Thought Registry - Harish Vajha
[Self-Realization/Software/Creation ] Got comments?
I have moved to JRoller. I'll continue to keep the stuff that I've wrote all these days here, its been 14 months that I started blogging, I can't believe it myself!
&*%$! I have so much to say and I have so little of energy left to say anything at all tonight! Some of my "quest"ions answered and many more to be answered, I plan to just hit the frigging sack and worry about the rest tomorrow.
In the mean time, here's a site I found. I just couldn't stop reading and finished reading the whole thing in one go. And, no, it isn't about winning or losing in Love. Its just the thing one goes through what is popularly called as *failing* in love . Usha will let out a sigh when she reads this. :) I'm sure that sharanya is going to love reading it!
Roopa Purushothaman & co. have published a report that says that India will become the third largest economy in the world if it grows at an average 5.5 per cent a year, and by 2050 it will be the fastest-growing economy in the world. Now, Neither do I have the time or inclination to check how very fact-based their report is, nor do i care. This report re-inforces the hunch of mine that someday one INR will be equal to one USD, if not 45 USD. :)
There are some interesting points in the report on how the per capita income of India will be lower than other economies of the world still India manages to become the third biggest economy.
Grammarian Tales:
I found a little site interesting with good pointers to using punctuation marks correctly: http://www.myenglishteacher.net/USINGCOLONS.HTML.
All the lessons categorized as Tenses, Punctuation etc. are listed : http://www.myenglishteacher.net/previous.html.
Take the quiz at the end of each section. It's fun!
From Swaminomics:
How to become an economic super power with no GDP improvement?
Pagefile.sys And Hiberfil.sys and memory problems. Dont' reduce the size of the pagefile unless you're sure what you're doing! you've been warned.
CommentsTrouble Tree:
A man hired a carpenter to help him restore an old
farmhouse. The carpenter
had a rough first day on the job. First, a flat tire
made him lose an hour
of work, then his electric saw quit. At the end of
the day, his ancient
pickup truck refused to start. While the man who
hired him drove him home,
the carpenter sat in stony silence.
On arriving, the carpenter invited the man to come
in and meet his family.
As they walked toward the front door, he paused
briefly at a small tree,
touching the tips of the branches with both hands.
Upon opening the door, he
underwent an amazing transformation. His tanned face
was wreathed in smiles
as he hugged his two small children and gave his
wife a kiss.
After introducing the man to his family, the
carpenter walked the man to the
car. They passed the tree and the man's curiosity
got the better of him. He
asked the carpenter about what he had seen him do
earlier.
"Oh, that's my 'Trouble Tree'," the carpenter
replied. "I know I can't help
having troubles on the job, but one thing's for
sure, my troubles don't
belong in the house with my wife and the children.
So I just hang them up on
the tree every night when I come home. Then in the
morning I pick them up
again."
Funny thing is," he smiled, "when I come out in the
morning to pick them up,
there aren't nearly as many as I remember hanging up
the night before."
Author Unknown
After a really hectic month, here I am, taking relaxed breathes, and blogging again. I've been typing in my thoughts, whenever I felt like expressing, whenever I got time. The last two of my blogs aren't complete. They say "To be continued..". That brings me to the first point that I want to talk about tonite: Completion.
Complete?
Does it makes sense to write up something that is not really complete, may be doesn't convey the complete idea, just a part of it, may leave the reader wondering what exactly was intended to be communicated, and publishing it? In other terms, is there something like "Incomplete blogging"?
<Dec 01 2003>
I've come to the conclusion that there isn't anything like "Incomplete blogging", for, blogging is primarily a means to express oneself. You either "express" yourself or you don't. While the fact that the end reader may not make complete sense out of what the blog contains, there is a very positive chance that the reader *may* make sense out of what is written down! As long as the feeling is right, it is just fine to jot down what the blogger needs to express! So, just go for it, stop worrying about whether you've got it "all" right or not!
</Dec 01 2003>
<Dec 01 2003>
This is the book I'm upto right now. This is a book that I had put away for quite a while now and atlast I'm into it. Seth makes interesting reading, but for "Butts" comments. :) The way I read Seth books is to just read Seth's comments and completely skip the "Butts" comments. This is the way these books are meant to be read!
A bit of one such book everyday is what keeps me going. It gets me out of "victim's mentality" back to the fact that the current situation I'm in is infact my own creation and get me to think of reasons why I would create the challenge that I'm facing now.
</Dec 01 2003>
Sabbatical - My New Books
<Dec 01 2003>
I got this cool book "Six Months Off" from a book store at Lancaster! Yet another "coincidence" that the sabbatical I'm planning to take is a serious probability!
</Dec 01 2003>
A New way of blogging? :)
<Dec 01 2003>
I've decided to start with the things on my mind and blog away to glory going ahead, instead of starting with something and then forget the rest of the things that I wanted to talk about. Jio! Way to go! A brand new to blog away to glory! :)
</Dec 01 2003>
Thanks to you, Anand Mamuder(pronounced as Anaand mamoooder :) ), for making me my relaxed self again! My holiday was so wonderful because of you! I really enjoyed the drives, food at Taj Mahal, shopping at the Mall, trip to the Temple at Pittsburgh, driving your stick-shift Acura, the Tea you made!! Many thanks for a terrific thanksgiving!
CommentsPeace and Cheers!
Check this out: The mEatrix :) (Not just for fun, there's a message too!)
Living Lanka...Working Westboro
That sort of sums up the way I'm living these days. :) After moving to westboro, where my company is head quartered, life has become so fast paced, that there's just no time to "live". I'm really getting a feel for what is meant by a fast-paced life. Not that life wasn't fast based back home, but the implicit terms & conditions accepted at the work place are totally different. Until I mould myself to the new terms out here, its going to be a little (lot?) tough.
I had this problem with the "illegal" programs that had infected my windoze, thanks to one single "ok" button i clicked semi-consiously during my late night work hours , my machine got infested with a myriad exectuables, some popping up windows and some probably shipping away information about my machine! I first thought of installing a personal firewall, but then I din't have an authoritative answer on this. Here's a list of processes that can be useful for figuring out which process is the culprit. If you don't find it in the list, don't go ahead and kill it!! This is no comprehensive list and you should be careful about killing processes. Even if you find it on this list, you should go ahead and search for the location of the executable and then make a decision on whether to kill the process or delete the executable. I'm still thinking whether to try out Ad-aware or not. If you know of this or any other good and free :) anti-spyware programs, please let me know.
At work, there are lot of interesting things happening. I'm pretty excited about getting to know OLAP! We also got into this small piece of work related to SOAP and I'm all charged up. I couldn't get time to do any of the experiments and pieces of hands-on work on the week days and I can't wait to do it today and tomorrow. :)
At home, I've re-started ..... (To be continued..)
Comments
"The Great Indian Dream" wasn't all that good a reading and comprehending. The first reason for this, I think, is the extremely emotional tone of the book. While it is alright to get people thinking by stimulating their hearts, I don't think Economic statistics bundled with an emotional punch is going to make the reader comprehend the problems and the related solutions. Of course, this is my "expert" reader opinion! :)
Someone told me that Bengalis are by the virtue of their land are an emotional lot. May be that's why I get to match my wavelength so well with some of my Bong colleagues.
Secondly, while the book initially starts of with supposedly "startling" statistics on how poor India is and how bad the situation of the down trodden is, I found it bringing in unnecessary emotional episodes to give the "emotional" punch (for all good reasons). I had to really keep myself focused and bear the unnecessary pain to continue reading the book. While my primary motive was to understand the Indian economy and ways to better it, I ended up feeling bad about my fellow Indians who are living below the poverty line and tossing the book away by the time I reached the "2003 budget" chapter. This chapter is supposed to contain directives to devise a better budget to help ourselves and I just didn't have any desire or energy left to continue.
Like Philip Greenspun, I guess Prof. Arindham is also probably a bit too oriented towards the academic world. I could see the unending practicality(resigned attitude?) of Gurcharan contrasted with the I-can-move-the-mountain attitude of Arindham. While I get really fascinated by the attitude of Arindham, I don't believe that Macro Economic realities can be changed the way professor wants to see it go.
What I understood by these two books is the great need to support the downtrodden populace of India with educational opportunities and support them with good food and health-care facilities. I'm at this point convinced that these are the factors that can take us a real long way in creating a society with equality of opportunity.
The best part is that Vinay has lent me "Price of Onions", a Layman's guide to price rise, liberalization and everything... by Ashok V. Desai, adviser to Manmohan Singh in the finance ministry of the Narasimha Rao government. I can't wait to read this book!
Thanks you Kiran for the feedback on the downloading issues with my page. The reason I think was my "mini-meditating" image which was around a meg in size. I've cut it down and replaced with a real mini one. :)
CommentsQuite a few things have happened after my last blog. I have successfully delivered a presentation on BPM and the way it relates to the work our team here has been doing. That wasn't really as good as I wanted it to be. Due to reasons too numerous to mention here, I had to skip complete sections and in retrospect I had material enough for three one-hour presentations stuffed into one.
I'm currently at Sri Lanka under going training on Pega Rules Process Commander (PRPC). This is the product for which I built a compiler a while ago. The training is on building applications atop PRPC.
Philip Greenspun has wrote in his blog stating that Java is the SUV of programming tools. I've always revered Phil and about year back, almost read up the whole of his site. When I had to do some hard core DB design, I refreshed my gray matter with SQL for Web Nerds.
For starters, he has a not-so-impressive view of SUVs (unlike me :) ). I am surprised that he has come to the decision that :"A project done in Java will cost 5 times as much, take twice as long, and be harder to maintain than a project done in a scripting language such as PHP or Perl". I still am not able to recover from my surprise that he has come to this conclusion based on his experience with the students that he's teaching "Software Engineering for Internet Applications". Now, if you've been into Java, you'd know for sure that its a whole lot of libraries and there are multiple ways of doing the same thing. And that its continously evolving, thanks to JCP. I don't intend to bash Philip, because I still look up to him as a potential role model. Unfortunately, He's decided to settle down with a simplistic view of Enterprise development, which is probably due to the effect of being out of touch with the industry for a long time after he quit ArsDigita.
And I finished reading "India Unbound" yesterday. Here are some reviews on the book. It has been quite an enlightening book. Its a classic riches-to-rags and rags-to-riches book, the only difference being its about a country. My next book is The Great Indian Dream. From where I see, this looks like almost a sequel the previous one, although by a totally different author. You might want to check 'em out too!
Its a pain in the neck to link up comments, but I haven't yet notified any of the readers, so I want to keep it until I find a better solution.
Attempted enabling comments (elementary features only) on my site by doing some cross-site linking. Wanna give it a shot? Sastry, are you listening? :)
Reading "India Unbound" by Gurcharan Das and wrote a small intro before I go in deep and get lost in the detail. :)
Other than that I've been reading Lighten up your Body - Lighten up your life, an interesting book on using creative drawing and journalism to deal with your body better.
A couple of days ago I found that a search on Google for Thought registry or Harish Vajha throws up a link to my site! It took ten months (!!) for google bots to move in and index my site (from last year december when I started this) !!
Sastry, one of my college buddies was asking me a day before about enabling "comments by visitors" on my site. I've been seriously at it for quite some time now. Either my attempt to cross-link a blogging site with this feature, and this site is going to do the magic, or else I'll move in completely onto another site. My prime problems being keeping the content portable and offline updates.
My Telugu editor isn't yet ready for prime time. I have added font change feature which makes it so much more lovable. I guess I need to use it more and fall in deeper love with it, to go full blast on the new features. I've also thought of making it work with any transliteration engine so that this can be any transliterated-language editor! :)
BPM is in, Workflow is out. :)
Well, I've been into everything-that-is-BPM for the past few days, to come up with a reasonable presentation on BPM for the folks of my project, to get people more excited about the stuff they are upto. I'll post it out to enable all of you to quickly get upto speed with BPM, stay tuned! :)
Comments.. (Newly introduced feature..under testing) :)
ha!ha!ha!!!
Everyone who has read at least a little bit about Rickard /Marc Fleury / The JBoss Story, must check out these two (IMAGINARY) interviews:
Make sure you read the comments on this interview, before you move on to Rickard's! :)
I wrote myself an insta-converter from english to telugu in Swing. This sure saves lot of my time, instead of switching between windows, and directly doing corrections on the fly.
I understand that this is not the best way to write in Telugu. I also understand that Tikkana is not a standard font, but I just can't seem to get enough of writing this stuff. Now I plan to improvise my editor to have the ability to :
1) Resize the panes (what i have right now is too primitive).
2) Option to save the converted text as a JPG file directly.
3) Blissfully Continue my Aanadam postings. :)
A while ago, hani made a post on The happy idiot syndrome. The bit he is missing is that this syndrome is a universal syndrome. Not just Java programs, not even just programmers, this exists wherever there is a need to apply knowledge to solve problems, and as long as humans (with their limited knowledge and skill) continue doing it. :)
Thanks to Rangavallika (
)
Editor and Tikkana(
) fonts!
The interesting thing about this editor is that it is written in Javascript. :)
I tried to get a regular downloadable Telugu font that can be installed on demand, but have not been successful yet. I definitely plan to continue on those lines and get to have a mini blog of mine in Telugu.
Yesterday evening, I ended up reading an article on Messaging Architectures from theserverside. It was a neat article which comes from a seasoned soul. One of the major issues with Messaging, as with all other technologies, is how to get rid of anti-patterns which creep in due to requirements. I guess that's one big challenge for an architect in any project. How to force-out anti-patterns which force-in their way with use-cases coming from the end-user.
After I downloaded J2EE1.4 docs yesterday, I was looking at the new things in there. Boy! There are quite a lot of them. Deployment API comes in seven packages. :) All in all there are 54 packages. A world of a difference, from the days that I read my first EJB1.1 specification.
Today morning I pulled down the deployment API spec and started browsing. I get the same feeling that I got when I first started of with EJBs before delving deep into writing an Application Server. An ocean of unknown knowledge out there and I can sense the tension in my gut. The difference being the knowledge of someone who has gone down the path before.
I see where these specs are headed towards: Standardizing the various touch-points/interfaces between various potential vendors: tool/platform/others. In the beginning, if you were an AppServer vendor, you would have to provide tools for deployment, management etc. of all the applications that were to run on your server. Although, the applications themselves were to be portable, a deployer had to live with a world of difference as far as the tools that he is using were concerned. Things are changing for the better. Standardization is coming into play at other such key-points at the same time leaving room(?) for vendors to have their unique features.
Mini-notes on writing:
Four basic purposes of writing:
Narrative: Writing to tell a story.
Expository: Writing to inform or explain.
Descriptive: Writing to describe a person, place, or thing.
Persuasive: Writing that attempts to persuade or convince.
Tone of writing: Tone is the expression of your attitude. For example, happiness, anger, or seriousness.
I've declared today and the coming weeks to be Language weeks. I plan to read and write about English writing and Telugu Fonts. God bless!
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Such a relief! What happiness! All this from a little piece of script that I wrote. Nothing intellectual really, its just the kind of happiness that comes from doing what you like I guess! :) Some of you who know me know how bored I can get programming with the same language/methodology/paradigm for lengthier durations. I have been praying for a different language (hoping it would be C++/C or and God bless me: good old Lisp or even Perl. Yes you heard that right: Perl! |
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No, I don't want to write any CGI scripts with Perl, but as long as I'm writing something challenging, I'll be glad that I'm doing it.
Now, I know that doesn't sound like any genius, but I don't seem to get enough these days when I program in Java. I am kinda done with my crush on Java.
In the beginning of 1997...
My OOP instructor speaks about how Java is different in our OOP C++ classes. I wonder what Java looks like and feels like. All I know is that Java was similar to C++ in some ways. Over a year will pass before I start writing Java.
After a six month tryst with Visual C++, Kruglinski as my guide, I write my first ISAPI based windows program. There is really no need to work all that hard to learn how to use VC++ and all the nitty-gritty of NET API, nor ISAPI. It is a painful (but really challenging) week learning to debug ISAPI with once in a while help from the guys around. I feel proud presenting it to the biggies at TCS, showing off what all my web-based program can do! NTLM/Challenge-Response/ Domains/PDCs-BDCs/IIS/Interdev Boy! that is definitely lot of fun and that's the only reason, I think I worked hard than I need to, to do it.
Then comes the big depression. More than a year has passed since I wrote a single line of code that made me feel good. And I am wondering where on earth I am headed to. No motivation, not a single senior whom I can look up to who was thinking of things that I feel are the right things. Writing code in Visual Basic is the most majuscule Techie activity around. I need direction, motivation real bad. Then comes the light. I decide to take a course in Java. An old flame is re-ignited.
Fast forward to 2002. I have become pretty efficient in using Java. I have programmed or learned or at least read about most of the Java Technologies: Enterprise, Standard, Micro editions. I have my hands dirty with my Jini research. I know what JXTA is attempting to do. I definitely know what is happening in the Enterprise Java world. How can I miss out anything If I am mentally locked into the JCP activities? Real-time Java seems to be the thing that I'd like to get into. May be I should also try my hands at device programming with Java.
On a pretty uneventful day, I start my research to unearth the best J2EE scheduler. I wade through a couple of open source implementations, a couple of commercial ones. Being the do-it-yourself soul that I am, I also include what it takes for a home-grown solution. In a short while, I am ready to publish the results to my client. The next day, I receive a response from the client: "We don't need to write a new program. We already have a C program that does the job". For the first time, I have a rather discerning realization of the "Hammer Pattern". (When you have a hammer in your hand, every thing looks like a nail.)
Now, I've always been enamored by new (and old) languages and Operating Systems. I tried my hands at Perl when I had a chance to debug a script before even I touched Java. I tried to use LISP to customize my XEMacs editor that I used to program an Application Server, although with little success. But this time its a rather hyaline realization.
Quite some time has passed. These days I wonder how dependent I am on just one programming language to do any of the tasks. Whenever I get an idea, I find myself trying to write a Java program. I keep getting upset at myself for being unable to think in any other programming language. I get reminded of my School Principal's saying: "If you want to speak fluently in English, THINK IN English." What's the use, I muse. I don't seem to be getting anywhere in trying anything different. I am stuck.
I have a compiler to build. Hey! What if it is not a runtime that I'm building. So what if I have to use Java, I'm surely going to learn something drastically different.
Three months from the day I started building the compiler, Regexp is my best pet now. Time to dust my Camel book. I still find it hard to get used to the Perl syntax and thinking. I have no illusory plans to become an expert over night. Heck! I have too many things to learn parallely.
Fast forward to today. I am all smiles. This is no great task that I've accomplished. But I know I did it with Perl.
The idea isn't new. The one who did it is new. The way he did it is brand new. Writing comments in the source file and using a Perl program to strip off the comments and putting it into a pre-ordained excel format! I know I'm swimming the right course. :) Here's the source if you want!
Question: What is the point in having an ambition, pursuing a goal, when 'I' am already 'That'? Why do I have to 'yearn', 'burn' with an aspiration? What is 'that' I want to 'be' that I am already 'not'!?
They say:
'Everything is connected',
'There is no 'other'',
''I' is an integral part of the 'whole', The 'whole' expresses itself in a myriad ways of which 'I' am an integral part of'.
This is no esoteric question. This is a question that keep popping in my head every now and then. I don't have an answer right away, but I definitely have some "food for thought" on these lines.
I am reading this book, Guru by Your Bedside by S.D.Pandey. It is about two British 'seers' , Gopal Da and Ashish Da settled down in Mirtola, part of Himalayan India. Here's an interspersed version of the book's text and my expressions:
"You will never attain."
"Henceforward, that is, after setting foot on this inner path, you will never be the same again; now you are like someone who has been poisoned for life."
"Pondered over together, both these teachings....--are found to pertain to the basic question of identity. Sooner or later, the question 'Who am I?' has to faced and an answer to it sought."
"You will never attain, it was further clarified in various ways, because you are not you."
I've observed myself time and again and I agree with Ashish Da when he says there are multiple facets to myself. I've observed myself to be a loving person, a scared kid, righteous angry man, holier-than-thou saint in different scenarios.
"Which of these 'I's is the real 'me'?"
What Ashish Da says in essence is that none of these is the real me.
"Another concomitant indicator of the falsity of these 'I's is their all too obvious transience."
I think I can offer a some explanation to give a clearer perspective: Let me quote Morpheus's simple yet profound question to Neo: "What is real? Define Real?"
In other words: What is true? What is untrue? In Sanskrit words : What is 'satya'? Anything that is permanent ('nitya') is real ('satya'). Anything that isn't permanent is untrue ('asatya'). As the physical self and possibly all the other personalities that follow it are not going to survive death, they aren't real. In that sense, none of these I's is true. None of these I's is real ('satya').
Come to think of it the quote: "Satyameva jayathe", whose literal translation is "Only truth shall prevail!" probably doesn't refer to honesty but to the Atman, or the eternal self of a person.
Yearning... Burning...
The pain has started again.. This uneasiness.. Something has to be done.. Something needs to be finished.. Something out there is waiting to be completed..
I don't seem to get hold of what is it that I want to end up doing with life. But, from the days I've started working, I've carried this feeling inside of me that there is something about technology that I really want to do. That's one thing that explains my lackluster interest in business aspects of the software that I build. Here's what I apparently want to do (or at least that's what my feelings seem to say): I want to build some earth-shattering software. Here's my internal dialogue over the same today morning :
Wise-Man) Enough of this high-level thing. Let us get down to something more concrete. What is meant by earth shattering software?
Kiddo) Well! Ground breaking kinda..
Wise-Man) That sounds like another word for earth-shattering to me.
Kiddo) mmm... Let me put it differently.. I want to build software that is going to be a whole lot different than the ones that are built. I don't want to write just another tool.. another plugin(s) to eclipse and show productivity gains...or some shit like that. I don't want to come up with something that says I marry this technology to that technology and add web services to it and here's what I want to do. Heck! I feel like I have to get out of Java to end up doing anything different. Everything has become so predictable in here.
Wise-Man) Sounds like we're heading somewhere. Go on..
Kiddo) I think I gotta do something radically different. I want to change the way people program.. may be a different programming paradigm.. I want to change the way people solve business problems.. may be a packaged solution to a very specific set of business problems. I want to have rrrrrrrrreal innovative edge in the product that I'm going to build. I don't want people to say, "oh! so you did that. " I want my product to be mind bending of sorts. Someone should really take time to figure out what the hell my product is about. And the hell, this shouldn't be unnecessary technical complexity. I hate it as well.
Wise-Man) From what you've told me, you should probably start working towards figuring out what are the problems faced by a business community or a domain or probably a technology.
Kiddo) I guess so. I gotta really get to know what are the kinds of problems that are bugging people in software development. I don't really care what business area at this point. Heck! May be I have to read some history of how programming has changed over the years. Don't tell me about Assemblers, compilers and that kinda crap. I know all that and more. What I really want to know is what are the kinds of things that made people's life easier.
Wise-Man) I'd like to add one more point. You should also probably check up your own futuristic world-view.
Kiddo) What the hell is that?
Wise-Man) Your own vision of how things are going to look like. Once you start looking out for problems, a bit of history, this will automatically follow. I know you are highly opinionated. That surely is going to help. :)
Kiddo) Damn! I wish I knew what exactly I'm supposed to do... like that guy says in Reloaded.
Wise-Man) Relax. It will all happen in due time. Now, go home, make that presentation for your upcoming organization initiative, think a bit about BPM, may be it holds the solution to some of your problems. Love you.
I've been reading books in tons and kilos these days. I seem to be becoming increasingly ravenous for books. I've completed Thick Face Black Heart by CHIN NING CHU. In short, its an excellent book on using self-knowledge at work for success. Hopefully, I'll get to write a review some time in the future. I've finished a a series of three books by Brian Weiss on Hypnotic Regression. I got myself another (apparently) excellent book on techniques in Hypnosis. I've made myself a couple o' tapes and have been experimenting. The initial sessions have been very relaxing. I've experienced for the first time how it feels to be in a state of trance. Boy! It did clear up my mind and gave lot of clarity to a few things I'd in my mind at that time. Nothing solid yet. I plan to make another tape to try out something newer today. Let us see it how it goes and I'll post the results.
Yesterday I bought this book "The Corporate Shaman". Well, you may say that this falls into the category of books I keep looking for. Books that show how to integrate self-realization with work and real life. It was good reading, if not great. SHAMAN (pronounced SHAH-mahn) is a word of the Tungis people of Siberia which means "one who sees in the dark." Shamans are healers, and there is archaeological evidence of their work as far back as forty thousand years ago. For more information on Shamans and Shamanism, you might want to check out The Way of the Shaman - Harne Michael J.
I'm convinced that the bringing back of the "inner child" in a shamanic journey is equivalent to re-living and getting over past-life traumas in hypnotic regressions. This book has given me a new perspective about the "organizational" organism which has a life of its own. Another important lesson: "The Teacher (also) has to wait for the student so that the student's will to learn and the teaching coincide". I guess most of you have heard the saying: "When the student is ready, the master will appear". The master has his own waiting and prepping to do not to screw up. ;)
I've also started reading "Straight from the gut" by Jack. I've been postponing the reading of this for a while now and at last I've started and completed the first of five sections. Although, I've not read the rest of the book, I guess this is the one the one's who are not yet CEOs have to focus on. :) It is named "EARLY YEARS". The gist is : "You can only know so much at any given point in time. The way you get to know things you don't know about is the obvious way: Ask your juniors who know. Any job sufficiently positioned at the top, involves reviews of what is happening and that involves discussions, discussions and more discussions and a lot of common sense. It is better to have a mentor at any given position. Ensure an excellent team in place for the job your doing. Listen to your team and know your team well. Don't mess around with your bosses in an obvious way. If you want to take pangas(**) with your bosses, you better be sure it is only for playful reasons. :)"
**panga(s) - Oppose someone in a provocative manner
Momentary Disconnects in the Neural Net:
I guess it happens with everyone who is technical but also has other "cross-cutting" concerns of business, life and things like that. I was going thru the J1 day two details at Server side and these are some of the sample disconnects:
1) ....and Tim O'Reilly messed up and said "Jython is a good combination of Pearl and Java." He meant to say Python and Java.
2) Instead of saying "AOP compliments OOP", Bill (Burke) made a
great slip of the tongue and said "AOP complicated OOP". That got a
good laugh.
This one is a disconnect in the physical manifestation of a part of the neural
net (in simple terms, the software wrote by a brain) :)
Project Rave looks just like Visual Studio.NET but everything is real Java. Sun showed building a Web application using JavaServer Faces. Rave features a simple graphical layout tool and provides standard JDBC rowset support. Rave style sheets control default colors, type, sizes, and styles. The query editor provides mapping to define SQL schemas. Datasources use standard JAX-RPC calls to make Web Service calls. To make it a perfect demonstration, the example code crashed during the demo. Not to be outdone by a crash, the engineer on stage rebuilt the application from scratch in about 90 seconds. The audience loved it!
EJB3.0, they say, focuses on ease-of-use. The deployment descriptor is going to get wiped out. It will be replaced with @remote @session tags in the source code. The point: XDoclet has been used to do the same thing for ages now! And Linda (author - EJB Spec) thinks that AOP *may* replace EJB!'An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves in white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We are the middle children of history. No purpose, no place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war; our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'll all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.'
Chuck Palahniuk, The Fight Club
This is quote from the book: "SPIRIT IN THE CITY" - Ross Heaven.
I have more to say about this, but its 11:00 PM and my eyes are burning... really burning. Gotta hit the sack.
I have a code release scheduled to the client for today.. All I'm doing for today is just make the post that were pending since last Saturday.
The guy I was talking about last Saturday is Guy Finley! I met him (in print) at a weird looking store at Begumpet, downtown Hyderabad. At 9:30 PM, going home from my workplace, I don't know what made me stop my bike and look for a book. But, I did stop by and bought this book by Guy Finley ,"Banish Fears and Negativity - The secret of letting go". It is about getting rid of all the unnecessary pressures off our lives and lot much more than that.
From the secret of letting go:
"Here are five life-liberating insights that will help you to let something new happen in your life. You will see as with all real insights, higher understanding itself contains not only the instructions you must follow but the strength you will need to carry them out. Go over these following ideas with the intent of receiving their hidden message.
1. Self-doubt is born out of being identified with the idea that how you feel about yourself depends upon how others feel about you. Give up self-doubt. It only makes you more dependent on others who can't do anything about their own self-doubt. Independence is confidence.
2. Self-righteousness is born out of being identified with the idea that just because you can point out something that is wrong places you above that wrongness. Give up the self-righteousness. it only feels like something right. it is coming from something that is wrong. Right isn't something you feel. It is something you are.
3. Self-pity and past regrets are born out of being identified with the idea that you could have done differently than you did. if you could have, you would have. Give up the regret. It only ties you to the old life-level that didn't know better and keeps you from the one that does.
4. Anger is born out of being identified with the fear you feel when others won't conform to your point of view. Give up you anger towards others and yourself by seeing that the force of fear is not strength. Remember that for any and every action of force there is an equal and opposite one. This explains why the fighting never ends. Let it end.
5. Self-torment is born out of being identified with the idea that the more you suffer the m ore real, the more important, you must be. Give up all self-torment. It drives you - but it doesn't take you anywhere. Who you really are never suffers over who it isn't.
"100% Clone - The real me is at office."
That's the print on the T-Shirt my wife gifted me. Well, that sort of describes the situation at work too.
During the past one month or so, week days have been mostly about: Keeping up with the flood of e-mail knowledge from the client (of the software that we're writing), ensuring the knowledge reaches all the ones who need it, discussions for the same, more discussions for clarifications, conference calls with onsite lead: explaining and obtaining clarifications from the client, informing all the interested parties on our progress.
Weekends have been an attempt to expand my knowledge on various things. In the stack of books that I planned to finish, I've finished Wings of Fire ... discarded Sigmund Freud book on Interpretation of Dreams. Also read another book by Peter Drucker on Managing for the Future! Lot of interesting and exciting information about various aspects of knowledge. Some of it made me think, some of it made me laugh, some of it made me feel inspired...
The effect of all of this together : I felt drained. Day were passing by and I felt like going through the same rut, every day. I needed someone to tell me what to do now. This time around the problem (of being unhappy and discontented) got slightly complicated because I have been doing some really good stuff at work. Both the technology and the human problems presented to me at work are completely new. I didn't have lot of reasons to feel bad, I thought. I was reading good books and was getting very appropriate information that would really make me the best in my chosen path. I really felt like writing reviews for the books that I completed reading. Every time I started.. I would start with a mind full of ideas and then within a few lines of text, all that was left were questions and dissatisfaction of creating something incongruous.
Then the one I was waiting for came along. I met him at an unusual place and the meeting happened in an unusual way at an unusual place. The moment my interaction with him began, I started relaxing. And the interaction is continuing.. and I feel that I am finding a way out to really chill out at the same time not sacrificing performance at work or at home.
Sheesh! Realized that it has been QUITE some time that I made a post. What have I been doing all this time? Well, I've been:
(i) Reading: Secrets of Closing the Sale - Zig Ziglar, Pattern Oriented Software Architecture - Gang of Five (stopped at the Blackboard pattern and yet to resume from there :p ), The Goal, Many Master Many Lives, Compiler Design in C, Compilers and Compiler Generators, Wings of Fire - Abdul Kalam.
(ii) Buying and Collecting: This is the stack I intend to complete after I'm done with the above: Protecting Your #1 Asset - Rich Dad Series, .NET Framework Programming, Market Positioning - The fight(?) for your mind, Dream Analysis - Sigmund Freud (Have been waiting to read this for quite some time) etal.
What are all these books for? I wanna be an all-rounder. ;)
(iii) Sincerely attempting to revive the Hypnotist in me: Attempted a few sessions with easy success. The technique is pretty straightforward. All I want to is increase the frequency and regularity and most important of all, I want to have someone regress me periodically. I have a feeling that this is going to simplify answers to some of the major questions on life. Of course my knowledge of karmic patterns will improve dramatically. My primary interest is to realize karmic patterns in my lives. May be I should have done this quite sometime back...
(iv) Executing my fave Parser/Compiler project. Boy! My confidence is going to new levels! I'm pretty comfortable with parser generators now. In about a month or so, I'll be much more confident about all the nitty-gritty of ANTLR, recursive grammar definitions, syntactic & semantic predicates and what not!
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Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
Hypnosis, the word signifies some kind of limited-period mental-slavery for some, it means black art to some others, and for others like me it is a means to tap into the enormity of the human psyche.
Hypnotic Regression is the process of inducing a trance to a subject and make the subject recall his/her past by continuous suggestions. I learnt one such hypnotic technique to regress a given subject into the past, almost a decade back. With great initial enthusiasm, I went ahead hypnotizing anyone and everyone who said was interested. After I'd regressed about fifty people, I called off the whole thing. I don't exactly remember why I stopped it, although it was really exciting getting to a number of different possibilities. I guess it had something to do with copy-catting. I've never liked repeating something someone else has already done. I like breaking new ground, walk the path less traveled and, fly in the ionosphere.
My recent reading of the book "Many Lives, Many Masters " has triggered recalls of some really striking incidents:
(i) I regressed this guy who was a friend of one of my close friends. For a while, it seemed smooth, he was recollecting quite a few things from his past lives. After about a couple of hours, we hit rough tide. He was in some kind of accident nearby a ship. Some big fire was happening and he was almost screaming. I was shocked too, not having lot of experience in this. I tried suggesting him to calm down, but he didn't stop. After a while, I started getting perturbed. All I wanted to was to get him out of the trance. I suggested the same and it wasn't easy as he was really in a deep trance. It seemed like he was stuck with that particular incident. After that particular session, I was hesitant to meet him and he didn't seem to attempt an encounter either.
When I reflect now, I realize the best thing for both of us (especially him) would have been to set up a discussion and possibly further sessions to get a clearer understanding of his past trauma and the repercussions in his present life time. I have a feeling that he's probably going through the problems caused by that trauma in this lifetime. I just wish that he gains the knowledge through some means and over comes it.
(ii) The second one, which is actually one of the first cases I'd undertaken is the close friend's case, whom I was referring to a while ago. This friend had asthma.
One of his previous lives was as a Muslim girl. He saw himself as a beautiful girl with black robes. He described his lifetime and lifestyle in good detail.
Another of his lifetimes, was as a Bengali Brahmin. Again, he narrated quite a few details on this lifetime.
One other interesting aspect to this case was the way the effect of asthma was reduced during in-trance states. I used to give him a suggestion stating that I'm removing a weight off his chest and he'd get immediate relief! Another thing this friend of mine loved was his childhood in this lifetime. He'd ask me once in a while to regress him into his childhood and he'd stay there till his heart's content.
(iii) The third one I recall is the case of one of my cousin. We were in the middle of session, this cousin of mine in a deep trance. Just then, another of my relatives dropped in from another town. One of them came silently up stairs, in to the room where this session was happening, without even the slightest disturbance . Out of sheer curiosity, I tried a question on my cousin, who was lying in a couch, eyes closed, in a deeply relaxed state. To our astonishment, he answered that there was another person in the room along with the color of the dress this person was wearing!
I'd heard of xenoglossy, the ability to recollect completely unknown languages through Hypnotic regression that happened in our meditation circles. During the small set of cases that I'd handled, I was yet to experience this. With my old passion re-ignited thanks to the wonderful book, may be I'm just a couple of sessions away from another such mind-boggling incident!
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