All sad that ends well....Part 2

Well today's my last day at Aztec.

I believe in the philosophy that To be smart, be with smart people.... this place is an overflowing cornucopia of geeks and ultrasmart people. Every single day in Aztec had been enjoyable (except the weekends). Learnt loads of stuff...
But now the time has come to move on....

I'll never forget Aztec for what it gave me... the experince was exhilerating... Now am going to name a few people who made Aztec a haven for my ficle, finicky soul.

Ramesh Sir: If you are a fan of Hermione Granger then you will surely like Ramesh S. There wasnt a topic under the sun that he didn't know about. Not a single technology or a peice of code that he has not worked on. He is a know it all... He is the greatest geek i've ever known( then R & D head is supposed to be :))
I really look up to him for everything... where ever i go, i will take the values he taught me. Sir u r the greatest.

Jyothi Ma'am: Well she was my first PM. She was surely what i call KEWL... She is the first lady who had the professional air around her in a no non sense way. And she was the first ( and till now only female) who knows loads more about computers than playing solitaire. She really helped me climbed the enoromous learning curve. Ma'am I'm really greatful to you.

Abhai Sir: Another cool guy from Kanpur :). What really shocked me is his carrer graph and the way he lead his life according to his own condition. I can really write loads about him.. but i guess that's personal. Hats off to u sir.

Rohit : Well when i joined Aztec he was the subject of all the talks... people used to look upon him as a God of Linux ( spiced it a bit Rohit ;)) . So since we shared a common passion towards Linux friendship was inevitable. We walked me through various technologies like blogging, rss, ajax, bloglines, delicious etc. He made my stay in Aztec really worthwhile. Cheerz to him.

All sad that ends well....Part 1

Well like all good things in life college life ended (B.E... although it will start soon but still...)
College was cool enough... despite S.J.C.I.T being a non descript college, not so hyped up as RV or PESIT, we learned loads of stuff... Forget technology.. we learned the value of friendship, relations and blah..blahh..
Well not to be boasting or anything.. i got the gold medal for topping in college :)
Am not a great book worm... but still i guess just knew how to play within the rules.
Well i got a new philosophy of life...Aim for things larger than life and you will get something which is 60% is what you wanted but is still good enough.

I always aimed for 95% + in first two years but always got app 85%. Then i aimed for a VTU rank.... way to much of a hope but still ended up topping the college.

Gee... I'm not complaining :-)

I hope I remain the same and do the same thing in Syracuse Univ... where i'll be going this fall.

Pray for me guys!!

Water Wonder...

So was just browsing through few links given by hack-a-day . I came across a particularly interesting site.

The setup you see above is to make a normal motor run on water. Of course the basic principle involved is breaking water into its constituent 2H+O but there's something new to it. Now there is no need to employ Browne's process to electrolytically breakdown water. The same can be done via a cheap metal alloy and salt water. Just add some alloy piece to the container containing salt water and voila!! we have hydrogen produced at an accelerating rate.
Sometimes i wonder why thigs like this dont get reported in Times.
There r plenty of new information i'd like to share but am too lazy to write everything down here... read the Water Karma. It is really worth reading.

Too Much....

We r going at break neck speed towards a so called technological utopia. But I have started to feel everything is meaningless and crappy.
Somehow we are just finding new problems to solve without solving the existing ones. I recently ran into a highly placed software professional who explained me how the whole process worked. Here is what he said :
"We are a service based company... We r paid to maintain a code somebody else has written... We debug the errors but in the process introduce new errors.... then somebody else comes to do the maintenance job... this is philanthropy...we r generating jobs for the unemployed" ...of course he was joking. But consider the statement on its face value.

In computer terminology we r doing too much of throw away prototyping but are too happy with our creation that we keep it as an application. We spent hours or probably days writing the killer App, only to later realize that nobody needs it. That sixth sense to detect a non sense should be there in a software engineer. For eg. If your PM says that the code u wrote is not of much use... What he actually means is that the code you wrote is completely crap..Throw the damn thing away and produce something better. As programmers we all have some kindda emotional attatchment with our application, but HEY!!! Will it do good to anybody. The answer is probably no...(well it would be prudent to open source such code...some one might use it)

The afore mentioned syndrome is not only true for individual programmers but also software biggies like google. On the 37th anniversary of the first lunar landing they have released the google Moon Map. Great thing dude!! But get real ...who will check the map of moon (for the next 50 years atleast) ?? it would be great if they would have added Indian map or any other country's on earth, atleast it can be used by somebody.

Tech rocks..

Well am once again overwhelmed by the how pervasive technology is becoming in our life. Some of the latest inventions have made me nostalgic... well am just 22.5 but still i worked on pc's during the era when having a PC XT/AT was considered a luxury, when you had to put 750 kb/1.2 kb floppy into the floppy drive, turn the knob ...start the pc and wait for MSDOS to load. Stinking rich people wud have 2 drives to copy one floppy into another...
Forget past..the future is bright.
I was browsing through some etch news ..came across the following stuffs:

3D viewing LCD
a new planet
Google Videos

I wont say anything about them...only one thing.If u have not checked these links u r not a techie, and u r definitely missing something

The real picture!!

So I was having a talk with my uncle.. (he's placed at a high position in the banking industry..., and a gold medalist in MSc,electronics.... why am i telling u this?? read on....)

He was telling me about how bad Infy's finnacle was in terms of usability. He was also groaning about the usage of oracle in banks for data storage. The whole setup of the data centers was cumbersome and meant serious money. I like any other techie and open source evangelist suggested him better, cheaper and more secure open source products.

He replied with a simple but stunning question... CAN U BRIBE THE BANK BIGGIES???

man i was stunned... i was also told by lots of people that microsoft bribes to retain its market share... but this was too much....

I wont opine much on the matter... i'll leave it to u all to construe whatever u want.

I guess thats the way business works... Earlier i thought corruption was only there in India... but after chatting with people from aus,us, carribean, cambodia etc i think its there everywhere...
What i feel now is that something which is so prevelant should become the industry standard.... Companies shud start playing dirty... no point hiding behind that good boy image.

What do u think??

now just in case someone has an objection to the above post:

DISCLAIMER :
Whatever i have written above is a work of fiction. Any similarities with real life should only be considered as purely co-incidental ;-)

Google calculator

Google guys are really a bunch of supermen when it comes to innnovation and intellect.
Google has introduced currency conversion in their calc module. For those who dont know about it give a mathematical expression where u give a search string and search for it. It will actually give u the result.

Now type the following string "100 USD in INR" .... and BINGO!!! u'll get the perfect conversion according to current exchange rates. Try it out with other currency codes like GBP ( great britain pound i guess) etc. I am really starting to love google( no man i was already in love with it for its searching capabilities.... in that case i'm loving it more :-) )

Solaris...

So there, all u guys cribbing over linux's unusability, check out solaris

Shifted to solaris... and now when i work on linux, it is like when i went back on windows when i had shifted to linux initially. Windows now look too fancy to be good for any development work ( no offence meant.. just my current frame of mind).

the grep is totally different, doesnt search recursively and vi creates a havoc on solaris.

But the Dtrace utility that am working on solaris is light years ahead in technology than linux and makes for its incompetencies. Kprobe is avl for linux but is too crude and programming Kprobe is more difficult than the D language used to check D probes.

Something to add on the CV anyway ;)