life is tough

well, gotta say it man, rough days are ahead. the whole day was wasted in filling the GATE 2005 form. today was the last day and i was filling the online form. first i was searching for a scanner so that i could get my signature scanned. then suddenly it came to me that i could take a pic through the cam on my friendZ mobile and then transfer that to my laptop. so then spend about half an hour taking the pic, resiZing it, adjusting the contrasts, etc. then went for lunch. pathetic food. so as usual i had a pepsi. and that was it. then started looking for ppl with a SBI account or an ICICI credit card. no luck. ppl had either reserved slots on someones cards or the guy had run out on his limit. then finally got hold of swamy whose dad has an SBI account. now hes the kindoff guy who luves to do it at teh last second. anyway had to shoot of for a special lecture by Mr. Chirag Patel, CEO of Net4Nuts. my college has got this special lecture thing where every week or fortnight someone from the industry or teh academecia comes and lectures us on topics they think intresting. so today twas the turn of this guy.. infact we were the ones who asked him to come down here. and 'we' refers to the four of us who have started a company named 'Blue MemeZ'. (im teh CTO of teh Company). we wanted to discuss and convince him on collaborating with us to server his multii-million dollar clients in Europe. after his lecture we made a short 10 min presentation to him on what we have done, what we can and what we wanna do. he really started shooting us on the fact that our work was not innovative an all. i was like, man u think product innovation is easy??? somehow due to the presence of other non-essential elements or otherwise we coulnt convey to him what we were really looking for. im suppsoe to have a discussion with ankit(the CEO of Blue MemeZ) as in what our next step whould be. yeah so after an hour of this lecture and presentation i got back to swammy who some how delayed the job(of filling his own form) upto 7:00pm. then we looked for a bike so that we could go to the ATM and make the required payment. then the news came ein that all SBI ATMs in Gandhinagar were not working. we contemplated going to Ahmedabad but were saved when we got the news that there was one working in sector 10B. we got hold of 2 ATMs both of which had a combined balance of 5000 bucks. we were to pay for 4 forms. 4*850=3400. no sweat. reached SBI ATM at about 10 only to find that the ATm dint accept one of the cards. now we were real short of money. we finish 2 of the payments with the first ATM and get to a STD by about 10:30. swamy calls up his dad to ask hime to use his card only to find out he had noted the wrong application number. back at the institute we finally get it done by 11:00. whooosh. long day. and yeah just think of what lies ahead for november.
i gotta make a 20 min presentation on fuzzy controllers. i know some stuff about fuZZy logic and all but 20 mins??? and i have no idea what kindoff stuff i can demonstrate in software. gotta really drill into this topic
i gotta complete my embedded syatemZ project(whic we have not yet started). i think we have picked up the toughest project. we are suppose to synchronize 2 robots in their activities. im thinking of something in the lines of distributed topology creation. suppose u have and room u wanna clean it. lets assume u have n bots to clean the room. initially the n bots have no idea about the dimensions/size/shape of the room. they just start of randomly in any direction, co-operating with each other to achieve the goal. in the process they would build a gobal topolgy of the area as in where the boundaries are, what obstacles are there inbetween so as to more effeciently clean the room the next time. figuring out whether a given room is the same as previous is a different question altogether and which i dont think we would like to address. my friends think im going too far as our first obstacle is dumping a kernel into a chip and making the robot work as we want it to(move left, right, forward, backward). i guess we would scale it down if we run out of time(which we do always)
i gotta finish my grid computing project. we started of with the intent of doing something in the area of service gridZ. we have already achieved JTI(just in time integration) of but now we are finding it hard to webServices (dynamic, stubless execution) using UDDI4J, SOAP4J, Apache Axis and WSDL4J.differentiate b/w webServices and gridServices. maybe we`ll just provide support for some WSDL extensions and write some custom serialiZers/ deSerialZers. after all ours is one of the only3-4 groups that would have completed projects. have been doing pretty much reading on this and if u see my del.icio.us(which i started using recently) feeds for yesterday i was posting like mad.
im alos looking into building a moZilla based SOAP browser. still gotta look at the feasabilitiy.
on another note, i seriously think i gotta start applying for jobs at companies. now that im not that much intrested in pursuing my mtech or ms right now i must get a job. our first placement season is over and i foolishly dint appear for all of the companies. just think i dint appear for reliance infocom, TCS, Intera IT, HP, Mahindra-British Telecom, Infosys and many more. frankly i dont seem to be inspired to work in the likes of TCS or Infosys. they are not a google or a microsoft. given teh likes i would like to work in IBM, SAP or Oracle. i also like some middle level indian companies like Persistent and MindTree. let see what happens
i also gotta start thinking about my bTech project which is going to be a 23 credit elephant. i wanna somehting in the AI domain, but havent got any ideaZ yet. i was looking at automatic CPPA negotiation(about which ill post some time later) in ebXML about a couple of months ago and had interacted with one of the main members of the OASIS CPPA subcommite member. lets see where i can take it.
ans so ladies and gentlemen, life is tough

Love

my second mid-terms got over yesterday and believe me, exams really suck. but while doing some last minute studying, something really struck me really hard. or rather i realiZed something. and then i came across this. the course was IMA(Introduction to Modern Algebra) and the referenced book happened to be named 'Abstract Algebra'. Abstract has many definitions and the ones i like include

• Considered apart from concrete existence
• Having an intellectual and affective artistic content that depends solely on intrinsic form rather than on narrative content or pictorial representation
• Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only; as, abstract truth, abstract numbers
• Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete and an idea separated from a complex object, or from other ideas which naturally accompany it; as the solidity of marble when contemplated apart from its color or figure

basically people like abstract stuff(ideaZ, movies, books) because they are free to interpret there own version into it. so its not that ppl understand abstract art or something, but technically becoZ each one of them links that particular concept to any one pertaining to what they like best theres a larger audience that could be related to it. if i present you only with a circle u can read almost a million things into it. i could be trying to communicate to you about my life being a circle of sorts, or that the earth is round or presenting a visual form of some wise thought like 'what goes along, comes along, or it could just be a circle. and that is hte beauty. abstraction is a terrific form of generaliZation. and love is just one of those generaliZations. it can span such vasts limits(hopefully more so on the +ve side) that u can really use that word at a prettly lottof places. so prooving ur luV is basically bring that 'luV' thing to a more specific, concrete structure. putting more meat into it, defining it to an extent that the other partner can know what extent (s)he really meant. shanon`s information theory is hardly of any help when talking about the amount of information in such stuff. 'i luv u' is only a string of symbols for it. the formula does not take into account the context specifics or the number of interpretations. infact we should not only talk about the amount of information in a string but the amount of knowledge additon to the sink. let the string be 'abc'. more important than the amount of information in this string is the amount of knowledge addition. and this would be reciever dependant. for example let the string be the sentence 'apaches are persian gangsters'. let the amont of information in this string be x. but what if i already know apaches are persian gnagsters. the information in the string is still x. but there was no knowledge addition for me. my vocab would reamain at the same level. on the other hand for some-one who is not aware of the particular fact would be happy that a new word has been addded to their vocab. knowLedge Additon.

Yo ScorpionZ

the scorpio era starts today

valueAddition

the other day i was waiting for a bus to ahmedabad. after about 10 mins of the frustration of having to stand in the sun, a jeep-wallah stopped by and asked me where i was headed for. on confirming that i was destined to the same place where he was, he said(in a very sweet accent)

idhar beith jaoo dost

now generally i prefer to go by the bus bcoZ the jeep-wallas stuff in so many ppl that it becomes difficult to breathe. but the sun presuaded me to do otherwise. so i sat in teh front row, with half my ass hanging there in the open(bcoZ there were 4 other ppl in that seat). for the whole of the journey i was observing this guy(the jeep driver).

• he was extremely polite to everyone he talked to
• at every stop if a lady had to get back frm behind, he would personally step out open the back door to let them get out comfortably(otherwise u have to jump over that half door at the back of the jeep
• everytime, at every stop, when he asked someone where they were going and he wasnt going the same place, he would literally say sorry to each one of them
• in all of teh forty minutes i was in the jeep he cracked more than a couple of jokes that made all of us laugh

that got me thinking, given the choice and the availability of the option of going in a bus or a jeep, i would choose to go in a jeep and that too this one.. why?? bcoZ he was courteous, easy going and just nice. that was the value addition to his daily job that he was willingly/unwillingly, intentinally/unintentionally puttin in. otherwise all other jeep-wallas were traspoting u b/w the same 2 places at the same cost and with the same stuffiness. but valueAddition counts. this also reminds me of a Forbes 'Best Customer Service' list which consisted of an Indian pan-wallah who provided for stain removers to his customers. now isnt that real thoughtfull???
k, so whats the point now. well. if u consider every business, every domain area ur the best bcoZ either ur the first ones to enter that particular domain or bcoZ the valueAdditon u provide is unparalleled. so teh final question is what is valueAdditon int the software industry??? now, this is a tough nut ro crack for me bcoZ everything in a software is defined by its requirements, the effeciency, the user-friendliness, the extensibilty, teh cutomiZability, the integrability and everythin else. then what is left for valueAdditon? guess will have to give it more thought...

ChangeTheWorld Mission

saw the end of YuvA today. again. some movies get me thinking about wierd topics. yuva is one of them. there is no doubt that the ajay devgan character was the best. the ability to polriZe ppl has always fascinated me. generally when there is a fight going on in my college i often sit up wondering wherther or not i would be a ble to garner huge support for myself. i have not been mr.. popular. i thought there were only few ppl like me. on second thoughts the ability to influence and ppl around u is only a form of power and everybodys hungry for power. the presence of characters like that of abhisek bachan`s is disturbing. Sensiblity is lacking. many movies talk about giving more of urself to India. but it seesm to be a tight rope. someone has to walk it. i aint sure who`s going to do that. i mean i have gotta decide in what way im going to give back something to the country.
yuva also reminds me of this incident when i had just bought tickets to see yuva.
twas a normal day. normal till when i was returning from brigade road. a tall, well groomed man stopped me b/w the path ans asked me

kya aap mere madad kar sakte ho(Can u help me)??

i had a look at him. he seemed to be very young and there was a lady write beside him clinging his arm, very close. i asssumed he was married. i replied immediately as

aap ko kahin jaana hai??(do u wanna go some where??)

thinking he might have wanted directions to go somewhere. he had a mustage and it was very well combed. there was something about this guy that just hit me. he started of again.

haan. mein north side ka hoon, haryana se. main ether job dhoondte hua aaya tha. bees din ho gaya hain aur mera dimaag ghoom gaya hai. mera paas wapas jaane ke liya paise nahin hai.(yes,i`m from the north side, from haryana. i came here looking for a job. it has been 20 days now, and it seems i have loost my sanity. i dont have money to go back to haryana.)

i looked into his eyes an there was a high degree of sincereness in him. he continued

paise hai ,lekin poore nahin hain.(i have money but not enough)

i`m not sure what he said after that but he ended it with

mein aap se bhikh maang raha hun(i`m begging u)

i was as confused and i had no idea what to do. i knew i dint have more thatn 40 bucks in my wallet. i had just bought 3 tickets for yuva and some ice-creame that i was carrying home. i`m not sure whta i would have done if i had money. my brain was so confused. all the logic, all the cells iinside my brain were running out of sync. i lost my logical abilities. twas as if half my grey cells were asking me to run and the other half, i dunoo what. i said

dekheya mein khud padhai kar rahan hun. mein sirf bees saal ka hun,(look i`m a student myself and am only 20 yrs old)

he immediately switched to english.

Please. i dont have an option. i cannot force you. so i`m begging you.

i was ina darker room now. i repeated again this time in english

look i`m only a student and am only 20 years old

before i could say anythin else he snapped back

even i`m only 22 years old

my mind was breakiing apart. so young, educated and what can i do. i darted of towards the direction of my house increasing my pace and yet not running. i could hear his voice trailing gradually behind me.

friend, excuse me friend. u can help.

as i reached home guilt over took me. i hated myself more than ever. i grabbed 500 bucks and went back to look for him. he was no where to be seen. i wasnt sure how much time it had been. but i couldnt find him. i returned home but the thought never left me. i have always believed and been taught not to encourage begging. now i was having a second thought. what can i do. of course i can do without icecream. ofcourse i can do without watching movies. i can do without lots of things. but then what is the limit.
HenceForth i embarked on the changeTheWorld mission which i shall write about some time later.

3 moVies today

today was a movie day. saw 3 movies namely, the Village, Bourne supremacy and Fahrenheit 9/11. i guess the last one was the best. what research from Michael Moore. Excellant stuff. Definetely a must see. and if u havent or caaant see the movie have a look at this. 'the Village' was k. must say that teh quality from shyamlan has been linearly decreasing. sixth Sense was the best. signs was good. and then comes 'Village in the decreasing order'. Bourne Supremecy was also fine. definite;y above average. its a fast pace movie. and ull definitely not get bored for any secoond of it.
the other good thing was that all this cost me only 5 bucks. that was for the transportation to the theatre. i gotta lift frm a friend the way back. and the first 2 movies were courtesy another friend. and the 3rd one was on my lappy. so thats it for today. 3 movies for 5 bucKs.

Orchestration & Choreography

is there any difference in the two words??? i always used them interchangably when i was talking to anybody randomly blurting out any one of them. but atleast in the context of webServices there seems to be difference b/w the two. i was browsing the oracle magaZine(which i came to know has got some award which is the equivalent of an oscar in the publishing world) and they have highlighted a pretty subtle but important difference. Orchestration according to them is when u talk about how ur going to tie together multiple webServices(create a workflow) to produce a consumable, composite, larger functionality oriented webServise. Choreography is when one is talking about how different businesses can define which message eexchange patterns they will engage in before implementing there corresponding internal processes. the main difference clearly is that in the former case everything is more or less under ur control while in the latter it aint.

HaloScan`s Out, BlogBack`s In

k, now after she alerted me about what the HaloScan ppl were hiding from me and after some enlightment from her as in what kindoff addvertisements u get on HaloScan i thought i needed some change again. after taking some help frm Google Baba and some other webSites the conclusion was that since i dint have any server where i could host this comment stuff myself, BlogBack seemed to be a better bet. i registered on there site and got started. this time twas over in a poof. thats bCoz of my prev experience which meant i knew the code inside out. twas all over in a couple of minutes. tehn i thought of importing the HaloScan comments into so i started to look for an export option in haloScan but invain. so theres another reason as to why haloScan sucks. but then i was like, even if there were an export option in haloScan and an import option in BlogBack; the chances of them following the same XML standard were scarce. and u bet i weren`t going to write an XSLT just for transfering 6 comments. so i just did them by hand and they are there now.
although i still would miss the nice feature that blogspot provides me, that of mailing all commetns to ur blog to any mail address that u may want. im of the school which believes that the disparate information on the net needs to eb brought under one umbrella for better(both quantative and qualitative) knowledge extraction. that also brings me to the point that gMail has been upgraded. and they have added support of Atom. so u can get ur feeds right in ur mail. thats going to be a boon for me. more centraliZed access for all the stuff i do. and hey if u dont have a gMail u neednt worry. yahoo has bought oddPost.com which has the coolest mail interface. they have support for drag and drop mails and subscription to RSS feeds and stuff. so dont loose heart. yahoo`s not far behind. better late than never.

HaloScan is Up

k, finally everything is fine. after getting my hands dirty with html and some dirty language embedded in it, i finally got another comments link up. and yeah it works, go ahead give it a try. at first it went all wrong. HaloScan provides an automatic installer for blogspot users which i was very happy to see first. but it fuckin deleted my old comments. god knows how i got it back. later i realiZed that it had not deleted my old comments but just overwritten the old link. whatever!!! after a lil bit tweaking with the template code and a couple of previews and more thana couple of test comments i finally did it. Bravo boy, bravo. ur the man.

BloG my friendZ, BLOG

highlights of a weblogging survey completed almost an year ago.

• The "blogosphere" will number ten million souls by the end of 2004, but almost all of them will be dead.
• Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life.

Why men Lie

Too GooD

One day, while a woodcutter was cutting a branch of a tree above a river, his axe fell into the river. When he cried out, the Angel appeared and asked, "Why are you crying?"

The woodcutter replied that his axe has fallen into water. The Angel went down into the water and reappeared with a golden axe. "Is this your axe?" the Angel asked.

The woodcutter replied, "No."

The Angel again went down and came up with a silver axe. "Is this your axe?" the Angel asked.

Again, the woodcutter replied, "No."

The Angel went down again and came up with an iron axe. "Is this your axe?" the Angel asked.

The woodcutter replied, "Yes."

The Angel was pleased with the man's honesty and gave him all three axes to keep, and the woodcutter went home happily.

One day while he was walking with his wife along the riverbank, the woodcutter's wife fell into the river. When he cried out, the Angel again appeared and asked him, "Why are you crying?"

"Oh Angel, my wife has fallen into the water!"

The Angel went down into the water and came up with Jennifer Lopez. "Is this your wife?" the Angel asked.

"Yes," cried the woodcutter.

The Angel was furious. "You cheat! That is an untruth!"

The woodcutter replied, "Oh, forgive me, my Angel. It is a misunderstanding. You see, if I said 'no' to Jennifer Lopez, You will come up with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Then if I also say 'no' to her, You will thirdly come up with my wife, and I will say 'yes,' and then all three will be given to me. But Angel, I am a poor man and I will not be able to take care of all three wives, so *that's* why I said yes this time."

The moral of the story is whenever a man lies it is for an honorable and useful reason.............

ps: i think J.Lo and Catherine Zeta Jones should be reversed here. Zeta is definitely far better than J.Lo