Proxy War

Finally managed to squeeze in some time to pen down my thoughts after 2 months. My sincere apologies to all of them who follow my blog meticulously and had been soliciting me for my next article. In the last couple of months myriad of things happened- ranging from my long waited India trip to India’s “phoenix” win in the 1^st cricket test. But I would focus today’s article on a very intriguing and interesting article I read in ‘The Economist” Dec 2006 edition. The article talks about Chinese government and their relentless fight against deluge of information, creeping into the country. China being a communist country obviates the public from free-flow access to sensitive (pun intended) information which the government thinks might compromise communist manifestos and act as a catalyst to social dissent. China is running the biggest censorship program known as the ‘Great firewall of China’ or ‘Golden Shield’ to hunt down proxies and block them from broadcasting data into the mainland. Sites like Anonymouse.org redirects data from the censored sites and enable people living under repressive regimes to get a hindrance free access to Information. Anonymouse.org is not the solitary reaper. It’s a part of large and growing constellation of computer servers known as proxies, deployed at diverse places to outmaneuver the censors working to protect un-democratic regimes. There is a whole group of community called ‘Anti-Censorship Community’ fraternizing the ‘Information is everybody’s birthright’ cause. Whenever the Censors detect new proxy they block it and the ‘Anti-Censorship Community’ creates another one. This process can best be described as ‘Cat and Mouse game on the web’. An American NGO called ‘Tor’ and lot of outspoken human-rights activists in China are vehemently opposing this policy of the un-democratic regimes. I sincerely wonder “What is the rationale and thought process of preventing someone from accessing the cornucopia of information lying in the World Wide Web...Isn't it an amorphous form of incarceration”…Can someone answer??

Josh(ling) in Java

Yesterday I completed the book ‘Java Puzzlers’ by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter. Josh is a principal engineer at google and was a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems. Josh is a very well known name in the Java community and considered to be a capable protégé of James Gosling. I myself have been working in Java for the last 5+ years but still this book has a lot to offer. Though personally I feel that, a lot of puzzles mentioned in this book are seldom used while we code but it’s definitely good to be abreast of all the quirks of Java Programming language. Some chapters are absolutely essential like Expression Puzzlers. Java’s Integral calculations and floating point arithmetic is a ‘Pandora’s Box’. You open this box and you open a lot of surprises, facts and can of worms but every developer need to know these boundary-point conditions to write bug-free code. In this book Josh also points out design issues with Java and vehemently voice his opinions on an inadequate Java API documentation. All in all I was impressed. His fluid way of presenting problems and solutions propelled me to read his Jolt award winning bestseller ‘Effective Java’.

Water Water Everywhere!!!!

On the 10th day of October, 2006 I watched Roger Waters “Dark side of the moon” concert at Shoreline, Montainview. It had the largest congregation of people Bay Area had ever seen in a decade. Absolute maddening crowd. I was half an hour late when I entered the amphitheatre, thanks to the traffic (I was stuck at Rengstroff for more than an hour). He sang popular numbers from his various albums/CDs like ‘The Wall’, ‘Wish you were here’, ‘The Final Cut’ etc. The second half of the show was an absolute stunner. He played the entire ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and the crowd was hysteric (You can visualize how a place would reverberate with screams emanating from 100,00 people…No kiddin..) I was really feeling sorry for Pratik who could not make it to the concert as he was stuck at 101 for more than 3 hours. Dejected and exasperated he went back. I was all the more feeling sorry because he went home to get his camera and the security was not allowing any kind of camera or handy-cam inside. All in all this was my best concert and my dream to see Roger Waters came true. I started listening to this psychedelic rock band when I was in IIT and since then I was hooked.

The numbers he played:

FIRST HALF:

In the Flesh - The WallMother - The Wall
Set The Controls For the Heart Of The Sun - A Saucerful of Secrets
Shine On You Crazy Diamond - Wish You Were Here Have
A Cigar - Wish You Were Here
Wish You Were Here - Wish You Were Here
Southampton Dock - The Final Cut
The Fletcher Memorial Home - The Final Cut
Perfect Sense parts 1 and 2 - Amused to Death
Leaving Beirut
Sheep Animals
Pig who escaped

SECOND HALF:

Dark Side of the Moon

ENCORE:

The Happiest Days Of Our Lives - The Wall
Another Brick In The Wall (Pt 2) - The Wall
Vera - The WallBring the Boys back Home - The Wall
Comfortably Numb - The Wall

Leveraging India as India stands up

Today I saw Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala's techtalk on "Leveraging India as India stands up" at GooglePlex, Mountainvew. It was a very inspiring and an eye-opening dissertation. I guess I was under the wrong impression that the young generation can only bring some conceivable changes in the Indian society. But with prominent figures like him the messiah's are not only confined to the young generations. This talk was particularly interesting for budding entrepreneurs and for those who has some passion to 'give back to the motherland'. The business model embraced by India in the recent past is a very unique one with a bohemian outlook. If you listen to his talk you will understand why. I sincerely urge every Indian who are based out of US to listen to his talk and seriously think about doing something if we envision India to be a country recognized not as a haven of snake-charmers( overly exaggerated portrayal in The Temples of Doom) but as a power to reckon with.

Scuffle between Veterans and Avante-Gardes

Yesterday I was reading an article in WIRED which encompasses a wide range of topics ranging from the induction of Ray Ozzie in Microsoft (supplanting Bill G Reviews) to the ongoing battle of grabbing acres and acres of lands around Columbia River in Oregon/Washington. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has prophesized that those companies would rule the Internet who would master the growth and realization of Data Centers. The world is slowly moving from Desktop based application and packaged software to the cloudspace concept. With innovations juggernauting regularly from companies like Google, Apple industry behemoths like Microsoft is really cornered. So to take the next battle forward all these contenders including search engine companies like Ask.com are purchasing lands near to a place where electricity costs are low. Google has just bought 30 acres of land in Dalles, WA for their data center and plan to install 450,000( no I am not kidding) parallel processing units. Off course they need these astronomical number of servers to cater to 100 Million queries per day. Microsoft has already started acquiring land near Columbia River gorge because hydroelectricity is cheap and the land is strategically located near Bonneville dam. The war of storage capacity has already begun and I sincerely hope we the consumers would be immensely benefited by the ongoing technology scuffle.

Adieu to Pacific North West

I moved from the pacific northwest to the warm cauldron of Silicon Valley. Moved for better pastures, that time will tell. Joined a consulting company called eTouch Systems. I was working as a Java Architect in a product's company based out of Vancouver,WA called CIBER corporation. Last 1 year in Ciber was a very fruitful year to me as i learnt tons and tons. I struggled and learnt and succeded. Nothing gives u an essense of 'kick-ass' feeling when u achieve something. Pacific NorthWest is beautiful and lush green, unlike the charred expanse of California and Nevada. I guess the dark green is because the amount of precipitation it receives. It rains 9 months a year which is one of the reasons i moved. Sometimes the dull and gloomy weather gets very depressing. Lets see what California has in store for us. So far so good.

Happily Married

After courting my girlfriend for more than a decade we finally got married on 28th November, 2004. I was really fortunate to marry my childhood sweetheart and always thank God for not being unfair with me.

Salute to the OpenSource Community

OpenSource buzzword is a phenomenon of the yesteryears, has been in existence since the early ages of software development till 1965 when IBM ceased bundling their source code with the operating system of their computers. In 1969 Ken Thompson wrote the first version of Unix and distributed the source code freely throughout the 70's. The extra-ordinary effort of a young student at the University of Helsinki:Linus Torvalds along with lot of other computer engineers and mathematicians paved the way to a great operating system "Linux".Engineers all around the world(aka "The opensource community")created their own flavours of Linux as the source code was freely available.That created versions like Susie,RedHat( a renowned company),Debian etc. University of California, Berkley started a project which gave rise to a BSD( Berkeley Software Distribution) Kernel used by Macintosh operating system.

Source Code is no longer a proprietory concept.The developer community all across the globe contributes and uses the source code, subsequently tweaking the code according to their needs thereby giving rise to a new version or flavour.The cycle goes on forever. This can only happen as the source code is freely downloadable.

The concept of freely distributable source code has been a bane and an idea of consternation to monopolist behemoths like Microsoft. The opensource community is infact bigger than anything even Microsoft could afford and the software development model behind it is more effective than the conventional closed-source proprietory model.Today the strongest competitor to Microsoft is Linux and the challenge posed by Linux pre-empted Microsoft to postpone the shipping of their latest OS "LongHorn"..Horns are getting shorter....

With projects like Apache and sourceforge its been a juggernaut for the OpenSource Community. We are on a constant roll. I have always been an ardent exponent of freewares and opensource and it gives me great satisfaction to proclaim that I can develop a fully functional web-application without purchasing any proprietary softwares. Speaking from a java world with free web-frameworks like Struts,Tapestry,Hivemind,JSF,Spring: Application Servers like JBoss: Web Containers like Tomcat:Data Access Frameworks like OJB and Hibernate:Databases like MySQL and PostGRE SQL one can do wonders.

I thereby solicit all the developers in the planet WORLD to contribute more towards OpenSource and reduce the monopoly of companies like Microsoft and strengthen the OpenSource brotherhood.