Its a bit weird post title, but i wanted to write about turbulent happenings in my professional life.

Though its not recommended to tell the World that you have been fired. Because it comes straightway into the mind that only inefficient guys are fired . Anyhow for me ,Our whole team of 30 guys was scrapped all of sudden. They said the global economic slowdown has arrived so the decision is directed from US office and they( Indian office guys )  have nothing to do with it.

It was a bit harsh for most of us,as there should have been some signals beforehand about the lay-off. Anyhow as we work in US styled corporate environment. Things like ethics or employee rights are a bit alien for the corporates. Capital is the only entity a corporation should think of. One should scrap off the resources that are liabilities. But the lay off could have been made smooth also.

Anyway i was hired by another local consulting company, they work on cool enterprise technologies. Looking forward to work with them.

Now the third thing , I was tagged by Manpreet , This is the first tag game i’d be playing. Its fun game.

I’m : a radical atheist, leftist, Idealist, feminist, environmentalist.

I think : more than I do

I know : quite a lot about everything

I have : a calm and thinking mind

I wish : i should contribute to the society

I hate : religious bigotry,chauvinism,fanaticism,exploitation.

I miss : my village

I fear : nothing except loneliness

I feel : feelings should not be turned into weakness

I hear : things that matter

I smell : roses in the nearby garden

I crave : for ghar di roti, lassi and makhan.

I search : Google

I wonder : how humans have been the superior race on the planet

I regret : not going for higher studies

I love : freedom

I ache : to live in village

I care : the ones who need it

I am not : an aggressive person

I believe : one has to make his/her own destiny

I dance : to any Punjabi Bhangra Hip-Hop Pop Song.

I sing : any song that comes to my mind, generally Punjabi , a sample :”Khaure tere vich kehri khaas khich nee, mainu shuru ton hee billo tere vich nee, Mummy ji dee noonh diss dee, Mera Dil nee parhaee vich lagda nee akhran ‘ch toon dissdee”

I cry : when deeply hurt, it happens rarely.

I don’t always : express myself well.

I fight : rarely but i want to fight for justice/rights

I write : to express myself, to share my thoughts,to contribute.

I win : friends

I lose : get up and try again

I never : give up

I always : try to be a better person

I confuse : helmet,keys generally when i am in hurry

I listen : to Ustad Nusrat ji,ghazals, random pop, Punjabi folk, duets and hip hop.

I can usually be found : in front of a computer, in a library/book shop, at home or office

I am scared : of nothing .

I need : to keep learning, keep growing, to contribute, to do something that adds value

I don’t have sufficient passers for this tag so i will pass it to some non bloggers :

Vinod

Chetan

Sohail

Sakooter

Kanwar Bajwa

Navjit Rai

Supreet Sahota

I have tagged two tech bloggers wish it goes well with there blogging style. I have tagged three non bloggers ,  wish they should enter the blogging world with this tag.

At my present job , Most of the time, I have to do changes in the legacy Java code to improve performance.

But this time i was asked to tell the extent of performance improvement due to my changes . I tried to use some Java Profiler , I tried Eclipse TPTP and HPROF but due to complacency of the legacy application. I was not able to profile my changes.

So i decided to keep it simple . Log the timestamps and analyze the result. But the log generated by this was unable to show any subsequent improvement in performance as I had to log time in Milliseconds ( System.nanoTime () could not be used for Java 1.4) .

For better time precesion i googled and found this timer library by Vladimir Roubstov.I tweaked it for my code and got the comprehesive log output.

Now to analyze the log, I wrote a python script that reads two log files and generates the time improvements in aggregation and for each run. This was the most exciting part.

for i in imap(lambda x,y:(x, y, x-y), [float(b) for b in new_list],[float(a) for a in old_list]):
              print ‘%f - %f = %f’ % i

I wrote it in no time , Python Rocks . Then I decided to go one step further. What about plotting it on a graph. Straight away Google Chart API came to my mind and there is python wrapper to this.
So I wrote this small function to produce graph for these logs.

def draw_chart():
    from pygooglechart import Axis,SimpleLineChart
    chart = SimpleLineChart(600,200,
                        x_range=(0.000, 0.999), y_range=(0.000, 0.999))
    chart.set_colours(['ff0000', '0000ff'])
    chart.set_legend(['New','Old'])
    chart.add_data([float(a) for a in old_list])
    chart.add_data([float(b) for b in new_list])
    chart.set_axis_range(Axis.LEFT, 0.000, 0.999)
    chart.set_axis_range(Axis.BOTTOM, 1, 100)
    chart.download(’D:\\my_data.png’)

This is the graph generated for my data :

The graph does not show much improvement though , but the post was about joys of python and APIs

P.S. : There are Java backports for using 1.5 > features like System.nanoTime().

“Take a free Stress Test”  was the board on small makeshift table , at this busy market in my city. I ignored it for few days . But my friend got lured by the stress meter, books and the girl counsler.So he took the test , She asked him to hold too cannes connected to the ‘Stress Meter’ and asked some common psychometric questions . Then she interpreted the meter readings to him and hats off to he skills , She sold two self help books to my friend who is hard core non-reader. I too tried my hands with the stress test,but i refused to buy the book she highly recommended me.

Any how , I looked through the books my friend had bought from the “The Stress Test Shop”. They were the same old self help books with some exercises to do better at workplace. Then i came to know it was distributed by the local Scientology outfit. Image of Tom Cruise came to my mind, as he is ambassador of Scientology. I have no offenses against Scientology.  But some days later i read this ad in newspaper.

So it is quite lucrative profession to be a Scientology  counselor.

So the question raises is Stress another niche market?

Yes, I think it definitely is.

Another brand in this category is Art of Living.

Endorsed by Swami Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. I again have no offenses against Art of Living. It has done good humantarian work. Its satsangs might have helped many of us live better. More over Art of Living has become a status symbol.  But the question is ,

Is Stress a market in new India ? Are we consumer of this market ?

The changing India has resulted completely different environment for us , than What it was used to be for our earlier generations. We have our 8 hour plus corporate  day jobs , Which require to put in extra effort to be ahead. To unwind we have weekends  Which generally are ‘consumed’ in going for a movie, going for shopping or going for a party . We hit the bed to sleep, which has no regular pattern, We ‘consume’ sleep too, and often we are sleep deprived.

The living culture/pattern we follow has given birth to the Stress phenomenon. So how to take over stress bye ‘consuming’ medical pills, by ‘consuming’ art of living satsangs.

Do we have some leisure time , Time for ourselves only ?  Without TV,Internet When we are in the pure relax mode.  When we don’t ‘consume’ anything.

Lets be peaceful persons by not being consumer to the every market segment. Lets think carefully how we can adapt to the ever demanding living / work culture.

After being postponed 2 times , The Delhi Barcamp 4 started at Amity audi quite well as scheduled. All credit to Piyush and volunteers the people behind it.

I reached the venue much early and met this guy Nilesh and IITK and IIML product , He has just started a startup and runs a music school and he was to perform in the evening beer party .

Then the event started in a formal way , But by an amazing personality Mr. Talwant Singh , A Judge by profession who has used IT in the district courts to evolutionarily automating the processes of District Courts, A first by some one in Government Sector. No wonder he blogs for cyber security.

He presented a good talk and said build something that works and is simple to use even for an illiterate person.

Then it was talk on entrepreneurship incubation my Amity ppl, Then we moved to the presentation halls. First interesting talk was by chahiye guys (one of the main sponsors) . The presntation was a bit over crowded by the American names but the emphasis was on building something that adds value.

Nirat Bhatnagar said there are two ways to make a difference :

• start a business and make profit only
• start an NGO with no profit no loss.

But there is middle path also , to put ethics in you business , to do something that adds value to society.

Then a nice talk by two young guys on building facebook apps. They had built a cool Gift sharing app iGift in their summer training.

Another session was by Alabot guys , there product is really cool , it uses NLP and sits as middleware to give results for any query from different sources. The talk was more market oriented more then telling how it was built . There was demo for getting air ticket from chennai to banglore. from IM and it provided awesome results.

In the mean time i met my twitter frnd Mayank Dhingra , He is working some really cool stuff at a startup that works in Mobile and Python . Then the guys frm quite famous slideshare , Arun and Gaurav.

Then it was lunch . After lunch Guneet from chaahiye told about developing web apps with salesforce.

and Demo by RouteGuru folks .

The the last talk was by two firangs Nick and Charlie from UK and Germany . They out sourced themselves to India for yet another startup for yet another Rails app Entrip . This talk was pick of the barcamp in terms of demo and the work they had done . Entrip is mashup of Google Maps , flickr facebook and many other api’s to show travel trips by frequent travllers on a map .

The two presentation i really liked were by prashant on weird topic East Internet company , he elaborated how the History of expeditions lead to colonies and Wat will happen with the internet .

Get the East Internet Company presentation here.

The other presentation was by Akshatt on Folksonomy the term given to social collaboration over Internet . The power of contribution/sharing can do wonders. Get the Folksonomy presentation here .

There was quiz to go and a beer party later , but i had to leave as i had been offred lift to gurgaon by another startupper from Masplantaz. He is working on some product on Rails . Wish i hear another startup success story.

And Yes i got the free T-Shirt  which says ” I want to change the world but they don’t provide the source code “

This was my first barcamp. I wanted to hear about python/django stuff . But it was Rails and Entrepreneurship all the way .

My Takeways from the Barcamp were:

One should build some thing that is simple and that adds value.

Check out the Barcamp Pics at Flickr.

One of my friend asked : “How can one write to console without using semi colon in Java ?”.
I tried many work-arounds . Even Googling did net help much .

I thought i should raise an exception some how thats it some thing will be written on the console. Naa , its did not work well.

Then a stupid workaround was to enable the verbose argument , thats it every class loaded in the JVM is traces on console.

The some how i tried real tricks to print my name on console ,

This is what i got,

public class Test {

 public static void main(String a[]){

 if ( System.out.append(”jasdeep”) instanceof Object ){

               }
         }
  }

You might be wondering , why i did not use System.out.println() . Because it does not return anything , So it can not be compared in if block.

My blog title goes like “Ramblings about workplace, java, python, linux and web ” . But my recent posts were distracted from this tagline. The frank answer to this is I was procrastinating. It is not i have not been learning much. I have learnt a lot of new things professionally but could not get them together to share my learning on the blog.

I was surfing the web to dig deep into Java, When i came across this great post by Curious Schemer.

Mr Ray deliberately explains things in the post that we are rhetorically asked to use ArrayList over Vector for better performance .
If we need to make it thread safe. We do it this way :
List list = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());
But it does not solves the purpose. The thread safety breaks if we do something like this :

final List list = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());
final int nThreads = 1;
ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(nThreads);
for (int i = 0; i < nThreads; i++) {
  es.execute(new Runnable() {
  public void run() {
  while(true) {
  try {
  list.clear();
  list.add(”888″);
  list.remove(0);
  } catch(IndexOutOfBoundsException ioobe) {
  ioobe.printStackTrace();
  }
  }
  }
  });
}


As long nThreads is 1, everything runs just fine. However, increase the number of nThreads to 2, and you start getting this:

java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException: Index: 0, Size: 0

at java.util.ArrayList.RangeCheck(Unknown Source)

at java.util.ArrayList.remove(Unknown Source)

at java.util.Collections$SynchronizedList.remove(Unknown Source)

Now the workaround to get away with this problem , is to use block level synchronization . Synchronize the methods which update the list to the fine grain level is the best approach to avoid such exceptions .


synchronized (list) {
  list.clear();
  list.add(”888″);
  list.remove(0);
}


I learnt my lesson here , one should use atomic level synchrozation to keep the performance and effeciency intact.

The Full Post by Mr.Ray is worth read it explains further conflicts in using synchronization .

Some years back when I came to City Beautiful ‘Chandigarh’ . Like everybody who comes here I fell in love with the place. For its planned Living,Gardens, Broad roads with trees along sides. There was hardly any traffic problem those days.
There is a duet Punjabi songs which goes like :

“To drive on roads of Chandigarh is like, paper boat sailing on water flow”
“The decorated round abouts are like , The embroidery done by you “

This was true some years back, when traffic was sparse.

Chandigarh is a heaven for students for its academic institutes,entrance coaching centers,training institutes.It has attracted students here like a magnate. Industry has also been set up here in Chandigarh/Panchkula/Mohali tricity. So almost every Punjabi youth comes here looking for a job. Industry also attracts/recruits people from all over India. Although the Industrial growth has not been so steep here relative to other cities.

Accumulation of people here has given rise to traffic chaos in the City Beautiful. To accommodate traffic administration has to cut down the trees along side one of the main roads to broaden it,has changed round abouts into traffic signals,has improved public transportation system. But still it is unable to contain the rising traffic. Driving at 8-9 PM has become like hell.

The workaround to fight traffic chaos which people like us can do is :

• Car Pooling for offices
• Increase Use of bikes and bicycles
• Better public transportation system

Car Pooling

In Western countries a concept of Car Pooling was stated way back Seventies . It has broadened to SMS based / Web Based Carpooling system, and is quite successful also.

In India MyKoolPool is such venture which provides Web/SMS based in Mumbai and Pune. Maybe there such venture like Commute Easy in Bangalore and other cities too .
We have to give push to such ventures in our cities too and In City Beautiful Chandigarh so that it can be kept beautiful.

Using Bikes / Bicycles
The economic rise has thwarted the use of cars, with exponential rate . Which has definitely made the traffic more chaotic than anything else.
Using a bicycle for commuting is rare by people like us. Although it is common for laborers an economically weaker people.
We need to start a bicycle riding campaign, Such that people like us make lesser use of motor vehicles for common commuting , like visiting nearby places or offices.
Yes I know, there is status conscience setup in our psyche, That is the only reason we don’t use bicycles anymore. But It will be great if we can change this status conscienceness.
Use of bicycle has many advantages like :

• Zero Pollution , It has no Carbon emission.
• Lesser traffic , It does not need a Broad Road .
• Better health, Cycling is a good Exercise for body

Yes , Bicycle is non feasible for commuting to longer distances, But use of motor bike is still more traffic friendly , than a car.

Personally i use a mix of Bicycle and Motor Bike for commuting . I go to office on a bicycle and sometimes on the motor bike. In my previous organization which was near to my living place. I always used bicycle for commuting there. And mind you I was not labeled psycho or My status qoutiont was not questioned. It was welcomed by most of my friends actually. I have inspired One of my friend to ride bicycle. there are 3-4 more guys in my new organization which commute on bicycle. But we are quite a small no. people. We need to start a campaign such that It becomes a trend to ride to office on a bicycle. It is quite common in some of European countries.

Come On , Ride Bicycle a day and Keep the Doctor Away.

Public Transportation
The public transportation system is quite messy in almost all the cities. Either the buses/trains are crowded with passengers, or the the time taken to reach the destination is quite long.
I Wish If we can make public transportation system such that it gives one preference over using Car to commute.
It is only possible if the

• buses/trains are made high on comfort.
• Better routes to the common destinations

Moreover for commuting to office locations , Initiative needs to be taken for Public/Private partnership. Although some corporates have there private commuting vehicles. but they are not much effective. People prefer personnel vehicles over them. I hope public-private partnership can provide a better alternative. As small enterprises can also afford to tie up with public transportation system.

Happy Commuting, People

The headlines today are huddeled with Reservation being introduced into the IIMs and IITs (the premier institutes for giving higher education and management) for Backward and Other Backward Classes (BC and OBC) excluding their creamy layer. There has been mostly anti-reservation campaigns and little pro-reservation campaigns too.But the state has the stick in its hands , it can do what it wants.

Rather than going into same debate whether reservations should be or should not be. I want to know :

Will reservations help in socio-economic upliftment of targeted masses?

Reservation is a just a shock therapy to prevent the damage done by our grass root Public education system. There is no sight of any improvement in Public education system.

I won’t go into statistical details, But what i have experienced 

I am product of an Village Government School in State of Punjab(One of the affluent states of India). The school where i studied was called the best school in the locality, But the study culture there was like, we were made to learn from the help books rather than reading texts. English was started in 6^th grade by Social Sciences teacher because there was no English teacher and After 8^th grade there was no arrangement for English language teaching. There were no extra-curricular activities, no games. It was the time when the school was called in its prime time.

After that the school has gone to worst conditions , the only way the kids clear is by Mass cheating in the exams. The alternative to the government schools are private schools which employ teachers on salaries of 1000 to 1500 and who are product of those government schools. They are called English medium schools , but there is hardly any healthy learning environment.

The economically weaker parents put there kids into Government schools and economically stronger put them into those private schools out come from both schools are almost the same. This is the story of nearly 70% of Punjab and one can imagine the status of other states.

Those to who study in good city schools , are taught good English, are given good environment, are made to take part extra curricular activities. They face the pressure of doing good in the exams in terms of scores . The focus is on getting scores by hook or crook rather than learning. there is no healthy competition ,There is lethal competition. We don’t study what we love. We study what we are made to study. I want to know :

Are there any measures taken to improve the quality of education?

Revolutionary changes needs to be done in Education system, But i don’t think there is any step being taken in this direction because this will have long term benefits.

Improvement in Education system would not fetch votes, But Reservations will fetch them quick votes .

We are amused by the way India is progressing , we are amused the way Dhoni’s are fetching crores. We are amused be the way India’s riches  has made into the Forbes list.

We don’t care how the other half lives, and  Then we are worried about the biggest Internal threat to security are Naxalites. We are amused why they are so evil, we are amused why they can’t be like us.

When i opened my Google reader this morning , cam across this little awk kiddie. So ran it for my ubuntu shell. It tells the story that i have not been doing anything worthy , only procrastinating

history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ |sort -rn|head
84 cd
66 ls
43 sudo
15 python
10 django-admin.py
6 svn
6 ln
4 youtube-dl
4 pidgin
4 cd..


The original script lies here.

While acting on my new year resolutions, I started reading the SICP book .
The book focuses on the aspects of computer programming fundamentals and making the reader learn this by problem solving through LISP  programming language.

So in the first chapter i had to solve some problems , and one of them was :

Define a procedure that takes three numbers as arguments and returns the sum of the squares of the two larger numbers.

So my implementation of this problem in LISP is here :

(defun square(x) (* x x) )
(defun sum-of-square(x y) (+ (square x) (square y)))
(defun grt(a b) (if(> a b) a b))
(defun grt-2-sum-of-square (a b c )
(sum-of-square (grt a b) (grt b c) )
)
(grt-2-sum-of-square 1 2 3)


I implemented the same problem with python as following :


#Returns Square
def square(x):
return x*x
#Returns Sum of the Squares
def sum_of_square(x,y):
return square(x)+square(y)
#Returns greater number
def grt(a,b):
if (a>b):
return a
else:
return b
#Returns the sum fo square of greater numbers
def grt_2_sum_of_square(x,y,z):
a=grt(x,y)
b=grt(y,z)
return sum_of_square(a,b)
# If main mein module is called
if __name__==”__main__”:
#print result
print grt_2_sum_of_square(1,2,3)

and implementation of same problem in Java goes like this :


public class Test {
// Returns the Square
public int square(int x){
return x*x;
}
// Returns sum of the Squares
public int sum_of_square(int x,int y){
return square(x)+square(y);
}
//Returns greater number
public int grt(int x,int y){
return (x>y)?x:y;
}
//Return the sum fo square of greater numbers
public int grt_2_sum_of_square(int x,int y,int z){
int a=grt(x,y);
int b=grt(y,z);
return sum_of_square(a,b);
}
// Main Method
public static void main(String a[]){
//instantiates class
Test t=new Test();
int res=t.grt_2_sum_of_square(1, 2, 3);
System.out.print(res);
}
}

There are easier ways of implementing it in python and Java though . But i preferred these as i implemented the same LISP construct. I am amused by the simplicity and cleanliness of LISP code here and no. of lines i had to write for doing this.

I wish i should have been taught LISP in school and i would have been a better programmer

Python gives me pleasure of code elegance and simplicity, but Java is the one i am working with . The one that got me a Job.

Learning new things make me feel better, that there is no end to learning.

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