Daylight Saving चालू झालं...

आता आम्ही (आमची वीज जाळून) आमेरिकेची वीज वाचवणार...

A false dichotomy

Simplest vs Hardest. They are basically the same.

[One more cliche borne out by experience].

एक वाक्य

"किती आले किती गेले, आम्ही आहोत तिथल्या तिथे"

(गावातल्या चावडित आणि आय टी कंपनीमधे या वाक्याचे अर्थ अगदी वेगवेगळे होतात).

Tales of Cards

I recently got myself a credit card. Now this news would come as big relief to some of my friends, because before I was always  begging to use their card for something or the other. One might think repeated begging should have pushed me to get one for myself, but then I don't call myself lazy for nothing. I managed to be a holdout for more than four years. I had one before that, for a year or so, but it expired and I let it (again, I don't call myself lazy for nothing). The push to get one were the recent 'faaren' journeys; not having a credit card really is an incoveneince when in a different country. The funny thing I noticed was I did not immedietly go on a shopping spree to complete my long pending plans. For example I wanted to get a LWN subscription forever, but the thought came to my mind a couple of months after I was in a position to get it without begging. Ditto for a subscription to sciam digital. I think I had gotten too used to living without a credit card. I was surprised at how deep that 'used to' went.

Foundation saga so far

Foundation series is one of the tallest pillars of science fiction. It tells a history of the future in seven books. Some numbers

The order of events in the future history
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The order in which the books were written
3 4 5 6 7 1 2

The order in which I wanted to read them
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The actual order so far
7 1 3

The last number of the last sequence was an addition over the last weekend. As can be noted it was the first book to be written (in 1951), and it is part of a subset of the series known as 'Foundation Triology' (comprising of books 3,4,5) so it was an important addition. I liked it very much anyway. I thank the anonymous benefactor who left a copy of the book on Z's desk (for over a month) which I finally decided to borrow for the weekend. May you live long and prosper \\//.

Good read

Richard Hamming's (of the Hamming code) advice about doing first class research. Relevant for all young professionals (as a side note I can feel my age writing those last words :).

You and your research.

Made in Japan

These words used to carry the connotation of sloppiness not a very long time ago. In the book with the same name, Akio Morita, one of the founders of Sony tells how they turned these very same words into a symbol of qaulity.

The book tells the story of Sony, from its beginnings in the devastated ruins of Tokyo after the second world war, the enormous problems that were faced and the ingenious ways in which they were overcome, and the commitment to quality that made brand Sony what it is today. However that is not the entire book. Morita in his later life became an advocate for more harmonious world trade, a defender of Japanese policy when Japan came under attack from US in the 1980s for 'eating local jobs' and he also spent his time and energy in bridging the gap between Japan and the rest of the world on business and other levels. So the books spends a fair amount of time on how Japan does business, how Japanese think and also a little of its history. The book is old (published 1986), so some of this latter material might be dated, but it is a good, optimistic, and I dare say, inspirational book.

I really liked this quote

Not that I have anything against OO..

 

"I think the lack of reusability comes in object-oriented languages, not in functional languages. Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle".

-Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang and OTP)

It just clicked

Unix is telling me how to live. Read, Write and Execute. It was there all this time. Clever.

The End of Eternity

Asimov takes time travel to a new level in this short novel. We had had too many loners traveling into past; here we meet an entire organization engaged in doing that and that alone. And not just travel into past, they make changes to the past to get the present that gives (in their opinion) the 'greatest happiness to the greatest number'. This means there is an abundance of realities, each as real to its inhabitants as ours is to us, coming into existence when the current past (whatever that is) leads to it, and going out of existence when past changes again (leading to an alternate reality). Not the best Asimov novel in terms of character development, but readable, and provides quite a bit of food for thought.