The Song of Creation

While reading "The Argumentative Indian" By Amartya Sen , I came across an interesting verse

Who really knows?Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is thiscreation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps itdid not the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only heknows or perhaps he does not know

[ The hindi translation of this was also used as the lyrics in the casting song of  "Bharat Ek Khoj" ].

This is parts of a hymn "The Song Of Creation" in Rig Veda.

Look at the premise: There was nothing before the existance of universe. God came into existance with the existance of universe. So does God know how universe was formed , or perhaps he does not know.

So simple yet so profound. It questions everything.

What you believe in , Why you believe in  , Should you believe in ?

What is right? What is wrong?

What is the right choice?

Is there any right choice.

Perhaps we can decide; Perhaps we cannot.

PS. There is a dialogue in Matrix "The life is the sum total of choices we make"

The Snatch

Day 26 June 2006

9:00 PM

The air rushing through my hair was almost soothing. I had a hard day in office and was walking home. It was completely dark and road was almost deserted.

The motorcycle stopped in from of me. Two people got down(lets call then "P" and "Q".

 "Sir, can you tell me the address of HCL Technologies"

"Sure"

I turned and pointed my hand in the right direction.

"It is just around the corner"

The hand lock on my neck felt unusually painful. "Q" had got behind me and grabbed me.

"P" checked my pockets and took out my mobile and wallet.

They ran to their bike and zoomed into the darkness.

9:10 PM

Dialed 100.

"Hello Police Control Room"

Explained.

"We will just send a patrol van"

"Thanks"

9:45

Dialed 100.

"Hello Police Control Room"

"The van has not come"

"Goto police station and file a complaint"

10:15

Sec-58 Police Station:

"Write it in Hindi"

"Ok"

...........

"Will they be caught?"

"Maybe"

"You can have the copy of the complaint"

"Thanks"

PS. My mobile phone was a Nokia 6610 (black). If any one knows anything about it . Please tell. He/She will be suitably rewarded.

PPS: In case you are wondering . I took a hit of around 9000 INR (including cost of mobile phone) and i think the snatch took less than a minute.

Reading and Me

Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-smoker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Store or Bradshaw’s Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. . . . Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. . . . like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm, I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter.

A quote by William Somerset Maugham and something that very nearly describes me

Blogging

Fannaa

Fannaa : Some body told me that this means ultimate sacrifice. I watched "Fannaa" the movie aur mein fannaa ho gaya.
The second half of the movie is loosely based on a novel "The Eye of the Needle" by Ken Follet.
[ The fact that Follet's website claims that more than ten million copies have sold might just tell you how good the novel is ]
The fact that there was no story to begin with and that I knew the story made it one of the worst movies this year. It was a total drain on my resources (money , time and the calories spent going to the theatre).
People might say that Aamir and Kajol were good,but this fact should be also taken into consideration that there were no other actors worth the name in the movie to compare them with.
Only in the last scene when he points the gun to Kajol does Aamir matches the intensity of Henry Faber [ aka the needle ] , the protagonist the of the novel.

The trek to "Bhavishya Badri"

I am an avid trekker.
(Though the lack of time has made only once a year phenomenon.)

A couple of week ago (January 28th to be precise) Me and four of my friends trekked to "Bhavishya Badri" (3641 m)

A digression: "The mythology of Bhavishya Badri"
As the name suggests it is the future abode of "Lord Badri" , which as the most Indians would know is worshipped in "Badrinath". The mythology states that the current route to "Badrinath" will turn inaccessible and then "Lord Badri" would be worshipped here. Hence the name "Bhavishya Badri" or Future "Badri".

Now back to the trek:
I will skip the details of the route (They can be found here), but we (there were five of us in all) started the trek at around 10 AM in the morning few kilometers from a place called Saldhar.

All climbs begin with energy and enthu. All climbs end with no energy , but only enthu.
The is a strenuous trek and even though we only averaged 26 years in age , we had a real tough time after just 15 minutes. The "Saldhar" is a typical mountain village with very friendly people and twenty minutes later we were given water by a friendly lady and a tip : The normal route to the top has ice sheets and is unusable; use the long and pucca route.

We messed the routes big time :) though of course we didn't knew it that time.
Three of us (including me) went on the wrong route and realized that we had to climb a mountain.

This split caused us a delay of about an hour and was first in the series of tragedies that were to unfold.

The route we were now following was a gully carved by flowing water from top of the mountain. The soil was very soft and we were continuously struggling to locate good footholds. Falling and slipping became regular and I was hoping against hope that I do not tear my clothes.

On a particularly tricky section, our food packet fell below. The salvage operation that followed yielded a few badams and a box of haldirams sweets.

After around an hour we joined the main route. Here we were met by a local who was transporting sand for a construction. We had worked hard to reach here and we felt the need to get a reward. Reward: A nice photo with the deep valley behind us. We requested the local. He agreed. I put down the box of sweets near the edge of the route.
We got the photo clicked. We moved forward.

We reached another village "Subhai". We were painfully aware that we had forgotten the box of sweets in our enthusiasm to record our journey.
The next this was to buy food/water on our way up. Imagine to our surprise, no food/water is available in the village (To be more accurate, the shop did not had biscuit packets, bottled water).No choice but to move ahead.

The temple was still "some distance away". Actually this village also has a temple, but the "true" temple is on top of the mountain [this info. is from the locals, and I really don't know the truth; anyway we were more interested in the trek, so we ignored this village temple]

From here onwards the going became very interesting.
If you can't believe that every muscle in your body can be painful, you have to go on this trek.
The trek is an almost 70 degree incline for about a kilometer. It sucks up energy at a rate that thought did not even existed. Lack of water only made the matter more excruciating.

We were now walking on ice sheets and our progress slowed down considerably.
The route now had a pine forest alongside. I cannot express in words how trekking in this forest felt. The silence was broken only by our walk.

It is very serene and very beautiful. You can watch the whole valley below, joshimath and Auil ski slope included.

We spent fifteen minutes in the temple and started on our way down (we would probably have enjoyed it more but we faced two constraints: A) Time B) No food since morning).

General trekking trip: Coming down can some time be tougher than going up especially on an incline > 45 degrees.

I was feeling unwell and slowed the group.

We finally reached our jeep @ 4:00 PM and hit Auli some time later. Starving, we pounced on food (the shopkeeper was as surprised as he was happy, we had a bill of about 300/- in fifteen minutes)

PS. I got away with my jacket safe and sound.

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.