Days in the lives

Being the arm-chair marco-economist that I am, I keep trying to understand what makes economies work and how history is an effect of economic activity.

I found this article on IHT on Obama's economic thinking to be quite a good read.

I particularly enjoyed the comparisons made to prior economic policy and his approaches to solving the shortcomings in earlier models.

Scientists hope the device may help chart climate change under Antarctic sea ice.


First thought: This is funny.
Second thought: I wonder if this affects the seals ability to attract a mate.
Third thought: This probably isn't fair to the seal.

Just read this today while flipping through unread e-mail. This was sent by a person (obviously) in charge of arranging for food & drink to all employees working in an office where I used to work in Bangalore.

---

Subject: Grahana the Solar Eclipse
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:12:12 -0700
To: people in bangalore <e-mail address hidden>

Hi All,

Tomorrow there will be a solar eclipse between 3 and 6 PM. Since it is considered unhealthy to consume food during the eclipse no snacks or fruits will be provided between 3 and 6 PM. The coffee/tea vending machine will continue to be functional but employees may employ discretion in its use.

Regards,
<name hidden>

---

I'm a little outraged (and would have complained if I were still working in that office) and a little stupefied.

I'm not sure on who's authority the person-in-charge was acting other than his own. I can understand that some suppliers might have has issues with serving food, but that should have then been explicitly mentioned as the reason for the non-supply of food.

The "employees may employ discretion" part I find really funny. I believe that people always exercise discretion in using the coffee machine -- I usually don't hit the brew button for entertainment.

The fact that I'm noticing this makes me worry if I'm slowly losing my connection to India.

If you want to create a good piece of software using a new language/paradigm you have to re-write it at least once.

Today I got my laptop at work changed to something that supports 1400x1050 on a 287 mm wide screen (normal aspect ratio of 4:3). To my laptop I also have connected a 400x300 mm CRT monitor which supports up to 2048x1536 at 85 Hz.

A bit of math tells me that

1400dots * 25.4mm/inch / 287mm = 123.90 dpi
400mm * 123.90dpi / 25.4mm/inch = 1951.18 dots

My monitor actually supports a resolution of 1920x1440, giving me the best dpi match I've had since I started doing Xinerama.

What my monitor does is:

1920dots * 25.4mm/inch / 400mm = 121.92 dpi

Given that I can't use all the reported visible area on a CRT it actually is an even better match than the numbers speak of.

The big deal about the dpi matching is that fonts don't become bigger/smaller as I move windows from 1 screen to another. Also, also my font sizes and settings look equally good on both screens.

OTOH, a typical 17" LCD monitor which does 1280x1024 is usually 345 mm wide.

That gives:

1280dots * 25.4mm/inch / 345mm = 94.23 dpi

I am working at a 30% higher resolution than what is most common. When I say resolution I mean dpi and not just monitor screen pixel area.

One of the things that vi users say is lacking in emacs is support for anti-aliased fonts. I can't help concede that point.

However once you move your life to 123 dpi things change.

If you ever get a chance to use a 123 dpi screen, try this:

emacs -r --font "-*-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-*--*-*-100-100-*-*-*-*"

Now do you still really need AA? :D

Also, Serif fonts begin to start looking usable at these resolutions as well. At low dot resolutions Serif fonts like Times New Roman look a bit blurred.

I'm sitting in the iway right outside Delhi Airport's domestic arrival terminal.

Before this over the course of the last few days I've been to Ahmedabad, Udaipur, Jaipur, Ajmer, Pushkar, Agra and Bikaner (Snaps coming soon)

I choose an afternoon flight back home so that I could take a look around the National Capital. However, after my all night drive from Bikaner to Jaipur I just don't have the energy.

I realized that traveling alone is a lot of fun -- it was something I've always wanted to do but never did till now. The good parts are that you do things at your own speed and have lot's of time to think about things that you would never be able to do if you were with company.

The bad part of course is when you're zapped and stuck in a hostile airport in a new city things can get very boring.

This airport is particularly hostile, the terminals are not internally connected and one end of the airport to the other is almost a kilometer long walk.

They won't let you in until 2 hours of your scheduled departure and you don't get anything to eat within the airport campus outside of the terminal buildings :(

There's not much around the airport from what I could gather -- I couldn't even find a newsstand.

Apart from that I regret having missed Alan Cox's talk today at FOSS, would have been great to hear him speak. They are not too many people in the world who have implemented and debugged a non-BSD derived implementation of TCP/IP.

On the whole it's been an action packed few days, trains running through the desert have been freezing cold in the early mornings -- I don't remember feeling that cold since I left the UK. Apparently, there are stretches that the train passed by that have minimum temperatures in the range of -6 degrees Celsius. Definitely not something that a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt get you through.

There Taj Mahal is simply magnificent as are some of the places in Udiapur. I think the Taj Mahal is a good reason for India to exist. A creation that beautiful needs to be protected -- something that didn't always happen

Childhoods' End -- Arthur C. Clarke
The master writer talks about how the human race re-integrates with the parent race and childhood as we know it has come to and end. I read this book a long time ago maybe sometime in 1996-97. I was too young to fully appreciate it but it has left a lasting impact on my mind.

Yet for most of us aliens don't cause the end of our own childhoods.

In response to anomalizer's post

The realness of our early life where most people moved towards a specific goal and knew that they would know if they got there has now be replaced by a kind of realness of early adult life. We know (some) what that we are working towards something but have no way of knowing when we got there. That why idiomatic goals replace real ones -- for example arwind has mentioned often marriage in his posts of late. Marriage is not a goal in its self. However the notion of marriage is an idiom for a number of other changes that come along with it. Resolving this IMO is a simple matter of doing what you did in your earlier years. Set definite goals for your self and set yourself a date for them. For example, if you want to find a better half set yourself that goal and *do* something about it. The truth is earlier our exams were forced upon us and we took them reasonably seriously, now those exams are no longer forced down our throats and we tend not to take them seriously. Suddenly we are left with a bunch of "goals" and yet we find that our life is drifting.

Where do we go from here? I have find my self drifting with increasingly frequency these days. Losing passion for my day job makes it worse. Presented with this situation I find that it helps to set yourself realistic goals and keep working towards them. It's alright if they don't revolve around love, money and power.

Getting a chance to blog after a long time.

I've had a really stressful and hard last 2-3 weeks at work. I've tried hard not to let that impact my personal life but succeeded only partially.

Some times when you work hard you tend to party a bit harder. I've been hungover more times in the than I would have liked to be and that's had a bad effect on the little time I have had off. Would really love to take a vacation at this time but I think I've got a few more things to finish off before that.

Over the last 6 months here I've developed a new set of work ethics which mostly relate to responsibility, ownership and a bunch of stuff that you would end up reading in one of those self-improvement books. However, all that has taken a lot of passion out of my work.

Situation -- A team/manager expects an engineer to do things in ways he/she doesn't necessarily agree with they end up in a deadlocked situation with neither of able to convince the other. It's a healthy thing. The problem is that unfortunately one person reports to the other.

Here's where my new ethos come in. Helped me out a bit, at another time I might have been fired for incompetence.

But I've started wondering what I'm doing programming for a living. I mean it's nice having all those qualities but really would like to be spending my time doing stuff I enjoy.

I find Hans Reiser's passion inspiring. Check out this interview. I would love to be that way. Time to abandon the paycheck? Sounds like the most exciting in months.

What is an engineer supposed to do?

On request by a few people, I've written a rather long guide to Campus Placements for young C.S. Engineers to be. It mostly applies only in an Indian context.

Would love some suggestions on how to make it better. Check out the article at http://www.vishalparakh.com/campus.html

Thanks In Advance.

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68144,00.html

Free beer recipe released under the Creative Commons license.

Sounds good to me.

But this raises some important questions in my mind. As much as I believe people should be allowed to take somebody else's creation an innovate on it, I also believe that people should be given a fair chance to profit from their own creation, else the motivation to create itself will be lost.

Where do we draw the line? If I invent something I feel I should be in a position to profit from it (right-wing). The law feels I should not be able to indefinitely profit from it (lefty law). Stallman would argue that I should not profit from the creation per se and instead make money distributing and consulting (left-wing).

The true economics of Stallman's model is hard to prove. And it carries a longer gestation period than the simple right-wing model.

Does it lead to more innovation -- no clear picture here either. Apple a company with a motive achieved more for GUI's on *nix than any open source effort.

GCC on the other hand sets a new standard for a portable compiler. Both ways work.

So what's the right thing to do? I guess we should leave the choice to the creator. What should the creator do?

In school, I used to be stingy about sharing things that I created/knew about. Whether it was code or the name of a good textbook I wouldn't let it out. By the time I entered college, I started sharing those things. It didn't make me poorer. But by that time, I had given up on the academic rat-race.

Maybe that's the problem - rat-races make people more selfish than they normally are? In a rat-race free world, would people give freely, at least that what does not make the giver poorer? When I think of it, I suppose that it does -- but the truth of the matter is we live in the world where, "I'm bigger/better/faster/richer/... than the rest of you" is a powerful motivator. Sport is about that too sometimes.

Sport actually provides and interesting example. When I play snooker (yes, I've moved on from pool) I can play to win or I can play to push my self to new limits. Playing to win depends on my opponent. If he's a push-over I manage to just about push him over. If my opponent is good, then I play well too. If I play to push myself to new limits I play well all the time. I've observed it personally. So in effect if I allow the rat-race concept to fade away and treat myself as the bar I play better on average.

Maybe that's what it is. People who struggle with self-belief tend to focus on their opponent, since it makes them feel better about themselves. People who are comfortable about themselves focus on the joy of doing the task at hand. It's a difference in mindset.

So what's the answer to the GPL vs. closed source debate? Closed-source might be better for people getting their feet wet. Gives them something to focus on until they hone their skill with the force. Once you are strong and confident -- that's when you can play for the sheer joy of playing the game.

http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/125th/

This one was my favorite though it might not appeal to everyone:

"Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?"

Pick one, I'm sure all of us wonder about something. Some of us hunt around and try to more than just wonder. I find it intriguing that when I end up at a dead end.

Why the obsession with Quantum Theory?

Was sparked off by this book:

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Excellent read, especially for people who don't want to get tangled with calculus before going to bed.

What is so intriguing about Quantum Theory? In a nut shell this is: Observation is what makes the Universe real. Nothing exits until you measure it and the act of observation causes change to the particle being observed.

It relates to spirituality and psychology in a very romantic way. You can never be an observer and be neutral at the same time.

The non-locality experiment implies something somehow has traveled faster than the speed of light. This has been verified. Mind Blowing, I'll describe the experiment in a later post.

Fuel Prices went up again. The "Left" is making a big deal out it (as usual). People are complaining that the real sufferers are going to be the poor.

The Left wants the government to sponsor a employment program for unemployed youth. They are/were also pressing hard for reservation in the private sector.

Houston, we have a problem.

When will they learn that the great experiment of communism and a welfare state has failed? Greed, folks is the greatest motivator of all time. In the world of macro and micro economics there exists only a dark side of the force.

Seriously -- think of how a single slab tax structure would benefit the economy as a whole. Apart from the obvious simplification and reduction of complexity it would also put more money in the hands of the people.

In the "tax the rich" model, the rich are being punished for being rich. In most cases people who make a lot of money year after year haven't done so because they have been lazy and non-contributing. Yes there are the family tycoons and such but even that is excusable. Because most family businesses do not survive a generation and the lazy incompetents' offspring will have to work hard to regain lost family wealth.

On the other hand the poor are rewarded for being poor. You have welfare programs, guaranteed employment programs, free schooling programs and what not.

Get real -- if the rich are allowed to keep more of their money it will lead to a more efficient distribution of wealth model than the government could ever come up with. And the model is this:

Depending on the kind of person this rich guy/gal is he/she will spend her money in the capital market, invest in his/her own companies or avail goods and services produced by others. This friends is good news.

Investment in capital markets ultimately leads to more capital in business which ultimately leads to expansion (highly simplified I know, but after the law of averages cancels out of the if's and but's thats what you get)

Investing in his/her own company generates employment.

Consumption leads to employment. More employment leads to more buying power which leads to more consumption.

It's really as simple as that. We don't need to be providing people with massive incentives for saving. We need to provide people with incentives to earn, keep and spend as much money as they possibly can.

The only problem with this model is that it's not a "wham bam thank you ma'am" type of solution. It will take years before the wealth is passed down and new employment is created.

Even China realized that's what it takes to be a vibrant economy in the 21st century. Put a greater share of money in the hands of those who earned it.

The government is in almost every country of the world is a very very inefficient organization. The less money they have to waste on it the better. How about a zero direct taxation government. Only form taxation would be a uniform nominal surcharge every time money changes hands. Imagine the effect it would have on our parallel (black market) economy. You would so disincentivise tax evasion. To escape a paltry 1 or 2% a person would have to become a criminal. Will not happen.

The government should stay out of people's way as much as possible.

Last sunday, I filled my gas tank at the Shell bunk on Mallaya Road with some skepticism.

http://www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=in-en&FC2=/in-en/html/iwgen/shell_for_motorists/site_locator/zzz_lhn.html&FC3=/in-en/html/iwgen/shell_for_motorists/site_locator/vittal_mallya_station_0504.html

The attendant was a lot more gracious than the waiters at The Captiol. Pleasant surprise. I opted for Premium fuel (The RON of my car is 87, but I'm doing plenty of long drives these days and don't mind the extra smoothness in exchange for the minor power loss). The moment I swithched on the car I could tell the difference in smoothness. It was unbelievable.

There however still *was* the slight power loss that I experience whenever I tank up on Premium. But the great improvment in smoothness more than made up for it. The next time I will try out the regular fuel and see if I can capture the best of both worlds. I could not find any information about if their non-premium fuel is also detergent mixed.

Makes me wonder what kind of liquid is being dished out by the GoI oil company affiliated bunks in Bangalore.

The Joy's of 0-100 km/h in 10 seconds....

How do I begin this one?

I'm sure all of us have seen our fair share of TV/popular literature about relationships in which 1 partner is cheating on the other. Where the cheated partner is advised by all his friends to see through the lies and confront his/her love/romantic interest.

It's not that funny when it's no longer on TV. I happened to witness such an incident inside my friends circle recently. I did what I thought was right -- ensured that my friend knew about what happened. His reaction was the stuff that Soap Opera's are made of -- that he believed his girlfriend and that was the correct thing for him to do.

At least that's what he told us. Apparently, he wasn't that charmed by her to dismiss our accusations that simply. He did pester her about what happened she lied to him (at least my friend says that she denied everything, I personally haven't spoken to her since). And then we have this new guy who's apparently unaware that she is not single and moved on her.

There are lies there are dammed lies and then there is truth. I'm so disgusted by the chain of events that followed that I think there is a lot of truth to that saying. My friend who was almost half a dozen time zones away from Bangalore pursuing academic goals dropped them like a hot potato in depression and flew back home. The new guy thinks we've turned against him and the girl in this triangle maintains that I was seeing things as was the other witness.

I'm sick of the lies and the dammed lies. I'm sick of two people conversations and the truth being manipulated at each stage. I don't know whom to trust in this mess. I really wish all of us would sit down in one place and finally establish who said what.

There is a lot of bitterness all around. I wonder if we should have told the truth and instead have let things take their own course.

All of a sudden you realize that you are no longer 16 and love isn't all it's cracked up to be.

After many years of contemplation I finally bought myself a Mac. I had always wanted one and when OS X came out I wanted one all the more. A *nix that works out of the box, what more could the average wannabe hacker ask for?

I paid what IMO, seemed like a large sum of money for a single machine. My initial impression was that it seems to serve only as eye-candy and a cool gadget. I really disliked the lack of separate Insert, End, Home, Page Up and Page Down keys. (Sorry about that, I grew up as a Windoze kid). I also was not too thrilled about the lack of a real delete key either (you have to hold down an extra key in order to get real delete functionality.)

I found shared libs being suffixed with .dylib kinda strange. But what really turned me off is that portage (Gentoo's package management system) was horribly inadequate on ppc-macosx. At this point I actually seriously consdiered putting the Powerbook up on eBay.in

I tired fink after that. It seems to be a lot better at managing my Open Source dev environment than portage. It's based on Debian's apt and means that I have to learn a new package management system all over again.

Well, fink has been builidng away in the background for almost 24 hours now. It very gallantly refuses to use any of the OS X provided tools and libs except for bootstrap, the idea is not to mess with OS X, which is kind of good but doesn't give me cozy feeling of having one closely knit together system that I had with Gentoo.

Over the course of the week, I've gotten used to the really polised Aqua UI. I find looking at Gnome 2.10 on my other laptop like a trip to the Hippe-Era, looking at WinXP doesn't seem much better either (in fact, probably looks worse than Gnome).

I'm now kind of comfortable with keyboard nav on OS X. Lot's of my favorite Gnome apps are coming up. I've built Emacs with gtk+osx and it looks pretty neat.

I'm begninning to regret not getting the faster PowerBook. It works great today, but given that I love using it so much I might want to extend its life as much as possible without having to shell out large sums of money again. I'm still a cheapo you know. :)

And Darwin is stable, all USB devices work great so do some PCMCIA cards that I tested. Everything just works. Which is nice, I used to spend large amounts of time getting hardware to work on Linux and even when it did, it wasn't always very nice. This is a whole new experience. People can argue that you will not learn as much that way.

But then again, you have more time to do the things that really matter (like blog :D).

In summary, the reason I will buy a Mac as my personal machine: It's FreeBSD, It's Mach and It Just Works (TM).

IMHO, this is the best Unix on a desktop, ever.

Maybe I should go over to http://jobs.apple.com and see if there's something I could help out with ;)

I programming a lot of Java these days at work. I find coding Java boring. I suspect that is has a corrosive effect on the moving parts in my brain. In fact after a few hours of Java programming I usually find it hard to find my way to the office restroom.

Many smart people seem to think that the programming languages are only an implementation detail. I sometimes wonder if they are right. Managers especially seem to feel that way -- that choice of language should be based only on the amount of industry momentum behind the language and that more popular languages are necessarily better than the less poupular ones.

The cynic in me says that this is so that the engineers on the project can be easily replaced if the need be (for whatever reason -- increased manpower requirements, attrition, re-organization whatever). This also strikes me as similar to assembly lines and basically equates software development to let's say large scale manufacture of cars.

The problem with this approach is the loss of the artistic element to software development. IMHO, the Artistic genius of good developers is a very powerful force in software development.

Let me elaborate on this concept a little further:

All people who go to Art school don't become good painters. Yet some amount of knowledge of how to paint is necessary in order to become a good painter.




This is one of Michelangelo's greatest works. For a moment just think about it. This painting was done of the ceiling of a Cathedral. Do you think it Michelangelo would have spent years on his back painting this if he was told only to use water colors? Or if he was asked to make sure that the background was not white?

The point I'm trying to make is that the greatest works of creation come as a result of the work of a few gifted individuals. As a society over hundreds of years we have striven to ensure that people conform to a norm. Witches were burnt at the stake, people died because of their faith. Hell, even in the 20th century more than 6 million Jews died because they in the mind of a certain Maniac were not "normal".

Who are we as humans to decide what is normal and what is not? And in fact by curbing what is not normal are we not limiting people who are well and truly above normal?

The same applies IMHO to software. There are developers and there are gifted developers. I think that Software Development is a full time profession and many of us give up a good portion of our lives to develop software better. Why is our creativity curbed? Why are we asked to do things in a way which we know is not the best? Why is any attempt to do something that is not the norm so discouraged. After all these years have we not learnt that the best people for a job are the people who are passionate about what they do and not the people who follow orders.

Get real world, orders are for armies. I don't know too many great breakthroughs that came out of a soilder.

I finally have a picture of myself here at LJ. It took me a long time to find a good one to use. I had previously explored the option of putting in a picutre of a distant galaxy but sadly I could not find one which looked good enough at 100x100.

The Cassini-Huygens mission finally obliged and I got a picture which captures (to a limited degree) my mental-projection of my self -- lost in space.

For some more specatular views of Saturn check this out

All you people who know a bit about Greeko-Roman mythology might think I'm very full of myself. Saturn was the Roman god of fertility. Saturday was named after Saturn. During Saturnalia (the festival of Saturn), all business transactions were suspended, presents were exchanged, and slaves were given token freedom.

By the way "Nike" was the Greeko-Roman god of Victory :)

It's often said that as engineers our imagination is often cramped by the limitations of the tools we use.

IMHO, the tool most guilty for ruining the imaginations of leagues of Engineers is the RDBMS.

Today when you speak to almost any engineer (esp. if he developed software for the Enterprise) it seeems that the only way to store any information is in a database. What ever happened to other data-structures? Have files completely lost their meaning?

What really rubs it in is that Mircosoft is planning to use a Database for their next-generation "filesystem" for longhorn. I don't know if it's going to be a classical RDBMS or some hybrid O-R DMBS but the thought sends shivers down my spine.

You are beginning to see mail clients that store your mail in an RDBMS :o I wonder if these guys have heard of Maildir's. How many of you think that fetchmail + procmail is not superior to any all-in-1-mail-client? Let's no go into the area

Geez, have we all become so brain dead that we can't write a simple file-persistence mechanism using advisory locks?

But back to my original point -- how often have you passed on a simple and elegant idea just because you were thinking only in terms of what you were comfortable with? I'd love to know.

People who hate IDE's, weird build-tools (like Ant!) and artificial test frameworks please leave a comment.

I'm slowly getting back to my online self. It's been quite a while. I eschewed my technical self for a while but I'm slowly getting back into the thick of things.

For all of you who don't know, I'm now working at Amazon. We have a really good view of the Race Course from up here. The best part is that it's about a 2 minute walk from home. I think I'm going to start going home for lunch soon.

I've noticed that the hardest part about change the part before the change. I found the period preceeding my decision to leave Yahoo a very hard one. I had lot's of fun there, did some good stuff and made a lot of good friends. I was honestly impressed by what makes Yahoo tick and am pretty sure that very few other companies are as hack-tech as Yahoo.

These things weighed on me and probably impacted my Judgement in a negative way. I probably reacted to events in a very subdued fashion which really made things worse than the need have been.

Have you noticed that the more you expect time to fix things the more things stay the same?

I've generally been a proactive person for most of my life. I like controlling change in my life. This philosophy has served me well -- too often my life has been a story of much promised little delivered. Like all matter in the Universe I tend to move into a state of minimum entropy (disorder) all to easily. I tend to settle down in what I do and where I am. I do this in my relationships with people as well. This is also more commonly known to taking things for granted.

I don't want to take things for granted the idea sucks. But I keep doing it. I love the idea of having someone whip my ass every now and then to remind me that I'm being lax. Unfortunately in real life, when it comes down to ass whipping you usually have gone past a point of easy return :(

Which really makes me feel grateful for the people who do tell me when I'm going off course. I know that most of the time the advisor gets an ego-trip in being one. In giving you advise if the person was a party involved in things going wrong, he might be washing his hands of all guilt. It's important to know that, but not discount the conversation altogether for that reason. There is something to be learned from every screw-up.

Have I gone all over the place? Hey, it's been a while....

http://www.livejournal.com/users/arwind/36134.html