dumb
Mid-life crisis of a software professional
Apr 30th
I just added one more year to my age yesterday. Thanks to my wife, the day was special. But, It is scary actually, thinking about how my graduation 8 years back feels as if it happened only yesterday! Time *is* flying. Looking back, I have had my share of moments – moments I feel proud of, moments I’d cherish & moments I’d rather forget (but can’t!). My professional front has been one hell of a roller coaster ride too. My love for computers is the only thing that has survived these years. Passion for them has gone down drastically, though.
Can I code day and night for 4 days, like how I used to do during college time or even in the first 2 years of my career? A big no.
Can I still read a technical book non-stop from cover to cover? NO!
Do I still have that passion to learn everything? Probably yes. But I don’t care about that anymore.
Other commitments apart, even if I had everything else setup for doing the above things, I’d not, because of the laid-back attitude I picked up over time in this industry. After some years, I guess you become numb and dumb. Numb, because you stop enjoying/appreciating all the beautiful things in the world around you, become too insensitive to non-professional things. Dumb, because the mechanical work style you are forced in to makes your brain cells commit suicide and there is no sure-fire way to bring them back.
To visualize what I am saying, look at the graph below. I plotted my competence/commitment over time (from 2000 to 2008). Click to open the original image in a new window.
Student life: Odd exam superstitions
Mar 16th
One of my school friends had this habit of wearing the same shirt everyday for all the days of an exam – be it the quarterly or the annual, we were sure he’d wear the same yellow full sleeves day after day. The shirt was too worn out, totally faded (I came to know it was actually an yellow shirt, only when he told me!), in fact I remember seeing couple of patches in the arm pit area, but all these didn’t stop him from trusting his old shirt. Nay sir, never ever did he come with out his good old "yellow" shirt!
This made me think why I had no such beliefs or "superstitions" myself….may be if I had something my grades wouldn’t be this abysmal. Anyway, all the shirts I used to wear to college were kind of worn out already – things other than clothes were of interest to me then (no..no..what you are thinking is wrong!) – so I guess I had this same-object luck all the time 
Thinking about it, I now realize that nearly all my friends had at least one exam-superstition. One of my 9th standard friends didn’t cut his hair during the annual exam, while another friend didn’t take bath through out the exams This was kind of awkward for all of us as he used to sweat a lot!! I am used to skipping bath too, during exams, but that was purely because I thought I could use that 15 minutes for reading couple of more pages – I used to open the text book only the day before the exam, you see, so I needed all the time that I could get for at least passing the exam. Maths and Chemistry were the prime candidates for me, to skip bath, during my school/UG days.
During the exams, I have noticed God becoming an important entity in all students’ lives. My mom used to shout at me, to see the God before going to the exams, but most of the times her sound advice didn’t penetrate my numb skull as my mind was full of some formulae or some text which I absorbed (read, "mugged up!") in the last minute! My level of talking usually went down during exams – Aha…may be this was my exam-superstition, if you can call it one – "to talk less", as I was afraid if I talked about other things, I would lose the thread of what I learnt for the next exam.
Superstitions used to vary a lot; From "I will eat only 2 idlies in the morning of the exam" to "I will come only by the 8.30 bus" to "I will make use of only this hero pen for all the exams" to "I will wear the same slipper/dress everyday"; there were too many to count here. Luckily, my friends’ circle was made of so many varied characters, I had a nice exposure to this wonderful world of exam superstitions. There were couple of weird habits too – "bringing a peacock feather and keeping it out near the paper during the exam" beats it all! One of my 8th standard friend used to do this. "Tying a knot in the corner of the hand-kerchief at the start of the exam and untying it only after the exam" was an intriguing one too.
I am pretty sure these habits die hard. Only a small percentage of people who used to have these beliefs during their school days grow out of them. These habits are carried forward in to the corporate world too….wait…is this probably why my colleague was stinking so much that day during his presentation?? may be, may be not!
Yahoo vs Google: why Yahoo lags behind?
Mar 7th
You wanna know why Yahoo lags behind Google? Look at the image below that I took from Yahoo’s careers site today (WW10.4). It shows all open reqs, sorted by date (descending).
As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! 
), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?
Spamless inbox == Utopia??
Feb 16th
I get only spam in my JumbledThoughts inbox nowadays. My wife never misses to make fun of this; Though it is irritating (getting spam, not my wife’s jabs!), I have learnt to live with that, like all the other netizens. Daily my mail client downloads close to 50 mails, 40 out of which tell me why I should buy viagra or how to become the next richest man in the world (Have you ever wondered why the person who sent that didn’t become richer using his *own* technique??). After being spammed for 10 years now, I have kinda become an expert in weeding out the unwanted mails. But, amongst all the usual crap, the following mail caught my eye some days back.
Dear Sir/Madam,I am Mr. G. Bertino, STMicroelectronics Company. GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.Our company deals on the importation and
exportation.Such as we mainly manufacture & export all kinds of micro and
electronics,who has it worldwide headquater s in GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.My company is currently recruiting Representatives/Agents
that will assist us with some logistics jobs as well asreceiving
payments on our behalf and remitting back to us.Please contact
us for more information if you are interested in being an agent
of my company. You will be given more information about the job
and your remuneration.I expect your favorable response.
Regards,
Mr. G. Bertino
STMicroelectronics Company
website: http://www.st.com/stonline/
Americans are not the *only* stupid people
Feb 3rd
After watching this Youtube video on how smart the Americans are, one of my friends pointed me to a similar video, shot in London. Funny one!
Oh..and btw, here’s another American classic; Miss North Carolina 2007, Katie Coble, answering a question
President Bush never ceases to amuse us!
Feb 2nd
Do you remember the hoax (?!) mail that circulated circa 2002 which claimed President Bush’s IQ to be 91?? You watch these videos posted online and you will start believing them
Compilation of Bush’s goofy moments from his speeches:
More Bush:
Want to see more of Bush? Check out this – Top 10 goofy moments of Bush
Crazy online sites & Einstein!
Jan 4th
Every mundane task of our daily lives has its presence in Internet nowadays. Online stores for all those super malls, movie review sites for the reviews in our morning news papers, online magazines of nearly every print magazine out there, the list goes on and on. This is good, in the sense, any one can come up with a good idea or try to emulate the real world task solution in the online world to earn; Talk about entrepreneurship possibilities!
One crazy online-ification of a common real world activity is the bunch of confession sites that have popped up in the recent years. These sites carry thousands and thousands of confessions (petty ones to the really sick ones, sometimes with lurid descriptions) by real people. The idea of providing an online space for public confession sounds like a good idea. But, the problem starts when you start reading others confessions, because 90% of them are related to carnal activities or activities that create an yuck feeling deep down in your stomach. The lurid descriptions can rival Playboy or Hustler anytime!
These sites offer the confessions categorized in to a neat list of containers. For example, look the left pane in one site:
How nice of the site owners to provide us with a “Top rated” and “Most read” lists I guess, the top rated list items are determined by the number of “I like it” clicks by the readers, but the question is why would anyone read another person’s confession and say “I like it“? Do they like the confession content or the fact that the other person was bold enough to come online and confess?? These sites just cater to the voyeuristic basic instinct in each one of us.
One other effective online idea is the cyber begging. I am not referring to those sites setup for collecting donations for some natural calamity or something, but these are for covering personal expenditures. Some interesting links:
- Yahoo directory has a section under “Societies and Culture” for E-Pan handling
- Tom Locke sent a snail mail to 100 companies asking for some freebies. Results are listed in his site.
According to Wired, this trend of e-pan handling is dwindling, which may be true. But, that’s what people said about spam too.
Bottomline: you don’t have to be an Einstein to make a quick buck in the internet!
Oh no, Demonoid is down again!!
Nov 12th
Demonoid, one of my favorite trackers, is down again. 
I was not running my torrent client last week, as it was used for doing “important” things like playing “Super bounce out” and “Half-life” by my relatives. I saw the “CRIA blocked us” message in Demonoid.com only this morning, a bad start to the week, I’d say!!
Demonoid.com lately has been giving lots of problems – site won’t load, blank pages, torrent files won’t download – all these irritating stuff, and now the site itself has “officially” gone down. Luckily the trackers are up, so your current downloads won’t be affected. Lets pray Demonoid finds a nice home in some country where people have other jobs than shutting down the torrent sites. How about Sweden?
Talking of Sweden, I read Prince is trying to curb Piratebay with the help of Web Sheriff. What a joke! Read this “fan article” to understand why Websheriff is such an interesting personality.
Good programmer = Sense of humor + Programming skills
Jul 27th
I was trying to setup a debug machine today. My setup required a specific version of BIOS; I booted in to DOS and tried flashing the new version. The flash went on well and during the verification phase, the tool found couple of invalid regions. It automatically tried erasing/flashing again. I was impressed; “Good. The programmer is smart enough to implement this auto-retry option, else It’d have taken ages to find out this data region corruption”, I thought and was silently thanking that programmer. It was premature, immediately the tool stopped and showed me the following screen.
[Snapshot: Tool output]
[Close up of the message]
The tool very helpfully said “Your platform is dead & have a nice day!”. “Have a nice day”??? Though, now I need to take the flash, go to the lab and program it using a flash programmer, I couldn’t help laughing at this cheeky message!
Is Windows XP the right OS for an ATM?
Jun 10th
Have you ever wondered what the ATM runs on? Most 0f the ATMs in India (and all around the world) run some flavor of Windows. Nowadays they use XP (some with SP2, if the technical team is good) but I remember seeing Windows 98 (saw BSOD once in one of the Chennai ATMs); Also read somewhere that they used to have embedded Windows NT, OS/2 and sometimes even Windows CE! I know what you must be thinking now – How safe is it, right? A good design should put the ATMs in their own private network, if so I only will be worrying “Who is going to reset the ATM when Windows crashes? 
 ”; now I realize why the security person in ATM seems to be knowledgeble on the machines…talk of all the ways one can gain some IT gnaan!
Above is an ATM of the famous VTB bank of Russia, powered by an unactivated copy of Windows XP. Look at a closeup of the activation dialog box below.
I wonder why ATMs don’t have their own OSs! When we talk so much about security / WORMS & malware stuff, does it make sense to use a general purpose OS for something so critical as an ATM? Even a cellphone costing a mere INR 4000 has so any OS flavors to choose from, why is the ATM you withdraw that INR 4000 from is stuck with a most-often-unpatched version of Windows? As Obelix would have said – “These ATM makers are crazy!!”
Check out these interesting links related to Windows Crashes:
- Windows crashes on Flight information screens and ATMs
- ATM crash here and here
- Slot machines too…
- Gallery full of Windows crashes on ATMs/slot machines
- Oh no! Even trains are not spared & other Public computer errors
