I went to the Atlantic city unforgettable show last weekend. Having been to a couple of such shows before, we knew the show won’t start till 9:30. So while the insanely huge crowd was trying to push it’s way into the hall, we enjoyed the open air nice blues gospel music in front of the hall. We got in without any blockages at about 10 min before 9:30.

The show started with a countdown with a loud thump at each number which grew louder till Ritesh Deshmukh appeared on stage. He went on with some of his popular numbers like Cash and Hey Babby. His dancing was OK, but he looked pretty tired. Shiamak Dawar’s troupe was dancing very well, though the steps were pretty predictable. Ritesh definitely got the crowd stirred up and wanting for more. He then blurted a few words about Priety and set the stage for her.

Instead of a live compere, they were using some pre-recorded deep manly voice speaking about the stars while their filmy clips were playing on the three large TVs placed one in the center and one each on the two sides. Well, this voice sounded like some national geographic documentary and at times even like Darth Vader. It was very monotonous, went on and on at times and the overall feel was like a Award show rather than a live show.

The stage as I said had a square LCD screen in the center and then 4 vertical long LCD panels covering the height of the stage on each side. All graphics effect started from the center LCD screen and went all the way out the the LCD panels giving a nice techno look. At the center of the hall there were some lighting from the ceiling that looked like a bunch of flash lights strung together and they went on and off once in a while lazily and somewhat randomly.

Well, back to the stars, Priety Zinta came with a bang and danced to her popular numbers, some notable numbers were from Dil Se and Where’s the party tonight. The crowd started up warmly but then got pretty hooked up towards the end of her performance. She looked better and did much better than what I was expecting. It was really nice of her to mention her uncle and aunty who were in the show. She then rambled some words about Abhishek and set the stage from him. Then that boring recorded voice went on and added more blah blah blah.

There was a silence and then there was some crowd movement in the back center area. My mother panicked and thought there was a short circuit. But after a while the unexpected happened. Abhishekh Bachan emerged from there like a god emerging out of the clouds, the lazy center lights located him and made him look even more godly. He was wearing some silver stuff to add to the spectacle. The crowd went berserk. He then proceeded to the stage. It was apparent that he didn’t rehearse well, and his dance was to put it mildly sloppy. The girls still went crazy at his mere presence. He then commanded the crowd to stand up and the crowd did. Then I guess he did the number from Dus.

Abhishek introduced Aishwarya and she came in and mumbled something about how great the crowd is etc. For some reason the crowd was least responsive to her. Maybe because her cheeks looked a bit chubby and she appears to have put some weight around her waist. I think the crowd was somewhat shocked, expecting to see the Aish they have adored in magazines and movies. She danced to some numbers that I can’t remember - I think there was one song from Devdas. Her dancing was OK.

Aish then started building momentum for the next appearance and everyone thought it will be Madhuri. But it turned out to be Jaya Bacchan. Jaya Bacchan read from a paper about some preserve energy stuff. A good half an hour of the show was dedicated for the same.

After this Vishal Shekhar took on the stage with live orchestra and started crooning their hit songs one after another. Vishal kept criss-crossing the stage like a hurt tiger and Shekhar kept jumping as if he is preparing for a skipping competition. I have to give this to the guys, after the dance troupe - they showed more energy than any other stars on the show. Unfortunately, their voice sounded out of tune and they sounded like a bunch of drunk folks doing Karaoke. The overall acoustics was poor and in the back it was all sounding like a big howl. Don’t know if it was the sound mixing, but I think the orchestra was fake and they were singing on pre-recorded tracks.

Vishal Shekhar gave away for the one and only Amitabh Bachan, but not before the invisible voice went on and on about his greatness. Anyways what followed, according to me were the best moments of the show. He started by singing RD Burman number “Jahan teri yeh nazar” from Kalia. Amitabh commands immense star power - he didn’t have to ask but the crowd stood up and did bhagwan dada moves with him. His voice sounded very much in “sur” and definitely better than Vishal and Shekhar, but of course none can get the Kishore Kumar feel to this song. He then sang another Pancham number “Dekha Na Hai Re”, the crowd remained standing. He then sang “Are diwanon” from Don and “Rang Barse”, and one other number I can’t remember. He ended his spell with a bizarre Rhumba piece where he kept on doing “ooh”, “aah” on Rhumba beats played by the band (it sounded real this time). It was a bad experiment I think, and by this time the crowd had cooled off and took their seats.

Then came Madhuri and she looked absolutely gorgeous - as beautiful as ever. She danced to the original tracks of ek do tin, dhak dhak, choli ke peeche. The soundtracks of these songs sounded a bit unprepared for the high decibel large hall environment and frankly sounded very dated. Madhuri’s presence and dance more than compensated for this. The song of “Aaja Nachle” was a welcome break from the 90s tracks. The crowd was not as excited to see Madhuri as I thought they will.

The show went downhill from here. I think by now they had increased the volume and I could hear it cracking up. What followed was a “tribute to amitabh” with song and dance by each member of the team. More old songs were played at top volume.

Vishal and Shekhar reappeared and then went on with some of their recent tracks form Bachna Ai Haseeno and Om Shanti Om. Once again their singing was atrocious, the live orchestra (if at all it was live) was cacophonous, and the mixing was utterly mindless. These two guys single-handedly butchered what was left of the rest of the show. I feel bad for them because they seemed to show a lot of energy, sweating and all, and Vishal was even barking at the audience to standup. I also feel bad for the guys in front seats because I think some of them probably went deaf. I think I would have liked this part if I were badly drunk.

Then there was a section on each region of India with Priety finally dancing to “Bhumro” - I just love this song and she did well. Aish and Madhuri danced to Dola re Dola - by now the high volume was becoming unbearable. Then ritesh danced to “dekha jo tujhe yaar” - so called Marathi music which is actually stolen from some Arabic number by who else - Pritam Ji. By the end of this section, I couldn’t take the sound anymore and had to prepare to run off to protect myself and my family. I was also worried about the traffic. Amitabh Bachan reappeared after the boring recorded voice again grumbled his praises for 15 minutes. This time he did some film dialogs. I got the hell out of there when he was doing Silsila.

Overall, I think I enjoyed the first half of the show. Like Hindi movies, this show also needs some editing - 2.5 hrs will be optimal. It also desperately needs a good sound engineer. Just blasting the speakers with pre recorded music is not the kind of live show I was looking for. Only thing that looked live was the dance troupe and Vishal and Shekhar and to a lesser extent Madhuri.

Everybody else were just banking on their presence. These guys are not performing artists and it clearly shows - you go there to just see them. If you went there to see them perform, you will be disappointed. Vishal Shekhar were a complete letdown. Only live music that sounded good was the couple of songs that Amitabh did.

I had spent 30 bucks to see a Indian Ocean show last year and watched them lot closer in a lot smaller auditorium. And boy did they do good - their show was far memorable than this “Unforgettable” show! The only bollywood show I am waiting for now is a Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy show - hope they make it.

Remember the good old days of Web 1.0? There was no Myspace, Blogspot or Wikipedia at that time, but there was Angelfire, Geocities and a large number of student pages in university websites hosting tons of information. They were the ones who made Internet what it is today. Each “webmaster” as they were called those days would display his or her best creative work. It was a world of mostly static web-pages with animated gifs, cheesy backgrounds and low resolution images with liberal use of “Under Construction” banners. Then came Java.

When Java arrived, the term Java and Applet seemed interchangeable and for some time it seemed Java was only meant for creating cool applets to be hosted in browser, pretty much where Flex/Flash is today. In fact applet is what made Java a household name to begin with. Very soon a number of interesting applets sprouted up, adding the right amount of dynamism to the colorful websites. There were a number of scientific applets demonstrating algorithms, evolution, etc. Then there were chat applets popularized by the so called “portals”. Then there were applets with scrolling news (kind of like mashups of today’s world) and applets to do some special jazzy graphics effects on images. At one point Applets were everywhere. I don’t know when it really started, but over the years applet started phasing out from the web and actually many developers now consider them a no-no for web-pages. So what happened? How did applet lose it’s lustre?

Who killed Applet 1.0?

Microsoft

By keeping on bundling an antiquated version of JVM with Internet Explorer. This version wouldn’t run any applet developed with latest java version - no swing, no collections. This is a big handicap for developers. If Microsoft had stopped shipping it’s JVM, more people would have downloaded the latest Sun plug-ins, thus keeping their browser’s up-to-date. Look at Flash, how come most people have the latest version?

Sun

The one thing Sun should have tried in it’s ever popular battles with Microsoft should have been to stop them from shipping that JVM, instead they fought for the opposite which IMO was really stupid. Sun also didn’t make much attempt in tying up with Dell and other PC manufacturers to bundle the latest Sun Java plug-in. Meanwhile, Sun’s focus shifted from Applets to enterprise server side computing - EJB, JMS, and what not. I think the plug-ins were not very well thought out and particularly didn’t handle first time install in a user friendly manner. Not to mention the huge size of the install, breaking backward compatibility and popping up meaningless error messages. In an environment where many desktop apps are moving to web and Google Docs, Maps YouTube, and Meebo are catching up like wild fire, Sun is going to regret it. Flash and AJAX are miles ahead in user adoption (not technology). Also the security folks in Sun went overboard and introduced self-defeating sandbox rules and crazy messages like “Warning Applet Window” and all other assorted security messages that do nothing but scare the users more than mortgage refinance and on-line casino pop-up ads.

Developers

Developers didn’t make it any easier by writing apps that started breaking with newer JVMs, and not taking the time to fix the apps. Also many of these apps were not smart enough to guide the users to install the plug-in when it was not pre-installed in the browser.

System Administrators

Believe it or not, many companies still mandate the use of Microsoft JVM in IE and make it impossible for employees to use a plug-in. This makes it difficult for developers to create applets unless they are keen on writing there own Table and Tree component in AWT ;-).

Applet 2.0

Ok, what has happened has happened. As a developer of Java and Swing apps, I know that it is probably the richest development platform available. You can do anything in Java - there’s an API for everything. Java is open source; there are awesome open source IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans (which is great for Wysiwyg GUI design); thousands of open source utilities are written in Java; Java has a huge developer base. So why not leverage all this and build on it rather than reinventing the wheel with Flex and AJAX. Once you get over the gloss of Flex, you will realize that except for the XML layout, it doesn’t make life any simpler than Swing. And AJAX is really pushing the limits of a scripting language that was put together for simple scripting needs.

So what can be done? To help us get started, Sun JDK 1.6 plugin is significantly better than previous ones and thanks god Microsoft has decided to phase out it’s JVM. Also more people now use broadband thus significantly minimize the bandwidth issues with applet downloads. A few things that comes to my mind (feel free to add):

1. Create a Applet 2.0 showcase

I am going to keep updating this page with links to cool new applets. If you find one or have developed one, let me know. The more cooler applets we create, the more incentives there will be for people to download the plug-in. Also developers can gain more confidence in the viability of applets by looking at the cool pages. The Sun page is good, but IMO overtly downplays the power of applets.

2. Request to sun

Can we compile our code to a single file of some sort (like swf) instead listing out all the jars. This is a good start. Also please carry on the good work you have been doing lately with the plug-in. Please work with the PC and browser makers to always bundle the latest-plugins and have a means for automatic updates. Make swing prettier out of the box, and please remove the unnecessary messages like “Warning Applet Window”. Also let’s have XUL and please don’t hype up something like Java FX that any developer can see through and know that it is no silver bullet. Guys you have your Silverlight/Flash in Applets, so just build on that.

I do sincerely hope that when desktop like applications are getting more and more prominent in web, the technology that started it all doesn’t fall behind for no good reason. Heck, Java had a JMF video player back in 1997. So why is it that everyone is going ga ga over the Flash player that Youtube and others use? So c’mon people, let’s bring on the Applet 2.0 revolution.

From the moment I received a call from Viral Marketman, Google’s product marketing manager, I was frantically contemplating what the secret press conference is about. Today I was blindfolded and taken to a top secret location where the announcement was made. Folks, hold your breath - Google has released Google Listen (Beta), a music player that will directly compete with IPod!

“Today, we have taken another big step towards organizing the world’s information,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in front of a choosen audience of 1000 press reporters. When asked about how Google is going to provide content for the new player, Eric said “We are in the process of converting all the music in the world into gmp3, Google’s new music compression format”. “gmp3 will make it extremely easy for listeners to find music of their taste,” Eric added.

Google plans to make all the songs freely downloadable. “We believe that obscurity, not record sales, is the no. 1 problem faced by artists today. By making the songs freely accessible, we are doing a great service to the artists,” Google’s Founder Larry Page responded when a few reporters raised copyright concerns. “This is a perfect example of fair use as per the US Copyright Laws”, said David Drummond, Google’s Attorney. “Artists always have the option to opt-out using our simple five page form,” Larry added. Artists who don’t see their music in Google’s database can upload their songs using the soon to be released Google Base.

Google Listen (Beta) will be available by invitation only. Interested users can initiate the invitation process by giving out their own cell phone number, and the cell phone numbers of five friends. “We have carefully installed a invitation process to keep pirates away from our gmp3 music files,” said Sergy Brin, Google’s other founder. After giving the cell phone numbers , users will be required to send in a home video of themselves dancing to and singing “I Love Google”. By doing this, the users give Google the right to display the videos in Google Video. Meanwhile, a Ebay user named GoogleRepresentative has started auctioning invitations.

Omid Kordestani, Google’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development, explained the business model behind Google Listen (Beta). “We will have paid voice advertisements played whenever a user attempts to play a song”. To this, Larry Page added: “The advertisements will only be good advertisements. An antenna installed in each music player will track the location of the user at all times and help us deliver highly targetted ads”. Larry and Omid brushed off questions about privacy.

Google Listen (Beta) is released as a Beta now. “The BETA logo is designed to be peelable by the user, and we will let them know when to peel it off,” explained Sergey. Steve Jobs in a statement to the press welcomed fresh competition from Google. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer followed with a press release announcing a new music player gadget for Microsoft Live. “We will have a music player for our users by early 2019, and users will be able to download music through Microsoft Live,” he said. He further added: “I also want to take the opportunity to reiterate that I have never thrown a chair in my life”.

With the Iraq occupation drying up resources, the police force is now forced to cut budgets and send more and more of it’s members to Iraq. Milwaukee alone has experienced a 36% increase in crime rate. In a desparate attempt to control crime, the mayor of Milwaukee Kathy Drumbell approaches S Ramdaroga, CEO of Toota Consultancy Services, India’s top outsourcing services outfit:

“Hello Madam, what can I do for you”
“Ramdaroga, Humare state mein dunga fusaad bahut badh gaya hai, humein aapki madad chahiye”
“Parwah Illah Madam, We have highly qualified candidates from prestigious Indian School of Security Servicess - ISSS”
“ISSS? Humne toh yeh naam kabhi suna nahin”
“Err..Don’t worry madam, our people are very well trained and our services are CMM 555 and ISO 420 certified!”
“Bahut acha, Bahut acha, How much is it going to cost?”
“We are very cheap madam, 100 dollars per man hour”
“100 dollars! you kidding me? Hum log to gareeb hain, itney paise nahin dey saktey”
“Okay Okay, 50 dollars a dozen”
“Done”

Venkateswara Murugan is on his first assignment as Assistant Speed Analyst on I-90 in a white Ford Crown Victoria equipped with the latest electronic police gadgets, talking to Amma using the satellite phone.

“Hello Amma, me Ventateswara amma, how are you, are you able to hear me?”
“Yello, Ventkataswara, entiappa, i am able to hear you loud and clear. How are you, how is your new job?”
“Excellent Amma, talking from free phone amma, client has also given me big free car amma - twice the size of ambassador”
“Are you eating well?”
“Yes amma, today Janaki packed me some idli and kondipoddy, and I am drinking some homemade filter coffee rignt now!”

Just then a speeding black Mercedes with steel rims zooms past and makes the radar go crazy.

“One minute Amma…Aiyyo, I just got my driving license in the 4th attempt..I haven’t even seen Niagara falls yet..and if I don’t go for it, they will send me back”

So he pulls himself together and presses on the gas pedal with all his might. His car wriggles like a snake everytime he changes lanes, but, He manages to catch up with the unsuspecting Mercedes which pulls over. Mr Venkat brakes and falls an inch short of hitting the Mercedes. He comes out wiping the sweat on the back of his neck and feeling proud of himself.

“Sir, I think..like..you are like..I mean, basically speeding”
“Yo..check this out man..”, says the driver looking back to his passengers. “Whass going on man? You out of your mind? Take that blue light off your cab Indian”
“No sir, you don’t understand, I am like..you know..”
“So you’re what..mobile seven eleven?”
“I am Officer Venkat sir, can I take a look at your goggles, Sir”
“No kidding man, show me your badge first”
“Here..”
“This is serious man, here you go”
“Ray-ban! What’s it worth?”
“don’t know, some 200 dollars”
“hey hey..200 dollars..that’s 8000 rupees..can I have it?”
“sure keep it man..whatever..we have some grass too..want some?”
“No sir, In our country only cows eat grass..Thank You..come again”

Gather.com came to limelight from nowhere, thanks to Boston Globe and then tech.memeorandum. It is a shame that what stood out was the 7M dollar investment and the 23 people they employed - not the website or the concept itself.

So what is new in Gather.com? Nothing. Boston Globe hailed the advertisement revenue sharing as if it is the greatest invention since the light bulb. In reality, this is a shoddy little plan to make a few bucks from other people’s content. I can always add advertisements to my blogspot or wordpress blog and retain all of the revenue . Not only that, these services also allow me to modify the look of my page any which way I want. Just compare my blogspot blog to my gather profile. The later looks horrible with all the junk on the left and right. There is no easy way to upload images and the WYSIWIG editor they have is lame. One of the buttons in the top of WYSIWIG editor shows the licence given to gather.com by some third-party provider. This shows that even with 7m in investment these guys could not even buy let alone create a decent WYSIWIG wrapper.

It hurts to see how some influential people are able to raise so much money and employ a big team to deliver software without any consideration for the user, and still manage to feature in Boston Globe. At the same time, there are many entrepreneurs writing their heart out through software, giving everything to the end users, and still struggling for acceptance from press and VCs. Well, the world is not a fair place and this is no exception.