Chaos

If you haven’t seen or heard about the movie SAW, then you might not get exactly what i want to convey. But if you have, then you can totally understand what i am saying.

Let me start from the basics for the people who haven’t seen saw. This movie is basically a very cruel movie with a lot of gore, so it falls under the category of movies which either are liked very much or hated.

The basic idea of the movie is - A person is chosen, and put to some cruel test, something like [cruel]the victim is made unconscious and a key is planted into his eye surgically. The guy wakes up to find a metal encasement around his neck, its a metal encasement which is fit with spokes around the inside, which is also mashed up with a timer and a lock.The victim is provided with a knife. He has to use the knife to cut through his own eye and get the key planted in his eye. Use the key to open the lock and the trap around his neck, if he fails to do it, then the timer counts down two minutes and the metal trap around the neck smashes from both sides around his head, remember the spikes in the inside, so the victim dies.[/cruel]

Basically, the idea of the whole exercise is to make the victim realize that he has to be thankful for his life. Which if the victim passes the test, then he will be, for the rest of his life. If he doesn’t then he was never meant to be.

This is the idea of the movie - to make people realize that they have to be thankful for what they have got instead of cribbing around for what they don’t.

Now, this is just a movie with a crazy idea, but it actually showcases a very good point.

There was this recent earthquake in China, and it killed many many people.I came across this thought when i was just talking to my friend about the quake. The middle class people at least in the part of the world I live, earn all through their lives and most of them end up buying some good real estate, a house, most often. And just think about a quake, I mean the whole lives earning might be wiped out in a matter of few minutes.

No matter how much man has conquered in fields of science or technology, Man still remains so very vulnerable, at the mercy of nature.
This thought and the images of the recent calamity which are all over the media, just makes me feel what the movie saw was all about, being thankful for your life.

Its weird, tyranny and mercy,imagination and reality can produce the same feel, yet so true..

The Saw effect, The same thing, said all over in the paradise song, phil collins, now makes more sense.

Well, this is strictly only my perception.

Its not all in this genre,there are a few exceptions too.
Anyway, the commercial capitals, the places through which there are lots of business deals happening every min, lakhs and even crores of rupees transact often.
Yeah, I am not sure if you guess what i am speaking about, anyway these places are the temples of India.
Oh my god, there are a few temples,which are perhaps even richer than the BCCI hehehe.

I dont believe in god and perhaps this is the reason i can reap these so called anti but open thoughts.
Its a appaling situation, the people do a lot of bad things and i think this wouldn’t let them sleep peacefully, so they come down to the temples, which they believe can save them of their sins (but actually the temples are used to save people from their guilt).

What i don’t like about a few temples are that, they are hopelessly commercialized.
I just don’t understand the need, I mean even if i believed in god then, I wouldn’t want to go to a place where some thousands of millions of people . I would prefer going to a quieter place, a place more peaceful, where i can truly connect with god or my inner self.

But the temples with a business model,they have growth plans for the next 5 to 10 years, let me give you an example - This temple by all bounds has gone over par (a pure business)- There is a temple called the “Kotilinga temple” a little far from Bangalore .As any other business,you and your competitors do a fine job, but you can score over your competitor if you can differentiate yourself from them.
So this temple has an amazing idea to attract users, “koti” means a crore and “linga” means a form of god. As the name suggests, there are one crore idols one next to other, all in one place. Now, age old divine wisdom suggests, how many ever (gods)idols you see together, that measure directly translates into blessings.
Problem 1 - build user base - completed

Then, the investment, There is an initial investment, there are a few lakhs of idols that have been religiously installed and the rest are still to be installed. So here is a sort of a public offering, idols are priced at a few thousand rupees a piece and the user who wants an idol to be contributed by his name then he pays the amount.So thats how the business increases and money flows in.
Problem 2 - Investment - completed

How do I make money - Very important, there is going to be some amount of money which will be required to keep the temple running. Well these running costs in this particular temple (Kotilinga temple) are incurred by a modest fee for entrance into the temple(this made me feel like i was going to a muesum), a fee for buying a coconut(a custom of breaking open a coconut in the temple, this convention has been cashed) and a fee for breaking the coconut.
Problem 3 - Running costs - completed.

Now there is the problem of advertising, how do the users know that the idols are priced at xx INR and they can be purchased - well, after the normal formal course of events in teh temple, of praying, just before you go out of the temple, (This temple left me spell bound for this)the priest started to explain (something I had never seen before), the priest addresses the crowd gathered - there are so many idols that have been installed and the rest have to be done, if you are interested then you can contribute this amount of money. And one more, the priest comes and tells the gathering, the holy food given awayis blessed and it helps in curing diseases etc etc… long speech which ends with - is available at the counter at 10 INR a piece.
Problem 4 - Advertising - completed

This is just one of the temples-
It doesn’t end with the temples as corporations, even the people act as hypocrites -
They dont pray, they deal with god. I mean the normal conversation with god goes on like this - say its a student - “God, help me pass the examination, then…. i will fast for couple of days or … i will break 10 cocounuts for you”.
A business deal, Asking god to do his bit and then if you are satisfied then you will hold up your end of the deal.

Hopeless.

MotoRazr 2 V8. This phone is stunning by looks, by features etc in its league.
There is loads spoken about its appreciable s all over. Anyway I want to bring this one major disadvantage in the phone.
Its almost a flaw. Its perhaps a misinterpreted requirement.What ever…

You just cannot install any themes or skins(more widely used) onto the phone MotoRazr 2 V8 2gb. There are 3 themes that are provided by default and these are all that can be used.

Now this is a big disadvantage considering the fact that the display of the phone is so good and there cannot be any themes used on. All that can be done to customize the look of your phone is to change the wall paper.

Thats about the problem with the phone. But now lets explore the solutions to all these problems.

The curse or the Boon of internet - Every one wants everything on internet for free. Well this drives us to opening everything. Now phones.

Basically Motorola has a initiative of open source for its phones and I have seen the activity of these is pretty intense. There is everything available here - There are open source development forums, development projects, developer networks and even kernel packages for download of Motorola mobile phones like Razr 2, Rokr, etc etc etc - so many more.. all model specific.

There are projects that happen on open source development and these also have public releases of the developed products.
For instance, the Moto Razr 2 is a linux based phone using Java technology. There are different projects that are identified and tracked in this initiative. The projects are released to the public.

Now there are other means as well.
There are public forums which gives away the full flashes of Razr 2 V8. Flashes replace the whole of the phones current firmware and all personal data will be lost.
And Re-Flashes replace only a part of the current firmware and generally the personal data is backed up.

These of course are flashes which are re-done to improve the existing features. As in the above example, the flashes could accommodate the phone to install skins on to the Razr2 V8.

Simple. Isn’t it.
Long live the Geeks.

Apart from these, the future, there are initiatives which try creating the Open phones from scratch. They even let you design your own at openmoko
Of course there is the most heard about Open Handset Alliance Project - The Android. This is even put back the much awaited GPhone

Regular expressions are the simple and flexible method of identifying strings, characters, symbols, patterns of any combination of these. Regular expressions (abbr. REGEX) are instrumental in searching particular strings and patterns in text, they are used for simple validations.

For instance,client side validations, reduce greatly the overhead of the server side script to accommodate the handling of various types and forms of invalid inputs.And these expressions can be used in Perl, PHP, Java, .NET language or a multitude of other languages.

Lets consider a common example -
There is a textbox which has to accept a positive integer from the user. Essentially the input provided in by the user(accepted in the textbox) will have to be validated. So the code has to accommodate the conditions -
check if the input is a integer then check if the input is a integer is a value greater than zero, if any of this fails then user has to be prompted to provide a valid input. This would include, accepting the value from the user, posting to the server, execution of the server end code and then reporting bad input to the user if in case.

Instead Regular expressions check the validity of the input at client end and post the input to the server for further execution only if the input is valid.

Now, returning back to the simple example we choose, The REGEX to check for a positive integer is ^\d+$. ^ indicates the starting position and $ indicates the end.

Lets consider a name of a person. The REGEXfor this is ^[a-zA-Z”-’\s]{1,20}$.
A valid input to this would be ‘Pavan Kumar’ or ‘Tim O’Reilly’. This expression as you can see, allows a maximum of 20 characters, and allows both lower and upper case characters and also accommodate a special character in the name as shown in the sample name.

Now lets validate a password, (?!^[0-9]*$)(?!^[a-zA-Z]*$)^([a-zA-Z0-9]{8,10})$
This Validates a strong password. It must be between 8 and 10 characters, contain at least one digit and one alphabetic character, and must not contain special characters.
Its obvious that the password should be 8 to 10 characters long, and it should not include any special characters,besides the ‘*’ indicates the match of the preceding element once or many times. So the “(?!^[0-9]*$)” checks for at least one digit and “(?!^[a-zA-Z]*$)” checks for atleast one alphabet of upper or lower case.

Another simple example is ^\d+(\.\d\d)?$. This Validates a positive currency amount. If there is a decimal point, it requires 2 numeric characters after the decimal point. For example, 7.65 is valid but 3.1 is not.

other very commonly used expressions are email and url -
^([0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*@([0-9a-zA-Z][-\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z]\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,9})$
This validates a email address.I guess it can now be easily understood by examining the REGEX.
Similarly, ^(ht|f)tp(s?)\:\/\/[0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*(:(0-9)*)*(\/?)([a-zA-Z0-9\-\.\?\,\’\/\\\+&%\$#_]*)?$, This validates a url, A little bit of time invested then it is possible to formulate such REGEx, but general practice is that such common REGEX dont need time to be invested as google gives scores of such expressions if searched for.
Only if there is a specific purpose, then there would be formulation of REGEX to be done, Purposes like, Searching for a string or a pattern in a text, or matching for it, or even replacing them.

There are some websites which claim to be REGEX generators, This is one of the most popular REGEX generator (as they claim it), but i dont find them even close to what i would want from a actual REGEX generator.

All in all REGEX are very simple and flexible way of reducing a great amount of overhead in actual code.

Well, this is what i realized after the recent elections here in Bangalore. The state elections, to elect the government that will rule my state for the next 5 years, supposedly.

Now, Getting to the point, The political situation here is in the shitter.
The democracy allows people to vote and vote for any one they please. This and the number of candidates contesting, generally make sure none of the political contesting parties get an absolute majority.

So there are coalition governments formed - This means two parties which do not have a majority by themselves, pool in and work out a plan where the government is formed. Now this is something which is out of my bounds of explanation - a party essentially symbolizes an ideology, and people in the party join the party for the very reason that their ideology matches the ideology of the party.
Now If that is the case, then how the hell do two different parties, with a major differences in basic ideologies, suddenly mutually feel, may be the opponents ideas are not bad, lets join them.

Well, these coalition don’t last the term of 5 years and end result an election held every 2 or 3 years. That means more than half the hard earned money of you and me that we pay as taxes is going down the drain here for this cause.

Now the point why the coalition occurs, cant the people just decide who is better and collectively vote for them, OK, may be the choices were bad to the people but it cant be so ambiguous every time that the public misses to estimate the better at least.

Well, I always thought, perhaps this is due to the rural and illiterate population, which clearly don’t have the exposure to make right decisions and often get carried away by campaigning gimmicks.

But i was wrong, This election i just realized it and i was shocked.
The so called , silicon valley of India, the IT hub, which houses all the computer geeks who are considered to be super smart in aspects of logic and … a majority of this highly intellectual population cannot see the benefits of casting their vote.

And some intellects are so irresponsible, I have heard these, “I pressed the first button on the voting machine”, “I voted for the electric pole”(symbols of the parties to help identification better and easier)… etc etc… Believe me i have heard these by intellects, software engineers, totally educated and smart, exposure includes few abroad trips and … I just don’t know why.

Bangalore, the very urban city, city filled with these intellects, recorded an voting turn out of just 44%. Thats it. And I will give you the picture.

Say there are 100 people in the state,
and obviously there are not everyone included in the lists, may be some turned 18 just yesterday, and may other reasons, so lets say, 10 people are not included in the lists.
That leaves 90 voters.

An interesting Report published in Deccan heraldI quote from this article here below :

“I am concerned that a large number of names were added, but no deletions were made. The people of Karnataka seem to have taken a special drug that nobody has died… We have decided to scrap all the 33.48 lakh additions made in the draft voters’ list,”

These reports say so many bogus voter cases being identified, so by comparing those numbers, lemme say 10 are bogus voters(i strongly believe this is highly understated)
This leaves 80.

Now about 10 don’t stay in state at time of polls either permanently or temporarily.
This leaves 70.

20 stay at home, go on a hike, go away to their farm houses with friends as its a holiday.

As the polls show, 44% turn out of the listed - Roughly comes up to 40 voters who actually vote in population of 100.

Among these the ones that waste their vote, irresponsible voting, which aids no cause, say 10,
That makes 30 effective votes in 100.

Say modestly 3 contestants, votes divided among them, say as 12,10,8.

Democracy defines contestants with support of 10 and 8 votes combine, and this is the government elected by the people.
By the people -!!! 70% were indifferent, and out of the 30, in an example which is fairly right, about 18% is what counts and makes the majority.

The rest of the 70% comes into the picture only when there is a small family or friends gathering and the state politics is under discussion and all the 70% complain.
Whining.Losers.

Ahhh… Microsoft!! again!!!
They know that the majority of population has reached a point where if suddenly the sun rises and god says there will be no more .ppt, .xls and .doc , believe me the world will almost stop.
That is the way microsoft is ruling.

But well that day did come though. But in a little discounted fashion. Microsoft one fine day realized that the software that they were providing was not good enough (Yeah fair enough you have to improve with every version) but still, changing the file formats, which ‘Einstein’ came up with this idea.
doc became docx, xls became xlsx, ppt became ppx, mdb became accdb etc etc.

Come on. Its easy to say, you can convert the older files to the newer formats and its listed all over the place.But less spoken about the reverse of it.
There are hacks to make the newer versions convert to older ones, hacks which meddle with the registry to make a file formats work.

If you say why do you need the older formats and why not move on with the newer xml formats. Obvioulsy it seems better when microsoft lists down so many positives about the newer formats.

Now, apart from the normal problem which i am sure all would have already experienced, you make a presentation, and just before the presentation you realise that system you about to present on has an inferior version of office.Dooms day.
Now, thats a subtle problem, To get to the much irritating problems - Now the file format of microsoft access changed from .mdb to .accdb (.mdb is easily convertible to .accdb). Doesn’t sound so bad until, you realize that .accdb is not recognized by Microsoft visual studio 2005. If you have Visual Studio 2005 and you just upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007, and say you want to develop a small application involving both of them, then you are left with these options -

1. Buy Visual Studio 2008 - thats about US$799 only.
2. Forget about the $329.95(for the upgrade) you spent and revert back to the older version.
3. Use Adobe air.
4. Stop developing your applications.
5. Go pick a pirated copy of VS 2008. Now who’s responsible for this ??

There are websites which made use of this misfit. zamzar is one of them, popular for their online file format conversion, including converting the xml formats to the older formats of office.

Alls well that ends well, Microsoft wins, people must have got used to the newer formats by now.

Google has this very impressive Google maps. This is now being used in almost all the mashups being made today.

I still remember the days when Google came out with Google Earth. The satellite picture, We all were excited to search for our colleges,schools, homes in the satellite picture. And that was about it. But well from there on Google maps has gone a long way.

There are a lot of features that are added in the google maps, Its made a lot more interactive and you know, its there to see, It provides traffic updates, directions, places of interest, finding businesses and ofcourse the street view. For example - check out the street view of the Times square, New York - Click and drag on the image to navigate where u want to look and click on the arrows to walk along the road.

View Larger Map

Street view - This is the view of the place that you are looking for, as if you were walking on the road and looking around.It gives you the total 360 degree view.You can move along the road and look all around, you can even zoom in to have a closer look at the neighborhood you are currently but virtually in. Its amazing, It just leaves you wondering how the hell is this done. It gives you a almost real life experience.

Check this out if you want to know what all Google Street View can do, an easy intro by Google -

Now I couldn’t resist to find out how this works, I googled to find out how google street view works (Boy! googling about google… Google is owning me!! LOL), Its Fairly simple .

I stumbled upon this explanation of how Google street works,which gives a pretty convincing explanation on how the 360 degree view is photographed and formed , but according to which there is not much of technology involved but all of USA streets are photographed and is streamlined when asked for. Wooooah! Thousands of millions of square miles filmed

Now I am not sure how its done, but all i can do is admire this technology. What amazes me is that such amazing technology i available to me absolutely free. Mind Blowing.

Now coming to the Microsoft’s version of Google Maps , they call it the Live Search Maps.
You can see, that Microsoft has gotten even the live streaming of this now. Its slightly different though, This though in the preview stage, It gives you the option of walking in the street or drivng in a sports car or a race car.It gives you a split view of both the map,satellite view from the top and the street view. You can use the arrow keys, to navigate in the map which supposedly, gives you the live images of the corresponding position you are on the map. But you just see it through the windshield of your virtual car (including the live traffic). Wow! This is more impressive. How the Hell Can you do this now!! Though its just a preview now, available only in Seattle, WA and San Fransico, CA (city centers).

The Live Search Maps was launched in China in december 2007.

Technology!!! WOW!! For free!! Takes my breath away!! Congratulations To all the people who made these things.

Well, I know because i have been through it. My internet just broke down for a couple of days, And i was quite amazed at how badly i was dependent on internet.
Its not like an addiction to any drug that i would do anything to surf, but yeah i can assure, I come home, back from work, and I just dont know what to do. Life just seems to have stopped.

I mean, I have lost the habit of watching TV, except it is any sport - live or its just while having dinner or lunch. Well besides that i never watch TV, I listen to songs on computer or online, I watch any TV show or movie, i want to by stream-lining, I play games on computer and online. I barely do anything offline.

I do, I meet my friends,hang out and am back home, but the main time slot between say 12 and 3 (considering I have to wake up early to make it on time to work the next day :D), time slot between 12 and 3 suddenly seems endless. i cant sleep at 11 or 12, nor can i wake up doing nothing till 2 or 3.

Ah that was bad !! The tasks like playing music on my system, which generally is a secondary task, a task done in the background, suddenly became all that I had to do.

I tried to write something for my blog, so i could publish later, but then the slightest reference, hyperlinks… ahh again i cant even write if i dont have internet.
I Installed a game, Halo 1, thinknig that would keep me busy, but after playing and finishing Doom 3, Mafia, Call of duty 1,2,3, Half Life, Hit man, Thief. etc etc, playing Halo made me feel like I was fighting Hobbits.
I just had no clue what to do.

The Worst and most funniest part was, I was listening to songs and going through my old playlists, made me feel nostalgic , I remembered all the days when i had made these play lists, the songs i was crazy about then, And suddenly i began missing my friends !!! Cmon i felt like …. nevermind…
I miss my friends when my internet breaks down. Immediately, I am thinking am i that materialistic, i am a hypocrite then.
Ahhhh I just forced my self to sleep.

I was virtually living in the stone age -
In the stone age, men went to hunt, that was solely to earn food, and they were back in the caves or where-ever they lived and did nothing, because all their life was about surviving.
And me without the internet, I went to work, that was to earn my self food, and then i came back to where i lived and absolutely had nothing to do.

Just was begining to wonder if i was an internet addict. I took a few tests in the internet to find out if i was an internet addict and surprisingly i was not an internet addict, not even close to an addict. Seems like i have some purpose in time i spend on the internet and not just letting one site lead me to another blindly. (That was a couple of those stupid test’s verdict)

Now i am back, I mean My internet is back, so my life’s back on track.. hehe..
I hope, what I have written is more exaggeration than it actually is

Well, this is for the people who reside in the same place as me,Bangalore. Since i wanted to, i inquired and thought i will blog about it, perhaps it might help a few who want to.

OK its obvious you just can’t pick your gun and go out firing at will anywhere, if you didn’t know that, it is illegal

Getting to the point, The Karnataka State Rifle Association is responsible for all the shooting sports and civilian “GTA” tendencies and activities, in my city, infact my state.

The Karnataka State Rifle Association is situated at

No.782, 15th Cross,
J.P. Nagar, Phase I,
Bangalore - 560 078.
Tel.: 26635631 / 026 / 642

The ranges are situated at the Sports Authority of India (South) complex next to the Bangalore University grounds. K.S.R.A. has a 10 meter indoor range, a 50 meter outdoor range, a 25 meter outdoor range and a Trap and Skeet range. Well, more bookish data is published in the KSRA website.

Now, what is very important and which is not published in the website.

If you thought, ah!! nice day, lemme go and fire a few rounds today, then its not that easy.
The process is somewhat like, you first,

1. Go to the KSRA office, then you register and then i don’t think this part is mentioned in their website, but there is an almost endless wait (in order of few months i suppose) till you are given the Green for you to get to the next step in the procedure.

2. You need to get a police verification, Now this process involves your nearest police station should authenticate you to be a legitimate citizen with a interest for firearms and not a terrorist who wants to use government resources to practice and master his professional skills.
I hear this would cost you 3000 INR, well i presume there will be personal taxes extra

3. You have to go through an civilian arms training program.This is where you are giving basic training to make sure you dont go out there aiming at the target in the shooting range and blow your neighbors brains out by mistake (Perhaps Dick Cheny missed this part).
You are now almost qualified to do what you wanted do in the first place - ah!! nice day, lemme go and fire a few rounds today .

4. Now you will need a membership to use this shooting range. you can get a life time membership which i was told it about 5000 INR ( an old member told me this, and i am not sure about it, it could be more now). Or you can get some limited period memberships.

5.Ah the procedure ends, Now you can buy your own gun if you are rich enough, or you can use the ones they provide at the shooting range.

Now, if you think this is too elaborate a process, then you have two options,
1. Go to a place where the procedure is simpler
2. Or do what i did, This process is too time consuming and money consuming for a hobby or passtime activity, so i postponed this by a couple of years and now, i go swimming in my free time. hehe

happy shooting.!!!

Guns

Alright this will not be easily digested by you all(you referring to all employees),because you are satisfied,happy and think you have achieved it all, but, face it, the truth is different…

Lets take a Automobile factory, The lowest grade of job that directly involve with the final product are the workers. Now, lets draw the parallels to the IT sector, the same logic applied, the software engineers are the lowest grade on job that directly involve with the final product.

Now about the dreaded news for all software engineers, the job layoffs in all Companies.
This makes no sense - We hear about the sudden job lay offs of a few thousand employees, to incorporate the ominous profits gone down by a trifle due to the rupee strengthening or some reason of that sort. And let me remind you, the companies are not under loss but perhaps the profits fell from, say, 40% to 35%. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous!!!
Almost No other business provides such amounts of profits.

Worst part, they hire them back when they need!! The much worse part, the same employee will still consider himself lucky to be hired back after being thrown out.Beats me!!(Perhaps many other personal factors of the employees are the reason for this, well thats not the point of discussion now).

So essentially these companies consider the employees as “Tools of lowest possible self esteem”, which are put to use when necessary and abandoned other wise.

1000 jobs cut and you read the news, think for a second if you were the unlucky one, the thought scares, because you have small bits of constant income and you spend it like wise, you have all the necessities and luxuaries you want, but perhaps own only a small percent of each. Ownership for all due a few years,when you pay all your installments.The thought of loosing job scares and a minute later, you are back to what you do best - ‘adjust and ignore’.

Do u think its possible to throw out so many employees all of a sudden in any factory of other sector (for eg the automobile factory here) just because the company doesn’t want to compromise profits.

Its impossible.. because they have worker unions, any injustice and company is pinned down till it feels the pinch.

Why don’t software sector have any organizations like that. Why can’t there be some sort of procedures or guidelines that the company has to follow before taking a step like that.

For what is happening now…I dont want to blame the MNCs because they are all capitalistic entities which exist in the market to cease every opportunity of making money.

Neither can I assume the plight of the employees who humbly render services but are ever vulnerable.

The companies have to be rational and the employees are weak. Just seems to work out that way. No one to blame.