meant keeping our shoes clean, our nails clean and our clothes washed… umm.. I just tended to differ).

So, back to the question of gatekeepers, I am ok if they are really goalees pretending to be gatekeepers because in that sense, goalees make your game and goals sharper, gatekeepers keep you out. So, I prefer a goalee to a gatekeeper, any day of the week.

I met a chap recently that I really wanted to impress. Besides being really nice to me, he was inspiring on a very different level, having moved back home to teach, after some fancy degrees abroad. Much like my friend SS, who instilled a great sense of what is right and what is just plain boring when it comes to following your heart vs. taking a job just because you were meant to. In this case, I misread the chap to be a gatekeeper, rather than a goallee.. now that my foggy perception has cleared up… I am back on track and blogging like there is no tommorow.. oh wait, it IS tommorow being past midnight.. so, Ill stop now and hopefully my Goosefraba therapy will kick in soon.

Deep Depths and High Heights

I feel lost…….. not just a little lost but WAY lost. I have been in this place before, unsure of where I am coming from, much less sure of where I am headed. Add a few people who mirror your worst doubts to you and what you have is a sure-shot recipe for disaster… or metamorphosis. It is your choice.

I have had a lot of time to think in these past few months though. Im bold enough to write out a few things today…….

Most people live in fear: Fear of traffic, bad jobs, bad-hair days, relationship drama, neighbor-gossip drama and other dramas. I find the spoken word very shallow in most people. I personally cannot stand polite conversation so, I stay as far away from the spoken word as I possibly can. But, fear renders stupid words as well.

People have big egos: I am right because I am older than you, richer than you, smarter than you, more powerful than you, have seen more of the world than you have, have had worse circumstances than you have, etc. etc. Ive heard most of it in my own life…… I have an ego too…….. Mostly about my weight. Athletes are obsessed with their weight, as we well should be. It is our job. However, post injuries Ive also felt like a big stationary potato, unable to move and consequently also like a festering pile of bacteria So, my ego is hurt…..

Writing is an act of will and reflects our innards: Try writing a hand-written note to someone when you are unhappy. Given the propensity of keyboards, this is hard but, I still hang on to my ink-pens and my foolscap paper… I dont suceed at writing all the time though because I know I am very transparent and whatever I feel comes out with no filter.

In summary, my fear, ego and writing are all things to watch, acknowledge and work with for myself to evolve. I choose metamorphosis today and to remain stable through the deep depths and high heights and not take either as a hit.

The comeback kid

Truth be told, I have been in a very bad head space after multiple back-to-back injuries. Two steps forward, one step back, is what it has felt like, since January. Added to this, I have realized that no matter how many technical degrees I get, I am something of a right-brained, left-handed, artistic-tendenc(ied!) person who takes everything to heart.

I met the undertakers of creativity three days ago and this added to my grand depression about the state of the world. These people were the usual suspects, loud, judgemental, passive-aggressive and just lousy people. I felt like I was stuck in that nightmare when all the street signs point to hell.

Randy Pausch while a showman of sorts, said that one can choose to be like EOR or TIGGER, when going down the path called the boulevard of no excuses and guilt-free, potential-maximizing living………. Today, I feel like Marvin (the paranoid robot with a big brain who is perennially depressed). I have a long road to recovery staring me in the face, unhappy people around me that get me down and my attitude is at an all time low.

But then, its only Wednesday. Stay tuned about how this week turns out. Persistance for me is like hotel California, I can check out any time I like but, I can never leave.

Back at it

Im three days into my recovery plan and I can say, its all coming back to me now. I love doing what I do and that is good enough reason to keep doin’ it! I made a mistake in January by biting a bit too much more off than I could really chew. Recovery is the holy grail for any athlete and thus, I am more mindful of the need for sleep or being very selective in how I spend my time. Some friends understand that most nights I am drooling by 8:45 pm, some dont, either way, the ones that stick around are the only ones worth having anyway.

I went on a long run on Sunday with much apprehension. I was fast asleep by 8:30 the previous night and up by 4:30am. There were so many voices of doubt in my head. It was almost as if it was my first EVER long-run.. Somehow, I feel this way even after having run 84.4km in one go, last August. I worry that I will forget how to run if I am seperated from my shoes for more than a few days. I started out in the pitch dark and as light slowly emerged, in an hour’s time, so did my spirits. I considered cheating on my long run, several times but, I was very glad I did not give in. I proceeded to spend the rest of the day with one of my best friends and his amazing wife. There was more temptation to “chill” at lunch but, thankfully, I did not give in. I went on a long swim, once again te impulst to cut it short being very very strong.. I took a little break in the middle, watched some kids play, helped a kid with his stroke and kept swimming.

Sometimes, just ocassionaly that is, it is OK to step back to actually make progress. While its hard to admit that one makes mistakes, that is the very nature of life. Besides, how will we know our limits if we dont test them? Time and again and again?

Ive decided to live up to the promises I have made to myself in order to be a better person for everyone else to engage with. If I am not happy, there is no way Id be spreading any joy around, for starters.

Its 9:40pm tonight, I am on a strict “no late nights” embargo. So, Im off to read my book and fall asleep.

Shapeless sisters

Well.. I never like athletes who make excuses. Ever hear this “Oh, I was perfectly ready but my shorts didnt match my socks and my race went downhill” or “Oh, Ive had such a hard time at work that I didnt have time to train” or “Fill-your-favourite-excuses-here”…

In any case, for about 5 weeks in the recent past and since January to be precise, Ive had a string of random injuries. Injuries are a given in my life however, its annoying when they all clump together! Makes me wonder if there is some evil force out there pushing pins in a rag-doll that resembles me

Just in the last five weeks, I managed to fall off my bike, have a major dislocation, infect my foot for 2.5 weeks and suffer major separation anxiety from my dissertation work. So, Ive made up the same annoying excuses with myself, knowing fully well that they are simply excuses and invalid, in many ways. Laziness manifests itself in many ways but, the first step is acceptance that there is a problem The second step is doing something about that and Im on the road to recovery. The magic step is not too far away either.

Wish me luck! And if you ARE pushing pins, just know that I am made of some combination of carbon and H2O so, it ain’t gonna work, starting now!

Sweet May!