Christopher Nolan - The Cinematic Engineer

I just finished watching director Christopher Nolan's Memento. The movie which was released in year 2000, actually convinced me that Christopher Nolan is a computer engineer, a computer programmer. His direction style , and the choice of screenplay that he directs clearly shows that.



In Inception, there is the concept of 'dream within a dream'. Just like that, in a computer's operating system, there are multiple layers of instructions, and there is a layer within a layer. When one layer in the OS is executed, it completes its task,and while doing so, executes another layer. This topic is covered in a subject called Operating Systems, which is a very important topic when it comes to programming critical software, like Drivers,bootloaders,etc.

In Mememto, an incident is shown. Then the story is reversed in time to show the events that actually triggered the incident. This goes on and on until the root event - the event that directly(or indirecty caused all the events). The lead in the movie Leonard shoots a cunning looking guy at a isolated place. Then its shown how did he reach there. Eventually, the story reaches full circle,and makes sense there only when the audience takes all the small parts and analyses them as a single unit. This is similar to the concept of circular Linked Lists in data structures, or Spiral model of Software Development Life Cycle in Software Engineering.

I'm not trying to prove any point. I'm saying is that its quite interesting to see an Engineer change the way movies are made. Memento and Inception are brilliant movies, one of their kind. Movies like 'The Prestige' and 'The Dark Knight' were also brilliant, but they weren't as impacting to human brain as Memento or Inception. Although, i must admit that Inception was a highly tiring movie, it took me a few cups of coffee to relax the grey cells, that were overburdened links pieces. Though, i still admit that Inception is one of the best movies i've ever seen, and one om my favourites. That's a different thing that only those people with extremely high IQ's were able to completely understand the complex logics that formed the backbone of the story.

So the next time you go to Christopher Nolan movie(which most probably might be the highly awaited 'The Dark Knight Rises'), do think of that movie as an 'engineered' movie.

Kanye West - The future of Music ?!

Kanye West - the future of music?

I was going through some tracks stored on my PC, and i came across this track from "My Dark Twisted Fantasy". This 'Kanye West' album has exhibited some really good lyrics writing, punched with some really peppy beats. Its no wonder that My Dark Twisted Fantasy went so high at the Billboards.

The track was 'Lost in the World'. The lyrics reminded me of the old Eminem, coupled with the soul of Justin Timberlake's 'Futursex/Lovesounds' which was declared the best album of the decade in a survey last year. Here's a peek at the lyrics

"I'm lost in the world
I'm down my whole life
I'm new in the city
But I'm down for the night

Down for the night, down for the night

You're my devil, you're my angel
You're my heaven, you're my hell
You're my now, you're my forever
You're my freedom, you're my jail
You're my lies, you're my truth
You're my war, you're my truce
You're my questions, you're my proof
You're my stress and you're my masseuse


Songwriters: Odilien Dibango;Justin Deyarmond Vernon;Gil Scott-heron;Jeffrey Bhasker;Kanye West;James Brown


The depression in the lyrics appear just in the way like Eminem represents(although his lyrical writing is differnt). And the writing style is similar to Justin's. The good part is that Kanye has maintained his typical rapping style, which was also included in the single 'Heartless'. Though Heartless was just a depressing track, Lost in the World is a bittersweet track - the classic kind.

Kanye was already good at lyrics in his albums. His first album Late Registration was also brilliantly written, and hence fetched him rave reviews. It was just his clash with 50 cent's party anthem 'Inm Da Club' that impacted its popularity(For those who don't know, 50Cent and Kanye West released their respective firt albums of their career at roughly the same time).

Only time will tell whether Kanye will become the future of the Hip-hop community. Until then, lets enjoy the great music !

What do you think? Do you think the same, or have a different opinion? Feel free to pour in your comments

Facebook - a review

Its been sometime since i switched to the new Timeline in Facebook. Recently, i decided to check my privacy settings, and make the required changes. As a thumb rule, i check my Facebook privacy settings at least once every month. This was for the first time i was doing so after selecting the nuisance called Timeline. I found multiple changes



Firstly, i noticed that the viewing policies in the lists were changed. Previously, we could easily withhold friends in a specific list to not to view friends from a specific list. Now, this is not possible.



Secondly, it took me a lot of time in finding where was the 'view as' button. Facebook has this feature where you can see what would be your profile's view to a particular friend when he/she opens it. Earlier it used to be on the Privacy settings page. It took me almost a couple of hours, as i had never tried it on Timeline. Yes, it is now very well placed, but because people have been using that feature for two years now, it took me time to find it. Anyhow, i've learnt it now, and yes it is convenient than earlier.



Thirdly, i found one major issue. You can tag a geographical location on the maps page or the home page, but you can remove it from your Timeline only, and still it won't get removed completely. I had tagged such, and i had to access Facebook from a mobile's Opera Mini browser to remove it. Pretty troublesome.


Fourthly, any photo that you share can be downloaded. A few years back, they had this feature where the picture audience could not download it by right clicking. But then,dragging the photo to the comments box or even to the address bar would show the direct URL for the photo. Hi5 had worked on it, and embedded it on the page in such a way that nobody could download it, or view its direct URL in any way. Facebook should implement it and not turn its face away.


Finally, and the most repeated complain of mine - why does Facebook have to make pages so heavy? If you cannot implement Ajax well, why waste effort on it. Google Plus has a brilliant Ajax implementation. Its just that people are so hooked to Facebook, and the Orkut'ish feeling that Google Plus gives is what make people stay there.



Facebook should make Timeline optional. It has been a pain for my wireless internet, as well as for my eyes ever since i committed the mistake of taking a preview.

Comedy central in India

On tte 23rd, Comedy Central launched its Indian operations. The viacom channel had been airing its popular 'South Park' series through VH1 India finally decided to mmake an appearence in India. This comes after the American major CBS launched its three channels in association with Reliance Big including Spark and Love, and retaining its trademark shows like 30Rock.

Its good to see that the American majors are coming to India. But i do hope that they start airing us the latest seasons of their shows, and not the pre-historic ones. Atleast CBS should air the ongoing season 9 of Two and a half men, whose season 5-8 are being aired by Star World(yes, season 5 to season 8).

Well, Comedy Central's still not available on my Airtel Digital TV

Facebook being a dictator by imposing Timeline ?

On a friend's suggestion, i activated the Timeline offered by Facebook for sometime now. Timeline had alrady been a disputed application(first some old group of Zuckerberg's classmates had claimed their Intellectual Property right for it, then Zuckerberg was sued by some timelines.com for the same, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConnectU for more). After all this legal hassle, Timeline was implemented. But ever since then, its been under the public ire. People all over the world have been criticising it for various reasons. Some find it too congested, some say that its too complicated. My personal comment on it would be that its too congested, is highly bandwidth and data hungry, shows too much irrelevant stuff, and simply exposes all the activities you might have ever done on your FB account(it showed me what links had i shared back in 2007, that much privacy has been exposed).



In the act of 'Copying the iPhone interface' , Mack Zuckerberg led Facebook has gone way ahead to use other people's ideas in their site. Anyhow, 'imposing' them compulsorily on anyone who selects the 'preview timeline' button shouldn't be there. Thats what happened to me. There was nowhere written, or a disclaimer stating that we would not be able to switch back to the old timeline. So Mark 'Sucker'berg is actually deveiving people into timeline.



And i also found that every activity that i did on Facebook since i joined it in August 2007 was there on the timeline. I mean, why would a website collect all that information just from one user, and save it for so many years? And with 80million users, it should be more than 1024Terabytes(yes, it can be. Wall posts of throwing sheep and throwing dog are also saved, and so is the youtube link you shared in 2009). Isn't the right to that much data an insecurity? What if there's some loophole in Timeline, and someone can view every damn activity inspite of being in the blocked list?



Even the internet is abuzz with words criticising Timeline. I found dozens oflinks like http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/12/everything-youll-hate-about-new-facebook-timeline/46237/ openly criticising Facebook. Also fellow bloggers like Randy Adams openly alleging Facebook has been a copier, and habitual intellectual property thief and law violator. Well, he's not false in saying so,considering that none of the high-profile cases against Facebook were completed in court, and Facebook did an out of court settlement with all of them. Randy did find out a great way to protest facebook's move to 'force' timeline on us. Just hide the ad, and state "protest timeline" in the reason to hide it.



My point is, Facebook should keep things transparent and clear, just like the mighty Google(the supreme god of Internet) does. Google, inspite being an ecosystem in itself, thousand times larget than Facebook has a better transparency, and does things flawlessly. We should remember, that all the Ajax that Facebook uses exists on the planet thanks to Google Labs.



My personal view - Google should buy out Facebook. I've been with Google for the last 8 years, and have to admit. Google is the only thing on the planet that can challenge Microsoft. Apple's a down'er with again copied concepts and unfair policies.

A resource for the mysql needful

Hey everyone.

I recently had a task given by a ivy league company for its recruitment assessment. The program was to be done on c++, and needed the use of MySql C API. It took me a lot of time to understand how it worked. I tried a lot of googling, but it did not help out much. It was only by chance wen one of my friends suggested a page which eventually leads me to the API description page. Things went smooth from there.

I've decided to share te program with everyone, for education purposes only. Do not send this program to the recruiter. Read it, observe it, understand it, and use your logic. Also, should i mention, the program has been compiled and checked for any errors(no errors found), but hasn't been tried on a database. Mysql doesn't install properly on my Ubuntu 10.10(wonder whats the problem).


Write a program in C to read a single line mysql query from a text file, and execute it.


#include
#include
#include
main() {
MYSQL *conn; /*pointer to connect handler */
MYSQL_RES *res ;/*shows result of the query */
MYSQL_ROW row; /*one row of data*/
char *server = "localhost";
char *user = "root";
char *password = "1"; /* set me first */
char *database = "mysql";
conn = mysql_init(NULL);
char ch[100]; /*string to get sql command from file*/
int colno;



/* Connect to database */
if (!mysql_real_connect(conn, server,
user, password, database, 0, NULL, 0)) {
fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", mysql_error(conn));
exit(1);
}

/* to get sql command from file */
FILE *fin;
if(fin==NULL)
{
printf("no command file");
}
fin=fopen("sqlcomm.txt","r");
fgets(ch,100,fin);




/* send SQL query */
if (mysql_query(conn, ch)) {
fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", mysql_error(conn));
exit(1);
}
res = mysql_use_result(conn);//read the result of the query, one word at a time

colno=mysql_field_count(conn);


/* output table name */
printf("The Output for your query is:\n");
int c=0;

while ((row = mysql_fetch_row(res)) != NULL)
{ for(c=0;c<=colno;c++)
printf("%s \n", row[c]);}




/* close connection */
mysql_free_result(res);
mysql_close(conn);
/* close the file */
fclose(fin);
}



I've added comments too to make understanding easier. Special thanks to my old pal Shashank Mehra for his inputs, and for clearing out silly mistakes.

Permanent Resident Certificate - a present need for Delhi

On Sunday, the New Delhi CM Sheila Dixit again mentioned that the immigrants from neighbouring states were causing the arrangements made by the Delhi government inadequate. The immigrants, that come into the city in thousands everyday, cause the resources to be inadequate.

I fully agree to her. Being a fourth generation in Delhi, my family has been staying in the city since its inception(courtesy of my Grandfather, who was in excise services then). And ever since then, the city has been taking in more and more people. Infact, even i've seen people from far away states come to Delhi, and reside here.

One of the major problems in Delhi is that everyone's calls himself a Delhi'ite - even if he's just come to Delhi half an hour back. There a lot of students from multiple states who coe here just for six months, do not attend their classes, and pass their course, and call themselves a 'Delhi'ite'. Such are the people i get disgusted at. they get all the rights which are meant for us Delhi'ites.

I do not mean to discriminate people. Its just that everyone eats into our share. For better elaboration, i'd give my personal example. When i had passed highschool, we had to give enterance exams for higher edication. Now in Delhi, there were hardly 12000 seats(including 49% quota for SC/ST/OBC/Defence Personnel/Kashmir Immigrant), and the number of applicants were 76000+(YES, JUST IN DELHI, this figure doesnt include Noida,Gurgaon,Ghaziabad, Greater Noida).

And so, because of excessive competition, i wasn't able to secure an admission in Delhi. Born in Delhi, brought up in Delhi, lived in Delhi, but still no admission. Though a specific batchmate, who just had shifted from another town in Western India to Delhi, got a seat. My point is, in other states, there is a provision of domiscile. Haryana has planned ahead, and has provided a "Permanent Residence Certificate", which grants admission to people who have been residing in Haryana for the past 15years, even though they are not currently here. The state has protected the interest of its public. Other union territories like Andaman and Nicobar islands also have such provisions(Residents of the Island in Andaman & Nicobar).

Delhi should learn from Haryana. The original Delhi'ites are being bullied by people who just came to the city yesterday. Infact, i am saying this with a sad heart, most of the people who're migrating to Delhi are mostly less mannered people who lack decency like the old Delhi'ites and spread wrong word about the original Delhi'ites and their city. They are more like parasites, who keep on cursing the city which has provided them with employment/education. Once a person wo used to study in my institution, and lived on rent in my locality, was from a eastern state(some village too far away) kept calling Delhi names for being too populated, and dirty and himself used to spit continuously on the road. When i said that guys like him were making the city dirty, inhygenic by not caring about public hygiene, he started cursing Delhi'ites calling us arrogant. Which city would like to have such parasites. Mumbai has multiple Marathi forces which keeps a check such people. Its Delhi who 'tolerates' such people.

Delhi used to be as good looking as Chandigarh back in early 2000's. In the past 5-7 years, it has become into a city which is nowhere near the old city. Even the BBC archives of this city seem to be of a city in other nation. Its hard to believe that this city has changed so much, and that too in the negative sense.

So, its high time that Delhi should bring in a 'Permanent residence Certificate' preference when it comes to any admissions, government jobs or property allotment. Unless we filter the crowd in the city, traffic, cleanliness, health, pollution will remain a problem.

Hope someone in the Government of NCT of Delhi would be reading this.

A funny story, do read

Recently, i came across a very funny post. It was of a guy who goes, falls for and hits a girl in a local club. Only to realise he has screwed it up really badly. A hilarious post.



Originally, the post was open for all, but on getting too may visitors commenting on his tragedy, he decided to lock the blog to invitees only. Anyhow, i found a link to his blog. Better check out asap. The article is definitely worth a look.



Read the post at http://tinyurl.com/shortfunnylink

And if you like it, feel free to express. Comments are welcomed

HCL kids bigtime !

I recently got an interview call from HCL Technologies - one of the majors in software and IT services. Better known for one of the biggest IT employers in India, and for its US$7Billion turnover(which we see mentioned very frequently in HCL ads). Along with the interview call mail, i got the following introductory manual.

Better known in India as one of the least employee friendly IT company, and considered way behind Indian IT giants like Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys , pays less than most of its counterparts in India. Infact, for some software development positions, it pays engineers less than what it pays to the Technical support staff(for example, the staff which sorts out networking issues in AT&T's US network). Have a look at the brochure promoting their fresher recruitment program as "Step Up".

Download the Brochure from here and see it for yourself
http://www.cocubes.com/download/attachment.aspx?id=2821

"Promoting and searching best talent", "IBM becoming nervous about HCL" - such dialogues seemed hilarious. Everyone knows that HCL is the 'vendor' in IT companies.

HCL sure knows how to kid around :)

Which one to choose - Payback or Loyalty ?

I recently visited the Pantaloons outlet at Noida. Now, to my surprise, they were not accepting the Payback card that i had signed up for recently. The card, being promoted by the Future Group, which is the group owning Pantaloons, and the Pantaloons logo being clearly visible on the card, still the employees did not accept the card. Instead, they only used the Pantaloons green card that has been there for some years now.

It is actually surprising to see that a major like Future group has such mismanagement about flagship programs. What should a consumer do in such situations - go for the Pantaloons card, or the Payback loyalty card?

Samsung Kies Mainstage - a Failure

Samsung Kies has been one of the worst designed piece of software i've seen in a long time. Not only it has issues in connecting to the devices, it also gives a lot of trouble in starting up. Also, at a number of occasions, it gets hanged. It also affects the other processes that un on the OS. Here's a view of the screen during one of my PC's freeze on running Kies.


The white screen that you see is the Kies Mainstage screen. This is not something morphed. Just as i used to run the Kies application, the Kies Mainstage froze the system. Because of this, most of the applications that run on the system became unstable, and started freezing(maybe because of Thrashing).

This is not a new problem for Samsung. Samsung SDS, which is responsibe for making softwares for Samsung hardware, has been shamelessly promoting this application for the new geneation Samsung phones, phones like Ch@t 332, Ch@t335, even with the Android smartphones, such as Galaxy Ace. Everyone that has been using this application has been constantly grumbling about the unstability, hanging, slowing and inefficiency of the application and its side-effects on the system. And if you download the new version of Samsung Kies, its nothing more than a media suite for managing audio-visual media, which can be done even with a memory card reader. Utter nonsense

Hoping Samsung will be reading this ... Please stop distributing this nonsense and introduce something sensible.

Product Review - Keypass Password Safe

Accessing various public shared computers and typing my password on them had been a concern for me. And this concern was increasing day after day, as many of the computers that i used to access my accounts were under remote access, which the admins used to unlock the computer and make it available for access. Because of this, the on-screen keyboard was extremely unsafe. To add to this were the constant risks of viruses, trojans, spywares and desktop-monitoring softwares that might give out my passwords.

So i decided to go around the net and find some password vault software that would make it really convinient for me to store and fill passwords without typing on the keyboard, or the on-screen keyboard. While surfing, i downloaded KeyPass Password Safe. I don't remember from which site i downloaded it, but i would be really thankful to it. The installer was a few MB's in size, and small. For those of you who would like to see a screenshot of the running program, here's it.







The program has a brilliant UI, and a easy to understand system. Just choose a master password, right click, add an entry, enter the username and password, and the URL for the site where you'd like to fill in the password. The rest should be considered as done. Whenever you need to write the whole userid and password, just open the database, right click on the value you'd like to fill the userid password columns with, and click "Perform Auto-Type", and the password will be automatically filled in that page. Though the program does not fill in passwords for embedded or pop-in sub windows, or scripts, but words for the regular textbox based authentication columns (like Blogger's).

Anyhow, after using this software for some weeks now, i can say that i can leave all my password related worries to this software. Easy software, great UI, it has been the program that i should have had in my pen drive years back.

I'd rate this program 4.8 out of 5.

What would you say - do you think the same, or have a different opinion, try the program and feel free to share your comments.

Windows 7 taking over iOS ?

Is Windows 7 mobile taking over iPhone

For sometime now, i have been hearing rave reviews about devices running on Windows 7 mobile. Its since the launch of iPhone 4S, the number of reviews in favour of Windows Phone 7 have been increasing day after day. Just recently, i read an article describing the same.

In a column by Nick Wingfield in the HT, the writer states that the software from the digital giant has already started shaking Apple's domination. He furthur continues to write that a professor at University of Washington Axel Roesler finds Windows phone OS packed with Nokia's hardware as 'striking different' and sets one apart.

Thouth the article by Nick Wingfield was not a good piece of reading material, but it still makes one think over. Nokia's Lumia 900 which runs on Windows 7 mobile is sold in the US on AT&T network - the same network on which the iphone is sold. Just add good looking hardware to the Windows Phone 7 OS, and here's a device comparable to the iPhone. This example only shows that even AT&T finds Windows Mobile 7 packed phone poses a stiff competition to the Apple iPhone. Another thing that affects is that Apple has been more or less repeating products over the same central idea - flawless touch experience and hasn't done much changes to the UI design. Microsoft, on the other hand, after being rejected completely on Windows mobile 6.5 and Windows Vista , reworked its whole UI on both desktop and mobile platforms, and has been trying to establish Windows 7 as a big label , just like Windows XP was.

And apart from all the factors is the pricing. Windows 7 devices are way cheaper than iPhone 4S (i can buy five basic BlackBerry's, or two-three Windows 7 handsets at the price of one iPhone 7). And everyone knows that Siri maybe the first assistant in mobile devices, but it was Microsoft who first introduced speech translator for Word and the subsequent speech recognition softwares(some Lauren-Housie program as far as i remember, was bundled with office XP).

More Reliance Nonsense

After my friend's experience some days back, i decided to see if i go through the same experience that he had gone through. So i got myself a recharge of Rs50, and got Rs42 as balance, alongwith 10 night minutes of reliance to reliance.

On the same day, i got some work late at night and needed to call a friend for some cross-reference, and by chance the friend i called was on the reliance network. So, i called him up thinking that my free minutes will be used. I was able to talk only for 1min 47 seconds, because the network was so bad at my end that any conversation was practically impossible. So the other person disconnected the phone and called me up.

After that, i realised that Reliance had deducted 5 mins our of the 10 minutes given to me. And this is when the call didn't last for more than 107seconds. Pretty astonishing that Reliance bills 5minutes for calls less than 2 minutes. Thats a loot of 150percent.

Anyways, what else can be expected of Reliance. Bad network, worse billing. The network is really 'cheap', no wonder they need two-three actors to promote their network.

is Elitmus better or AMCAT

In the past six months, i have appeared in both of the consultancy exams that open the for multiple companies - AMCAT and eLitmus. The AMCAT exam comes from the Aspiring Minds Limited, and eLitmus comes from eLitmus evaluations limited. Both of these companies give candidates the opportunity to sit for companies like Ericsson and so. Both the exams have a good track record. AMCAT gives a better detailed result, whereas eLitmus gives a more transparent process. Once, i had a confusion on which one to appear in. eLitmus was expensive, but more reputed, whereas AMCAT was quite reasonable but didn't give the opportunity to apply by oneself(one can only pray that the company will invite the candidate).

So i appeared for the both. Both were very different exams. AMCAT tested your speed, efficiency , skills with easy questions that needed to be answered rapidly. eLitmus, on the other hand, needed one to be more precisely correct, and have better IQ abilities.

I got a decent face-saving score in both. Though i like elitmus personally, i'd rather suggest that someone who is on the threshold of making a decision to appear in either one of them should analyse himself/herself well. If you're good at roteing stuff, go for AMCAT. If you're bad at roteing, and use your logic go for eLitmus. I've seen that girls perform better in AMCAT,maybe because they're consistent in efforts and that shows in AMCAT. Both the companies open opportunities for good companies. I've appeared for companies through both these tests, and let me tell you, these tests give you a hell of opportunities, but only to realise that you've only cut the crap, and the competition is still enormous. In one company, i managed to reach till the personal interveiew, but couldn't make it to the HR interview round. The reason was that the company needed to recruit 3 programmers, and there were 60 candidates who had appeared for the PI round.

Hope this has been helpful who are on the verge of this dilemma. It took me three months and 1000bucks to realise this.

Tablet sales worry RIM, calls for desperate measures

RIM had announced that in India, they were offering their Blackberry playbook for a whopping 50% discount. This was done on the occasion of the festive season starting from christmas. The Blackberry Playbook 16Gb , priced originally around INR27000 is being sold at around INR16000(don't know the exact digit of the prices).

It is quite a surprising move that RIM has taken. Inspite of a great OS, the Playbook hadn't been a great success. Its competition comes from Apple's iPad, and the pleothra of various Android powered tablets which come in all shapes, size and price bands.

My Wishlist

I've been in a technology deprived state for quite sometime. My life's lately been more involved in academics rather than technology. So i decided a list of all the technology that i'd want in the new year. Here it goes

a new laptop(preferably a i7)
Blackberry Bold 2
Apple iPad/Samsung Galaxy Tab


And this would do it for me at the moment. With the hectic life, there's nothing more i'd like to purchase