Courage

Read an amazing article on courage

http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/courage-to-live-consciously.htm

The courage not as in "courage to FIGHT" but in as "courage to LIVE"

Here are some of the quotes I liked on the page:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
- Helen Keller

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
- Ambrose Redmoon

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
- Mark Twain

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.
- John Wayne

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
- Anais Nin

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
- Amelia Earhart

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of our obstacles would melt away if, instead of cowering before them, we should make up our minds to walk boldly through them.
- Orison Swett Marden

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
- John Quincy Adams

The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is.
- John Lancaster Spalding

There are many many more at the website. It really is an amazing piece of motivational writing.

Trade-off

One of my coding experiences has been that , writing code involves making a trade-off. But other people have figured that trade-off are also required in making decisions such as whether to fix a bug or not or even which features to include in a release and which to leave.

The article at above link also suggests that you need to be a good economist to make a trade-off( Since it is like an economics problem about optimizing about when given a set of resources). I think a mathematician would be better at doing it.
Check out the Dijkstra's article Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature

The article also has a small but excellent proof of why a program which has been divided into modules is likely to be more correct that a single monolitic program.
(Something that i thought was intutive can acutally have a proof surprised me).

Finally one of my own experiences in making a "trade-off"

Recently i had to design a lexical analyzer. A fairly straight forward problem , just use lex .But in my case there were several restrictions which ultimately forced me to write a hand written lexer.

One of the first decision i had to make was of input buffering.
There are several factors to decide
1. The size of buffer( some suggested that it should equal the page size of the machine ,other simply went for a large buffer say like 16K ).
2. To use double-buffering or single buffer.
3. How to code the use of buffer for maximum performance.

The amount of time spent by me in making above decisions exceeded the time i had budgeted for it by a factor of 10. But it was an ultimate learning experience.

My current understanding in how to make a trade-off is:
1. Consider all the factors and prioritize them ( for e.g. 1. Speed of code 2. Size etc. )
2. Less important factors can be usually "decided" with help of books and literature which explain other users experience.
3. Profile the performance of the algorithms for the most important factors and then choose the best algo/data structure

Point (3) can be a very time consuming step so you will have to make a trade-off based on no. of algo's/data structures you can profile and time you have :)

(since there are so many ideas about what a software engineer is, i think i will create my own definition someday)

How much time dose a novice need to learn programing

10 Years perhaps........

An interesting article by Perter Norvig(http://www.norvig.com/):
http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
which makes this claim.

I tend to rather agree.
The amount of issues a programmer need to think when writing code is quite large.
Offhand i can think of the following:
1. The problem he is attempting must be CORRECTLY solved.
2. The code should be readable and should be understood by other people.
3. The code shpuld be easily debuggable
4. The performance should be nice.
5. If the application has UI , then it should be intutive.
6. Code should be Portable( if that is a goal ).
7. Easily maintanable( like adding new enhancements )

and probably many more...

Most of the above issues require programmer to make trade offs ( for e.g. Algorithm might be tough to understand , but perform much better than a simpler algorithm)
and I think it might require a programmer about 10 years to learn to correctly make these trade offs.

Being a book junkie

I am a book-aholic.
I need a daily dose of some good reading.

This july i brought books over 1000 INR; something that is very difficult to justify.

My friends have recommended that i take membership to BCL and i am looking for people to share the membership fee.

Another problem i face is that people borrow books but dont return them.

Here is the current list:

1 book: Sanjay ( He to his credit has returned some of the books :) )
2 Books: Parikshit
2 Books: Loki for reading on his trip to Bangalore
1 Book : Ajay ( He has got "A curious incident of dog at night time" , a very darky funny book)
1 book : Vishwanath (Another of my favourite book "The Life of Pi" by Yann Martel)
1 book : Animesh ( Ummm.. His girlfriend wanted something to read and there was really no choice !!!! )

If people know you are a book-aholic then , to show their consideration , they also gift you books.
The most recent one that i got was on my birthday.
Titled "Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus". I usually hate such kind of books but this seems to be different and is making some sense. I will get back with a review after i finish it.

Regarding unfinished books, i have recently run a huge backlog.
There are
1. The Zahir
2. Gibbon's the Fall and Decline of the Roman empire.
3. Godel, Escher,Bach

This is first time , that i am facing a book backlog but i hope to finish them all very soon.
Wish me luck on this odyssey

"Sehar"

I watched this movie in a new mall (Shipra ).

It is a pretty decent movie.

The reason that i liked it more than others is that it is set in my homwtown of Lucknow.

It even has a clip of my university (Lucknow University).

The story is tight and ending is dramatic.

The action is realiastic.

Enjoy,

Google Research Papers

Link to all the research papers that have been published by GOOGLE

http://labs.google.com/papers/

People dont like my name !!!

The rating of my name on http://www.babynamesworld.com/meaning_of_Arnav.html
has " I don't like it " at 82%. :(

Blah!!!!

war of the worlds

Just watched spileberg's new movie , war of the worlds.

Special effects are stunning.

There is not much to story though.

Regular Expressions

How will you write a regular expression (RE) such that it will accept all strings except "hello"? You cannot use perl RE or extended RE's.
[ Remember RE are thigns you use in "grep" in UNIX ]

Here is the answer:
http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/05-06-050

Midnight

I love books.
I have just finished "Midnight in the garden of good end evil". It is a actual story.
The author realises that ticket to the city of Savannah costs same as that of an upmarket restaurent in NY. So he decides to go to Savannah and write about the city.

It is a good book.
The characters are real and pretty eccentric.

Nice read.

First mail

Hi,
I have just made this blog after getting inspiration from a very dear friend of mine , Sanjay ( a linux guru ).
Lets see how this thing turns out.