Archive for: January, 2009

The paradox of existence

Jan 30 2009 Published by under General

Asha Jayanthi says:

In my opinion, there are three types of people:

1. If they do some good act, they will let everyone know about it
2. If they do some good act, everyone will come to know about it
3. If they do some good act, no one will know about it

Now the third point got me thinking. It is a very interesting statement from a mathematical point of view. Will we ever be able to prove that there are people of the third kind in this world?

Is there some way to know that a person is of the third kind? I think it is not possible.

Whenever you find out about a person who is of the third type, he automatically becomes a person of the second type, and ceases to be the third type! This means that you will never be able to prove the existence of the persons of the third type.

May be you will have to rely on some kind of Nonconstructive Proof to solve this problem of existence.

You can see that Schrödinger’s cat is a similar thought experiment. Both of these examples talk about some type of Observer effect.

Now if we say that there is nobody such that if he does something good, no one will know about it, it becomes a Self-fulfilling prophecy.

14 responses so far

Launching does not matter

Jan 29 2009 Published by under General

KSRTC is observing road safety week. Every week in a year.

That is what you have to do if you think your cause is important.  If you are fighting AIDS, why do you think spreading awareness on just December 1st will suffice? You should do it every single day.

The same is the case with promoting and marketing your product. Just one day does not do any good. Do it every day, with the same rigor and freshness.

The hype and media attention you get with a high profile launch will not help you if you cannot maintain that attention throughout the lifetime of your company.

Remember what happened to cuil? They launched with the biggest hype in recent times and traffic skyrocketed. Within days it fell down with the same speed.

So don’t think like “we will launch on January 1st “ with a fantastic launch party. It doesn’t matter. What matters is your willingness to follow up with the same intensity.

Decide that you will launch every day. Create the buzz daily.

2 responses so far

Portability of Java

Jan 13 2009 Published by under Programming

In the last semester of our computer engineering course, we had to do a project work which comprised of building and demonstrating a software system. We were given the following instruction:

“You must develop the softwares using the Java Programming Language”

I still don’t understand why there was a restriction like this. May be they followed the strategy of imposing one rule or the other once in a while so as to show off their authority.

Anyway we started doing the projects. Some of us were using the machines inside our computer labs and some others were doing it outside the campus. There were all kinds of projects. File encryption program to application that could control a PC from a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone. There were bigger systems that used a mix of Java technologies including JSP/Servlets.

In the course of time, we found out that it was very difficult to migrate some Java applications from one machine to another or one network to another. A Java application that worked perfectly in the home PC would not work when it is executed in our college lab. There were all kinds of dependency problems and as most of the students did not know how to resolve the issues. We started realizing that Java was a “Write Once, Debug Everywhere” platform. Some of us even encountered the dreaded JAR hell.

The day of project submission came.

I was among the group who did their projects inside the college lab itself. So we did not have to bring the projects and install it in the machines in the lab. But what did the others do?

They were carrying their machines with them!

The machines were powered up, and the projects were demonstrated.

That was the day we started joking about the Portability of Java!!!

12 responses so far

The million dollar question

Jan 11 2009 Published by under General

Some time ago I asked you a question: What else do you do?

Things what you do other than your day job, things that you do without being pushed by someone else are the things that matters. These things make the difference.

So what else do you do?

I thought that this question was the million dollar question  - the question that could change your life for ever. It turns out that I was wrong.

In the article typical persons are all around I wrote:

There is another very strange thing that I have noted. We know that people are motivated by different things. For example great stories motivate us. Great movies motivate us. Great speeches inspires us to do things great. Great books give us bigger dreams. Then came the strange feeling to me. There are some people who never get inspired by anything. At least they do not get inspired by things by which I get inspired. Then came the real shock : Most of the people around me are like this. Typical Persons.

What is the rationale in telling that everyone should get inspiration from what I derive my motivation from? Why should someone get inspired by a book, a speech, a story, a movie, a work or even a proverb? Because these things are exactly meant for that. Every single person reads a great book to get something from that. I strongly believe that this thing is inspiration – the urge to do great things. Great proverbs are meant to make people better. If you don’t feel that urge to be great when you read a great book, watch a great movie or see a great piece of work, you are a typical person. I am sorry.

I was wrong again. Every single person has got a passion for one thing or the other. Some may like reading books, some may like doing business. No one thing can be declared better than the other. So what does make the difference? What makes successful people different from the others? What is the million dollar question?

The million dollar question is not “What are your passions?”

The million dollar question is: “Are you passionate enough?”

Are you interested enough to care? To spend your time? To work hard?

4 responses so far

Opera, please hire a designer

Jan 04 2009 Published by under Design, Internet, Review

Opera is once again set to screw up its UI in the upcoming version 10 of the web browser.

Granted, that the new iteration of Opera is faster and bloasts loads of new features, but the UI is still such a mess to look at. See for yourself:

Opera 10 user interface

This is the default theme named Opera Standard. Couldn’t be uglier.

The last time I wrote about it, the interface was much better!

There is another themed named Windows Native which is bundled with the application. Even though it does offer a more native UI feel to Opera, it leaves a lot more to be desired too:

Opera 10 windows native skin

How can a major player like Opera ignore the usability point of its products? What makes them think that they can fool around with the UI in every new version? I cannot undersand.

It is time Opera starts analyzing the relation between user friendly user interface and market share. Opera is now a distant fifth behing IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome in browser market share.

9 responses so far

Orkut Vs Facebook

Jan 03 2009 Published by under Internet

You guys wont believe this: I have a hard time convincing some of my friends that facebook is having more users than orkut !!!

Why is there a confusion? It is because in India orkut is more popular than facebook. So they think that facebook is just a clone of orkut and it is less popular.

So I show them this statistics:

Facebook traffic is shown in red color(*). Orkut traffic is shown in blue (If you can find it at the bottom).

Orkut traffic reduced by 7.7% last year while faceook traffic increased by 69.5%.

So that is about popularity. The next time you have to explain this to anyone, it is better to show them this graph.

57 responses so far

No Testing = FAIL

Jan 02 2009 Published by under Internet, Programming

For a national paper presentation contest in a reputed engineering college, they developed a website for participant registration.

Before opening the website, they changed the database table name to a better one. (You know, these developers have got a habit of naming tables and variables after their pets).

After one month of operation, they closed the registration recently.

When they checked the database for the details of the participants, they were in for a surprise. Guess what? The database was empty.

Why? They forgot to change the table name in the code.

Two things I cannot understand:

  1. Why did not the application throw any error?
  2. Why they did not test it after it went live?

What are they going to do with the paper presentation contest now? I am anxious.

5 responses so far