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.