DevLock Inc. (Part 1)

Mr. Brahma, the principal software architect at DevLock Inc seemed anxious as he briskly walked into the 6^th floor Meeting Room 3 of the Vaikunta campus to head the tech leads’ meeting. The tech leads Mr. Narada, Mr. Indra , Mr. Kuber and many other heavy-brains had already assembled and were sure that Brahma was about to elucidate the new product which the DevLock Inc had premeditated to work on.

“The rumours have come true guys. I just had a management level meeting with delivery leads, Mr. Vishnu and Mr. Shiva and the chitchat is coming up. The company has decided to launch its first-of-it’s-kind product. A species with a ‘BRAIN’!!!” , Brahma’s underway explaining.

“But, that we already have right? Except our basic versions like Amoeba and such, almost all others do have BRAIN chipped in them. So what’s the point?” , the first objection came from Mr.Yama, the chief Garbage Collector of DevLock Inc. It was his accountability to take care of worn out products, put new souls into them and relaunch into the market.

“No this a bit dissimilar from all those. We are for the very first time furnishing Artificial Intelligence into them. They could ‘THINK’. They could even ‘THINK’ about us. “

“What does that term ‘THINK’ mean?” ,asked an all keyed up Ganesh. Ganesh and his brother Karthik were two of the most respected individuals at DevLock. They were also the sons of Mr.Shiva, the manager at DevLock’s Kailasa campus.

“Well, ‘THINK’ is something where the product itself will be able to deal with a variety of topics in viable ways. For instance, the product can by itself search for the charger, what we have coined ‘FOOD’ and can even grab it from other products. That makes my life easier, as I no longer have to proffer all the details on their labels, technically, on products’ ‘FOREHEADS’ “, Brahma answered.

“Won’t that cause chaos among themselves? “, held out Mr.Ram, who was considered as the most idealistic person in whole of the company. He was honest, candid and unimaginably sincere. If someone sought a true success, it was his footsteps were what had to be pursued, whispered a famous quote at DevLock. Mr.Hanuman, the talented senior software engineer reported to Ram. Ram could be contacted at ram.dashrath@DevLock.com

“Yes it would. Upto some extent. Infact, upto considerable extent. But I have come up with a radical design for that. That some of the products themselves would monitor all others and endeavour to keep the entropy at it’s minimum. But if it still sustains, we would have to interfere. Ideally, Mr.Yama has to. That I ll explain a little later”, explained Brahma.

“This looks very obscure. I mean, since those monitoring-products can also, what you said, ‘THINK’, it would rather become ineffectual to monitor those objects in-turn. Isn’t that so? And furthermore, will all the products ‘THINK’ alike? If no, what triggers them to do so? A trap-door algorithm embedded in them? “ , asked the smartest worker of the bunch, Mr.Krishna aka Mr.Krishh, who was himself an incredible coder and was even able to handle any hard-hitting tasks alone. Some of the very knowledgeable senior-software engineers like Mr.Dharam Roy, Mr. Bhim Sen, Mr. Paarth and a few others directly report to Mr. Krishh. He also authored an exceptional technical reference doc, named Shrimadbhagavadgeeta, which is, of late, released as open source doc and a copy of that could be obtained from him at krishna.vasudeva@DevLock.com

“ You are right Mr.Krissh. There’s a bundle of problems involved in it. So have we decided to resolute this as a long term project. Any guesses as to how long? You can’t imagine, it’s a 350 ‘God-days’ work. And in products’ timeline it will come upto some 3 and a half million years. I’m also glad to inform that Mr. Goutham Buddha is going to enjoy an onsite opportunity somewhere at the end of a stable phase, not right now though. As far as the first versions are considered, they will be backward compatible with our previous release, the ‘APE’. In addition to the hardware plug-ins what ‘APEs’ carry, these new ‘HUMANs’ will have more product-life, will be more energetic, but above all those , they can ‘THINK’. The outer hair covering is reduced, outer body is lustred with some pigment and are not equipped with the ‘TAIL’ what ‘APEs’ enjoyed. This is actually an effort to keep these ‘HUMANS’ away from lucrative ‘tree’ markets, which is ruled by our ‘APE’. Mr.Vishnu wishes to have ‘APE’ get the edge in ‘tree’ economy zones. Infact, these new products don’t have any mobility and portability features apart from their ‘LIMBS’. They are deprived of ‘WINGS’ and a streamlined outer shape is denied too. Some among our newest product ‘HUMANs’ will carry a ‘HEART’ and many would not!! Why many don’t, I don’t know. It appears to be the law of nature. But none can have more than one ‘HEART’, and even if they bear, other products can’t make out they do. Ok, back to portability issues and mobility features, they are provided with two ‘LIMBS’. Trust me, I’m going to design their ‘BRAIN’ in such a way that they can prevail over all these subjections they have. But it will take time, it can’t come at once. And you won’t believe, we will also release a ‘dedicated’ HUMAN product somewhere in the later phase of this project, just to explain other ‘HUMAN’ products that they can gradually change themselves, can ‘THINK’ better and can use more that constituent they need and can even throw away some parts which they may not call for, at that juncture of time. We even have named this ‘dedicated HUMAN product’. It will be sent with the label ‘darwin’. “

“What’s a dedicated product?”, Mr.Venkatesh cut short Brahma’s sophisticated detailing. Mr.Venkatesh (venkatesh.tirupati@DevLock.com) apparently held a lion’s share in the roaring revenues as he directly got customer royalty in crores. He was infact the richest in earning customer royalties, after pasting Mr.Jesus Christ of the Vatican-Tech Corporation recently!

“Well, a “Dedicated Product” is one which is explicitly created to pull off some specific task. As of now, we have charted 3 ‘Dedicated Products’, one this Darwin, another labelled as ‘nelson’, which will have a very imperative task to do infact.

“ What’s that crucial undertaking nelson is built for?”, questioned Mrs.Sharda.

“ I was just about to let you all know that. There’s been a serious dearth of the pigment what we have planned to deliver on the products’ outer hardware. So, some of the products will have more pigments, some not as much of. Eventually, this might cause serious complexes among products owing to it’s dependency on their BRAIN design. If that arises, ‘nelson’ will carry pre-biased specifications and will be launched in the troubled market to bring it to customary state.”

“ But the third case is an interesting one. Mr.Vishnu, after reviewing my design of BRAIN opined that these products may start using one more or multiple layers of covering over what we assemble as their outer wrap, technically SKIN. So, at some leg of the project phase, we will launch a product labelled ‘Mallika’, to explain other products that their own made outer wrappings are not really necessary. “

“ These are not the only dedicated releases, if I should be blunt, I acknowledge we will have hundreds of them, to correct hundreds of bugs that would arise in the code what we write. So more logical our codes are, lesser shall the count of dedicated products we might have to launch. So, without much ado, lets straight away get into the details pertaining to the software architecture of the brain.”, Brahma finally commenced his harangue.

“ I can broadly divide the design into two, a ‘structural’ and the other ‘behavioural’. Structural is simple, behavioural is beyond my horizon.

-------------------------------------To be continued in next part--------------------------------

Ponting blames Bollywood for his anti-Indian attitude !

In what can be described as a totally shocking and ridiculous statement, Ponting, after his team’s whitewash in the latest test series against India, has mentioned that Bollywood is responsible for his anti-Indian attitude. When the awestruck press-reporters asked him if he cared to elaborate, Mr.Ponting began recalling all those instances which carved inside him an anti-Indian idol.

“My parents were big fans of Bollywood movies”, he began, “till that day,when out of the blue they became very angry and were disappointed about a hugely anticipated movie. My parents watched the much expected movie “DON”, but were utterly upset when they found out that it was not about DON BRADMAN and there was not even a mentioning of Sir.DON BRAMAN in the entire movie!! They were frenzied.They even stopped watching Bollywood movies. Such was the popularity of Don Bradman in that era. But I kept watching B-Town movies even after that, till that day when I watched another blockbuster movie “Border”, only to find out that it had completely neglected “Allan Border” in the entire movie. I was furious and the incident was shocking. But the only soothing that came my way then was that someone told me they are remaking the earlier movie DON. I thought finally Indians realized their mistake and watched that new DON with high hopes and expectations. No, you people cheated us yet again. Don Bradman Sir never appeared in that either, not even in a cameo. That was disastrous. As to add up to the frustrations, recently I heard from a friend of mine in Sydney, who is studying Indian culture, that there was a movie in Bollywood called “Hussey_na Maan Jayegi”. When I asked him what the hell did that mean, he explained that it translated to something like ‘Hussey never agrees’ and also explained that Hussey was treated as a female! I don’t know which Hussey they meant David or Michael, but seriously, I could not sustain this at all, simply could not, at any cost. All these made me feel malice towards Bollywood and bear a grudge against Indian culture”

The Great Migration!!

It’s not more than 2 years ago, when the only website that our browser was accustomed to launch was Orkut.com. Wishing friends on their birthdays, scrapping, laughing over the comments on our photos, communities we never missed to enter into (including Orkut-Figure-Finders ;) ) had almost become indispensible parcels of our BE life. I’ve even witnessed crazy acts by many of my friends who were using some JavaScript code and a community to boost their friend count! And some orkutizens had even developed a strange hobby “Testiphilia” (don’t mistake ;) ), asking their friends to write a testimonial in return to a testimonial again! Hundreds of profiles I had seen were overloaded with this kind of business testimonials that often looked like, “Oh! this is one testimonial I should have written a long back”, “ Hmmm…How can I describe this person in 1024 characters? “ (why? Was his character so blunt and complicated? ;)) , “ Hmmm, He’s very very friendly and damn cool guy “, (ya he should be, coz he had agreed to write a similar testimonial to this writer! ) and many such crazy lines. And people started to showcase their personalities by simply joining various communities spread throughout! Some people I know even had tried to pretend about their images through the communities they were into, as in , joining communities like “Java Guru”, “ C/C++ Masters “, “Code Hackers”, “ Solving Greatest Puzzles”, portraying themselves as one among what the community name described! I do know one guy who was in windows all through, had not even worked in Linux for even a day, joining “Linux Masters”, essentially, thats what Orkut did, it rendered a pseudo-personality that you not are. When I saw him joining that community, it really appeared odd to me, seemed like a ‘silent movie’ winning the “Best Dialogues” award !! And when it never required an invitation to join, fake profiles started emerging, where you befriend some random Brazilian chicks- sending them requests and messages using Google translator, navigate through odd communities, basically, the real you!! I recollect Orkut once had disabled copy and save-as options from photos, probably unknowing that there’s a Print-Screen button for all of us!! And at some juncture, orkut provided options to link YouTube videos, and the rest - is hiStory (and herStory!).Soon,people without an Orkut account were in minority among netizens!

Gone are those days. Gone. The period of “Great Migration” started which marked the downfall of orkut empire, atleast in India, which was a strong orkut hold. It’s been more than 4 months now when I last logged into Orkut. Opinion is not just mine, but of acclaimed Alexa rankings, in which Orkut dipped steeply and was listed way outside top 50, while the cause, another giant FB, silently rose to 2nd spot staying just behind Google. Why the Great Migration, is no mysterious. FB claims of having stricter securities and stringent privacy policies, which is just a management answer and not a technical one. Because if it was, that’s a no big deal for Orkut and its parent, the giant Google to provide sufficient security to the profiles. The major thing that paved the way and drove the great migration seems to be the apps! FB hosts millions of applications and which is counting, unlike Orkut that got exposed to this very lately. One experimental guy among your 300 orkut friends suddenly joined FB and started using “Make my cartoon”, “Whats my Italian name”, “How many Gfs do you have” and suddenly you screamed ‘I too wanna’ and Orkut was just too lame for them then. He started sending virtual kisses and gifts and you yelled, I’m still just “Comment”ing. He one day became a friend of a local heroine (who already had 4,387 unknown friends) and you said, enough is enough, lets jump into FB. Moreover, buddies who went to states either to work or pursuing their higher education immediately started using FB, which is THE site in US and we felt, is he a little above us, by using FB???

But the initial phase of migration was not so swift, as the customs and habits were a bit different between them. The one Orkutizen who entered FB for the first time screamed, “Where’s the scrapbook and where do I write”! Like a person shifting from Indian to European commode asking where’s the bucket! It took a bit of time to get accustomed to “Wall” and to divide one “Scrapbook” into two “Wall” and “Private Message” section! But time-passing looked a bit easier and comfortable with FB, given numerous apps to play with, millions of sentimental and slightly mental friendship-love quote links that you just share and get some dozen “likes”(if you are a girl), and innumerable pages to like and forget. To add, FB gave an advanced “Friend Finder” and “You may be knowing” options that made the life of all those who were in Friend-count mission, easy. All the same, girls enjoy the same popularity they used to have in Orkut. They look at the calendar and update their status message “Today is Thursday, so tomorrow gonna be Friday” and get some 15 comments, “Oh you are so intelligent!”, “So, whats the weekend plans”, “Hey you using Windows?” , “ You leaving early today then?” along with some 25 likes.

Implications?? Orkut changed itself to a new improved Orkut with themes and posters, that just made it more intricate to use!! Nonetheless, FB also is adding various alterations and enhancements and integrates third party apps that will duly increase its popularity among coders and users alike. Its been rightly said that in software companies, managers can survive just with Outlook (or Lotus) and S.Es, just with FB. The acronym FBI is slowly, but steadily loosing its firm in common man’s terms as being for “Federal Bureau of Investigation” and settling more for “FaceBook Inc”.