The Vault Of Souls

Most of us have traveled by bus at least at some point in his life. But traveling itself is an adventure starting from the time you set foot in a bus stand. I went to Coimbatore recently and had a similar adventure. Boarding a bus in Tamil Nadu is an art in Itself.

As soon as you enter the Bus Stand you will see nothing strange out there. Waiting for the bus, you start wondering about the things you could do when you reach your destination in the next 3 hours.

You see the bus. Hopeful , you stand up in acknowledgment as a true civilized engineer. But as soon as the bus comes in your full view.... SWARMS!!Hundreds of People!!.... come running towards it from every nook and corner of the bus stand. The previously calm Bus Stand suddenly becomes a battle ground. And you stand there Stunned....


When you return to your senses a second later and start frantically running towards the Bus but .... in vain.... . The bus stand goes calm again as soon as the Bus leaves and you can then count the people on the bus stand and you sit wondering where the people dissapeared or where they come from in the first place!!.

You again wait patiently for another bus, thinking that most people had boarded the last bus and this time the crowd will be less.... but this time too ... hundred more people come running as soon as the bus arrives hanging from EVERY NAIL of the BUS.

Shocked again!! Wondering where the people apparated from.. you again run frantically towards the bus. This time you reach touching distance but alas.... this goes in vain too...!!



Irritated by your last attemept you decide to wait until the crowd thins away and do not try to attempt to board the next 2 buses. But the crowd will just keep on coming... all night long...

Well of all the places you have been to and with all the childhood lessons which taught that "Patience is the best Quality"... This is one place where patience never pays!!

"Space always intrigued me, with its incredibly rich possibilities, space alteration by (architectural) objects, objects' transformation in space (sculpture, design), movement in space and in time, their correlation, their repercussion on mankind, the relation between man and space, the object and time. I think the CUBE arose from this interest, from this search for expression and for this always more increased acuteness of these thoughts...”

– Enro RubikThese were the words of engineer, architect, sculptor,professor Enro Rubik who created the world’s most selling toy ever – the Rubik’s CUBE. But apart from the cube there have been many other creation from the ‘Rubik's Studio’:



RUBIK’s Magic : The puzzle consists of 8 black square tiles (Changed to red squares with goldish rings in 1997) arranged in a 2 × 4 rectangle; diagonal grooves on the tiles hold wires that connect them, allowing them to be folded onto each other and unfolded again in two perpendicular directions.The goal of the game is to fold the puzzle into a heart-like shape and unscramble the picture on the back side, thus interconnecting the rings.

RUBIK’s Snake : is a toy with twenty-four wedges shaped like right isosceles triangular prisms. The wedges are connected such that they can be twisted, but not separated. Through this twisting, the Rubik's Snake can attain positions including a straight line, a ball (technically a nonuniform concave rhombicuboctahedron), a dog, a duck, a rectangle, a snake and many more imaginative shapes and figures.

RUBIK’s 360 : Rubik's 360 is a 3-D mechanical puzzle released in 2009 by Ernő Rubik,The puzzle involves changing the position of six balls, each a different color, in a central sphere to six compartments in the outer sphere. This is done by shaking them through a middle sphere that only has two holes. There are three spheres that make up the puzzle. Unlike the original Rubik's Cube, there seem to be no algorithms and, in general, less mathematics associated with this puzzle. In addition there is a factor of manual dexterity involved in the solution, that was unnecessary with the original cube.

Hats off to the master architect.... one who gave a play toy for adults and children alike, a toy which appeals to a 60 as well as a 6 year old alike and all believe that they'll be able to solve it. The WORLD stands greatful!!!

But, this is still just a concept and there are no plans yet to commercialize this product. Till then... keep measuring the time!!!

"THE ERA OF GOOGLE"

For most people, information on the web means 'GOOGLE'. But for serious research or searching for opinions or finding answers to some questions, Googling may not always produce the best results. Although the knowledge of Google commands, the internal working of the search engine will certainly improve the probability of 'getting lucky'!!

However, even these may not be enough to give you an adequate information about the subject. You may have to browse through many web pages to obtain a proper understanding of the subject.

LOOKING BEYOND 'SEARCH ENGINES'

This inadequacy in search engines is not relevant when you are looking for facts with keywords. But once you start asking questions or opinions, the regular search services fail.Thus, there is a need for a service which gives you a substitute for an advice from a real expert.

Thus a search service is needed which uses the net infrastructure to seek an answer from an experts mind instead of seeking the facts from the already existing database of WebPages created by unknown experts.

Here are some of the experiments worth mention in this direction:

• LEXXE – Its a search engine which uses a technology called ‘Natural Language Processing’ to return results for queries typed in regular English. E.g. The question ‘How old is the earth?’ will give the correct answer along with a number of result links and many cluster of links. But the question ‘What is the age of Barak Obama?’ may give a surprising result !!
• QUERYCAT – This service returns, not links , but an array of FAQ’s about the topic. Although the search is not very good as it does not use the collection of WebPages but rather its own database of FAQ’s. But the Querycat-Health is a good enough service which may return result to act as a substitute to a real doctors advice!!
• DocMazy - DocMazy is a ‘document search engine’, so it only searches for only PDFs, Docs, Excel, and Txt files. It quickly finds these files, which are normally stuck deep within search engines. This thing is especially useful for people looking for quick research sources.It even allows you to preview these documents in your browser itself using AJAX.
• SCRIBD – Started in 2007, Scribd is a ‘Social Publishing’ site. It enables millions of users to share , discover and read original writings and documents.it comes with an iPaper reader which converts print files such as PDF,DOC,DOCX,TXT etc into web documents and hence makes it easier to share docs.
• WATTPAD – It is the worlds largest ‘e-book sharing’ community. Started in 2006 with a tagline of “Read what you like, Share what you write”, wattpad has become a hotspot for people who want to share or read e-books.

Other than these, many other services have been launched which spark some exciting hope for the future of search engines. E.g.

• WolframAlpha
• Citeulike
• Yahoo’s SearchPad
• Ardvark

…………..etc

Our elections are the biggest event (magnitude wise) ever in the world. And the level of detail and importance each vote is given is truly remarkable.

I read this recently and really started admiring the earnest and conscientious effort the Election Commission puts to the electoral process and the belief they have in the system.

POLLING IN THE VALLEY!!

During the III Phase of the current elections, In Kashmir and Ladakh area, there were two polling booths which were at an altitude of 13,000 feet and the air force helicopters were not able to land there. So, the EC had to dispatch 6 people in 2 parties for the booths. These parties had to walk on foot in knee deep snow for 40 km to reach the booth. They walked for 2 days (obviously stopping for food, rest and sleep!!) to conduct the polls. They took satellite phones with them in order to communicate with the EC. But the most interesting fact was this: “there were just 37 voters from that place!!”

Special arrangement was made for the counting as well as the parties that went were not able to come back.

This is called DEDICATION!

Hats Off to the Election Commission!

Unless you have been living in a cave for the last week, you would have witnessed the wholesale hysteria over the recent swine flu. All this panic over a simple strain of flu got me pondering over what it was like in the IT industry whenever there was a computer virus that took the form of a pandemic in the computer world.

Searching (or rather “Googling”) the topic, I came across certain viruses that were pioneers for the technical mischief makers in their own times. Though these viruses were not the most widespread or effective (though some of them were), they were the innovators and the ones that stick to our mind and bring back memories…. Not all of them happy!!

Here are the HONORABLE MENTIONS:

CREEPER: It was the first network virus released in the mid 1971. Although 1971 is a prehistoric time in the computer world (no MICROSOFT no APPLE), It sure did harass a lot of people. It was developed by bob Thomas and spread over the ARPANET (the precursor of the internet).
To delete the creeper another piece of code was written called the REAPER (the first ANTIVIRUS!!) .

The creeper was basically a harmless virus; It only displayed a message “I’m the Creeper! Catch me if you can!!, no theft no payloads….those were happier times.
Perhaps another sign of the simpler time was that creepers creator not only wrote the virus but also the antivirus Reaper.

BRAIN: It was the first virus written for Microsoft’s DOS. It spread to its peak in 1991.It was originally written by two Pakistani brothers Basit and Ajmal Farooq Alvi for their biomedical software to prevent its piracy. Later the code for brain was separated and ‘redistributed’ as a virus.

Elk Cloner: It was written by a 15-year-old high school student called Rich Skentra as a practical joke. Unfortunately for him the joke turned bad very quickly! It was the first virus for the Apple II system (and they say Apple systems don’t get viruses).

It was a boot sector virus and spread through what is now called a “Boot Sector infection”. It copied itself to the boot sector and spread to all future disks.

This became the most preferred method to spread virus in the pre-internet times.

Klez: It was born 10 years ago and is still doing rounds today. It basically spoofs email by randomly picking one Id from a previously infected machine. This virus spread thru E-mail. It duped the users to open the mail and once the malware was installed the users contact book was his!!

For the last two hours… I have been thinking of what to write next. You’ll say that I have too much free time (who spends two hours thinking?!!) But in reality it’s because I am sick and have no other work to do lying on my bed (;-)). Lately I have been reading a lot about recession and economics. (As you would have notices if you’ve read my earlier post). Recently, I read a theory about how INDIA has survived the recession. And as soon as I saw the soaring stock markets today… I felt like I had to write this. So, here goes.

The main reason why America is the worst sufferer of this recession is
the “charuvaka” philosophy the people follow (which tells people to borrow, spend and live happily ever after).This and the habit of the Americans of spending more than what was needed made the US lose most due to the recession.

INDIA is a different scenario. During the early 2000’s the economy of country was booming. Till 2006 and the first half of 2007 the per capita income of the country was increasing. As the per capita income of the country increased, so did the per capita expenditure and the per capita savings. Thus, economists thought that INDIA would go the same way as America. But when recession hit the world, the per capita income of the country fell and remarkably, the per capita expenditure fell and the per capita saving remained the same!!. This confused many economists who thought that capitalism could not survive in a society oriented country like INDIA. It was only this society only that saved our economy. The values which were passed on from generation to generation of spending only on what is required and the famous Indian phrase “ADJUST KAR LE YAAR” were the things that helped us maintain our economy. Thus, The values taught to us by our parents and grandparents, which were ignored by the greatest minds of the world and neglected by the greatest B-schools of the world, acted as a shield at the time of trouble.

Also,borrowers by and large in INDIA especially medium and small borrowers believe in repayment of loans, as rightly said by the American Ambassador Mr. Galbraith that he could see “the richness of honesty in the poverty of agriculturists”.
JAI HIND!!!