Random thoughts...

Should finance be outside politics?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:33:47 +0530

Everybody does what is good for them (more looking at the short term and some times looking at the long term). Politicians do what will get them elected. If short term growth has to be slowed down to ensure long term safety, politicians simply won’t do it. Is that a good reason to say financal decisions of a country should be taken by non-political body?

Google is harmful - says Google ;-)

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:51:52 +0530

Google is harmful - says Google ;-)

"I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t"

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:40:00 +0530

“I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t”

- Jules Renard

"To me, it was all about winning a mind game. If I could make people understand the issues, they..."

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:00:04 +0530

“To me, it was all about winning a mind game. If I could make people understand the issues, they would take charge and deliver the results.”

- Go Kiss the World, Subroto Bagchi

"The key is not to react to what had happened. Whatever the incident, you had to learn to absorb all..."

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:59:25 +0530

“The key is not to react to what had happened. Whatever the incident, you had to learn to absorb all the details and then figure out the subsequent damage control.”

- Go Kiss the World, Subroto Bagchi

"If it requires a smart programmer to handle ‘how’ to do, it requires a even smarter..."

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:50:53 +0530

““If it requires a smart programmer to handle ‘how’ to do, it requires a even smarter programmer to handle ‘what’ to do.””

- My own observation :-)

Making wrong code look wrong!

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:55:00 +0530

Why is this bad?
char* dest, src;

And Why is this dangerous?
if (i != 0)
foo(i);

What is wrong with this?
s = Request(“name”)
write “Hello!” + s

Keep functions short. If a function cannot be viewed from a single screen and needs scrolling, it is time to refractor your code. Why?

Why this line in c++ doesn’t really say anything about what it does?
i = j * 5;

What’s wrong if dosomething() throws an exception?
dosomething();
cleanup();

One line answer that Joel gives for all above questions is “It doesn’t make wrong code look wrong!”.

Read more here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

An interesting read!

:-)

Back to Basics!

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:43:00 +0530

What is a null-terminated string? What is a Pascal-string? And finally what is a f#@&ed string?

What is the problem with this code?
char bigString[1000];
char *p = bigString;
bigString[0] = ‘\0’;
p = mystrcat(p,”John, “);
p = mystrcat(p,”Paul, “);
p = mystrcat(p,”George, “);
p = mystrcat(p,”Joel “);
…
…

Does malloc do garbage collection? ;-)

Why is it better always to malloc 2^n bytes?

Why “SELECT author FROM books?” is slow when done on xml?

Do you understand what this code does?
void foo( char* a, char* b )
{
while (*a) b++;
while (*a++ = *b++);
}

I know most of our answers will be “Why should I care about all pointer nonsense when I’m coding in my beautiful language like Java or Perl?” This reminds me of an old discussion we had during lunch. Is it necessary for application programmers to know low level stuffs? Joel says “Yes”. Read the following concluding paragraphs from his article:

For those three gracious members of my audience who are still with me at this point, I hope you’ve learned something or rethought something. I hope that thinking about boring first-year computer-science stuff like how strcat and malloc actually work has given you new tools to think about the latest, top level, strategic and architectural decisions that you make in dealing with technologies like XML. For homework, think about why Transmeta chips will always feel sluggish. Or why the original HTML spec for TABLES was so badly designed that large tables on web pages can’t be shown quickly to people with modems. Or about why COM is so dang fast but not when you’re crossing process boundaries. Or about why the NT guys put the display driver into kernelspace instead of userspace.

These are all things that require you to think about bytes, and they affect the big top-level decisions we make in all kinds of architecture and strategy. This is why my view of teaching is that first year CS students need to start at the basics, using C and building their way up from the CPU. I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it’s “easy” and you don’t get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don’t even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can’t quite see that in your perl script. If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It’s like Karate Kid. Wax On, Wax Off. Wax On, Wax Off. Do that for three weeks. Then Knocking The Other Kid’s Head off is easy.

Go here for the original article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

:-)

Too rigor, mathematicians are!

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:46:43 +0530

A meticulous mathematician, a sloppy physicist, and an even sloppier astronomer are on their way to Scotland. They cross the border and observe a black sheep in the middle of a field. ‘Look,’ exclaims the astronomer, ‘all Scottish sheep are black!’ The physicist responds, ‘No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!’ The mathematician shakes his head, takes a breath and proclaims, ‘Gentlemen, all we can truly say is that in Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.’

:-)

Everyone has someone to envy at !

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:44:14 +0530

Quite frequently I used to compare myself with others and think “I am not as good as X”. I used to think “I’ll be happy if I can perform like X”. But it looks like even if I reach the level of X, there will be another ‘X’ with whom I will be doing a similar comparison. And guess what? I’m not alone :-)

I was reading an article on Richard Borcherds, a field medalist. This is what he says:

“I wasn’t getting very far. Most of the time I was struggling to keep my job. I’d see other people my age, such as Simon Donaldson (1986 Fields Medallist), being considerably more successful, and I thought I’m obviously not all that good. There were times when I thought of dropping out.”

This shows one thing. No matter however great you are. You will always have someone you envy!

:-)

“God created bugs!”, I guess. No software escapes...

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:56:00 +0530

“God created bugs!”, I guess. No software escapes from this rule. This is a snapshot of my wordpress blog @ 17:58 12/7/08 IST. Look at “Recent Posts” at the right corner. That is supposed to show the title of the post :-)

Innovation @ S7 Software

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:38:00 +0530

This was the title of the presentation that took place in our office a short while back. I wanted to write this last Thursday itself (when the presentation actually took place). But unfortunately didn’t get time. So writing this on a relaxed Sunday morning :-)

This is a presentation where people showcase their FFF creations. If you are wondering what FFF is, it is expanded as “Feel Free Fridays” where people can work on their own pet projects. Here are the projects that were presented:

Lisa:

This is a build analysis framework. Lot of times we stumble upon customers who don’t have their source code well organized. All sources might not be maintained under one directory structure. In such cases transferring their source code completely to S7 to do porting will be painful task. I remember projects which took 1.5 months just to get all sources. Infact I’m facing this problem right now in my own project :-)

Solution to this was first proposed by Kumar. He proposed a runtime build analyzer. The project was named Lisa. This way, first need to run the build on client’s machine through Lisa’s interface. As the build happens Lisa will capture all files that are being used in the build and the dependencies between them. The dependency will be displayed as a directed acyclic graph and all files used in the build will be tarred and zipped as a gzip file to be transferred to S7. This will enhance productivity by reducing the time taken to replicate client’s build environment at our end.

Unfortunately the interns who carried out this project were not present during the presentation (due to their exams) and I took the pleasure of presenting it. The sales team was impressed and asked for a windows version of the same and few feature enhancements too!

Enigma:

This is my own pet project :-) It was designed by Karthik and me. Enigma is an Online Programming Contest framework. This will give us the ability to host our own programming contests similar to Topcoder.

Contests happen at a fixed time and for a fixed duration. Various algorithm intensive questions will be posted and contestants can solve the problem in one of the following languages - C, C++, Java or Dot Net. (Few python enthusiasts were asking for python support. Let’s see…) Once the contestant has solved the problem, he/she can submit it through the web interface. The solution will be compiled and checked for correctness automatically and scores/rank will be updated. Security concerns are yet to be addressed however. Somebody asked a smart question - “What if someone intentionally codes a malicious program and submits it?” Without missing a beat, or looking up for the questioner, Manju replied “We’ll hire him!” :-)

Unfortunately we presented only one third of we work we did. One part we didn’t present is a similar system for people who come in to take interviews. This process needs to be computerized. One important difference here from the previous problem is, our question papers have some puzzles which cannot be automatically evaluated by machine. So, when a candidate completes answering a paper the paper will automatically be mailed to the person (decided by the HR while setting the interview) who will correct it and send it back. All tests will be achieved for future reference. One more part that was not presented is the infinite timed contests like SPOJ which will be used internally.

Karthik made the presentation and it was quite witty! There were laughs and giggles here and there :-)

ImageGallery:

This is an online photo organizer designed and presented by Tripati. The idea came when Sridevi (HR) was using picassa for hosting some of our photos online. So the question was raised - Why use Picasa for putting up S7 related photos? Why not host it on our own. Why not build our own Photo Gallery like software?

But this is something to be debated. The debate arose after the presentation. One group was arguing “Why reinvent the wheel? Why build something that already exists? Why not use some open source solution?” Another group argued “It is always a pleasure to use our own product that something designed by somebody else. This way we’ll have more control on the software”. This is an argument that surfaces very frequently at S7. I remember this kind of argument surfacing when in one of our previous presentation one team presented ‘cyborg’ – an IM tools which will let you speak to machines!

The product looked very simple and clean which I liked. I also heard Tripati developed it in a very short time. Great work!

AdminTools:

Unfortunately I wasn’t there when this project was presented. For the mails I understand it is a web-based tool for automatically tracking/querying the various hardware resources that is available at S7. This uses snmp to retrieve details of all hardware available at office that is connected to network and stores it in a central repository. This repository can later be queried using the given web interface. For example I can ask “Give me a Linux machine that has more than 2 GB of RAM and has MySQL installed.”

Though I was not present during the presentation of this project, guessing by the presentation time it took and the number of questions it evoked, it must have been a great work!

Great going ‘innovation @ S7’ !

Silence is good :-)

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 07:35:19 +0530

In my room in Bangalore I only have a fan and don’t have an AC. The sound of fan is so irritating (however smooth it runs) that I find it quite difficult to concentrate.

Back in Chennai I’m right now working from a room that has an AC. I must say this is simply great! This keeps the room silent and I find it easier to concentrate. One more thing I have noticed is, lesser temperature keeps me in better mood. Office is of course air-conditioned but presence of many people breaks the silence. We need to earn much more dollars before we can have separate room for everybody! We are only a startup up now.

I wish I can work in a separate air-conditioned room all the times… Guess what? I’ve switched off my AC too now. This is even better :-)

"Go Green" @ S7 Software

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:57:00 +0530

This is the current hot discussing at S7 Software. If you enter the office, you’ll see a transparent board right at the reception where you’ll see what my colleagues are doing to “go green”. One writes he has stopped using his car and instead bicycles to office. Another guy says he has stopped using plastic bags. There was many other writing which I don’t remember right now. Today morning I got a mail in ‘s7views’ mailing list which I found useful and would like to share with you people.

Subject: [S7views] Incredible Induction Stove!!!
Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:07:54 +0530
From: Ganesh N T
Organization: S7 Software
To:

Saturday morning I was window gazing in and around Jayangar complex when I came across, for fist time, Induction stove!!

I saw a demo and was puzzled! I thought it was splendid! The stove could boil 1 liter of normal temperature water to boiling point in about 30 seconds!!! Amazingly the vessel was not even warm! Not even the stove surface! Only the water was boiling! For me it was kind of a magic!!!! so impressed by the technology, I did some research on the internet about it. It is about 80% energy efficient than our Gas stoves! Induction stove works on the concepts of electromagnetic induction & eddy currents.

Link on Induction stove pros and cons http://theinductionsite.com/proandcon.shtml

Science of Induction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_cooker

Though there is one big con of inductive heating is that the crockery/cooking vessel should be ferrous (means magnetic). Many of your house hold vessels might not be ‘Induction Ready’. But this one reason alone is not enough compared to the pro energy efficiency and pro environment friendly quality and cost benefits of Induction Stove over Gas Stove. You could easily buy few such ‘Induction Ready’ vessels which sell cheaper than much expensive Teflon or copper vessels. Just carry a magnet to crockery shop, to whichever vessel magnet sticks is ‘Induction Ready’ vessel.

In a shop in Jaynagar 4th block (Bangalore), next to the complex, Induction Stove sells at about 2,000 - 3,200 Rs.

I am planning to buy one soon J

GO GREEN J

Ganesh N Tiwari

S7 Software

Solved a Topcoder problem after long time!

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:01:00 +0530

I exactly dont know why, but felt like solving a Topcoder problem today evening. After long days, I got this feeling today.

So opened last match’s 500 pointer and started solving it. It took little more time than it usually would take. Probably because of the long break.

But the moment I cracked it, the pleasure I got was simply unexplainable. Running the code against 500 system test cases was like a roler-coaster ride. I enjoyed the ride after long days.

Hope I enjoy the ride often!

2 * 4 = 8. Wow!

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:42:00 +0530

Of-late, I’m getting more and more interested in multi-core processing. Trying to learn OpenMP, Intel TBB and similar stuff… But where to test my programs? I have a dual core processor in my notebook. But I thought having a quad-core would be lot better. I asked Kumar if we have any such machine in our labs. He pointed to Superman. “I remember this machine. It is a dual core”, I said. “No, It is quad-core”, he said. Neither of us were sure.

This night as usual, I didn’t feel sleepy. So connected to Superman and ran a small program to see the number of cores it has. Guess what??? See the result for yourself!

Capabilities:

Hyper-Threading Technology: not capable
Multi-core: Yes
Multi-processor: yes

Hardware capability and its availability to applications:

System wide availability: 2 physical processors, 8 cores, 8 logical processors
Multi-core capability : 4 cores per package
HT capability: 1 logical processors per core

All cores in the system are enabled for this application.

Relationships between OS affinity mask, Initial APIC ID, and 3-level sub-IDs:

AffinityMask = 1; Initial APIC = 0; Physical ID = 0, Core ID = 0, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 2; Initial APIC = 4; Physical ID = 4, Core ID = 0, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 4; Initial APIC = 1; Physical ID = 0, Core ID = 1, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 8; Initial APIC = 5; Physical ID = 4, Core ID = 1, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 16; Initial APIC = 2; Physical ID = 0, Core ID = 2, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 32; Initial APIC = 6; Physical ID = 4, Core ID = 2, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 64; Initial APIC = 3; Physical ID = 0, Core ID = 3, SMT ID = 0
AffinityMask = 128; Initial APIC = 7; Physical ID = 4, Core ID = 3, SMT ID =0

Press Enter To Continue

Great…. It is a machine with two processor each being a quad-core. So, totally eight cores. Wow! Nice machine to play around. I’m going to try all kind of parallel programming stuff on this!

Stay tuned for more…

Cheers, Indhu

Secure Passwords Keep You Safer

Sun, 18 May 2008 16:28:00 +0530

Secure Passwords Keep You Safer:

An interesting read on creating strong passwords.

A small excerpt from the article:

So the first attack PRTK performs is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, things like “letmein,” “password1,” “123456” and so on. Then it tests them each with about 100 common suffix appendages: “1,” “4u,” “69,” “abc,” “!” and so on. Believe it or not, it recovers about 24 percent of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.

Then, PRTK goes through a series of increasingly complex root dictionaries and appendage dictionaries. The root dictionaries include:

* Common word dictionary: 5,000 entries
* Names dictionary: 10,000 entries
* Comprehensive dictionary: 100,000 entries
* Phonetic pattern dictionary: 1/10,000 of an exhaustive character search

Normally, PRTK runs on a network of computers. Password guessing is a trivially distributable task, and it can easily run in the background. A large organization like the Secret Service can easily have hundreds of computers chugging away at someone’s password. A company called Tableau is building a specialized FPGA hardware add-on to speed up PRTK for slow programs like PGP and WinZip: roughly a 150- to 300-times performance increase.

…

What’s happening is that the Windows operating system’s memory management leaves data all over the place in the normal course of operations. You’ll type your password into a program, and it gets stored in memory somewhere. Windows swaps the page out to disk, and it becomes the tail end of some file. It gets moved to some far out portion of your hard drive, and there it’ll sit forever. Linux and Mac OS aren’t any better in this regard.

Arnab Chakraborty's compiler tutorial

Sat, 17 May 2008 22:40:00 +0530

Arnab Chakraborty's compiler tutorial: A very good turorial on Flex and Bison. Expecially good for people like us (S7 software) who have to automate a lot of task while porting source codes from one environment to another. Tools that automatically parse the source code and give valuable information or handle few porting tasks automatically will go a long way in saving hours of engineer’s work.