Ever since we moved to our new building near Carillon point, driving back home has always been a challenge, because of the traffic on 520. This evening was quite stressful as I drove to Sammamish where I live.

I am sure all of us have had those days when we pick the wrong lane on a clogged freeway, and get stuck behind a series of trucks that barely move. Today, that guy on 520 was me. As I sat there, steaming at my plight, I realized there was another way home from Carillon point in Kirkland, via Redmond downtown - not going through 520. But that seems longer, so is it really any faster.

Usually, I would have to wait till the next day to run this experiment myself, but I just now realized Google Maps has added this great feature that tells how much time should one expect to spend in traffic on a certain route.

So, I plugged in my start destination (Carillon point in Kirkland) and end destination (Redmond-Sammamish boundary), and looked at the route it produced. Rightfully so, it picked the 520 as the way to go, as shown below.



But what struck me was the information on the left, that told me that it is ~10 miles of drive that will take me 35 minutes to cover due to traffic - double the normal expected time. Very much what I had experienced.



So, to figure out how much time it would take to go via Redmond downtown, I used this concept Google maps has called draggable routes. Hovering over any part of the route provided me with a handle that I could drag to any other point I would like to put on my route, just like stretching an elastic rubber band. So, I dragged and pulled it as shown below, to force Rose Hill area to be on my way home.



The result was immediate:




25 minutes to go home, wow - nice! 10 minutes saved without having to spend an extra minute on the road. As a matter of fact, by further maneuvering the route and going through the internal roads, I shaved off another 3 minutes, making the ride back home 22 minutes long in traffic, compared to 18 minutes when no traffic. I was very pleased with myself.

And if you are like me, wondering why Google did not already tell you in the very beginning that the other route was better, and saved you all the extra legwork (pun intended), good point! The good news is that we built the Google driving directions right here in our Seattle offices - so it should be easy to find someone who can tell why.

One of the products that Google Seattle office works on is called Webmaster Central. It is a service that provides webmasters with a means to improve the quality level of their sites and do better in search results.

You can find out more about what this team does at http://www.google.com/webmasters.

However, what you cannot find out from that page is how much fun it is to be part of the team. And as you can tell from my bias, I am also a part of it!

Recently, when we all moved into our new Lake Washington Boulevard office in Kirkland, we held an contest to decorate our workspace. And, in pure Google style, anything people wanted was acceptable - so long it was legal and tasteful.

Here was the entry from the Webmaster Central team.


The picture doesn't do justice to the complete tropical theme accented by little GI Joes and action figures rappelling down the various structures, but was enough to win the competition.

As if having a fully stocked tiki bar right in the middle of your work space was not rewarding enough, the winning team had another surprise waiting for them. A ride to the nearby ice cream shop.



If it is worth doing, it is worth doing in style. Thats how this team rolls.

As I got ready to leave for India, I was wondering if I was packing enough warm clothes. This meant a quick Google search for weather in Delhi, Bangalore and Bombay, the three cities I will be visiting.

And then, out of curiosity I did a search for Seattle weather.

Yesterday, I was at a friend's place watching superbowl - and the only person in the crowd rooting for the Giants.

We all know how that ended.

Today, when people are thinking McCain has it nailed and Obama-Clinton is a head to head competition on super Tuesday, here are my predictions: Between Clinton and Obama, Obama will get >58% of the votes, and between Romney and McCain, McCain will get >54%.

Lets see how this turns out. Of course, this is based on the state of things as they are right now.. who knows what will take place between now and tomorrow, so I will try to revise my guesses tomorrow again.

My favorite Bollywood actor, Aamir Khan, has come out with a new movie. And if you know him, you know how rare that is - given that he does barely a movie a year. But the best part is that his movies are a delight.

But it seems there was something special this year. His new movie, Taare Zameen Par (Stars on earth), is his directorial debut as well. And judging by the reactions from the readers of his blog (another first - a Bollywood superstar writing a blog and reaching out to the masses), the movie is probably one of the best in a long time.

I am eager to go see it this weekend. Will post a review once I am done.

If you have seen the movie, let me know what you think.

If you wonder where all those WMDs in Iraq went, turns out they are being sold on Amazon.

Amazon has a Uranium-238 can for sale. And if you think that is funny, you should read the customer reviews that have been posted.

Now there is something George Bush can give the country for Christmas.

One of the benefits Google currently provides to its employees is a $5000 subsidy towards the purchase of a Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid.

If you got surprised, you should probably check out this article on various green loving initiatives by Google.

Anyway, back to the point. $5000 subsidy for buying a Prius.

If you know me, you know what I did. I bought a Prius. It just arrived night before last, and I am loving it so far. Not only the geek in me loves to watch the engine/electric motor switching dance, he also loves to adapt the driving dynamically to coerce the car into sipping even lesser gas.



Some of the things I love about this car so far:

• Higher mileage - duh!
• Smart key - I do not need to take the key out of my pocket for to unlock the car, or to start it and be on my way.
• Continuous variable transmission - sometimes reminds me of Kinetic Honda, but the overall performance is excellent, and start/stop/park are all at the press of buttons.
• The steering wheel has all the controls you need, even climate control and maps.
• GPS - once you have it, you need it.
• Bluetooth - so much easier now to make calls on the road. No echo of any kind. Atleast from where I sit :)
• MP3/WMA support - It has a 6 disc CD changer, and all 6 discs support MP3/WMA. This means that you can fit in 72 CDs worth of music, or 144 if you use WMA.
• iPod hookup - Since those 144 CDs are mostly useless music anyway, you can hookup your iPod to it.
• Turning radius and body profile - the car has an amazingly small turning radius and is smaller in body length, making it easy to get around, and park in tight spots. Of course there is fear of the car next door dinging it.

There are probably more - I will add as I think of them.

The coolest part was that I got a great deal on it with the dealer making just few hundred dollars on it (won't tell you, but can hook you up on the inside track if you want). Of course, they tried to take more out of me during the final paperwork.

They tried to sell me extended insurance, 7 yrs/70k miles for $2400. I negotiated back and forth, and came to 7yrs/100k miles for $2000. I then found out that the insurance provider was someone called 'National' and not 'Toyota'. I threw a fit and found out that Toyota is cheaper and I could have the same deal of 7 yrs/100k miles in $1800. I tried negotiating, and the guy said 'I will have to ask my manager' when I asked for $1600. Knowing its a charade, I told him to go ahead. While he was gone, I whipped out my blackberry and searched online for Prius extended warranty costs. Found on priuschat.com this same 7yrs/100k warranty selling for $990.

The poor guy's charade cost him a warranty sale. And I got away with a deal.

Nothing is more personal to you than your genes, and now there is a way for you to look through them without a degree in Molecular Biology. I was wasting time on the web this morning, when I ran into this site called 23andme. Turns out Google is an investor in this company.

Advances in genetics seem to have reached your neighborhood Costco. Now you can order a kit that arrives in the mail, you send back your saliva, they analyze your DNA from it and make it available for you on the internet.

Well, now what, you ask?

Once you have that, you can log into their site and read what they have to say about your genetics, explaining any physical traits or risks to certain diseases.

A sample view of such data:


You can also discover more about your ancestry and how it spans the globe.



It seems even Warren Buffet used their services to determine if he was related to Jimmy Buffet. And of course, you can use this data to rich up your inheritance tree.

Obviously, a very fascinating kind of data for anyone. But the question is, is it worth a thousand dollars.

I will be hanging out in Delhi and Bangalore in the first two weeks of Dec. If you live there, drop me a line and we can meet up.

One of the things I really like at Google is the general awareness and activism that engineers exhibit, and nothing can show it better than the current environment.

We already know how YouTube has been used as a means to open up the presidential debate to the whole country by allowing anyone anywhere to pose a question to the candidates. One of the things little known outside Google is that Google has invited all the presidential candidates one after another to come talk at Google and tell us how they will make America better starting in 2009.

Yesterday, it was Barak Obama's chance. And, he used this opportunity to unveil his innovation agenda, so it is worth watching.



Seems like Obama has all the right answers, even to the question "How would you sort 1 million 32 bit integers".

A few posts ago a reader complained about me writing a lot about Google on my blog, and that he or she did not come to my blog to hear about Google - but instead to hear my take on the Pakistani crisis.

So, here I go.

In my conspiracy-theoretic mind, the current crisis is a deliberate move on the part of our own White House.

Whenever analyzing the facts of a criminal event, one needs to look at the means, motive and opportunity to determine who is a suspect. And in this case, the only person who stands out is our own leadership... not just our president, but our top executives.

Here is why:

• Means: No one doubts that Bush has the means to make President Musharraf do what he want. After 9/11 we were able to turn the Musharraf against his own countrymen to the extent that there were multiple attempts on his life. Making him take over his own country by force is like asking Cheney to dig Alaska for oil. Not only it makes the White House a prime suspect in this case, it also absolves President Musharraf himself. Acting alone, Musharraf would not have the courage suspend individual liberty, something which America is actively preaching through out the middle east as the virtue worth preempting
  
• Motive: Both Musharraf and White House have motive to make this happen. Newsweek's Oct 29th issue proclaimed that Pakistan is currently the most dangerous nation in the world. For the west, of course. For Taliban and militants, it is a safe haven. Now, if such assertions are anywhere close to the truth, not only will President Musharraf want to get a handle on the situation through any way necessary, our own President would also like make 'Patriot's out of the individual Pakistanis. If we want to catch Bin Laden, it just stands to reason that every South Asian give up at least as much freedom as the Americans themselves.
• Opportunity: With the supreme court case, and the upheavel surrounding the return of prior leaders, and the elections, what better time to seize power? If all went well during elections and Pakistan returned to being a democracy imagine how difficult things would become for both the presidents. Both are used to getting their way, and working with a large group of people and bringing them to consensus on issues like support for Islam or hunt for terrorists/freedom fighters, would just be too tedious for them. And in their defense, neither of them can be expected to be used to the concept, given their own dubious use of the democratic elevator for their rise to power in their respective countries.

So, these days when I hear President Bush tell the news channels he has asked Musharraf to relinquish power as soon as possible, I can only imagine the wink wink that goes with that. But when Bush says he still stands by Musharraf, I realize he has to... some call it 'propping up', he calls it 'standing by'.

While I was in Vegas, I got interviewed by BlogTalkRadio about a variety of things, including Google, my personal blog, India etc.

Listen to the interview.

There are few things that have the ability to keep me up late at night, and tinkering with gadgets is surely one of them. Little did I know that the latest one I am buying is going to turn sleepless nights into a necessity.



So yesterday when the UPS box arrived with an EVA8000, I was ecstatic. The only thing that kept me from hooking it up right there and then was the pending Diwali celebration. Distributing all of my digital media from all computers in my house to all TVs in my house - add to that the ability to view YouTube videos, RSS feeds etc. all on my television, and the only thing that could stop me was the fact that wife's request for help with tidying up the place takes precedence.

But later at night, I did get a chance to get my hands on the box. And here are some highlights of the adventure:

• The box looked pretty sleek, and came with all the required hardware, batteries, cables etc. No skimping.
• The hookup was easy! Everything connected and switched on without a problem.
• The wired network refused to work. I have a gigabit ethernet network in my house, and I had tested it with my laptop before connecting the cable to the EVA8000. It refused to budge, and I assume it is its 10/100Mbps connection. My router is autosensing 10/100/1G type, but then it is also a DLink, and I would not be surprised if Netgear and DLink do not play well together.
• The wireless network worked without a problem. I needed the MAC filter to enable the device on my network, and it could be easily found on a sticker on the bottom.
• The device booted up and told me it needed a firmware upgrade. Of course, by all means, have at it, I told it. And it did.
• Once the firmware was upgraded, it told me to install software on the home media pc. I did so dutifully, and the two ends started talking to each other. This is where the issues started.
  
• The device refused to see all the various music and video files I had in one folder. It would show the folder as a listed share it would scan, but the scan operation itself resulted in no videos from that folder. I tried it again and again and nothing happened.
• Finally, I tried entering my Vista user name and password in the list of shares given in the setup, and tried scanning again. This time it worked!
• Now, a new problem - not all the files in all the folders were seen by the device.
• After rescanning the folders, and restarting the system, things got better.
• Now, we tried to watch a video file was sitting on my hard drive, and the system kept stopping every 5 minutes or so with an error message saying the file was either in invalid format or I did not have permissions.
• Luckily, just hitting play again remembered where the last stop was, and started playing from there.
• I tried the internet radio version, and found one station I liked. The thing worked flawlessly, and the sound quality was very good.
  
• At this point I thought let me try their YouTube support, so I went and searched for some songs I like.
• There was a list search options, but only supported search by user name or search by tags.
• Once I found the video I wanted to watch, I tried playing it and the screen went blank. But it soon came back as if it was done. Very surprising.
• At this point I started looking around and found this link on the Netgear forums that dared me to download a pre-QA internal binary from NetGear, and it might solve my problem.
• Thinking how worse could it get, I downloaded the fix, and tried again.
• It worked like a charm, and I am watching something right now.

The experience has been pretty rocky, but I enjoy it tremendously when it works. The above saga will continue after my YouTube tests.

Update:
After testing YouTube, I decided to troubleshoot the video stoppage issues. So, I went searching and found that NetGear has been continuously providing new beta versions of firmware for months, and they are supposed to fix many issues.

So, I went to the NetGear forum, singed up for beta, and upgraded my system to the latest version (2.0.119). Everything is working so far, so fairy tale continues.

I am headed for Vegas tomorrow. And surprising as it is, I will be back the day after...

If you know me, you must be wondering how come?! What will happen to all those suckers on the poker table. Who will take their money? Who will drink the free booze at craps table?

Well, some other time. Friday is Diwali, and while it is the night to gamble, gotta do it at home!

See you all Friday. And by the way, if you could not figure it out, all that craps about me winning at poker.. sarcasm.

As mentioned in the previous post, I just now bought a new iPod... an iPod touch. And as I look through my music collection for stuff I want to put on it, I came across this song sung beautifully by Lata - "Tumhe yaad karte karte".

The only problem - I did not know which movie it was from, or what the picturization was like. In the old days, it would not matter and I would just be content listening to the song.... but not in this day and age, when I expect Google to tell me everything.

So, I went to Google, searched for the song title as 'Tumhe Yaad Karte Karte', and viola... results from YouTube, including the video below.



Once I was done with the video, I thought, why not get the lyrics. Given how limited the amount of Hindi content on the web is, I did not expect much - but "Tumhe Yaad Karte Karte lyrics" returned something useful:
http://www.geetmanjusha.com/hindi/lyrics/english/556.html

This page still contains lyrics pretty much in English, as shown below:

tumhen yaad karate karate, jaayegee rain saaree
tum le gaye ho apane sang nind bhee humaaree

man hain ke jaa basaa hai, anajaan yek nagar me
kuchh khojataa hain paagal khoyee huyee dagar me
itane bade mahal me, ghabaraoo main bechaaree
tum le gaye ho apane sang nind bhee humaaree

birahaa kee is chitaa se, tum hee muze nikaalo
jo tum naa aa sako to, muze swapn mein bulaa lo
muze ayese mat jalaao, meree pareet hain kawaanree
tum le gaye ho apane sang nind bhee humaaree

So, how do we turn this into Hindi? All I did was turn on transliteration in Blogger, and here is what I got:

तुम्हें याद करते करते, जायेगी रैन सारी
तुम ले गए हो अपने संग नींद भी हमारी

मन हैं के जा बसा है, अनजान एक नगर मी
कुछ खोजता हैं पागल खोयी हुयी डगर मी
इतने बडे महल मी, घबराऊ मैं बेचारी
तुम ले गए हो अपने संग नींद भी हमारी

बिरहा की इस चिता से, तुम ही मुजे निकालो
जो तुम ना आ सको तो, मुजे स्वप्न में बुला लो
मुजे एसे मत जलाओ, मेरी परीत हैं कवान्री
तुम ले गए हो अपने संग नींद भी हमारी

Wow - that is damn good, for automatic transliteration!

To paraphrase a popular ad on the TV, 'can your search engine do that'? :)

A friend of my team mate send him this following story, which resonated with my earlier points about iPod.

This buddy of mine told me I could publish it on my blog, so here I go.

When the 4GB iPhone was reduced to $300 I decided to get it before supplies ran out.
I went home and went through the 10 minute activation process but was disappointed that I had to then wait for an email from Apple before my phone was ready to use. I searched over the web and saw countless stories of people who had to wait days for this to happen, but mine only took an hour. I charged up the batteries, installed the latest firmware, and was ready to go.

The first thing I noticed later that day was that the time was behind by about 30 minutes. (Yes, I was using the right timezone.) As I played with the iPhone I watched it magically race forward to the correct time. A fluke I guess. But the next day the same thing happened! Once you doubt the ability of a time-keeping device to keep time, it is forever untrustworthy. But still in my iPhone euphoria, I thought "no problem, I can go to http://time.gov to see what time it is - I do have 'the complete internet' after all." Taking Safari to that site was disappointing: it uses a Java applet to show the time, and Safari doesn't support it :( Turns out it doesn't support Flash either. So much for the complete internet.

Next I wanted to check my gmail. The built-in generic pop-based mail reader is a far cry from the gmail interface. Also, it downloads all your messages including those that have been filtered! So your "inbox" doesn't match the "inbox" that you expect. "No problem, I'll just go to gmail.com directly in Safari." Aside from having to zoom in very far to be able to accurately click something, this was much better. My first message was a phishing email from a Bank Of America scam. I clicked the special option in gmail of "mark as phishing" which pops up a "are you sure" window. In the iPhone browser this window is rendered incorrectly, and you can't close it because the buttons are visible to click! I had to close the browser to get out of this.

As excited as I was for owning the iPhone, I was disappointed that no one was calling me so I could test it out. As I found out a few days later, my iPhone is missing a useful feature: it doesn't ring for incoming calls! Lovely. Yes it shows a missed call, and no, I don't have it on vibrate. It turns out this is a bug that other unlucky iPhone owners have complained about online: when the phone autolocks (dimming down the display to save battery) it fails to ring even though it's supposed to. Yes, you can disable the autolock, but then the bright iPhone display drains a full battery in 12 hours.

A possibly related problem is that text and voice messages would sometimes take up to 2 hours to show up on my phone! I've never had more than a few minute delay with my old phone (also on Cingular) so I doubt it's the service. I use Google Calendar's SMS-reminder, so for me this was a show-stopper.

I returned the iPhone a week later (you only have 14 days to return it) with a 10% restocking fee.
Yes, I was probably just unlucky and got a bad iPhone. It is a pretty device that's fun to play with. But the fact that it even could be broken in these ways disturbed me. It just felt like there were too many layers of software in between my fingers and the hardware. Now I am in the market for a simple, high quality phone that "just works" :)

This guy should have done what I did - get an iPod touch... 16G for $400, and all the functionality, without the hassle of a phone.

Who could have imagined, but the richest man in the world is no longer Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet, or even Carlos Helu. It is a guy called Mukesh Ambani, the half owner of India's Reliance group of industries.

Economic times reports:

NEW DELHI: Billionaire Mukesh Ambani on Monday became the richest person in the world, surpassing American software czar Bill Gates, Mexican business tycoon Carlos Slim Helu and famous investment guru Warren Buffett, courtesy the bull run in the stock market.

Following a strong share price rally on in his three group companie, India's most valued firm Reliance Industries, Reliance Petroleum and Reliance Industrial Infrastructure Ltd, the net worth of Mukesh Ambani rose to $63.2 billion (Rs 2,49,108 crore).

In comparison, the net worth of both Gates and Slim is estimated to be slightly lower at around $62.29 billion each, with Slim leading among the two by a narrow margin.

Warren Buffett, earlier the third richest in the world, also dropped one position with a net worth of about 56 billion dollars.

Is this top spot an indication of India's booming economy? May be. Or it could be attributed to the falling American dollar!

If you have ever written a computer software, you know why this post is titled the way it is.

And for the uninitiated, writing Hello World! is the very first thing any computer programmer does when learning a new language. More on that from Wikipedia. And this being the first post on this blog, I had to follow the convention.

Now that we are past the title, lets focus on the content. This blog is mostly going to be about whatever catches my interest, most likely Google, Seattle, India and technology. And when I say Google, I specifically mean the Google office in Seattle area.

And if you are wondering, "Google? In Seattle?".. yes, in Seattle. Not one, not two, not three, but four different locations. Three in Kirkland and one in Fremont. But more on those later.

And last, but not the least - actually, probably the most important, this is a personal blog. This is not a Google blog, and all that I say here is my own opinion, not Google's.

So, finally I am getting around to blogging again.

The reason for the big hiatus was because I was waiting for things to come together such that I could start including more of my life at Google in my blog.

So, now that it is here, I will post more often.

Hopefully!