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”.

The Thoda/Thodi incident!!

The Thoda/Thodi incident!! (Not to be confused with Choura Chouri incident !!)

Hindi has always been a nightmare for me, just like it is ,for a majority of South Indians who either kick off speaking or speeding up their Hindi when it’s really considered obligatory, as in when you get into the corporate world or when you catch a northie girlfriend (or a southie girlfriend who is fluent in Hindi ;-) ) or if u r staying in a pg where all your out-of-state roommates speak shuddh Hindi and giggle at u when you wake up and say ‘subah ho gaya’ , they mockingly rectify it, saying ‘subah hogayi ,maamu’ . At least for me, my memoirs linked with Hindi are disgustingly embarrassing and so have I laid a foundation for a ‘Five Year Plan’ , titled ‘Operation PremChand’, that aims at accomplishing the following three objectives within 6 years from now.

1. To become a fluent Hindi speaker. (Again, not to be confused with LokSabha speaker or lavish Bose speaker)

2. To make sure that I achieve what I have said in the first objective just above.

3. And to make sure that I realize the second and third points.

Having had a clear-cut roadmap of what I was required to do, I embarked my 6 year epic journey last month and so far, it’s been so worse! I mean, I truly marvel how those who are fluent in Hindi deal with those gender things so off the cuff! I have inquired a lot of people, but yet haven’t been able to hit upon a better breakdown than , ‘by practice’. Oh my God! A clear analogy with the situation of a new joinee to a software company that hasn’t believed in documentation. My ex-roommate, who is a native of Allahabad, that day was very enthusiastic and wholehearted in explaining me how to differentiate between genders.

“Look AD, I will tell you a simple formula. You just follow them and see how effortless it is. All words ending with ‘i’ as in GHADI, NADI and so forth are all Streeling”, he declared and I thought he had given me the much needed breakthrough with that proclamation.

“Wow, cool… All? “ , I asked excitedly .

“All of them, as far as I know”, he defended.”I haven’t come across any ‘i’ ending pulling shabd. Cant u make out man, that it sounds awfully jarred when those words become pulling?”.

“Ok.. Then, is this correct? Aadmi chal rahi hai???” , I countered sarcastically.

“Aah, listen Anoop. Everything will have exceptions and Hindi is not an exception”, he said and bunged his lectures.

Whatever, I adopted that formula and draw on that even now and 90% of the times, it has worked. :)

Subsequently, I came across numerous such situations where I could not surmise if it should be ka/ki or tha/thi . In the views of psychiatrist Dr.Hannibal Lecter of ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ fame, this particular bare state of mind where it attempts to deduce the gender of a genderless entity, is termed “KAKI-THATHI agendero syndrome“, for which practice is the only remedy.

My struggling with that syndrome was still ongoing when I had another embarrassing encounter, this time, a more intricate one with a more complex phrase.

Me and my mentor Shalini were analyzing a critical bug in a module, putting traces after traces and keeping our eyes wide open in front of the monitor screen. I was not knowing those processes that accurately then and hence she was doing the major tasks as I used to sit beside her and watch the tremendous pace with which her fingers hit the keys of that keyboard. Even today, I am of the opinion that if someone presents her a piano, she will surely bring out, either the best heavy-death-metal-rock-song tune or the keys of the piano themselves.

Having said these, one evening when we were working on that, she looked a bit annoyed and said “Output thodi aa rahi hain”.

I could not presume what was the maamla.

After a few minutes, she recompiled and re-ran and cryid again, “ Yeh output thodi aa rahi hai” !

This time I could not hold out. I humbly asked her, “yeh output thodi thodi kyun aa rahi hain, ek saat kyun nahin aati??”.

With all apprehensions and tensions and deadlines nested in her mind, she could not feel the air of innocence in my question and gave a strict impulsive reply which was something like this:

“What’s this Anoop? Don’t you know these are atomic state-machines and semaphores are bound to them?.. You should understand these basics Anoop, else you cant get the system level understanding. When an atomic change happens, a listener class opens up automatically and gets destroyed only when the thread dies, haven’t I told you?”.

“My God”, I thought, what had I asked?? I had just converted what she had told in an assertive sentence into an interrogative sentence. I was scared and never spoke that evening again.

Last week when we were having our evening snacks in office, I casually narrated that incident to another colleague here and exemplified Shalini saying how people become short tempered and start speaking something disparate and non-sense when they are under pressure. All of a sudden, she started laughing hard and certified that my Hindi is inconceivably poor and hopeless!

Only when she told the reason did I come to know about the weird and wonderful, yet mysterious behavior of the word “thodi” in Hindi!!!

“My dear boy, thodi means less, that’s true. But ‘Output thodi aa rahi hain’ means no output”, she elaborated. “This is very much in practice. Like, when I want to say, something is told by her and not me, I say , ‘ Maine thodi boli, usne boli’ “.

Oh my holy God, a twist. A twist that seemed a twist only to me! Not even in my craziest of the dreams had I imagined that a word called ‘thodi’ enclosed ‘utni badi’ connotations!! I opine that the best example for an object oriented language is not java or cpp, but Hindi. I mean, seriously, what was it if not polymorphism? :P

That day, I came to know how Hindi hides in itself, scores of such fantasies! I could relate this Thoda-thodi incident to the colonial Chaura-Chouri incident wherein the British controlled police mistook an Indian mob for extremists and opened fire, while the mob had mistaken that Indian police force for british officers with arms!

I truly had never thought that one day Hindi will challenge my technical (in)abilities about semaphores!!

The chronicles of Koramangala !! Part-1:

This is a work of ‘TRUE FICTION’:

Astrology has been an integral part of my life, from the very day I entered this planet unwillingly (yes, I’m a descendant of Caesar) to this date! My mother, aunt, grandma and a few other feminine characters of my family believe in astrology to the core of it and do seek out the suggestion of our “Family Astrologer” ahead of performing any major alterations!! So when I was about to move to Bengaluru for work, his counsel was predictably sought and that was the one damn thing which made me end up in this posh, modish exorbitant koramangala locality that is situated in the liver of this city (yes, it’s a bit far-off from the heart of the city!!). For he is the one who flagged dismissively that I bore “MANGALA DOSHAM” ( curse of planet Mangala) and in order to trounce it , I be required to reside either in “nelaMANGALA” or in “koraMANGALA” only!! I thought it was coherent to settle in liver of the city rather than in nelaMANGALA, the foot of the city and thus, I wrecked up here!! Thank God I dint have the curse of Lord Raama, for then he would have commanded me to hang about in C.V.Raaman Nagar!!

Just like Kaashi lies on the banks of Ganga and Shimoga on Tunga , Koramangala lies on the banks of … the city’s biggest and the nastiest gutter! This gargantuan open-ventilated trench that surges towards Indiranagara , Domlur and quite a few other ‘Paalyas’ and ‘Sandraas’ before uniting with the main drainage, appears even more appalling than its counterpart of the illustrious Slumdog Millionaire’s Dhaaravi slum!! Regardless of this ,Koramangala has been trendy enough to catch the real estate boom, ornamented itself with some of the best in the town arcades, in which list come the celebrated Forum mall, Raheja Arcade, NGV , Lifestyle Oasis and numerous spencers and spars and big-bazaars and needless to cite, an ample number of software companies have also surfaced. The ‘SHOPPING MALLS’ , btw, have become a sensational hit among both boys and girls, for , if girls go there for SHOPPING, boys go there for MAALS ;)!!

Well, if that facet gave you about koramangala, the notion of a spoilt neighborhood, hold on for a moment!! Because even in streets where realty rates have touched skies, there are a lot of temples too, which are so heavily teeming all the time that it makes you feel if these many people have guilt-conscience! Whatever, it’s truly a good sign that we are not yet ripped off from our cultural roots en masse. Similar to shopping malls, few spacious patrician temples also somehow have become a thing of thumbs-up among both boys and girls.

This is how I can portray koramangala to you.. I don’t really know which smiley I’ve to put after the line, “I stay in koramangala” , :) or :( . Maybe this is more germane “:-)=$$$$$$“ , implying that you can be happy here and get high on iff you have enough dollars in every part of you!

Having given an epigrammatic foreword about the place I stay, let me start narrating some colorful as well as some pathetic experiences I had here since my arrival, one by one, with the first among them, in this very post!

——- “ The Badam Milk Split Up “——

Let me be a bit frank this time, in saying that I’m not a spendthrift. Haven’t spent too much on any particular thing which I deem unworthy or if it seems to me as a dead-investment. Nonetheless, I should concede that koramangala has been triumphant in changing this demeanor of mine to a considerable extent. Yes, the place is a pretty penny where a film in Forum on weekends won’t come for less than 300, 400 bucks, a masala dosa for not less than 40, and a house for monthly rent at … better I keep it to myself. All I can say is that in a very near future, you will not be able to declare a variable like this:

int monthly_house_rent_koramangala ;

GCC will throw an out of bound error! You will be needing a long int.

But during my initial days here, I was oblivious of all these facts and figures and never carried more that Rs.100 with me many a times while going out! One scorching day, when sun was so harsh that no ponds cream could put up with, I was returning to my room from Forum, felt very thirsty and wished to have a glass of cold badam milk in some hotel nearby. I pierced into a heavily crowded token system hotel, with great difficulty , pushed my hands near the token counter amidst other tens of hands which craved for dosas and idlis and a varied selection of other items. I handed him an unsullied 50 Rs note and asked for cold badam milk. He, in next to no time, put the money in the drawer, tore the receipt, gave me the token and moved to another customer with the same pace.

I thought, in the rush of the next customer he should have forgotten to render me the change and waited for 2-3 minutes to ask him when he finds some air to breath in. When the crowd never seemed to lessen, I decided to raise him for my change somehow in that swarm itself, and looked at the receipt to know how much he had owed me. Well, u should have already anticipated by now, that to my dismay, the receipt threw a curve at me as it showed that a glass of cold badam milk was tagged at 50 Rs!!!! God, where have you put me in, I thought. Nevertheless, I soothed myself saying that I was going to drink the costliest badam milk of my lifetime and perceptibly expected a really luscious n a flavorsome cup of it. But when I had the first sip, from that medium sized cup what he had offered, I felt that to be no better than the 8 Rp badam milk that we used to enjoy in the corner shop besides our hostel in Mysore!! Regrettably, I was in koramangala then and if I did a hasty micro-economical analysis of the badam milk cost split up, I would have found that hardly Rs.3 had gone on milk, Re.1 on Badam and sugar, 1 for refrigeration and the rest 45 was on the grounds that I had that in a place which is beset with young software engineers and well-heeled, born to the purple businessmen who think that reserve bank prints INR only in 3 denominations, of 1000, 500 and occasionally 100 !!

Whatsoever, although at times this gives the intuition of being a good course, as it a causative for the decentralization of wealth, in contrast, as they say, has really an alarming influence on the recklessly escalating cost-of-living in koramangala. I feel it’s high time we realize this and kick the ballistics before it’s too late!