Have a happy weekend

The Diwali is over. Everyone is getting back to the 5-working-days-a-week mode.

It is highlighted in the news that the whole Chennai is marooned in water. Especially people in Velachery are suffering too much for the second year in a row.

Anyway, its weekend. Have a great time.

Exceptional Paintings

I came across this site from reddit. He is a Polish artist. Though I couldn't make out all the expressions in his paintings, I feel the color composition is exceptional. Have a look at them.

New blog started for technology

It made sense to separate the personal expressions from what I want to speak about technology. The result is this blog. Hence I would be posting only non-technical issues in this blog, and urge you to follow the other blog for technology related musings.

Thank you.

Beyond Java - Review by Joel Spolsky

There is a review by Joel Spolsky about the book Beyond Java by Bruce Tate.

Here is what I feel about all the hoopla about Java. Java is an exceptionallly designed language. While designing Java, the crew has taken the lessons-learnt from earlier languages into consideration and made sure that the traps and pit-falls have been addressed, if not all at least the most significant ones.

But ...

It doesn't matter how powerful the tool is. A person can still make least use of it. And much worse he can abuse it! Thats one of the things happening in Java community.

Class bloat - the scariest things that I can ever think of. I am sure there is so much of code that is redundent and repeated. For solving simple problems people write class after class.
Don't care attitude about objects - most of the people are least bothered about the number of objects created in heap, since the onus is not in their part but the GC's part to recollect unused memory.

Most of the Java programming community that I find around me lack insight (no offense intended!). Especially the ones who didn't like C/C++ and ran away, and the ones who never had a prior programming experience at the system level in Unix/Windows. They find it extremely difficult to visualize what happens when one million objects are created in heap and never used. Or the threading model of the underlying operating system. Or what is exactly meant by a resource handle (file descriptor, or socket id, etc.)

And most important thing that I find amongst the growing programming community (not just Java community) today is lack of theoretical knowledge. For e.g. in India, the number of programmers coming from non-computer science background is on the increase. But how many of them show interest and take time to read a fundamental computer science book on Algorithms?

I believe it will be a good thing if Design and Analysis of Algorithms is made as a mandatory course for all the Engineering and Science students.

The Hacker's Diet

The Hacker's Diet is an excellent book by the founder of Autodesk software, John Walker. This is not a technical book but on how to lose weight. Quite interesting. Start reading here.

What is permalink?

I recently observed that many sites, especially ones with dynamic content in their home page that would change over a period of time, have something called permalink appearing under the content. Here is what a permalink is.

Permalink is a shortened version of "permanent link." In case of sites like blogs, news, etc. the location of the content gets moved here and there. For e.g. on the day it appears, it is placed in the home page, but after a period of time it gets moved to archive. This creates a problem who refer to the content using the parent URL. To circumvent this problem, when the content is created itself, its given a URL ("link") which wouldn't change over a period of time. And using this link, you can refer to the content anytime you want.

Henceforth, when you forward any URLs, make sure you forward the permalink if one is present. This way one will not be surprised by some irrelevant content when they click on the link after a long time.

There is a good article about permalink here.

Where did they move the atheist videos?

In case you had been watching my blog for sometime now, I added a blog "The Atheist Tapes - Steven Weinberg." Recently I found out that the interview has been removed from YouTube and nowhere I could find any reference to that interview :-(

I don't know why and when that video was removed from YouTube. In case anyone of you come across that link, please do let me know.

Code Search Tools

There is much discussion going on about code search tools. Predominanty people talk about Google's code search solution. You can access this tool here.

There is also another company called www.koders.com that has silently released a tool for code search. I would say in all aspects the koders' solution is as good as Google's. But I am not sure if koders' one is better! I feel that koders should be working on one such tool for quite sometime now and their tool should be a little better. But thats only "how I feel."

If anyone of you have come across any quantitative/qualitative comparison between these two code search tools, please drop me a word.

Its Friday the 13th

Oops! Sounds demonic ;-)

I stumbled upon a website called PayPerPost.com. Its truly a brilliant idea. The funda goes like this. This site connects bloggers with advertisers. Each blogger creats an account with this site, and so does the advertiser.

The advertiser wants blogger(s) to write about their website, product, books, blogs, etc. and they bid money on each requirement. This is officially called as an "opportunity". The blogger picks-up the right opportunity that he feels he can blog about, and creates a blog.

The ground rules (when I am writing this) is very simple: the blog should be alive for 90 days or more and it must attract at least 20 comments. If these conditions are met, the PayPerPost pays the blogger money through his PayPal account.

I guess PayPerPost takes a cut from both advertiser as well as the blogger. Not sure though!

McGruff the Crime Dog is online

A bunch of public and private companies have come together to launch a campaign called "Take a bite of cyber crime." The campaign is spoken through the mouth of McGruff the Crime Dog. It focuses on how cyber crime affects citizens and how to prevent it more effectively. As per the web site, last year alone we have lost $67 billion due to computer crimes. Sounds interesting? Read more about the campaign here.

Its good if ultimately someone gets benefited, though it looks like marketing gimmicks.

Device fingerprinting

I was thinking about this. How good and useful it would be to come up with something like device fingerprints. I am not talking about the IDs that everyone says should be fused into a device. There is a separate movement going on in that direction and also there is something called Electronic Product Code. One of the weak points with a serial number or anything that is externally assigned by a manufacturer to a device would be: the possibility of replication. For e.g. in case of ethernet cards, the manufacturer gives a unique identifier called MAC address to each of the card. But how difficult do you think it is to replicate a MAC address?

The missing link here is this: all the IDs are assigned externally by the manufacturers. And there is no place where the catelogue of "what the device is" and "what the device is assigned" is maintained.

A stronger form of identification would be to identify a device using "what it is" rahter than "what it is assigned."

Let us take an example. Let us say Company DMA manufactures a microprocessor with serial number XYZ. Assume that we have a fingerprinting mechanism in place. The newly manufactured microprocessor is subject to fingerprinting, and a fingerprint is taken and catalogued against XYZ serial number. When there is a dispute tomorrow, or there is a necessity to prove that the processor sold in Chennai with XYZ serial number is not genuine, all that you have to do is to take a fingerprint of the processor from Chennai. Verify this fingerprint against the one in the catelogue. Declare it to be genuine or duplicate.

Difficulty lies here: how will you take the fingerprint of the device in a non-intrusive way. i.e. if you wish to take the fingerprint of the microprocessor, you should remove it from the board. Can you fingerprint it without removing it from board?

Different devices might produce different sized fingerprints. Instead of storing the fingerprints, or comparing against the fingerprints, we can come up with something very similar to message digest.

Can we identify a factor or a composition of factors that would help us in fingerprinting an electronic device? Remember that this factor(s) shouldn't change over a period of time.

Sense of guilt

I happen to read one the monumental works of Manuel J. Smith recently. The book is titled "When I say no, I feel guilty." One of the key things that the book examines is this: most of the time people get their work done by making others feel guilty. I don't know how far it is true with you, but I have realized this a lot.

I have done my part of it as well.

The Reiser case

Most of you might be knowing Hans Reiser. He is the man behind the ReiserFS, which is supposed to be one of the fastest file systems ever designed. A charge has been filed against him by the Police Department of Oakland that he might have been involved in the missing of his wife. The police suspects that she could be dead by now and what started as a "find and rescue" mission has now been turned into a "find and recover" mission. More on this could be found here.

Evolving a model of everything

Since time immemorable, humans are in an eternal effort to evolve a model of everything that they observe. From Pythagoras to Plato to Aristotle to Newton to Einstein to whoever. Is it truly possible for us to evolve a complete model of even the simplest things? Let us take sun rise and sun set. I don't think its really possible to evolve a model of this seemingly simple thing.

From what we observe, we can come up with a model. But how do we prove that our model is complete? How do we prove that our model's predictions will exactly match the ones in future? Or that would match with what happend in the past?

Let me pose the question the other way: Our observing ability is so limited. If we evolve a model of anything using our limited observation, will it be complete?

The Atheist Tapes - Steven Weinberg

Jonathan Miller interviews famed physicist Steven Weinberg as part of the BBC's series The Athiest Tapes, the full interviews created for A Brief History of Disbelief.

How to teach

There are many ways of teaching people. One of the ways that I like and feel to be successful is called Socratic Method of Teaching. The method goes like this: teach by asking, not by telling. My addition to that: teach by asking sensible questions.

There is enough material on the internet to tell you more on this method. Particularly I find the following pages to be useful:
http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method

So many acronyms

I recently shifted job. Man ... I never knew that there are so many acronyms to hit upon. Approximately 25 new aronyms in the first two days. Initially I was bewildered to listen to people talking, not being able to make out much of it.

I realized we have to be a little creative when someone new comes to the team. I don't know if the same thing happened to people who joined my team in the past.

My firm belief is that if we make someone who joins our team to believe that things are really simple and the everyone in the team is in full control of whats happening, the new joinee feel comfortable and his learning pace would be a little faster. Because a cool mind learns faster than the one under pressure. Especially pressure of uncertainity as to what is lurking around the corner!

Appaadaa ...

You wouldn't believe ... I tried almost 10 different names for my blog. But all of them had already been used. Anyway ... Arivuppasi in Tamil means "knowledge hunger". I am planning to jot down all thougts, of course only the ones that I can make public ;-), here -- technical, philosophical, musings, etc. Hopefully you (and I) would find it interesting to read.