Tag Archives: Internet

Happy Birthday again :)

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It is the time of the year again  when you say “Happy Birthday!!”

What started as just a time pass for some sleepy afternoon with Internet access has completed two years now..

This time I thought I could pull up some old posts which people might like reading. These are the top posts on my blog according to the stats: Do go through them:

Meanwhile, I hope I can come up with more nice stuff that you would be glad to read and I would be glad to write :)

Thanks everyone for visiting my blog and leaving your valuable comments. That has kept my spirits and hence the blog still exists :)

Cubevilled

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Cubeville_Morse_Code - Dilbert

A day in cubeville - Dilbert

I have been cubevilled. No, no, this did not happen yesterday. Just that the realization dawned upon me very recently. I have noticed a few people also recognise me as a corporate prisoner. Doesn’t sound good. I think they are just jealous. These are the ones who could not gain access to the cubeville. Anyway, now I am an inmate of the cubeville proudly :) Now I laugh, cry , sing , dance and live on the days of the week called as Saturday and Sunday. I am the happiest on a day called Friday and use terms like TGIF to describe my happiness.  I also use terms like paradigm shift, leverage and out of the box thinking to gain more acceptance from the folks around me in the cubeville.

Life here is interesting from the normal life outside. People here seem to think they can control everything around them. It starts with conditioning the breathing air around them with devices called as Air-conditioners. Using this they adjust the room temperature to sub zero levels to get a feel of the more attractive far-off Antartic regions which are considered the advanced ones. The people here also try to imitate the species staying there while speaking, laughing, walking and sleeping and eat and wear stuff popular out there. The more similar you are to those species the more worthy you are considered. And then there is planning. It is a must to also have a plan to plan.

And this one has a festival coming up every month(Isn’t that cool? ) and the holy day is called salary day. The major leisure activity around this part of the world is related to something called Internet. It may take the form of forwarding emails, watching videos on youtube, Facebook, twitter, stupid games and random articles. When people here get upset they just download their feelings to something called a blog and continue with their work later on. There is also this phenomenon called “Review/Appraisal” which occurs annually in this part of the world. People dread this day and keep preparing to deal with the day throughout the year.

The language spoken here is called numbers(even the names of the people that are also known as an employee id). And if you happen to speak in any other language the words go unheard of. Although they make a constant effort to also speak a language called HR policy.

Most of the important decisions are taken by a certain sect of people called Managers or bosses. They don’t seem to be liked by the general folk and they speak in a secret language of their own called an MBA language.

So far so good. Lets see how things shape up for me here. Will keep you guys posted on the happenings here. Well, that is if I can, coz family, friends and social life is kind of stigma in this place. You know I have just come in here and want to be the good books of the folks. After all, I am supposed to stay here. Please forgive me if I don’t remember most of you after a few days. Thanks in advance for understanding me.

P.S: You may not have understood the last paragraph unless you also belong to cubeville or cubeville like places. English meaning: It is a nice way of saying “I am selfish and will only talk to you if I have something to get out of you”. The word sycophant in English is close to the above meaning.

Standing on Giant shoulders

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“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of
giants” — Isaac Newton
At no other point of time would these humble words of a genuis mind
be more relevant than now. If the new generation boasts of acheiving
greater heights it is not because we are the most intelligent
generation but simply better equipped than our predecents. All the
acheivements that we have acheived till now are because we don’t
have to reinvent the wheel. It is already there we just have to use
it and build on it.
I realise this everytime I use technology as an aid. And what better
example than a google search. Anything under the sun and even beyond
the sun is available here. For example, if you forget some command,
searching for it wasn’t so easy. You needed to know where to find
it. If it is a book, is it a part of the library, is it available
currently. Or ask some resource person / expert/ peer. Esp. if it is
learning a new technology attend classes for it, travel half the
world to attend conferences or training sessions. Buy related books
and required equipment. Programs written in low level languages and
compilers took long to execute any program. Any error costed lots of
valuable time and money. All this was a costly affair.
Now it is just a matter of seconds. Type anything that might be
relevant to the command and lo! you have the thousands of pages
throughout the world giving you the answer. Visit any forum and you
have all the expertise dished out to you, that too for free. You
don’t have to waste your time and money doing the same mistakes that
somebody has already done. Just a PC and an Internet connection and
you have the world at your disposal. It is difficult to even imagine
a life without these facilities in our life. So if you are getting
things done in a record time. If you are able to produce excellent
results from a project. You also have somebody else to be thanked
other than yourself.

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” — Isaac Newton

At no other point of time would these humble words of a genuis mind be more relevant than now. If the new generation boasts of acheiving greater heights it is not because we are the most intelligent generation but simply because we are better equipped than our predecents. All the acheivements that we have acheived till now are because we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It is already there we just have to use it and build on it.

I realise this everytime I use technology as an aid. And what better example than a google search. Anything under the sun and even beyond the sun is available here. For example, if you forget some command, searching for it wasn’t so easy. You needed to know where to find it. If it is a book, is it a part of the library, is it available currently. Or ask some resource person / expert/ peer. Esp. if it is learning a new technology attend classes for it, travel half the world to attend conferences or training sessions. Buy related books and required equipment. Programs written in low level languages and compilers took long to execute any program. Any error costed lots of valuable time and money. All this was a costly affair.

Now it is just a matter of seconds. Type anything that might be relevant to the command and lo! you have the thousands of pages throughout the world giving you the answer. Visit any forum and you have all the expertise dished out to you, that too for free. You don’t have to waste your time and money doing the same mistakes that somebody has already done. Just a PC and an Internet connection and you have the world at your disposal. It is difficult to even imagine a life without these facilities in our life. So if you are getting things done in a record time. If you are able to produce excellent  results from a project. You also have somebody else to be thanked other than yourself.

This is just one example related to programming world but the same holds for all the other fields. Faster information dissemination, the way we  communicate and the ultra modern ubiquitous technology has enabled the modern day human beings much beyond our imagination and simply changed the way we live. Let us toast the technology and all those who made a better life possible.
This post was a part of my drafts from a long time. Since today is the 40th birthday of the Internet, so I thought this would be the best time to post this . 40 yrs ago on 2nd Sept 1969, the first test packets were exchanged on two computers in University of California. This eventually led to the birth of the Internet and the rest as they say is history.

Genie outside the bottle

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As a child I had always imagined computer to be a magic box. A mean machine that would answer all the questions that you throw at it. It was only as I grew up I understood it is the GIGO(Garbage In Garbage Out) principle at work. I was disappointed to some extent but nevertheless understood that is how things work and computer is not a panacea.

With the arrival of “The Internet” that came to India in 1995 things looked different. And then came a invention called Google which has been the top dog among search engines for almost a decade. It was a path breaker and somewhat resembled my imagination of a computer. You type in any question and it would link you to the pages that answers your question within fraction of a second.

Some days back(May 15 to be prcise) I tried Wolfram Alpha and voila! this is what I imagined my computer to be. This one computes the answer instead of just searching for keywords. It is as if I had found a genie out of the bottle. Though it cannot answer all the questions whichever it does, does it well. While I am still amazed how it was made possible, I am thoroughly convinced “knowledge engines” are the next big thing on the Internet. But it is going to take a while for people to Wolfram an answer rather than Google it out. Google has come up with one such engine called Google Squared

But there is one thing I still miss whenever I am out to search an image. An Image search engine. Currently(as per my knowledge) we have only text search. We can get image results but we cannot upload a image and say “Search an image that looks something like this”. Now that is being “extra greedy” I guess but that is how Human Mind works ( Yeh Dil Mange More). What say?

PS:The celebrated Stanford professor, Rajeev Motwani, known worldwide for mentoring and advising founders of the companies like Google and PayPal, has died in a freak drowning incident. He co-authored the paper on pagerank with Larry Page and Sergey Brin(Founders of Google) and Terry Winograd. Let his soul rest in peace.