the brook

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I have always considered myself a technology freak. I’ve always thought of myself as the guy who wanted the latest and greatest computer, the mobile phone with all the features, the smallest-sized but largest capcity MP3 player, the very best digital camera… the list just goes on.

To some extent, I’m still there. I whistled with the rest of the Apple fanatics when the 17-inch Intel Macbook Pro was released. I ogle at mobile phones that have five megapixel cameras and can control powerpoint slideshows from across the room. You can hear me ooh-aahing while reading the reviews of the latest digital SLR camera from Canon. But in many ways, my heart isn’t in it. I am – and the “me” two years ago would have balked at myself saying this – technologically satiated. There. Blasphemy committed. But for the life of me, I can’t think of anything that I really want. I’ve been trying to think of why.

In terms of computers, it’s quite clear what happened. Linux, first, and then Mac OS X. It’s quite clear to me – Windows makes your comp seem slower and slower with time. Greatly increasing that itch to upgrade. I’ve had my Powerbook for nearly 15 months now. And I certainly have an excuse to have the upgrade itch – the new Intel based Macs are two generations ahead of mine. And yet, my Mac to me feels as fast as it did on the day it arrived – and I haven’t reformatted my disk even once. I leave it on for weeks at a time, only restarting when Apple releases OS updates which require a restart. The last time my laptop was off for more than ten minutes was on the flight back from US, on New Year’s Day. The story with Linux is similar. I have an old Sempron desktop at home, and running Linux on it seems just the same as running it on the shiny new dual-core server in the lab. Sure the server boots up faster and runs scientific code faster. But there’s no difference in the responsiveness of the system or the speed of Firefox. There’s simply very little need to upgrade a computer which can connect to the net, burn DVDs, play movies and songs, download photos from a camera, check e-mail, surf the web and run your favourite text editor or word processor. Gaming still requires incremental upgrades but the only game I’m remotely interested in these days is Diablo which used to run fine on the first computer I ever bought way back in 1999.

As far as gadgets are concerned, I’ve started to use them more than admire them. And thus I’ve figured out I couldn’t care less for more than half the fancy features that come with phones or PDAs. This was a concept that a friend of mine told me about a long time ago – buy only what you need, when you need. That time of course, I never believed him. But now, my most fervent wish about a mobile phone is that the one I have lasts me forever and a day.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve realised the wisdom in the old saying – “wealth is defined not by what you have but what you can do without”. Seriously – nothing can make you feel poorer than wanting the most expensive stuff out on the market. And nothing like having all the technology you need, without wanting more.

An Indian student in an Armenian university recently fell from his dorm window and died, allegedly due to to negligence by emergency services and university administration – who prevented his friends from giving him first aid, asking them to wait until an ambulance arrived… which was 45 minutes later.

This has led to huge protests by Indian students both inside the university as well as outside (including at the Armenian parliament); though sadly enough there seems to be no support from the local students.

The spirit of these students is heartening. I wonder what could happen if students in India organized themselves like this.

Coverage and pictures on the Oneworld Multimedia blog as well The Instant Me.

A few Indian students have been taken in for questioning by police and have not been heard from for the past six hours. Later, the new Rector of Yerevan’s Medical University literally gave them “the finger” when they complained. Indian students are now demanding justice and the removal of the Rector from her position.

Thanks to Namit for bringing this to my attention.

I have been looking to a way to link Thunderbird and Growl for showing me mail notification messages for a while now. Thanks to this post, I was able to get it working today.

One issue I faced that I have four mail accounts in Thunderbird and I don’t care about three of them, but by default the above hack gives a notification for all messages. Thankfully, the back end controlling the notification is a good old bash shell script. After a little hacking, all was well.

To digress a bit, I would like to propose the following theorem.

You will always need to code a shell script right after you’ve forgotten the syntax of the if and for statements.

Proof: Emprical story of my life since I wrote my first shell script.

Thankfully, there is a corollary:

Every possible shell script in bash has already been written (and indexed by Google).

Proof: See above.

Back to Thunderbird. Thunderbird has had Junk mail filtering for a while now, and occasionally it will interpret some messages as “Junk” and give you a button to indicate that it’s “Not Junk”. Today, I saw this:

Interesting to note that there’s a difference between “scam” and “junk” mail detection. Even more interesting to know that Thunderbird doesn’t particularly care much about NUS Business School!

I’ve never really heard of this, so I’ve decided to call it the Mac Dimmed Dialog of Death. Happened to me for the first time today since I got my Mac, 14 months ago. I was always told that Mac OS X also crashes on occasion, never believed it till now.

I was working on an image in Photoshop with a dozen or so other applicaitons in the background (normal usage for me) when suddenly the screen becomes dark (it was translucent, I could still see my desktop in the background) with a dark gray dialog in the middle which says “You need to restart your computer. Please press the Power button for a few seconds”, in four languages.

On restarting I get some indecipherable report which I chose to send to Apple. Since then all has been working well. Hope it continues to!

This is an excellent book about building a web application. Quite different though, from most books you’ll find.

It is (as far as I know) an online-only purchase, you pay and get a PDF. The folks who wrote it are 37signals, a company that makes web-based enterprise management applications. I know them mostly from their excellent Signal vs Noise blog, and from their almost unbelievably simple free app, TaDaLists.

I finished my first reading of the book in less than two days. Although it’s decently long at 170+ pages, these guys don’t beat about the bush. In fact, the whole book feels more like a TeXpoint slideshow than a real book (it doesn’t even have a cover image). Because of this, their point comes through and makes much more of an impact – to me, at least. Flowery language is fine for fiction, but for a non-fiction book I prefer to read stuff that gets to the point and states it in simple, clear language. This book does a great job of it.

The essence of this book is keeping software (and software development) simple. That’s whats worked for them and they make a really strong case out of it. The point that made an impact was – know your priorities and do them well, and don’t worry about the rest. Unlike a lot of other KISS (for those who don’t know thats Keep It Simple, Stupid) approaches, they actually talk about what “simple” means, and what should be a priority at different stages of development – planning, design, coding, support etc. Their approach in the book is to state their point, explain it briefly, and give a lot of quotes from people about the topic. They also talk a lot about the business process – finance, customer relationships etc. While I don’t have any experience with this, their ideas seem to make a lot of sense.

Surprisingly, a lot of the ideas in the book seemed natural and familiar, and I realized that’s because the way software development is done in academic research is similar to what they advocate. We don’t generate large quantities of requirements or specifications; there are very little “extra” features except fulfilling the main goal; we keep the software small so it can be changed easily (and it often is); and most importantly, we code stuff that we care about and are interested in. In this sense, the ideas of simplicity in the book were not exactly new, but to me its an important validation that the same things can work even in the corporate world.

A final point. They say at the beginning of the book that the strategies they talk about can be applied to a lot of other activities and projects as well, and I wholeheartedly agree. After reading the book, I could very well imagine that any task that needed a systematic approach could benefit from the ideas in Getting Real. An excellent book if you’re thinking of building a web application and a wonderful read otherwise as well.

My introduction to the world of programming was via BASIC, C and C++. Along the way of course, I learned other stuff, including Java with its common theme of “Everything is an object”.

I could never get this concept of everything being an object, and hence I’ve never liked, and have always struggled with Java. That’s always made me feel totally dumb – given all the hype and oomph that Java receives for its features and ease of use, I could really never figure out Java totally.

It turns out, I’m not the only one. I came across this article by Steve Yegge entitled Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns. A totally humourous yet amazingly insightful take on “everything is an object”. I’d say its a must read for any serious programmer (and I’m sure the rest have run away by now) – and what it did for me basically was tell me why I felt the way I do about Java. Most memorable quotes for me:

Object Oriented Programming puts the Nouns first and foremost. Why would you go to such lengths to put one part of speech on a pedestal? Why should one kind of concept take precedence over another? It’s not as if OOP has suddenly made verbs less important in the way we actually think. It’s a strangely skewed perspective. As my friend Jacob Gabrielson once put it, advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing.

I’ve really come around to what Perl folks were telling me 8 or 9 years ago: “Dude, not everything is an object.”

I found Steve’s other articles are very insightful too – especially the one on “Moore’s Law is Crap“.

The reservation and the quota system have long been a subject of debate in India. With the recent announcement of imminent increases in reservations for IITs and IIMs, the topic is very much in circulation again. Yet somehow, there’s a difference.

Unlike the passionate and vociferous response to the Mandal Commission, the voices this time round seem muted. Dare I even say they seem tired? The arguments of the day seem to be rooted in whether this move is constitutional or otherwise; how this is a move to appease minorities and shore up votes; how could we better serve the interests of the underprivileged community; on whether OBCs are really deprived; yada yada yada. None of these is the point at issue.

What is at issue is simply meritocracy. It’s an argument that we have made passionately, and with great force before. And then, we just lost it. Maybe some of us think the point is so obvious its not worth making more than once. Others think that, since the argument didn’t get across to the policymakers earlier, there’s no point regurgitating it. It’s completely the wrong approach. What we’ve done is let the policymakers hammer our heads with reservation till we’re just willing to lie and take it. What we should be doing is hammering them back with the idea that we want meritocracy and won’t accept anything else. And not all hope is lost, yet. The big powers – the weak and silent turban wearer and the lady from Italy who stands behind him have yet to make statements on the matter; and if you will remember the reservation increase policy is just a proposal. Which means the government is hedging its bets and can recant the moment it feels the voting advantage brought about by reservation will be negated by a backlash from others. Thats playing dirty, but they’re politicians and that’s their job. Our job is to let them know what we think they should be doing.

So here is the old argument that I, at least, still believe in. And I’m not too tired to repeat it. It goes something like this.

1. Top educational institutions are about growing the nation and generating opportunities, not just about proving quality education.
2. To maximize this growth, its imperative to let the best opportunities go to the people with most potential.
3. Increasing reservation quota for specific communities effectively means decreasing the “quota” for merit-based applicants.

The IITs and the IIMs are not just the premier institutions of imparting education in the country. In imparting the best education India can offer, these institutions also impart opportunities for growth. Growth not only of the individual, but of the nation. One expects them to contribute back to the nation – through technological progress, through entrepreneurship and even social work. Hence the outrage when so many IITians go abroad immediately after their education and the demands for a bond to be imposed on them. The point is, studying at an IIT or an IIM is a privilege, not a right. And the privilege should go to those who deserve it most – the those who deserve it most are the people with the greatest potential to contribute.

Consider this – why isn’t there 50% reservation of seats at low fares for SC/STs and OBCs on every Indian Airlines flight? Should they be denied the right to travel just because they’re economically deprived? The answer is quite simple – if they want to get from A to B, they can do so by train. The privilege of efficient and fast travel rests with those who can return value (in this case, money) for it. Similarly, there are hundreds of technological and management institutions in India; and basic free education is guaranteed by the Constitution. Nobody is being deprived of a basic right here. Let those who can return maximum value have the maximum privilege. If we don’t do this, our growth will simply be stunted.

Throughout our childhood, we were urged to put hard work on a pedestal above all else. One percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, we were told. Is this the reality of our society? The proposed reservation quota increase will bring the total reservation to 49%. Thats very, very close to saying that there is a quota of 49% for hard-working students. Is this what has become of our tradition of hard work? Will this motivate students to study and contribute to the nation, or to run abroad at the first opportunity to escape “the system”? What’s even scarier is the fact that the quota is not only increasing, but doubling. Even the strongest proponents of affirmative action agree that it is a measure intended to achieve a level of balance and eventually rescinded. Yet we’re going in exactly the opposite direction, and fast. We argue vehemently that our nation has progressed so far, and yet these policies contradict that very statement. Just one more step in this direction and we have 98% reservation, which means out of three lakh students who give the JEE, 80 will get in on merit. It sounds too crazy to happen, but if you will remember, so did 50% reservation.

If we resort to killing meritocracy, we’re not only wasting resources and talent of good students in India. We’re rubbishing their talents, their skills and their efforts. And we’re drastically decreasing the opportunities of growth and progress. Maybe all the government wants is to win the next election by hook or by crook, and couldn’t care less about India’s progress. If this is the case, it’s time to remind them that there are people who do.

[edit: It has come to my attention that there is an online petition against the reservation policy. Please add your signature if you believe in meritocracy]

I was in the city this afternoon with a couple of hours to kill and my camera in hand. It was a really cloudy, gloomy day, really bad for landscape photography, So I decided to try a composition experiment and take photos of people taking photos of other people.

Some more of these here.

Microsoft has recently launched a site for open-source related blogs and news. The first post I saw when I got there was from the project manager for Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab, Kishi Malhotra. His first post introduces himself and his work:

My full name is Harvinderpal Singh Malhotra and somehow “Kishi” was chosen as a nickname for me when I was growing up (don’t ask, like the name “Kishi’s Korner”, it’s a long story). Okay, so I am the Project Manager for the Open Source Software Lab. I’ve spent the bulk of my career in IT Operations as an Infrastructure Architect with Fortune 100’s such as Pfizer, United Health Care etc. and since 2003 I’d been with MSN Operations. While at MSN I was responsible for re-engineering the server deployment process and providing key infrastructure services including Active Directory, DNS, WINS, SecurID, TermServ, Domain Registrations, SMTP, and AntiVirus for the MSN Operations IS team, among other things.

While much of my life has been spent living IT Operations, one of my true passions is research and writing. That’s why I’m thrilled to be involved with the Open Source Software Lab and Port25. I look forward to sharing our work with you and more importantly learning from you on how we can improve our methodologies and perhaps come up with new projects that we haven’t thought of. This is a unique opportunity for myself and the community and I look forward to being a part of it.

The 2nd comment in the entry is:

Thursday, April 06, 2006 8:48 AM by Santa Singh
Paaji,

Oye….welcome to the netta!