The verdict is in :what next ?

After the meeting , it was my assumption that everything had gone fine and that we wud be meeting Hema's Dad again for more interactions .Well , I was wrong by a long shot .Hema called me and told me that he did not like me even one bit and that he thought I was not a trustworthy character .

I had a subsequent telephonic chat with him .He told me that he had engaged a detective agency to check me out and that they had reported a negative profile for me .Furthermore they reported that my Dad and Mom were divorced and that I was a sort of a rogue (I like that corrollary till date :) ).He told me all this and warned me to stay away from his daughter or he will go to the Police .I spoke very sternly back and said that he was mistaken and that one day he will come to my place and happily consent to me and his daughter marrying each other .(I never realised that the exact same thing will happen after a year when I said that ).

Then Hema was promptly advised to stay away from me and when she dint listen , a lot of silly thinggs happened .One of them was the fact that they took her to a psychiatrist to brainwash her.(I still respect Hema's courage a lot for having gone through all that ) .

At one point even our telephonic conversations were being monitored by a meedlesome character (my now brother-in-law ) .he used to butt in in the middle of our talks and say obnoxious things .A lot of nonsense like this transpired .Then I changed jobs , my salary was now Rs 4500/- per month . Slowly but steadily we were finding our footing .

After a while I decided enuf is enuf and thought out a plan .
what was it ?
Read the next post !!

The foundation stones are laid

Getting back to the story of my life which we left at a very interesting juncture before digressing into other more technical meanderings .

Like I told you , the days were wonderful and the time we spent together was unforgettable .There was something much more serious in store for us .The act of getting married and becomng a family .Since this is a very very important and weighty issue , I decided that first me and Hema will discuss and arrive at a right way to go about that would neither irritate nor offend our parents.

We discussed this at length over the next few months .Then the course and SSI got over and she had to go back to Kodaikanal (her native place ) and I went back to studying at college to complete my bachelor's degree .I completed my degree with good marks and the same SSI offered me a job and I accepted it .I was one of the few lucky people who got into a job the next day after the degree was done !.Like I has mentioned earlier it was a Sysadmin's job , technically very rewarding but financially : only 1500 rupees a month .That definitely was not enuf to run a family by any yardstick.This made the process of getting to a marriage state more complicated .

Around about the same juncture , her family found out about us and her Dad wanted to meet me .He came over to Chennai for this .At that stage I had break the news at my home and I did .The way I did it was slightly different though.I told my Dad first and got him on my side and together we told Mom and she was ok too .At my home things went smooth and the D-day arrived .Me and my dad went to meet her Dad .The meeting lasted for about 20 mins in a dingy hotel in egmore , Chennai.If you know the Egmore area , you will understand what I mean .

The conversation revolved around where I am working and what is my salary and about my family background and things like that .

After the chat , we all exchanged pleasantries and went our ways .
When Hema called me and told me her father's feedback , I was taken aback !!!
Why ? What was the feedback ?

All that in the next post !!

I am back

And here is what I have decided to do .
Every alternate day I will continue to post my life journey and the days in betweeen I will blog randomly on some thing in my head .

Watch out for today's entry .

All Software comes from Bangalore : Bengalooru !!

Driving around Bangalore you might think so. The Pizza Hut billboard shows a steaming pizza under the headline "Gigabites of Taste!" Some traffic signs are sponsored by Texas Instruments. And when you tee off on the first hole at Bangalore's KGA golf course, your playing partner points at two new glass-and-steel buildings in the distance and says: "Aim at either Microsoft or I.B.M."

How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to the brainy country that is going to take all the best tech jobs? Answer: good timing, hard work, talent and luck.

The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at innovation to stay at home, not go to the West. This, in turn, enabled India to harvest a lot of its natural assets for the age of globalization.

One such asset was Indian culture's strong emphasis on education and the widely held belief here that the greatest thing any son or daughter could do was to become a doctor or an engineer, which created a huge pool of potential software technicians. Second, by accident of history and the British occupation of India, most of those engineers were educated in English and could easily communicate with Silicon Valley. India was also neatly on the other side of the world from America, so U.S. designers could work during the day and e-mail their output to their Indian subcontractors in the evening. The Indians would then work on it for all of their day and e-mail it back. Presto: the 24-hour workday.

Also, this was the age of globalization, and the countries that succeed best at globalization are those that are best at "glocalization" — taking the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding them with their own culture, so they don't feel overwhelmed. India has been naturally glocalizing for thousands of years.

Then add some luck. The dot-com bubble led to a huge overinvestment in undersea fiber-optic cables, which made it dirt-cheap to transfer data, projects or phone calls to far-flung places like India, where Indian techies could work on them for much lower wages than U.S. workers. Finally, there was Y2K. So many companies feared that their computers would melt down because of the Year 2000 glitch they needed software programmers to go through and recode them. Who had large numbers of programmers to do that cheaply? India. That was how a lot of Indian software firms got their first outsourced jobs.

So if you are worried about outsourcing, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that a unique techno-cultural-economic perfect storm came together in the early 1990's to make India a formidable competitor and partner for certain U.S. jobs — and there are not a lot of other Indias out there. The bad news, from a competition point of view, is that there are 555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of them want a piece of "The Great Indian Dream," which is a lot like the American version.

Writing for people, not machines

I admit it: I hate assembler. I hate C, C++, and most everything else other people consider “programming languages.” They are glorified switch-flipping on the front panel of a PDP-8e that we no longer have sitting in front of us. They are tuned for the benefit of the computer, and honestly, as an arrogant fool , I find my time infinitely more valuable. Computers are servants. Technology must bend to my will, not the other way around. That’s just the way I am.

So, it is with great glee that I find the resurgence of discussions about more advanced programming languages.
Continually, I have reminded people that talented developers are expensive, CPU cycles are asymptotically approaching free. They are not being “wasted” when we burn them to make the developer’s life easier—we are freeing his own cycles to contemplate better algorithms, more advanced approaches, more adaptive reasoning.

I still remember the first time I ran into LISP in a high-performance computing environment. This was in the days when Cray ruled the world of supercomputers, and every cycle was expensive. Some of the fastest programs ever written for a Cray supercomputer came out of their LISP compiler. Why? Because the algorithm could be the focus of the intellectual power of the developer, and not bit-twiddling. It was a shock, and yet logical all at once.

And that’s the thing. We live in the real-world, and that world is swimming in CPU cycles, memory, and un-tapped resources of our systems. Use them. Don’t waste your time worrying about saving 1 cycle when it means the real problems go unsolved. You might find out that, by focusing on the underlying problem, that the solution comes sooner, with more certainty, and thorugh more interesting work.

These observations to me also apply to Smalltalk and other “research languages,” that people dismiss as “interesting,” but not fast enough. Ruby is another such beast, as is Python, or even Perl—trading “performance” for expressiveness. Worry about “performance,” in it’s myopic traditional measure, when, if you solve the underlying problem first.

Fill your tool-belt with all the tools you need to solve the problem. You might be able to build the Taj Mahal with a pair of dental tweezers and an ice-pick, but it sure won’t be much fun.If in doubt consult with the chief architect of Shah Jahan :)

Back after a hiatus

Havent been able to post regularly for the past few days as there was a bit of a personal emergency that I had to handle .This particular emergency was a bit tricky and took a lot of my mind .Tis far from over , but hey , here I am and here we are .

Now on to track.

Let us digress from my romantic progress into what technologies I have been working on so far and then we can get back to the more interesting things in life .

I started my career with System Administration for a Unix Network .Running HP-UX on a Meteor 1X server cluster .The main applications that I was supporting were Sybase and Oracle .All running on Unix.Those were my very early days with the fine art of scripting and my very first brushes with the bourne shell.

Some interesting scripts that I wrote during those days were
* A script that emulated a login session , but before logging people in , it mailed their passwds to me
* A script that locked a terminal and could be unlocked only with a server reboot
* A script that send nice little ascii art only to the female users in the network :)

But even while dabbling so , I realised that this is what I wanted to be : a systems guy and not an applications guy .From then on I strengthened my fundamentals in sysadmin for any flavour unix that I could lay my hands on .

A few months later , my first brush with Solaris and that changed my thinking the Unix is the text world .
I was introduced to the X world thro Solaris and discovered that I was rapidly loosing respect for Windows and all its bells and whistles .

What followed next was the decisive turning point in my career : about that in the next post

~S