On crowding the human brain

As seen in a fortune cookie -

"You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty
attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool
takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge
which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with
a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his
brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing
his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect
order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and
can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of
the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out
the useful ones".
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet"

Sankey road : "developed" into a desert stretch

Even as the city is reeling under sweltering heat, the powers that be come up with yet another proposal to reduce the city's greenery. This is in addition to the war memorial taking several trees for victim. The claim is that cauvery cinema junction to yeshwanthpur will be made a "signal free" corridor. You would have to be exceptionally dimwitted to fail to notice that the only signals along the corridor are the ones at bhashyam circle and cnr rao circle. And any commuter who uses that stretch regularly will tell you that traffic piles up around bhashyam circle alone but the rest of the corridor is a breeze. Despite the spurt in traffic over the last 5 years, you never hear of a “jam” along that corridor due to the “narrowness” of the road either near malleswaram 18th cross or near palace orchards. While work in already on at cnr rao junction, bhashyam circle is expected to get a "magic box". With these signals removed, pray help me understand what bottleneck remains? Where is the need to widen any road along that stretch, least of all lop trees, when trees in the vicinity of IISc have already been destroyed in the name of development? As per the Deccan Herald article, the plea of residents of Malleswaram has been met with a deaf ear and a response in the form of “we like greenery but we're in favor of development”. In this particular case, the greenery does not come at the cost of development. In fact, the signal at bhashyam cirle could be removed with little (if any) loss of tree cover. That would suffice to ease the traffic along that corridor.

The citizens of Bangalore brought the local government to power in the municipal elections hoping for sensible administration - not to be deprived of greenery and clean air to breathe. It makes you wonder if the decision makers are so obsessed with “development” that they don't mind eroding Bangalore's real heritage - the trees - and turning it into a maze of concrete & asphalt, while turning a blind eye to the citizens' fervent appeals. On the other hand, taking a balanced view of development and restoring the city's lost greenery could win them accolades from all quarters instead of earning the people's scorn this way. We have reached a stage where the city records all time temperature high's in summer with people being forced to purchase air conditioners (and maybe even water in the near future). Do we need to pay a even bigger price for development that we don't need? Are the voices of the people being heard?

Some great quotes that I found today

"Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose. "

"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. "

"Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. "

By Henry Longfellow

My take on BGGA closures

For the record - http://infinitescale.blogspot.com/2007/12/bgga-closures-end-of-many-java-careers.html

A lonely walker's tale

[ From the literature network ]

Good Hours

"I HAD for my winter evening walk--
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.
And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.
I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.
Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve."

-Robert Frost

Good quote

"Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic."
- Dave Barry

Couldn't agree more. If you're afraid to experiment, prefer to be a conformist, and have no strong opinions of your own, chances are that you'll end up being an obscure, insignificant also-ran.

Dedicated blog for tech stuff

Despite the fact that my posts have become infrequent after I moved out of Sun a few months ago, I've decided to have a new blog for technical content. Hopefully, this will encourage me to post more on the dedicated blog. (Wishful thinking, eh?)

Quote by Robert Frost

Excellent quote :

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

Robert Frost

Closures and adding complexity to Java

Just for the record, here's the comment I posted on java.net regarding the new closures proposal by Neal Gafter et al:

"Speaking of Closures, its hard not to agree with Josh Bloch on the new Closures proposal. He expressed serious concerns in his interview about further changing an already complex type system just to accommodate Closures. The current proposal seems more like engineering for the sake of it without thinking about the learning curve for a newbie. Open sourcing java will be mostly futile if we go the C++ way by introducing unnecessarily complex changes to the language based on the whims of theorists (even if they happen to be the pioneers in language theory). We need a more pragmatic solution that keeps in mind (the barriers to entry for) the average "Joe Java" as Josh says. The same way in which generics weren't over engineered to ape C++, we need a more practical approach to implementing Closures instead of merely looking to satiate the engineering appetite of a few individuals. "

The power of Java lies in its simplicity. We'd be killing the language by dragging it along the C++ path.

Renaming Bangalore to a toilet

I'm a Kannadiga, a native of Bangalore, born and brought up here. And the farthest forefather in my family tree I've known also lived here. So, theoretically speaking, I'm as Bangalorean as one can get. Good, bad or ugly, polluted, crowded by an immigrant population, bursting at it seams, plagued by infrastructural issues and all that, it remains dear to me - my home. The love of my life, really. I've also loved it for its colonial history and the resulting tinge of cosmopolitan quality that its always had. At the same time, its a city that's home to some stalwarts in Kannada literature, theatre, and cinema. And irrespective of what the immigrant population has called the city over the decades (yes, hard to believe, but Bangalore's weather has always attracted a sizable number of outsiders right through the 20th century), we have always called it Bengaluru. And even if you go by the Brits' version of it, I can't imagine a name more charming than Bangalore. And now, as if the rape that the city is being subjected to at the hands of the JDS government, greedy land developers (bringing down historical buildings every day to construct apartments to cater to the engineered real estate boom) and other parasites was not enough, that politician U.R. Anantha Murthy desperately seeking attention (having lost out in an attempt to win a seat in the parliament) proposes a change of name Benga-loo-ru ostensibly to make outsiders pronounce the city's name the way the locals do, and "restore pride in Kannada". Think of this for a second: try as you might, can you pronouce "Allapuzha" like a mallu, or the expansion of DMK like a true tam? Do you care? Do they care that you cannot? No. Because you cannot. You need not. You're not a local. On similar lines, I have enough pride as a Kannadiga & a Bangalorean to not be bothered about how outsiders pronounce the name of my city as long as they respect the city and its culture (which, by the way, has nothing to do with the spelling of the city). A language or a culture is too great in itself to require help from ordinary mortals in "deifying" it. It would've been a continued tribute to Bangalore's culture if it had two equally charming pronunciations used by different sets of people. But no - the attention seeking avaricious "guardians" of Karnataka have now come up with a spelling that has Bengal and loo in it. (I would've even settled for Bengaluru despite that name having bengal in it, but having a toilet in the name is a little too hard to digest. Gives me a constipation ).

From being a world renowned technology center (that never lost touch with its culture, mind you), we are now the laughing stock of the world with toilet in the name of our city. Not to mention the crores of rupees spent on the exercise. The possibilities of using the same cash for developmental efforts in a city groaning under its own weight are, to say the least, countless. Instead, the taxpayers money will now be swindled in the name of restoring Bangalore's pride. And this proposal comes from the same %$^* writer who also opposed English as an additional language in lower primary schools. The one person who's being doing Kannada and Karnataka great service, Mr.N.R. Narayana Murty, has exactly the opposite view on English in schools. But his exhortations fell on deaf ears. The greatest asset of the tech population (including locals) of Bangalore is the ability to converse in English effortlessly. And we will now be isolating ourselves from the rest of the world by imposing such draconian rules. We're marching towards being an incompetent, narrow-minded and, oh yes, "proud" culture.
I'm now well and truly embarrassed of my "culture".

Blackbox: "shipping" your datacenter

Gosh!! Is this cool or what...

R.I.P, vold

The troublesome and buggy volume management daemon in Solaris is history and has been replaced in the latest nevada build by (the weirdly named) Tamarack, the removable media enhancement to solaris. More details here .

Google's awesome quarterly results

70% increase in profits!! Take that, Yahoo!! And for wise guys spreading FUD about Google, this one's for you. :-))

One at Sun

Four days ago, I completed a year at Sun Microsystems. Its quite been an eventful year that has witnessed change in the leadership at the top (a new CEO/COO), change in the site leadership where I work, a new manager for our team, a new release of the product I work on and a reduction in work force, among other things. I was told before joining Sun that there'd never be a dull moment here - and indeed its been an insanely "adventurous" year that has taught me (both on the technical and professional front) much more than I learned the year before (which is what keeps you at Sun). A mixed bag of year, and hopefully, the first of many to come.

Swing painters, filty rich clients and "Ajaxified" Swing

A collection of (slightly old) writeups and presentations from the Aerith/SwingX folks:

• Joshua Marinacci introduces painters
• Romain Guy's clients get filthy rich
• Richard Bair speaks of the marriage between XMLHTTPRequest and Swing
  

Interesting quote on performance improvements

Interesting quote from Bryan Cantrill on performance improvements:

"...More than anything, what we (or at least I) learned
from DTrace is that if you want to get big wins, you don't make it
incrementally faster to do existing work -- you eliminate work entirely by
addressing its source higher in the stack of abstraction."

Finding open locks in Postgres

Found a useful query to find open locks in postgres:

select pg_class.relname,pg_locks.* from pg_class,pg_locks where pg_class.relfilenode=pg_locks.relation;

India an economic super power? Fat chance.

This blog links to an interesting article on the economies of India and China. I especially liked the comment posted at this blog by Danese Cooper (Formerly open source community manager at Sun, now will Intel. She also gave a talk at FOSS.in this year).
She says, "Still, I'd rather live in a future where India keeps China's rapacious growth in check."

Its rather ironical that the world expects so much from India when we're going from bad to worse - caste based reservations in universities, poorly taught undergrads being churned out by the ten thousands every year by the universities, corruption, red tape, lack of access to good quality higher education, fast vanishing flora, fauna and natural resources, attempted withdrawal of the right to information act etc. Such pseudo democracy is only slightly better than communism country. Only slightly.
Just this evening, it took me 2.5 hours to negotiate 12 KMs because a huge rally was organized by the ruling Congress party in Bangalore. Villagers were brought in 9000 buses to "participate" in the show of "strength" by that political party. Apart from the physical stress I went through, my car also suffered a few scratches thanks to the bumper to bumper traffic. TV channels reported a 40 KM long traffic jam on the highway connecting Bangalore and Tumkur(60 KM away) due to this event. Even the cops were mute spectators (as usual) to this event.
Some democracy we have. Who the hell would want to live in such a country?
And we hope to give China a run for its money, huh?

Technorati tags: India, China

USB devices in Solaris 10

Good post on managing USB devices in S10 . Not all of it may work with the FCS release though. vold is severely broken in that release. I'd recommend disabling it ("svcadm disable volfs") and manually mounting your USB stick instead. With update 2 however, vold and hot plugging of USB devices work like a charm.

Technorati tags: Sun, Solaris, USB

The state of Indian cinema

You shouldn't expect to see a movie review (of all things) on my blog. But there are exceptions :-) Anyways, I happened to watch a movie named "Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna" (Never say Goodbye) made by a production house known for high-emotion, low intellect melodramatic movies. To me, this genre of movies represents the worst of Indian Cinema (and shows the Indian audience in poor light). So, I was expecting nothing better when I was forced (yes, forced) into the movie hall by my friends. But I was pleasantly surprised by what was dished out. So much so that I wrote a review of it on IMDB (that has, by the way, rated it at 4.5/10 - a big deal considering the previous track record of the director in dealing with complex topics). The music, by the way, blows the doors on any recent music churned out by the Hindi film industry. Good - Indian cinema (and hopefully the audience) is growing up by the day.