School days

Many moons ago, when I was still flirting with GW Basic et al in school, we had a computer teacher; who would always come up with what we used to call "crazy" problems. I don't think most of her students had enough brain powers then; to write those programs (and I doubt, most of them; including myself; have the requisite brain powers even now)! One problem which always has bugged me is this:
Given a positive integer, find the series of lower integers which add up to it. Here's an example:
assume the given positive integer is 5, so the series of lower integers will be:

• 1+1+1+1+1
• 1+1+1+2
• 1+1+3
• 4+1
  
• 2+2+1
• 3+2
  
• 1+4

IIRC, none of her students were able to solve this problem, and I don't think it was even possible in GW Basic, cause most of the series problems generally require recursion (maybe, you can implement recursion in Basic using labels and Go To). Now, that I do know quite a few languages which allow recursions and have more brain powers, I still haven't been able to solve this problem (granted; I never really spent too much time on it). Anyway, I'll take the lazy way out and see if anyone reading this is interested enough in taking this as his/her weekend project.

Of butterflies and flowers...

Off-late, I have started taking interest in a bit of gardening and the butterflies that frequent the nectar-flowers; maybe I have just too much of spare time at hands! The baby butterflies seem to have a liking to the purple Zinnia flower, I can almost always see 3-4 butterflies munching on it. The bigger yellow butterflies love a red flower (I don't know the name of the flower plant) that blooms daily and the marsh marigolds. The more colored ones seem to like the Crepe Jasmine, though they don't stay/sit on it for too long. I also read somewhere that butterflies like the Hibiscus family's flowers, but even though I have 3 Hibiscus family plants; I don't see any butterfly sit on its flower for too long.
Maybe, I should plant a lilac (butterfly bush) to attract more and more but then it's gonna be winters soon, so all of 'em gonna disappear anyway.

Joke of the day

Once, there was a competition between the police departments of all countries to find out which country's department is the most efficient, the deal was that each police dept goes to the forest and tries to catch a lion, whoever catches the lion in shortest period of time; is the most efficient department of all. First, it's russian police's turn; 2 officers go into the forest and return after 5 mins with a lion tied; everyone is impressed by their efficiency...many other police departments try their luck but none is able to beat the 5 minutes record set by the Russians. Finally, it's the turn of LAPD; LAPD's officers go into the forest in search of the lion; tournament officials wait for their return; first minutes,than hours pass by, but the LAPD officers don't return. The tournament officials start getting worried and they go into the forest in search of the officers, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Finally, they arrive at the scene where LAPD officers were beating a now half-dead bear; and shouting: "accept, you are lion!".
What's a joke, without any moral? Moral of the joke: You can't fit a square where a circle should be (not unless you are a policeman)! Guess, I would have learnt from this moral, but this has been my problem off-late, I am trying to push myself to start taking interest in things, which I know are not that important to me; trying to convince myself that this is the right thing to do, when I myself know that I am no policeman!

Junk Muzica

You know you have lotsa junk songs on your portable music player, when you delete few of them by mistake and don't remember which ones you deleted. This is what happened to me today, I wanted to delete a playlist which had around 10 songs from my Zune, so I clicked on the playlist in the Zune Player and hit the delete button; the player was "smart" enough to figure out that if you want to delete a playlist, you would also want to delete the songs that are in the playlist and without any confirmation or message of any sorts, it went ahead and even removed the songs from the Zune and also removed the playlist from both my system and the Zune. I still have those songs on my system, but I don't think; I'll be able to figure out which songs were those unless one day I feel like listening to a particular only find it gone missing. I really hate it when software try to outsmart the user, a good software in my mind, is a software which doesn't try to "out-think" the end-user and perform (unwanted) actions on his behalf!

The theory of reincarnation

Preamble: Most of this post is from the comments that I wrote on Sumit's review on the book "Coming Back: The Science of Reincarnation". Since, I kind of liked the comments that I wrote, I decided to string them together as a post.

The question that I asked was how do you define reincarnation, if soul and mind are indestructible, how can they be reincarnated (be born again)? Isn’t time and our three-dimensional linear perception of time (present, past and future) an illusion? Since there is no way to differentiate "past life (lives)" and "future life" without having a reference point of time to begin with, doesn’t the theory of reincarnation itself stand moot? Classical science is all about experimentation and observation in the space-time continuum and hence it can't explain something that is not bound by that. Re-incarnation or for that matter most of meta physics operate on the ketheric plane (a.k.a. the sahasrara/crown chakra or the higher mind) which is outside the physical body. The only thing that is destroyed with our linear perception of time is the physical plane that we live in(or the chakras that operate within our body), the point of reincarnation doesn’t even arise; you can’t reincarnate something which was never destroyed to begin with.

So then what is reincarnation? Reincarnation is the manifestation of the higher mind by (re)connecting with the lower mind (physical plane). Actually, the connection always happens the other way round, the lower mind has to (re)connect with the higher mind.
Reincarnation (based on above definition) in some form or the other does happen and we all go through it (it’s just that most of us don’t experience it as we are disconnected from our higher mind). Our life learnings (we are all here to learn) can be broken into two categories: 1) Growth, 2) Evolution.
We grow by learning something new everyday or learning the same thing in a new way, this learning lasts a lifetime and is associated with lower mind. But then, there are certain pieces of puzzle that we just can’t solve no matter how much we try, dots that we just can’t connect, wounds that we just can’t heal, this is the learning process of our higher mind and this is how our higher mind evolves and since the higher mind is not bound by space-time, it can obviously span lifetimes.

Trivia: astrologically, the evolution process is associated with the Moon’s Node (Rahu and Ketu). Looking at the moon’s node placement (by house and by sign) one can find the lessons that we need to learn in this life-time...more on that later.

as the hair fell down...

You know that you've long hair when strangers start looking at your not-so-old pictures and comment that you don't look the same, this has happened to me twice recently: once I was told by my old Apartment manager when I'd managed to lock myself out and then by a TSA agent. I indeed have quite long hair these days, it's been more than a year since I got them chopped; I don't know why I have been growing them though, perhaps one more of the silly things that I do so often.

Updated Blogroll

Here's the updated blogroll, ideally I should have it somewhere on the side-bar but the template that I use doesn't provide that much real-estate. I'll see if I can pin this post somewhere in the side bar. There are quite a few feeds that I don't read that often including BBC World News, Dilbert and Scoble Shared Items but they are there in case I've nothing better to do.

D or E, take your pick

At times we are confronted with choices, and we pick one of them based on which one is more aligned with where we want to go and our priorities. So, which one do you pick between D and E? What are D and E, first of all? They are two things which don't matter to us anyway, but we still have to make a choice, so it's like tossing a coin and taking a pick or coming up with crazy rationale and reasoning so that the choice that we make in the end makes some sense. I think, the most important factor in life is motivation, as long as we are motivated we would always want to grow, we would always want to explore the world around us, we would always want to learn something new, and unfortunately for past some time that's one thing that I've been lacking, maybe D or E were easy enough to choose between but since I just don't have any motivation left I don't care which one I pick.

Books of note

I've always been quite fond of reading and though it's been some time since I've read a book, a discussion with someone today got me talking about the books which have had some kind of influence on me, so here is the short list in no particular order:

• Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach
• Illusions by Richard Bach
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
• A Diary Of A Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray
• Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  
• Delhi Is Not Far (A Collection of Short Stories) By Ruskin Bond
• Best of O' Henry by O' Henry
• We, The Living by Ayn Rand
• Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  

I am currently reading Ivanhoe by Walter Scott (I've been trying to read that for past 2 months!), the to-read-next list contains Bhagvat Gita, Fountainhead among others. Any recommendations based on kind of stuff that I like reading (life philosophy, love stories et al)?

Oh, by the way I stumbled upon this quote on /. today, which I found to be quite funny:
The only person who got all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe!

Se A Vida É

How many times you come up with a situation where there's only one place in this entire world where you'd want to be at, one place which you would take anyday without even a thought, without even worrying about the other aspects and then one day you are asked to be at that place and you have to turn it down...because you just can't be there no matter how much you yearn for.
There are few things that are just way too painful but perhaps Se A Vida É (that's the way life is)...

Never trust a stranger...

Just learnt it the hard way today!

Comment of the day

Today Harvinder Pal Singh (aka Kishi) from MS posted his first blog entry on Port25 (MS Linux lab), the post was nothing great but the comment#2 by "Santa Singh" made me laugh & remember the good ol' Santa & Banta jokes :)

"re: Welcome to Kishi's Korner
Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:48 AM by Santa Singh
Paaji,

Oye....welcome to the netta!"

Anonymous blogging in corporate world?

The title of the post might sound paradoxical & I just want to touch on the same topic, should you be anonymously blogging about your job/company? NO! don't even think about it, if your company encourages blogging then blog publicly i.e. let your PR dept. know, or don't blog anything specific related to your company (remember a blog is just another website waiting to be discovered). I, for instance blog anonymously, that is no where on my profile or on my blogs you would find any explicity reference to the company I work for, the reason being most of the times I blog about my personal life and how much it sucks with some technical posts thrown in between, and I don't want my private life being discussed at work! You would never find any post on my blog which says how much my work sucks or how I waste away my time in the office by pretending that I'm working (PR dept.: if by any chance you're reading this post then don't take it literally, I am the most sincerest employee you could have ever imagined to find..hee hee). Secondly, there're are very few close friends/family members who even know that I blog (different story if they stumbled on it) and if you're one of those "acquaintances" who just stumbled on it, I would very much appreciate if you keep it to yourself.

bloglines down?

Is it just me who's experiencing issues with bloglines or is it universal? For most part of the day, bloglines hasn't shown me any new items at all, when I know for sure almost most have been updated. Oh, in case you're wondering what kinda feeds I subscribe to, you can view my blogroll here.

Moving on...

After a long and hard thought, I've decided to switch my job & I'll be joining KSC (Kuwait Oil Company) starting 15th of this month as a Technical Evangelist. I'll be moving to Ahmadi sometime end of this week subject to availability of tickets on Kuwait Airlines, what I really like about KSC is that they have a very open culture and they've got some real cool geeks working for them like Al Bashar Ul-Hussein, the father of CXA (Componentized Xml Architecture) and others. I got a mail from their HR on the 29th of Feb. and since then had 3 technical, 1 HR and 1 religious interview round (the religious round was more or less to ascertain whether you can survive in a Islamic country or not). My primary responisbility would be to help architecting & building the automation framework, which would automate the entire process of extracting oil from the wells to finally shipping them. Given that the TL on this project is Bashar himself, I am really excited to be part of such a team. Hopefully, my next post would be from Ahmadi itself....kuwait am coming!!

Sake and Sushi time

Today was my first attempt at Sake and Sushi and well I feel both of them are passable! I tried a hot kurosawa and a cold Mu with Salmon sushi on the sides, the Mu for sure reminded me of some sweet coconut water that I used to have once in a while when I was a kid. I'll have a Pinot Grigio over these anytime. Aside, if you haven't tried Ethiopian cuisine and are in vicinty of Washington D.C., you should give Zed's a shot, it's simply worth it.

the art of communication

Communication is a very funny thing and it can make or break almost anything, be it a sales pitch, a job interview or a relationship. It's not just about what you say but also how you say it and most of the times it really doesn't matter what you infact implied but how the "other person" understood it. Think about this statement: I want you to atleast meet me once before you go. What do you get from this statement? when I wrote it I meant that of all the things that I expect you to do before you go, meeting me once is one of them. Now let's rephrase the statement a little bit by playing around with the placement of the word "atleast", here's the reordered statement: I want you to meet me before you go atleast once. Whoa! the entire meaning of the statement changes dramatically, now it's like I want to meet you atleast once (or more) before you go : atleast that's what I meant before I wrote those statements.
Given that talking over the phone is one of the most prevalent forms of communication, where all you are spoken words to put your point across, it gives even more chance for the other person to read between the lines and make a completely other judgment. Perhaps this hazard is not so much in chat, e-mail where you have time to think twice and mostly words don't have to be im-promptu and also not so much of an issue when you are talking face to face where the other person & even you have the luxury of reading each other's facial expression. I feel it's imperative that while talking we don't hold back our doubts and try to get them cleared up by asking upright honest questions if we feel there is any scope for misunderstanding...most of the talks fall out more due to misunderstandings than all other reasons combined together.
I still remember what my brother used to told me long time back: communication is not what you say, it's what the other person makes out of it.

Code sample: success algorithm

a c# snippet:
//initialize the variables, experience effect is generally the same
int const experience = 1;
int success = int.MinValue();

while(success!=100){
//the chance factor is best left unhandled, also includes the time
int chance = Random.Next(1,100);
try{
effort = 99 - chance; //reduce the effort effect based on the chance factor
//experience can at times help you, at times go against you and times doesn't help at all!
success = effort + chance + Random.Next(1,-1)*experience;
}
catch{
//oops we blew up somewhere..try again
}
}
//we are done yippie, time to introspect...
wasItWorthIt();


so basically either you finally hit the wasItWorthIt stage or you hit a stack overflow exception, good luck :-)

DRM and Sony (suck)

For guys who are preachers of buying only "legal" music (including me) here's an interesting story about the DRM (Digital Rights Management) gone way too far, Sony-BMG have been marketing "Digitally Protected" CDs which restrict the number of times the CD can be ripped (ability to convert into mp3s or other digital format), though the fact that a CD is digitally protected is made evident on the jewel case, what they don't tell you is that putting the CD into the drive would also install a root-kit (a special kinda malware which uses some cloaking technique to hide itself from being listed in tools like task-explorer and windows explorer), not going into the nuances of what does that mean for the end-user it basically is one of the crappiest thing that could be done to a customer (if you are really interested in the nuances, check this link).
This particular action by Sony has made me lose all respect that I once had for Sony as being the "nice" company & from now on will definitely think twice before going for a Sony product!
Also, I feel DRM in it's current form itself has lot to improve on, if I am paying for some music I should be able to play it on all the devices that I have including my CD Player, computer(s), pocket pc, portable player and whereever else I want to play it as long as I am not illegally distributing it to others. Think about it this way the guys who use P2P clients to download music don't have any restrictions on copying the files around and generally get a much better bitrate (read audio quality) whereas people who use iTunes or any other DRM protected website to download music legally or pay for these new "Digitally-protected" CDs end up having to deal with all these restrictions. So to me it looks like the RIAA itself wants the music lover to use the P2P clients and other pirated way of getting music rather than going the legal channel and having malware installed on the system which can't even be removed!