But if you want to know your PAN number, you just go here: https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/knowpan/knowpan.do - and then enter just your Last Name and Date of Birth??!!

Heaven help you if you share your last name with someone else who was also born on the same day. My friend in India just got a different pan number on the site than on his physical PAN Card!

Not sure if the PAN number in India can be misused as much as the Social Security Number here in the U.S., but this site is just an open invitation to trouble-makers.

[Update: It gets better! Turns out it's quite easy to hack into any person's online tax-filing account.]

10 years, four employers, numerous clients, a software boom, a software bust, a little bit of Microsoft-hating, Java-loving, Microsoft-loving, Java-hating, Ruby-On-Rails-loving … if you think Software Engineering is just all about riding the next big wave (until the next big wave comes along), then you think right.

Meanwhile the more things change, the more they truly remain the same. My application server still spits out stack-traces expecting me to understand hundreds of lines of exceptions to figure out why it failed when it should have told me in plain English. Software still fails to work when you most expect it to (and worse, it sometimes works when you are confident it shouldn’t). Service-Oriented-Architecture, or SOA, is DOA. Amazon is still the only company that understands website-usability.

And, oh, real flesh-and-blood people are still needed to write software. Guess I’ll be shifting 0s and 1s around just a little while longer!

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
[Via KK]

Indra Nooyi recalls her father advising her to always “Assume Positive Intent“:

Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different. When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.

While not every piece of advice in this article is earth-shattering, some have indeed dramatically changed the lives of the recipient. For example, Larry Page’s adviser at Stanford University told him to “pursue the study of the link-structure of the web” and look where it got him.

Which ones did you like?

Well here are a few searches that recently brought people to this site …

1. “Temple in SPB Colony“
2. “Translation of Ninaithu”
3. “pronounce Narayanan“

I don’t want to mess with this kind of success in drawing the masses to this site, so look forward to more inane, keyword-poor posts in the near future!

Oh, and a new experiment begins.

But not today.

Because today is Customer Appreciation Day.

The store clerk continued to stare at my signed receipt. At first I thought there was something wrong with my signature - had this girl noticed how subtly it had changed over the years and no longer resembled the one on the card? What had been my initial and full first name now resembled the markings made by a chicken scratching away at the sand (so beautifully and succinctly described in Tamil as “kozhi-kirukkal”). But no, it wasn’t that - it was something more serious.

It was the first bead of sweat slowly trickling down the clerk’s forehead that gave it away: She was trying to pronounce my name.

“Mr. Na … Naaaryaa … Mr. Nnnnaa ….”

Heaven praise the person who came up the idea that store clerks should address customers by name on Customer Appreciation Day.

“Mr. Narayaaaaa …”

She was getting desperate and was looking around for any help she could get but the other clerks were fighting their own battles (”Mr. Venkatasuuuuu….”, “Mr. Gopa …” . If those were really the names I was almost sure they were, then Good Luck getting them right! I thought)

“Sir … Pra Praaaash ….” My first name was not of much help either ….

There were already more than ten people behind me now and one look at their ethnicities told me this was not my clerk’s day. By now her sweaty palms had rendered my receipt to an undecipherable mass of pulp and she was close to tears. I decided I had had enough fun for the day.

“Just call me Mr. N”, I said gleefully as I scraped the remains of the receipt off her hand and raced for the exit.

Only another month for the next Customer Appreciation Day.

I can’t wait!

Erez Lieberman, a specialist in evolutionary maths at Harvard University did a little research into this.

Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.

He was even able to quantify his findings with an approximate mathematical rule: “The half-life of irregular verbs is proportional to the square root of their frequency”!

How ‘holp’ became ‘helped’ (Nature)

english language, past tense