What should I feel?


Last day of citizens as India has been a day of mixed feelings. I found out that it would cost us 147$(really want to know who and how that number was decided) to renounce our passports. Congratulations from Australian friends, wife emotional of renouncing Indian citizenship. It made me wonder how come I cannot relate to what my wife is feeling. As I asked my daughter, if she understands what it means to be either Australian or Indian on an application form, she said aren't we Australians, I thought we were, we live here. When I explained to her what all these borders and citizenship means, she consoled her mum by saying, its not like we cannot go to India, we will just be called Australians. I am not trying to play Lebron James trick after watching south park(hahahhahah). I am really not sure whether I should be congratulated or condoled. If you are congratulated, that means it's some kind of accomplishment. If you get condolence then its a loss. Which one is it? What am i suppose to do?(tell kids I am not a role model, can't stop laughing) Not listen to my conscience and accept that having Australian passport will let me into 166 countries without visa? When having Indian passport, even 3rd world countries like Malaysia want to suck 100$ for visa from you! Should I feel bad supporting Australia when they play India on boxing day test? If there is a war between India and Australia whom should I support? Is War even a solution for any problem? even if it is, shouldn't I support the most Humane cause of it? regardless of which country I am citizen of. I have expressed my opinions about naturalisation long time ago. As the classic goes, you can't choose your parent's but you can choose your friends. Slightly modified, you can't choose the country you are born, but you sure will get an opportunity to choose one to be citizen of(If you don't, you are shit out of luck). This one is just about the feelings at the cusp of jana gaṇa mana to advance Australia fair.

What an Irony

In the last couple of weeks, whenever I read news about Indians protesting against corruption in India on British soil, I have found it very funny. The reason I find it funny is because, loooong time ago Britishers whipped Indian asses for protesting against British Bullying in India(on our own soil mind you…). Now Indians are protesting against corruption in India on British soil. Am I the only one who finds this irony funny.

I also have been thinking about something for which I would have to cop lot of flak from Indians(hahaha). Can British government stop Indians from doing this protest??? Well if I start thinking like a British citizen, I would want it to be stopped. Regardless of how peaceful and great this protest is, my tax money is being spent (police, nuisance to traffic etc.) on something that is not beneficial to my country. I cant think of any protest that is analogous to this one to compare to. What I failed to figure out (after lots of searches and reading about freedom of speech in British constitution) was, Is there anything in British constitution to stop Indians from doing this protest?

• Can British Government tell these people to fly to India and then protest?
• Can a British citizen get a stay order from court of law on these protests citing his countries tax money being wasted??

Leave your feedback if you find anything in the British Constitution :-)

INDIA vs PAKISTAN WORLD CUP 2011!!!
NOT JUST A GAME

Is semifinals between India and Pakistan just a game of cricket? Hell NO!!! People who can't relate to sports rivalry can at least relate to some of the facts mentioned below.

1. Mughal's plundered India from 1526-1858 (do the math)

2. Killed millions of Hindu's and raped equal number of woman.

3. Promised soldiers virgins for Hindu heads they brought back from war.Will run out of paper if I have to mention all the atrocities.

How is this all related to Pakistan ?

The Mughal dynasty was established by able Muslim rulers who came from the present day Uzbekistan. Pakistan is a country where majority of the people are Muslims. Aggression (good/bad) comes from their ancestors/religion.

Post Independence facts

1. War of 1947: First Kashmir War. Nehru fucker ran to UN and we ended up creating LOC

2. War of 1965: Caused by operation Gibraltar. Infiltration into Kashmir

3. War of 1971: Nothing to do with Kashmir for a change

4. Kargil 1999: Again infiltration into Kashmir.

With such a rich history between us (I have not even mentioned terrorist attacks), if we say its just a game then we are fuckin fooling ourselves. India had its last chance to loose, against Australia. "Loose" is not a word until Thursday morning. Fuckers (players playing the game) better play as if your life rides on this game.

2 things i would not let my players do(if i was captain/coach)

1. Meet/talk to family or friends:

Reason: They might ask the inevitable stupid question "how do you feel, are you Nervous?"

Of course, even Tendulkar will be nervous... Let them deal with it, no need to answer that question before the game. Its a question to answer after they win the game.

2. Watch/read News:

Reason: It will get to your head. Specially stupid stuff like Sanjay Manjrekar had to say, India is a much better team than Pakistan. STFU moron. Pakistan already know, they have nothing to loose. No one gave them a chance, now they are in semis. If players read such stuff (they might be thinking that way already, if they are, they will loose), it will get to their head.

Complacency is Suicidal. Be Humble and beat the hell out of them.

GOOD LUCK TO INDIA !!!!!!!

Decisions that affect our children

This is about an event that occurred in 1988/89. My mother was working for federal government. In India federal government employees are transferred to different states/suburbs to keep the diversified culture(I guess). One of such decisions affected my mum and I believe changed our(bro and me) life significantly. My mother had 3 choices;

1. Quit her job

2. Take us with her

3. Leave us behind and do Monday to Friday (as lot of consultants do)

Option 1: This was out of question as she was blessed with a husband who had drinking and gambling problem (double whammy). If she chose this we would probably starve to death or would have pushed my dad towards responsibility.

Option 2: She did not like this as the place she was transferred to was very small (smaller than Hassan) and no good schools around.

Naturally she chose option 3, leaving behind a 13 and 15 (my bro) year old kids to manage themselves with a drunkard.

This was the time in our life we learnt heaps (good and bad) but changed us for ever. Before this happened, I was academically very good (at least for that small town). Most teachers (i have had) were dick heads as they did not have the ability to understand children appropriately nor were they skilled for the job (I think i have a blog post about the kind of things i have experienced). I did fare well by my own effort. Proof of how good i was academically, when i graduated from engineering school, one of the guys who was competing (trying to keep up to me) with me during my good years, graduated with 2nd Rank (2nd best in the University).

I did not like going to school as teachers were morons, I did not want to come back home after school as we had to cook and clean. My dad would happily sit and drinking when I was cooking (my bro had dish washing responsibility). This was the time I lost interest in everything. My mum would come back on Friday evenings and hardly had time to ask us how we were coping with the change.I don't blame her, she was fighting with the government to get back to our home town . She could see that academically I was getting worse and lots of complaints from my school (more than usual hahahaha). It took 2 years for the government to understand how we were affected. As far as I am concerned, damage had been done.

Am I using this as an excuse for not doing well, academically? FUCK NO. I stand by my mums decision. In her position, I would have done the same. Its easier to complain or think about options in hind sight. If Gandhi was not around, may be we would have got freedom much earlier. I think, since Gandhi was less risky choice, we did not support Bhagat Singh or Subash Chandra Bose. We had enough population to piss and drown Britishers (I think).

The reason I wanted to pen this down is to remind myself that once we have kids, decisions we take is just not about us. Decisions we take during the formative years of our children are extremely important, however big or small they are.

K

YOW Melbourne roundup

Recap of YOW 2010 in Melbourne.

I will write about 2 things here, Conference Organisation and Talks

Conference Organisation:

Organisation of the conference was pretty decent except for the food. Food was shit as (Oz slang learnt from my daughter). They served up same shit all the days. I thought may be for vegetarians it was like that and asked couple of my carnivorous friends, they could not wait for the conference to finish so that they can have decent lunch. I always tell my daughter "Human beings will kill themselves because of their greed" (I have googled, That saying is mine). They charge 3000$ per person for the workshops and conference. Even if they spend 50$/day/person, it is 200$/person. I fail to understand what stops them from doing that!!!

Talks:

Exploring NoSQL by Erick Meijer:

He talked about this NoSQL movement and renamed it as coSQL. He proved using category theory that NoSQL databases are a dual of RDBMS. Awesome flow in the talk. I dropped out of a boring session and had coffee with him, very nice guy.

Tomato Meter:Do not Miss (if you are going to Brisbane one)

Integration tests are a scam by Rainsberger:

Very nicely presented. Showed how Integration tests are evil as they are slow and brittle. Showed how to solve the issue by writing contract tests using mocks.

Tomato Meter: Attend

Rails in large:

My Expectation:

Most people doubt ruby on rails as a sustainable choice for large applications and the speaker was to prove that wrong as they had built a large application using ruby on rails.

What it was:

I knew the speaker personally and was aware of his speaking skills. He presents really well but the content was not up to the mark. It felt like he was asked to use the name of the company he works for, a million times. He started of talking about how people doubt ruby on rails, but later it was about how much time it took for their tests to run in their builds, project manager finding a service to deliver coffee so that developers didn't have to waste time, company pairs on everything blah blah blah. Not once it was mentioned, what was the scale of the application that they built. Number of concurrent users, data size something... come on very disappointing.

Tomato meter: OK (if you want to learn how to make your tests fast in ruby/rails land)

Emergent design:

My Expectation:

New spin on BDUF vs Evolutionary design.

What it was:

How writing tests will help in better design (like ron jeffries solved sudoku writing tests). Used finding perfect-numbers as an example to show how writing tests will help in design. Code was written in java and later in groovy (hahaha). I was wondering wish he chose as functional language, it would be list comprehension and a reduce call.

Tomato meter: Not worth attending

Worst

The State of the Art .NET, 12 months of things to learn:

My Expectation:

To know what's happening in Microsoft world.

What it was:

Worst talk I have attended in my life. Slides and slides of links and names to follow on twitter, that summarises the talk. In the end few slides of tools and technologies.

Tomato meter: Should be removed from the conference

Things I walked out after 5 minutes:

100K transactions with 1ms latency, Restful Applications, Building distributed applications google way, Erjang etc..

Problem with these talks were that, they did not offer anything more than what you cant find by googling or reading documentation. Some of the speakers were so fuckin boring, they read out the slides which had xml in them. I understand they are not paid to present in these conferences, but nobody forced you to talk either (I hope).

Conclusion: Catchup with speakers in the hallway and quiz them about things you are interested, that will be the best take away.

Predict who is drunk using tweets

I have never blogged (to my knowledge) without something controversial before. This one is nothing like what i have written before.

For the last couple of weeks i have been playing with the idea of identifying if some on is drunk based on their tweets.

I started of with below thinking process.

Some one jumps on a site and says i want to monitor twitter id A.

We will gather tweets from that person every hour/time slice and basically analyze as below

1. Remove acronyms/#tags

2. Find number of spelling mistakes (using standard distance algorithms)

3. Find number of swear words (need to build some dictionary of swear words, not that hard :-))

4. Remember number of spelling mistakes and swear words/time slice.

5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 every hour/time slice

Say at about 10 PM in the night the person tracking twitter id A asks, is A drunk? Based on the trends in mistakes and swear words, predict if that person is drunk or not.

Sounds funny but could be useful. I even thought about revenue stream, connecting this to cab services who can push notifications to those twitter ids about being safe and not driving.

All for a social cause :-)

Addendum: Pitfalls of mobile keyboard dynamics that are hurdles for this project

• auto-correction
• typing while angry or tired
• typing while talking to someone
• last but not the least copy-paste

K

I am Scared!!!

I will be starting a new job this Monday and for the first time in my life I am scared. I have changed jobs umpteen number of times in my 15 year illustrious career (shortest duration with an employer is 1 week). With so much job changing experience on my back why am I scared? Below are the things that I will be loosing from Monday.

1. I have been working for a startup with 4 people since 3 years. I am not used to seeing more than 4 colleagues in a Day.
2. I had the freedom of working when I wanted, where I wanted.
3. I have not attended a single meeting since 3 years (demos to customer not included).
4. Not reported to anyone.
5. Other than some customers (read as IBM) and our CEO, I never had to deal with any idiots.
6. Since a year I have not commuted. I have been working from home(wfh) most of the days. I used to go to city on Fridays so that I could have beer with some friends.
7. When you wfh you get things like, you don't have to get out of your Jamis (Pyjamas), Going to Gym at 11 in the morning, volunteer work at kids school, cooking something nice for my daughter before she comes home etc.

From Monday the opposite of all those points will be true....(except 5, crossed fingers). I had an envious job till date but good things don't last longer. I am shit scared and excited for my new adventure.