random musings...

Last 2-3 weeks, it was graduation season in all across US universities and rest of the world also. Mainly in US, all media writing lot of articles and talk shows covering this topic. Why they are giving more importance? This generation going to be the vital part of next workforce, because they are going to fill up vaccum created by baby boomers (People who born between 1946-1964) starting from 2010 to 2015. This new generation is called Generation Y , they born between 1979 to 2002. They enjoyed most of digital advancement from birth. Here are some interesting facts about the Millennials . 97% own a computer 94% own a cell phone 76% use Instant Messaging. 15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week 34% use websites as their primary source of news 28% author a blog and 44% read blogs 49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing 75% of college students have a Facebook account 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod . Source : Wikiped...

What a fascinating contest and finally Sameer Mishra is the champion. This national spelling bee contest getting more and more attention over years. Now it is prime time live contest at US, 7.00Pm to 9.00 PM ABC Live, I think this is great rather than watching sit-coms. This year contest was more competitive than last year, and I feel this year the participants faced lot of foreign provenance words like Nietzschean, boulangère, satyagraha, those are very tough to spell for this 12-13 years kids. But any ways they all did it great. Most unlucky one I feel is Jahnavi Iyer , she got all toughest one but she managed to spell correctly all the way but she got a "impossible" word to spell "parfleche" at round 9.

After long time, Yahoo today announced that they are going to build new application to run web pages. Here is more detail http://browserplus.yahoo.com/faq/ . This is too late because already Google announced similar application Gear Project almost an year ago and now the application freely available for download. Any way both of these new extended web browsers fuel RIA based development. Here is link to Google's Andriod screen shots, really cool http://news.cnet.com/Screenshots-Googles-Android-comes-to-life/2300-1046_3-6240422.html?tag=nefd.lede

The definition of Decorator pattern (from Gang of 4) "Attach additional responsibilities to an object dynamically. Decorator provide a flexible alternative to sub classing for extending functionalities." The classic example of decorator pattern is Java I/O package. We used to create a powerful reader by chaining file reader and buffered reader. So file reader got decorated by buffer reader at run time with out extending it. BufferedReader buff = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("something.txt")); Again back to our traditional Car example. Assume, Car came out of factory and it is ready for drive but not quite ready for fully operational. Because now Car directly going to a dealer and he/she needs to add their own accessories and some more accessories depends on customer choice. If we think about an object model here, we can clearly understand the decorator. So Car manufacture has to create an interface ( assume an abstract class ) to satisfy both dealer specific ac...

School closed and official travel session kicked off from this weekend. Here 4 year old and wife started going crazy about going out because Chicago has long winter months and we can spend only these summer months for outing. But now we have 6 month old baby also, so we have decided to go near by places. Today we went to Indiana Duns National Park's west beach, all I can say is, this place is simply superb. I don't know how come the beautiful, white sand mountain formed in this lake shore. But we couldn't spent much time, because of little cold wind. West beach is a small,simple version of Clearwater beach,Florida. Useful Info Distance from Naperville - 70 Miles (~ 1.30 hours to reach there ) Keep map or navigation system handy, there are several construction going on in and around I-80 and some exits are closed. No shops are available, so take sufficient amount of water bottles, food and other necessary items. $6.00 for entrance fees. There are lot of recreational activiti...

There are several ways to save gas during this peak travel time. But here are some funny ideas, use it at your own risk. 1. Re-program your navigation system to show directions only by right turns to reach your destination. Left turn signal taking too much time nowadays and we are wasting lot of fuel. If you are living out side US, program other way around. UPS really considering this option. 2. Just in case the above step is not doable, while waiting on left signal, if there is no traffic and you are in small drive way, get out of your car and push pedestrian walking button on the main road crossing, some times the main signal turns red immediately and you might get a chance to go fast. This is something, I'm not joking, day before yesterday, the driver who waited beside to me for left turn, really did it, but it didn't work out :).  3. If you are planing on long drive by car, clean your car, if possible do a 2-3 times of vacuum because weight increase would take lot of fuel....

Wow...I realized that this is 100th post, I never ever imagine that I would cross this much in writing. Other than 4 years college exams (that is mainly diagrams and calculations, because I'm a mechanical engineering graduate) and workplace emails mainly one line to 15 lines, I never written in English for this extensive and longevity. I did most of my studies from high school and secondary school in Tamil (my mother language) and English was one of the subject for us. My first inspiration is Mr Sukumar Rajagopal, who is current Chief Knowledge Officer(CKO) and VP of Cognizant, I met him on early 2005 at our client's place, and he introduced the blog and explained it, showed his blog . That day onwards, I read his posts as well as his friend's posts, that really changed me to write more. I recommend his blog unequivocally. Thanks to Mr Sibu B Kutty, who is co-authored some posts in Sukumar's blog. He is the only one noticed first that I started writing blog and encourag...

Again US President asked for oil production increase to Saudi Arabia and again they refused to increase substantial amount, but agreed to increase oil production by 300,000 barrel per day by June, which is, insufficient to cool off skyrocketing oil price. Here is detailed news . There are conflicting reports regarding this increase, some media(mainly US) reported that this increase mainly because of Bush's request, some media reported that they made the decision well before Bush's visit. Again today OPEC member Qatar said there is no need of OPEC emergency meeting because oil price is balanced. Why OPEC don't want to increase oil production? Oil is under earth like water, why they don't want to cash in all free resource now? Now price is peak and if they pump all available resource now, they can make lot of cash. If OPEC agreed to increase production by lets say 3,000,000 barrels per day, I don't think price would go down $50 per barrel, because of high demand. This...

Ok. Now Ford, Honda, Toyota coming back to us and saying that you know what, we are no longer a single country car makers, we have multiple car assembly plant, all across globe, we want you to design something to fit into our global assembly model. Oops...what to do? how to improve our design? Here comes real factory model. While we talk with them further, we understood that they are going to use same assemble, sentToPaint and delivery for different countries. One thing definitely going to change is car creation because now we have a simple car factory but the requirement says we need different cars based on different countries. To achieve the above problem statement, first thing we do is convert CarBuilder class to an abstract class, we no longer use simple parametrize create car factory, we need something robust, multiple factories depends on countries. Lets think about country based factories like India, US, Japan and so on. So definitely we need a IndiaCarFactory, USCarFactory, Jap...

Factory and abstract factory pattern are little confusing but mostly used pattern in object oriented design. Factory Pattern The definition of factory pattern in simple "encapsulate object creation" and from Gang of 4 "Define an interface for creating an object but let subclass to decide which class to instantiate". Here is one example, we have a concrete CarBuilder class implementation and a method buildCar as follows, this class has other important methods to build a car also. public class CarBuilder { public void buildCar(String name) { Car car = null; if(name.equals("ford") { car = new Ford(); } if(name.equals("honda") { car = new Honda(); } if(name.equals("chev") { car = new Chev(); } assemble(car); sendToPaint(car); delivery(car); } } Okay, all are fine, our class is ready to support 3 types car creation and supporting methods. After some days, now we want to add Toyota into this mix, so we need to add one more condition in buildC...

Today while reading news, one thing got my attention is "Thomas Malthus theory", one politician from Indian ruling party Congress's issues some global wide food shortage warning . Since they are famous for negative propaganda, I didn't give much importance to it, but he mentioned something about Thomas Malthus theory , that increased my curiosity and did a little research. Thomas Malthus is an economist lived in early 19th century, wrote six editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population , mainly to focus on population growth that leads to lower wages and finally to prolong poverty. His view was very pessimistic but that leads or accelerated to Britain passed Census Act 1800, to keep check population growth for every 10 years. Now all countries has the similar law. His first edition was published on 1798 and second edition on 1830, almost 32 years after mainly to answer his first edition's criticism from noble economists. The core of his pessimistic view as f...

Job search is always stressful even when economy is in good health. I don't want to tell how stressful with this current economy conditions. But always stay at positive is basic mantra for successful job search. Based on my experience, we have to decide what would be the correct job description before we start searching job. This is specially important for Software related jobs. I have decided to stick with Sr Software Engineer 3 or 4 category, this is normally 30-40% design, 40-50% hands on and remaining would be mentoring team member and helping other organization initiatives such as PMO, Product Management etc. Brush up fundamentals I have decided to spent at least 2-3 months to search a good job for me with my expectations. Before starting job search, we have to brush up all fundamentals, coding exercise and puzzles etc., even though you are a 10-15 years experienced professionals, most of the companies want to test your academic level knowledge, very fundamental computer langu...

I waited for Communist Party Of India's statement regarding future trade ban for some commodities, as expected they are not satisfied with Indian Government action and they want to ban 25 more commodities. Here is statement from CPI(M) general secretary Mr. Prakash Karat "The CPI(M), which supports the ruling UPA coalition from outside, had charged the government with making a “wrong diagnosis” of the causes behind price rise and said the steps announced to control inflation would in fact stifle the high growth rate. It demanded a ban on futures trading in 25 commodities, alleging that allowing multinational companies to get into speculative trading in food grains had “resulted in price rise.” Based on Karat statement, speculation is the main reason of price rise and as usual he blamed multinational companies. Sir, first you need to understand the difference between an investor and a speculator. I urge you to change 1947 mentality of labeling an investor as speculator. An i...

Finally Indian Government backed Forward Markets Commission (FMC) suspended trading of futures trading in chana, soyabean oil, rubber and potato till September 6 . I think that it is bad move by leftist dominated current Indian government. There is no link between inflation and future trading. This leftist (Communist) are playing their cards to win next election by painting themselves as a saviour of poor and middle class people of India. But they are halting Indian economy growth and stopping money flow into Indian economy, ultimately that is going to hurt poor and middle class people of India. India is a vastly "black money" dominated economy, if we close some money flow channels like future trading, money would be again stagnate as black money and government going to loose sum of money as tax. How come price would go up if number of investors decided price after amount of brainstorm and scientific study vs small number of selected group of people fixing based on some unsci...

It is clear that Microsoft is playing gamble by pulling out Yahoo's bid . Microsoft never withdraw anything they want to buy. Even now, Microsoft pulled back, because of Yahoo's decision to join Google for sharing search ad business, not because of bid price. Microsoft knows better that Yahoo's share price plummet starting tomorrow, and Yahoo investors would not get benefit from Google's partnership for at least next one year. Yahoo can't steer company towards profit for next one year, because Google itself struggling to show growth from their search ad business, because of current economic conditions.  As everybody knows, more beneficiary of the Microsoft + Yahoo deal is Yahoo. Because they are the one in middle between powerful companies (Microsoft and Google). Yahoo is simply rejecting Microsoft bid for simple "bay area microsoft haters" and "some ego" reason in my opinion. As soon as, Yahoo's stock start go south, their stockholders goin...

I'm almost addicted to Quicken software, I have to enter my expenses in Quicken at least a week. Quicken is an excellent money management software in my opinion. I'm using it for 6 years. A single screen we can manage our bank accounts, credit accounts, 401k plan, stock, mutual funds, with various customizable reports etc. We have millions of free site to do just manage accounts, but Quicken offers wide variety of reports with graphs, portfolio management, automatically track budgets, track tax and manage foreign currency accounts. This is great tool. But now we are moving towards SaaS model, here is one promising online money management tool Mint  and it is free and Mint also offers basic reports and almost we can maintain all types of accounts. It is worth to have a look. Here is link to Mint's safe and security page , just in case you want to know what kind of security they are using to secure our data. It is money so security does matter. 

Continuation from yesterday's topic. So we know that a complex system is a composition  of multiple simple systems. How to identify them and split the whole system into small pieces. I'm going to emphasis on software system. Understanding the magnitude of complexity There should be a start and an end. If we look any system, first observation would be where it is starting and where it is ending. It is like travel between two cities, if you want to travel from Chicago to San Jose, you have to travel approximately 2000 miles. The magnitude of complexity is directly proportion to length of starting and end point. If a system involves so many integration with other system then obviously the system's complex is high. Chopping complex into simple solutions This is the most tough job. Our understanding of complex system relies on how good we are chopping into simple workable solutions. The above travel example can be used here also, if we want to end up in San Jose, We have to cro...

I want to write something about how to derive a simple workable solution from a complex system. A System can be anything, for example, Eiffel tower, what we are seeing now is a complex tons and ton of steel structure and it is very complex to build. But some human like us built it from scratch, they assembled simple steel structures to build this complex architecture. This is very basic, a multiple simple systems forms a complex system. If we see it correctly, we can make lot of simples from a complex. So nothing in this world is complex. Why some systems make us think that it is complex, because the way it was present to us is wrong or we are jump into conclusion very fast about a system. If we see a system as it's whole integrity. it is, yes definitely it is complex. All we need to do is see the system as parts and find a simple pattern hidden in the complex system. If we understand the simple pattern that makes the complex system, we are well off and we can resolve any system.