Funny English!

Found this on the back of a DVD cover. Reproduced here verbatim including formatting:

Warning: Video-disc( include but do not be limited by the vocal cord) its copyright
of this the inside of DVDThe owner allows of only of you does family project to
all rights reserve the person reservesEverything is relevant all right, at not told lis
t to the utmost" private family put

Don't believe me? Here is a picture of the cover. It's out of focus.

All public offers are not IPOs

The Indian stock market is on a great bull run and IPOs are runaway successes. Naturally there is a tendency to disguise many forms of public offers as IPOs and mislead the investors. SEBI clearly distinguishes between IPO (Initial Public Offer) and FPO (Follow-on Public Offer). But still a significant number of news reporters and analysts refer to FPOs as IPOs. In some cases it is just ignorance of the difference between an IPO and FPO, but when the mistake is done by "interested parties" you are really not sure if it is ignorance or if it is deliberate.

Take the example of the recently completed follow-on public offer of Andhra Bank between Jan 16-20, 2006. Here is SEBI's press release categorizing this as an FPO. Now check out the number of news reports from leading news sources referring to this as IPO. Check out ICICIDirect.com's (an online stock broking company) stock research for Andhra Bank. Nowhere in the research does it mention that this stock is already listed and this is a follow-on offer. In the valuation section it does not compare the issue price band to the current quote for the listed stock. (If I'm looking at investing in an FPO shouldn't I compare the issue price with the current stock price?) An uninformed investor is lead to believe that this is an IPO. Ignorance or deliberate? You be the judge.

Bengalooru aka Bangalore

Bangalore is set to go back to it's original name of Bengalooru starting 1 Nov, 2006. That's going to start off a huge debate about whether this is necessary or not. I personally don't have any strong views on either side, but why only Bangalore? The popular reason quoted by the ay-sayers will be that of getting rid of the anglicization done during the colonial rule and going back to the cultural root. Without being specific to any culture or region, I'd argue that if you really want to change the name then change ALL the names. I don't think anybody has a convincing reason to justify why only select cities' names should be changed.

The ONE really useful application for the Office Paper Clip!

How many times have you written an email saying "see attached file" and then forgot to add the attachment, only to follow up with another email saying "Oops! forgot attachment, here it is"?

Well, this is probably the only time I wouldn't mind the Office Paper Clip to start dancing around on my screen saying "looks like you wanted to add an attachment, would you like some help?".

Keeranur's historical roots

My native place Keeranur (in between Dharapuram and Palani in Tamilnadu) is the subject of an article in The Hindu. The article talks about the history of Keechaganur, Where Bhima killed Keechaka and how today Keeranur sports a composite culture with tranquil co-existence of temples and mosques.

You can see a few pictures of Keeranur on this site. Adding more pictures to this category has been on my ToDo list for a long time, but somehow I haven't got around to it. Hopefully soon.

My claim to fame

I'm acknowledged in the Xerox Document Services Document Model position paper presented by my former colleague during The W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents.