Sibling Excess, a great article on Tehelka which takes a look at how the sibling rivalry between the Ambhani Brothers, Anil and Mukesh, has hurt no one, and how it has benefited both investors and India.

Who cares if the brothers are fighting, the markets are growing because the two are trying to outdo each other.
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram

Due to a small act by my mom, I have a great example of this turn around of the Reliance empire. So this is how the story goes. My grandfather, a freedom fighter and an INA soldier, used to get a substantial pension from both the Central Government of India, and Kerala State Government. Back in 1992, he was bedridden after suffering from a stroke, and my mom used to take care of him, and manage his pension. It was also the year I turned 18, and as an 18th birthday gift from my grandfather and her, she bought some Reliance stock in my name for Rs. 6000, which was money left over after expenses, from my grandfather’s pension.

A year and half back, when Reliance was split up between the two brothers, all those Reliance shares got converted into stocks for each of the companies created at the time of the split. Today, I still have those stocks, and they are worth over Rs. 86,000. That’s approximately an amazing 1300% gain, with most of the gain coming in just the last two years.

With India still growing economically, this sibling rivalry is no where from over, and there is still a lot more to come. So, as an experiment, I am going to hold on to my Reliance shares longer, and post it’s performance every few months.

Apple retail stores provide a very convenient feature by automatically emailing the invoice after a purchase from the store. Yesterday, this simple feature came to the rescue when an invoice was required for product warranty confirmation. My wife had recently purchased a pair of Bose Triport Headphones from the Apple retail store in Salt Lake City, Utah, and during our travel to Dubai, the cheap connector on the headphones came apart. Not what one would expect from a $192 pair of headphones, and so my wife was really pissed off.

Since she wanted the headphones for her trip back to US and the product was still under warranty, we decided to try the Bose service center in Dubai to see if they could provide a replacement connector. After a couple of calls, and callbacks, we finally found the Bose service center, which is located opposite Cars Garage in Dubai. So, yesterday we headed there, and the service technician was able to get us a replacement connector. However, without the invoice the connector was going to cost us about $16.

There was no way I was going to pay $16 for a connector still under warranty, so the quick thinking geek and miser in me, quickly spotted the pc at the service center, and once internet access was confirmed, I got on Gmail, did a search for the keyword “Apple”, downloaded the pdf invoice of the purchase, and walked out with the free connector. As simple as that, it felt great, and kudos to Apple for thinking up such a convenient feature.

Even though that ended great, the service center technician still had to print out the invoice, which I felt was unnecessary. I guess old habits die hard; the entire process could have been digital with a simple forward of the invoice from my email to the service centers email.

Web scraping is a very common process which constantly gathers content from web pages, and is then either put to good use as in search engines or bad uses, such as stealing content. It’s mostly a server side process, where bots and crawlers visit pages, parse content using various pattern matching, string comparison, and regular expression based techniques.

But today, with the popularity of JavaScript, flexible access to the DOM structure, and availability of libraries such as jQuery, page scraping can be approached differently, with less code, and less intrusively using JavaScript. So, I decided to give it a try, using a well structured site like Digg as an example, and build a page scrapper using JavaScript.

DiggStripper is the result of this experiment. The functionality is simple, it takes the Digg home page, traverses the DOM structure, and extracts stories, and builds a JSON object containing the extracted stories. Now, Digg does provide an API to access its information, so there is probably not much use for this page scraper, other than to serve as an example of page scrapping using JavaScript, or to get around any limits set by the Digg API.

The DiggStripper code is available as open source under MIT License, so feel free to download it, and do provide your feedback and ideas for taking it to levels I have not thought of yet.

My wife and I are finally out of freezing Salt Lake City for a month long vacation in warm Dubai to be with my parents. Having grown up mostly in Dubai, it has always been home to me, and a trip I always look forward to. Usually, I don’t blog much during my vacations, but this time, I am going to try and at least post some of the interesting experiences during my stay in Dubai. So, let me start off with:

The Journey

Ever since Emirates started the direct flights to Dubai from JFK, that has been our preferred route. The journey is still a long one, about 17 hours of flying time, but the on-board entertainment and service on Emirates are both great, and that helps kill time on such a long journey. There is plenty of time to kill and I usually spend most of that time observing and contemplating. So here are a few things I observed during this trip:

1. Boarding Passes: One thing that caught my attention this time, was the use of paper in the airline sector. From boarding passes to baggage tags to e-tickets, a lot of paper is used and most of it probably ends up in the landfill and not recycled. So, this made me wonder why we can’t come-up with a reusable solution to paper usage in the air travel domain, rather than the regular old disposable ideas.

2. Noise Cancellation: Planes are loud, and Bose QuietComfort noise cancellation headphones seems like a must have for a comfortable long haul flight. However, $350 for a pair of headphones just sounds like a stupid way to spend your money. So we ended up getting two sets of the lesser no noise cancellation Bose On-Ear headphones for $180 a piece. Still a stupid buy, but the sound quality and on ear comfort are priceless. But Bose has skimped on the connectors, and the connector from my wife’s headphone came off on the flight.

Here is an idea for Apple, noise cancellation built into ipods, now that would be the ultimate killer app.

3. Puma: When it comes to fashion, airports can sometimes give you an indication of current fashion trends. Apart from the regular fashion, there is always some kind of sporting brand which stands out, and this time it was Puma. From Puma shoes, to bags and other accessories, Puma is in right now. Pretty impressive for a company which was almost out of cash back in 1993. Amazing Apple like turn around by focusing on design, style, line and color.

5. Airports:

US airports have to be the most boring in the world. They are no architectural marvels like airports around the world, quiet filthy, old, and poorly designed. JFK International Terminal has to be one of the worst. The air train system is a joke, and so is the terminal, but the sparrows flying around and the bird droppings are a nice third world touch. What were the designers of this terminal thinking when they put the escalator going up on one side of the terminal and the one going down on the other end! They do however have very comfortable seating, nice hard concrete slabs! I wish I had taken more photos, but it’s New York, it’s an airport, I am an Indian, and so it’s not hard to imagine what might happen. I did manage to get a few quick shots of the elusive sparrows at JFK.

Client: Ladybug Cakes & Catering
Notes: