24 hrs of non-internet bewilderness

Due to heavy rains (37 inches) in mumbai in the past 24 hrs, most of the mumbai based ISPs were unable to provide internet services yesterday.
Sitting in office for the whole day without internet can be frustating to a software engineer. It is days like this when you get to know how much connectivity and networking the internet has bought in our lives. Bill Payments, Bank transactions, giving and taking tech/non-tech consultancy to friends, and college style timepass in case one is getting bored :-).

I have not yet been able to write a post on the merits/de-merits of messenger and my take on it getting banned in software companies, but just to think how many phone calls it saves me everyday and how it non-intrusively works as a phone, voice mail, sms service alongwith capabilities of virtual meetings, discussions ... non-intrusive being the keyword, it certainly brings lots of buisness value to a software company.
Just to counter the point that messenger decreases employee productivity, think how much productivity is lost when you are in a meeting and the phone rings every minute. Cause phones are intrusive, there is no way out but to pick them even if they are low priority.
Of course there are downsides, but that is analogous to the dialogue by Om Puri in Maachis "maachis ki tili, khana bhi paka sakti hai aur ghar bhi jala sakti hai"

internet in its full form is a necessity in today's world and some company cannot simply take it away from an employee on security/bandwidth or "employee productivity" concerns.

Firefox market share up to 10%

Triumph of the Open Source :) ... While most open source software has been confined to the geeks till now, this killer app is actually reaching the masses. After all, its not everyday that a M$ product loses its 10% market share to an opensource freeware.

Good Trip, New Place

The vacations are over. It had been a long time since I last went for an outing. These have been pretty good vacations in that respect.

Its seriously amazing to see the what all people can do for religion here. 12 km uphill and another 12 km back, >24hrs continuous, no sleep and people > 60 yrs doing all this stuff that even young trekkers will think once before stepping into. Anyways, it was lot of fun with beautiful landscapes to view enroute and full satisfaction of getting mata's darshan.

To complete the change, I joined the new office today. Its pretty interesting working in a place like this, with employees number in single digit. Its a completely different experience and I feel that life is going to change a lot in next few months.

Time for Change

Its time for another career move. I remember more than an year ago when I was looking for a change, I had this huge discussion with a HR manager who thought that I do not really like to stick with a company for long. At that time, looking for a 3rd change in 2 years, I really couldn't blame her for thinking like that. My arguement at that point of time was that getting into the industry in a time when US and India were facing their biggest slump, I really didn't have much choice but to stick with whatever I had.

Today, getting prepared for my 4th change, my track record can still make any HR manager raise the same questions. However, I have hopes that the kind of profile I have been looking for all these years is finally coming along.
I have never been more optimistic and I hope things go as I want this time.

Tomorrow would be my last day in this office and then I would be off the technical world for a week. A 16km up the hill trip to Vaishno Devi awaits me next weekend and a new office after that.

Copy -> Brain -> Paste

People say that all that software engineers do is "Copy Paste". Here's a real life example why the Brain component is important.
I once wrote a code to get some data and cache it to make second time retrieval faster. Here's what the code for retrieval looked like that I wrote:

public ShowDetail getShowDesc(String territoryId,String showId) {
HashMap cmap = (HashMap)cache.get("somekey");
if(cmap==null) {
cmap = new HashMap();
}
ShowDetail showDesc = (ShowDetail) cmap.get(showId);
if(showDesc == null) {
logger.debug(showId+" not found in Cache ... Getting from Webservice");
showDesc = pwm.getShowDetail(territoryId,showId);
if(showDesc != null) {
cmap.put(showId,showDesc);
cache.put("somekey",cmap);
}
}
return showDesc;
}

Basically checking if the data exists in cache, if not, getting it from webservice and putting in cache.
Another fella needed to reuse the entire code (translation: copy paste everything). He probably didn't understand the concept of cache, or probably he did understand but didn't want to use it. Whatever be the case, here's the code that finally came out:

public ShowDetail getShowDesc(String territoryId,String showId) {
HashMap cmap = null;
if(cmap==null) {
cmap = new HashMap();
}
ShowDetail showDesc = (ShowDetail) cmap.get(showId);
if(showDesc == null) {
log.debug(showId+" not found in Cache ... Getting from Webservice");
showDesc = pwm.getShowDetail(territoryId,showId);
}
return showDesc;
}

The first 2 lines itself are amusing enough for starters. I used to laugh on such things some time back, but it not funny anymore.

Bunti aur Babli

Yeh world hai na world, isme do tarah ke log hote hai. Ek jo bunti aur babli ek hi baar dekhte hai aur dusre jo bunti aur babli ek se jyada baar dekhte hai. Hum dusro main se hai.

I enjoyed it more the second time. Why ? Because I knew by that time that movie is pure comedy and even the supposedly thrilling sequences are also comedy.
The movie doesn't get boring even for a minute. If I break the movie into infinite parts of infinitesimal frames and rate each frame, each of them will get atleast a "decent" rating.

The weak part? Lack of details. The movie has too many cases due to which each case doesn't get enough details for viewer to understand how exactly they did it. This also made me wonder why do they become so popular by interval that every newspaper is publishing their news. The cases lacks the certain spark to distinguish them from ordinary thugs.
Secondly, the lack of thrills. bunti and babli do not actually live on the edge. Even though Big B himself is behind them, their life is pretty easy most of the time. Wasn't really expected.

However, its being a long long time since I saw "housefull" in the theatres in jaipur and all three bunti, babli and DCP dasrath deserve the credit for their fine performances.

Echoing my thoughts

What is more important? Writing well or conveying thoughts. People who write well get all the laurels but the purpose here is the the latter, hence I would simply point to this post and say that I couldn't agree more.

I remember a question asked to me in an interview when I was a fresher. He asked "Why do you want to be a software engineer?"
I answered "Because I like Computer Science, or mathematics in general. I like it because it has straightforward equations for every scenario, not dependent on physical or environmental factors. Things are much more clear and reliable in that sense."
He responded "That seems untrue as one never knows when a piece of code will break while a building once made lasts for more than 100 years."
My reasoning "Code only behave the way it is written. It cannot behave in any other way depending upon the heat or coolness of the weather or simply because its not in the mood."