Rolling Stones

Yahoo Supports OpenId

2008-01-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! has announced its support for OpenId. This is a move inline with the focus of Yahoo! on moving from portal to platform.

For those who are not aware what OpenId is, it is an open technology standard for logging into website to access its content. It eliminates the use of multiple username and password across different websites.

So now you can login not only to Yahoo! properties but to a lot more websites(Open Id supported) using your Yahoo! login.

Fight or Flight

2008-01-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

I was wondering what could be the worst kind of feeling in an individual's life. There is no worse feeling than losing something which has high stakes for you and people have high expectations on you. It could be personal or professional. Like getting into the most premiere institute and then graduating with a track record which even you are ashamed of. It actually hurts.

It hurts so much because you know how much pain you are going through and there is nothing you can do about it. It hurts because you know how deflated you are and will be. It hurts because you know everyone around you that you care about will bother you with assinine questions and commentary and there is nothing you can or should do about it. The inside of you wants to lash out and try to beat some common sense into them, but you know there is no point.

You know that you are going to have to go through the drill of being calm so that everyone else is calm. Shutting out everything blasting at you when you leave your house or office, recognizing that its just noise that doesn't change all the work everyone around you has put in to get this far. It doesn't change all that they have accomplished.

You know that the difference between winning and losing at this level is a very, very fine line. You will think of every moment that could have changed the outcome over the past.All the what ifs.

Then there comes a point where a smile comes on your face. You think of all the joy and fun you had while trying for that thing. The moments you would never ever trade. The knowledge that has reached a level where the stakes are much higher. You take pride and satisfaction in where you are, knowing that its a foundation.

Then the competitive juices kick back in and you go to work. Looking for that edge. Wishing that the next most competitive and valuable thing is now.

Joy of Next

2007-12-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

One prominent thing which separates humans from machines is the ability to experience and predict things. To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was but to imagine is to experience the world as it has never been but it might be. To imagine things which do not exist in the realm of reality is a quality of human brain which is phenomenal and it is this ability which drives us to think about the future. Most of our time is spent anticipating and making future.

This is what separates humans from animals and is responsible for bringing us out of the jungles into houses, journey to space and most of the things which we see around us.The imagination of something which does not exist and might never exist.

Nexting or predicting the immediate future is something which brain does continuosly.When trying to walk on a crowded street we try to estimate the speed of others and walk accordingly.These predictions about our local immediate and personal future happen unconsiously, are ubiquitous and take
place at an unimaginable speed.

Now since we are endowed with such power it makes us believe we can always predict and control our fate. We do things in present which we predict will bring joy in next.When I am studying i am predicting i will be better paid off in the future which will make my life more secure in future. Even if we take example of very small things like going out for dinner i am predicting i will enjoy after having dinner at some XYZ place, when i reach there i will order things which i predict i will like and this goes on and on.

In a way we are always trying to find our Shangri-La and doing things which we think will bring joy in the next. And if I were asked what i did last year I would say preparing for joy of next and what I would be doing this year I would again say preparing for joy of next.

Welcome 2008!

Everything is Miscellaneous

2007-10-08T06:48:00.000-07:00

Everything is Miscellaneous is a book by David Weinberger who is also author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. The reviews seems promising, in short the book talks about how we classify things. It addresses some of the current trends on the internet.

According to Weinberger when we organise data in terms of physical placement , we tend to think in Aristotelian terms where objects are members of a categories, and share the same traits as other members of that category. We can organize these categories into trees: a robin is a bird, which is an animal. We can expect the leaves of trees to share the attributes of their branches, and we expect each leaf to fit onto only one, specific branch. But that's not how knowledge works in a digital age. When I bookmark, it's to my benefit to add many tags to it, both because it makes it easier for me to find it again, and because it helps other people find it as well. Weinberger advises us to "put each leaf on as many branches as possible", building a tree that looks more like a hyperlinked pile of leaves.

So when we are looking for a book on Amazon.com we can find it under a number of categories and it can also be found using a lot of metadata like tags etc. This makes the book more searchable.

Here is a brief video which makes the concept more clear.

Being with people who understand you, Priceless

2007-10-06T14:47:00.000-07:00

Mastercard has one of the best punch lines and they know how to improvise on it. Just saw this commercial and its lovely.

Wing Reunion Ooty'07

2007-10-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

When we were in college we used to make a lot of plans to go on a wing trip. But every time the plan was blown off mainly due to financial constraint. Now we are earning and money is no more a problem, but now most of us don’t have time. However this time nine out of thirteen of our wing mates managed to spare three days for the wing reunion and the place was chosen to be Ooty.

Why Ooty? Not because of its natural beauty, after a lot of research we found that there is not much to see in Ooty which means we will be spending more time in our rooms so in a way we will be having more time for Bulla (Gossip) and Patte (Cards).

So finally nine of us gathered in Bangalore for a three day trip to Ooty starting Sept 29 ’07. Just for the matter of record following people were present
Aayush aka CK from Hyderabad,
Anand aka AVS from Noida,
Arun from Gurgaon,
Gaurav aka gaG from Hyderabad
Jitendra aka Jitu from Pune,
Mayank aka MS from Hyderabad,
Puneet aka bunty from Kanpur
Rajat aka gattu from Hyderabad
Sandeep aka inzaghi from Bangalore

Also for record purpose the brakes of the tempo traveller failed near the 22nd Hairpin turn, while coming down from Ooty. The vehicle was stopped by hitting the rocks on the other side of about 1500m deep valley. Some snaps from the trip

Just before the Start

On the way to Ooty

After the brakes failed

Damaged vehicle

Gattu, Aayush, Me and gaG

gattu me and gaG

Sneak peak by gattu

Dress code as instructed by Mayank

All credits to Aayush, Mayank, Rajat and Anand for handling the logistics.

Top Companies for Leaders

2007-09-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

This year four Indian companies figure in the list of Global Top 20 companies for leaders 2007 by Fortune. Hindustan Unilever with fourth spot is the leading Indian company followed by Infosys Technologies at tenth, ICICI at nineteenth and Wipro at twentieth spot.

In Asia Pacific category Hindustan Unilever leads with the first spot followed by Infosys Technologies at second ICICI fourth, Wipro fifth and Tata Consultancy Services Limited at seventh.

All the companies from the technology side are primarily IT Services Company which again triggers the question, is the IT industry in India only about Services?

However this is quite encouraging for Indian companies, they are getting more and more globally recognized. I hope the trend continues.

Here is a demographic distribution of Global Top 20 companies for leaders 2007

Start Mashing!

2007-09-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! has come up with Y! mash which is a social networking site similar to Orkut and Facebook. Social Networking is pretty hot these days and with Yahoo! entering the domain the competition has become tougher. However Yahoo! needs to do a lot of catching up, there are already players in this domain with huge user groups.

I played around with Y! mash and one interesting feature of mash is the ability to create and edit other’s profile. I turned Kapil’s profile colour to orange, created a profile for Neeru and edited the About Me section of Aayush. This is something similar to wiki where anybody can edit the content of the profile. However if you feel people are going to mess around with your profile, you can restrict the editing to your family/friends or keep the editing completely to yourself.

Users can play around with the looks of the profile page change colour, rearrange the different modules as well as add/remove modules from a list of currently available modules like Flickr, Blog Module etc. I am not sure if people can contribute their modules to the list, but opening this to the developers will help building a developer community around mash and also provide entertainment to the users.

One has a pet on the profile page which I have renamed to “Chauggi”. Users can play around with it feed, lick, snorgle, poke etc. and it changes expression. There is also a placeholder where you can keep your stuff like videos.

The site is in trial mode and a lot of obvious features like profile search, private messages are still missing. Overall the site looks promising and Yahoo! is trying to be a lot more innovative this time. They currently has large user groups around Flickr, videos, blogs, groups, answers etc. and if they are able to integrate these services with mash and get the user groups on mash they can become a major player in this domain which they have lost to Orkut, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The picture will get clearer in the next few months but one thing is sure, this move by Yahoo! will force other players to be more innovative and if lucky they can get a major share of the social networking market. Till then keep mashing !!

Freakonomics Book Review

2007-09-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

I recently completed reading Freakonomics. I am really impressed with the treatment of everyday phenomena using economics by Steven Levitt. The book is not about stock comparison or a unifying theme. It is more about a sensible way of thinking in our day to day life and being more sceptical when deriving conclusions from conventional wisdom.

Levitt questions the methods and analogy used most of the time to derive explanations.
For example by knowing the fact that if in an election the person who wins spends more money we assume that money is the cause of winning. Seemingly simple explanations of such phenomena’s are often wrong. The answer to a given riddle is not always in front of us. Such phenomena’s have much more subtle causes.

The fact that two things are correlated does not mean that one causes another. A correlation between X and Y tells that they are related. However it does not tell what is the direction of the correlation. It is quite possible that X causes Y or Y causes X or may be some other factor Z causes X and Y.

A biography of a person (read successful since biographies are not written about unsuccessful people) will point out traits like honesty, hard work, integrity etc .etc. in the person which helped him to succeed in life. So a simple explanation of being successful would be to follow these qualities in our life as well. However on the other side we can find a lot of people who have similar traits and are a failure. Reaching judgement using such shallow factors to measure success or failure are just redundant and are still used as a parameter because most of us are still hooked on to the conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom most often represents the way people would like things to work however economics explores how it actually does work. The main issues covered in this book include.

1. How legalized abortion caused the drop in crime in US during the 90’s?
2. How experts use their informational advantage for their own agenda. How information correlates Ku Klux Klan and real estate agents and how once made publicly available can damage their position in society.
3. Does giving incentives or imposing fine always serve the purpose for which they were introduced? Do teachers cheat and if so why. What makes them similar to the Sumo Wrestlers?
4. Why it safer to send your children to a house with a gun rather than a swimming pool
5. Why people are attracted towards crime even when so much risk is involved?
6. What makes a perfect parent?

The book as stated in the beginning does not end with a unifying idea or conclusion. It however teaches how to use data and a sensible thinking to understand what really is happening under the surface of everyday life. I really enjoyed reading this book and would give it 4/5

Mort, Elvis or Einstein?

2007-08-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

This has been blogged a decade ago and still holds when it comes to applying persona's on developers.
1. Mort, the opportunistic developer, likes to create quick-working solutions for immediate problems and focuses on productivity and learn as needed.
2. Elvis, the pragmatic programmer, likes to create long-lasting solutions addressing the problem domain, and learn while working on the solution.
3. Einstein, the paranoid programmer, likes to create the most efficient solution to a given problem, and typically learn in advance before working on the solution.

So which one are you?

Non Blocking Algorithms in Java

2007-08-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

Nonblocking Algorithms is a feature of Java 5. These are concurrent algorithms which derive their thread safety not from locks but from low-level atomic hardware primitives such as compare and swap. Since they do not make use of locks they can provide better performance and are less prone to deadlocks and priority inversion problems.

Prior to Java 5 for making program thread safe one has to use synchronized keyword which has performance trade off and can also lead to race condition. Atomic variable classes in java.util.concurrent provide means for atomic read-modify-write operations without using locks. They form the basis for lock-free concurrent algorithm.An example of writing thread safe without and with the use of synchronized keyword.

A simple thread safe counter using synchronized keyword.

public final class Counter {

private long value = 0;

public synchronized long getValue() {
return value;
}

public synchronized long increment() {
return ++value;
}
}

A nonblocking counter using compareAndSet method of AtomicInteger. The compareAndSet() method says "Update this variable to this new value, but fail if some other thread changed the value since I last looked."

public class NonblockingCounter {
private AtomicInteger value;

public int getValue() {
return value.get();
}

public int increment() {
int v;
do {
v = value.get();
}

while (!value.compareAndSet(v, v + 1));
return v + 1;
}
}

The grass isn't greener

2007-08-13T04:59:00.000-07:00

A recent research titled Learning from Mixed Feedback: Anticipation of the Future Reduces Appreciation of the Present published in the Journal of Consumer Research has revealed that our quest for improvements can cause us to lose sight of the values of current choices. The human tendency that grass is greener on the other side is ubiquitous in our day to day life. Not only as consumer but in almost any field most of us are so much preoccupied with improving the current situation that we forget to appreciate what we have. The conventional belief that our continuous pursuit of preparing for the future and being on the greener side helps us make the right choices seems to be challenged from the findings. According to the experiment

A group of participants were to choose among three stores on a series of simulated shopping trips. After each trip, they were shown the price charged for a product at their chosen store and the prices charged at each of the other two stores. After going on a series of shopping trips, participants were then asked to indicate which store was the cheapest and whether they would want to switch to another store for a second set of shopping trips. Notably, the investigators found that when participants were told in advance that they would make a second set of shopping trips, they were less likely to prefer the store they initially chose and more likely to switch to another store after the first set of trips. In addition, they also thought the store they chose was the most expensive fifty percent more of the time. This phenomenon was replicated in later studies even when the chosen store was less expensive than the other two stores. In contrast, participants who did not expect to have to make a second choice accurately recalled an equal number of trips on which the chosen store was cheaper or more expensive."Ironically, participants who were preparing for future decisions, and should therefore be more motivated to learn from their past choices, were less likely to realize that they had selected the cheapest store and were more likely to switch to other, more expensive stores," the authors write. Additional evidence suggests that consumers who anticipate future choices selectively search for ways to improve their current situation and disproportionately pay attention to better prices at other stores .As a result, forward looking consumers overestimate how green the grass is on the other side of the fence, leading them to abandon their chosen store for an often objectively inferior alternative.

The statistics collected from the experiment clearly show that once some data is introduced a lot of preconceived believes and obvious things become questionable. It is an indication that our quest for improvement should not be blindfolded and is also a message to sellers that it is equally important for them to retain current consumer than to find new ones.

All Marketers are Liars !!

2007-02-13T02:17:00.000-08:00

Here is a nice cartoon on Marketers. Seems like I couldn't agree more.

Best investment for the next ten years

2007-02-09T02:07:00.000-08:00

According to an interesting article in indiadaily.com the best investment for the next ten years will be domain name , farm land, and cash in bank.
Seems like I should start saving some money to invest into these :-)

Your Face will be your password

2007-02-08T04:33:00.000-08:00

Gone are the days when every website and application needed a username and password to authenticate. With Face recognition as secure automatic access to websites and applications gaining momentum, the user no longer has to rember the lengthy passwords for more than a dozen websites.
While Lenova 3000 series has already incorporated this feature others I am sure will come up with this very soon. These face recognition software use biometric face recognition technology that takes a digital snapshot of the user and extracts key features of the users' face and creates a digital map that becomes the password.

However I am not sure what will happen if somebody shows the picture as user or I get a blow on my face :-)

10 seconds is what I need to get distracted !!

2007-02-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

I realised that it takes approximately 10 seconds for me to get distracted 13 to resist and 25 to become a part of it :-))

12:05:35 I Was Genuinely Working

12:05:40 Still Working not realizing someone is photo shooting me

12:05:45 A slight smirk after the realisation

12:05:48 Smiling in agreement

12:06:00 And here I am posing for the camera

Visit to my Alma Mater

2007-02-03T04:15:00.000-08:00

Recently got a chance to visit my college. Did not have much time but enjoyed every moment I spent there. Some pics from the visit

A-Bot Hall 1

Shopping Center@IITK

Vaishnavi Dhaba where we spent countless nights

So free that I have started hating the word free

2007-01-18T02:58:00.000-08:00

I am software developer although for the past few days I have not written a single line of code which is a testimony of the fact how free I am these days. I don't find the work I am doing any more challenging or interesting as a result I am not able to keep myself motivated. Previously when I used to go to my workplace I used to be enthusiastic, everyday there was something to learn from what I did, seems like the learning curve has come to a phase of saturation.

As a result of which I can feel a lot of deviation as a person in me. I particularly dislike people who form groups and gossip in office, they not only waste their time(which obviously is not important) but more than that they disturb people who are working. However these days even I can be spotted as member of such groups wasting time of other people. The number of smokes and tea sessions have almost doubled.

I dont know what other people do under such situations, I personally feel the only way to leverage this situation and to protect myself from detoriating is by absorbing myself more into reading and learning new things. Although i sincerely hope some good work comes up in my way pretty soon.

Singleton vs Static Class

2007-01-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at my workplace I had a discussion with one of my teammate over using static method or a singleton class. The use case was that there was a class which contained static method and cached certain information in maps required to load certain portions of the application. I was insisting on using the Singleton pattern however he was not very much convinced and insisted on using static methods only. It was then I realized that although Singleton is one of the simplest design pattern, still many people are not aware of its advantages over a Static class. So I will try to juxtapose the two in this article.

Java programming language supports static methods as well as static variables. Static methods, which have the static modifier in their declarations, should be invoked with the class name, without the need for creating an instance of the class. Similarly, fields that have the static modifier in their declaration are called static fields or class variables. By static classes I mean classes which can never be instantiated.

Since static classes have no instance level variables. They are suitable as utility type classes where you can group like functions together.

public class StaticClassExample{
public static int foo(String str) {
//Utility Method which converts a string to lowercase
return str.toLowerCase() ;
}
}

Singleton however is a design pattern, to ensure that only one instance of the class exists. Singletons classes have a private constructor's and are provided with a getInstance method. The following code is an example of a singleton class

public class SingletonClassExample {
private static SingletonClassExample instance = null;
protected SingletonClassExample () {
//Exists only to defeat instantiation.
}
public static synchronized SingletonClassExample getInstance () {
//lazy instantiation to ensure an instance is created only if required.
//synchronized so that in case of multiple thread more than
//one instance is not created.
if(instance == null) {
instance = new SingletonClassExample ();
}
return instance;
}
public String foo(String str1) {
return str1;
}
public Object clone() throws CloneNotSupportedException {
//we can create a copy of the object using the object
//clone method. So we override the Object's clone
//method to throw CloneNotSupportedException
throw new CloneNotSupportedException();
}
}

Since both are utility classes there is not much difference as far as the functionality is concerned. Now let us say if we want to override the method foo(String str) then in the case of Singleton this can be achieved pretty easily by making following code changes

public static synchronized SingletonClassExample getInstance () {
if(instance == null) {
instance = new SingletonClassCanBeExtended();
}
return instance;
}

public class SingletonClassCanBeExtended extends SingletonClassExample {
public String foo(String str1) {
//overridden method
return str1.toLowerCase(Locale.FRENCH) ;
}
}

However for the StaticClassExample we cannot achieve this. A static class can be extended technically but the methods cannot be overridden it does not inherit its instant members. We either have to add another method fooOther(String str) or else create another class if we need to keep the method name and signature same.

So the advantages of a Singleton over a static class are pretty obvious as far as maintainability and design is. The biggest problem with a static class is that it in a way defeats the concept of OO programming, these classes cannot use polymorphism, neither can one pass the instance, these classes are never meant to be instantiated or, at least, there is no point in instantiating it.

However static class can be handy in situations when we want to process the data and use the method like a service, we do not want to remember the state information. For example take the java.lang.Math class which contains static utility methods which are stateless. But when we need to remember the state then Singleton is a better way to achieve it.

Mission Statement

2007-01-12T00:21:00.001-08:00

I was just reading this mission/vision statement of my company(which happens to be a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company) stuck right infront of my chair at eye level. I wanted to write down these statement but that may lead to some legal issues (it is supposed to be for internal use only :-) although i can't figure out why) so i will refrain from doing so.

However after reading the entire A3 sized document, I am very sure that even after putting in the efforts of placing it right in front of the desk of each employee, it would be almost impossible to find even a single employee on the pay roll of my company who can state them.

This reminds me of Guy Kawasaki's book The Art of Start in which he talked about such situations. Where big companies spend thousands of dollars to get one mission statement which not even a single employee not even the person who approved the statement could repeat it without mistakes. Instead of that there should be a mantra which each and every employee can relate to and when she comes to her desk she is motivated to work towards the realization of that mantra.

Exception Handling and Performance Issues

2007-01-11T21:35:00.001-08:00

In this section I will talk about the cost of exceptions in JAVA and how to avoid them

The cost of try catch block without an exception:
The VM later than 1.3 have been improved not to impose any penalty in this situation, so no extra overhead is there.

The cost of try catch block with an exception:
Throwing an exception and executing the catch block has a significant overhead, which is mainly due to the cost of getting the snapshot of the stack when the exception is created. The cost is
large and so one should avoid throwing exceptions as a part of the normal code flow. If your application has been implemented to throw exception during the normal flow of the program , you should consider them during evaluating the performance of your application.

Let us consider this code fragment

public boolean test1(Object obj) {
try {
String str = (String)obj ;
return true ;
}catch(ClassCastException e){
return false ;
}
}

public boolean test2(Object obj) {
if(obj instanceof String) {
return true;
}else {
return false;
}
}

If the time taken to excecute test2 is 1 unit then the time taken by test1 is 100 unit for JDK 1.4
Which demostrates the fact that throwing exception can be very costly when we are building enterprise applications.

I will talk about using Exceptions without the Stack trace overhead in the next part :-)

Reference: Java Performance Tuning by Jack Shirazi

Ask City

2007-01-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

I recently visited this site Ask City , it is coupled with a number of third party sources to provide local information in a very user friendly way.The main features of this site includes maps movies events and business.
With Local Search gaining momentum in India and a lot of dot com sites coming up in this domain, I think Ask City is a worth while site for benchmarking.