RGIT....the place where I come from!

 Having worked full time for a few years I had almost forgot the importance of my undergrad education and how much it is helping me now. I was just taking some rest and few memories came back to my mind. Memories about my under-grad studies back home. Memories about the wonderful, state of the art building we have, the wonderful location of the college which faces the shore, great bunch of people, yes I remember that when I was in my second year and I had thought of a punch line which said: RGIT: The place where the crowd rocks!

 Currently doing grad studies, I realize the importance of all the classes, all the effort our professors used to put in. Coming for campus connect program on weekends was a big headache for us, but if you see it from the point of view of the professors, they were working on weekends! I actually feel like calling up a couple of professors and talking to them , especially the concepts taught on Systems Programming, Compiler theory, Software Engineering, Data Structures, it is all helping me immensely and I really thank all the wonderful faculty of my undergrad.

 To give u an idea, as part of one of my grad study course, we were suppose to write an SRS for a 3 tier cloud based application, also compatible with mobile devices, and hell I smoked it in 2 hours flat. Object oriented analysis and design and software engineering helped for sure. All the courses I have taken involves a hell lot of mathematics and logic, its application to computer science and we had mathematics in 5 semesters, dint we?

 I mean somehow, now everything makes sense. Like all the concepts you learn at undergrad level are actually implemented at grad level. Not everyone does that back home, as there are not much reputed institutes apart form the IITs, the IIS , BITS and several others, but hell no way I can get into an of those for grad studies...

 So yes...I came to US...and it actually feels like home...grad classes have 80% indian population and frankly speaking you are so filled with assignments, papers and quizzes....you don't actually get time to think tht you are in a whole new world, a new country...and add a 20hr job to that and basically you know what u get..hell if you still want more be a CS rep for IEEE and a member of ACM council...

.I actually believe the strenuous course structure of Mumbai university prepares us to slog, survive and succeed. Remember those days of chapping the assignments in SE and TE, chapping pages and pages...well everything helps in someway or the other, it's all about connecting the dots, and realizing that the dots are getting connected.

 The library is the best hangout place for me, wherever I go...hehe. RGIT, yeah they all know me, Infy DC library...yeah they know me too...bas abhi yehaan bhi pehchaan ban rahi hai...hehe The library in US is like OMG....like my one has 4 floors, graduate carells, skpe and multimedia rooms, best part is access to absolutely any paper from the world, be it IEEE, ACM, anything if it's there out there, we have it here. Also not to mention the big bomb MAC systems...hehe just started using those, ideal for reviewing papers...

 The other day, I was talking to one of my friend who is from SVNIT, very humble guy and I know him since more than a year. I was discussing, how reviewing 2 papers every week, gets to your head and he said, it was a norm at his college and his college students actually started publishing papers at undergrad levels...and I was like what...just awesome! Wondering what all they cook up at the IITs? Well I tried to get an in...just don't happen to study two years, all night along with a regular day for it!

  What all this implies is the power of indian minds and the extend of things we can achieve, I mean I am just an average or below average student and I know tons of people smarter than me, all that is required is a right path or a channel for them to use to get to a specific goal! I mean there is a reason why India is yanking close to 8-10% GDP every year with a population of 1.7 billion. You discuss about India with American grad students, and there is a good chance they will tell you they have many friends from India. However the notion still persists about the poverty and all, but then I tell them do a comparative analysis with US...and then one day somehow we started talking about China....that day I had a new found respect for China...how great China is and how much it is respected in the US! Try to look up Chinese history and culture and you will be in deep awe of amusement and enthrallment!

If I were Google...

 For people who know it, and for people who know me, know the fact what piece of crap facebook is. The question is if Google is so awesome after all, how come it's not yanking facebook left, right and center? Why is it being so naive and not capitalizing on the chances?

 If I were Google, I would first get some really smart marketing people who are creative and know the know of technology too. Like, cmon look at this, facebook just dished out another piece of trashed features, which is so fucking horrible that I don't feel like loging into the website anymore. If I were Google, I would take note of that, and may be I am, and may be I am waiting patiently for facebook to freak out and come out with more of such crap, untill it self destructs! May be, just might be!

 The other thing I love about Google is the amount of things they offer for free, their open source filospfy and their non commercial, problem oriented outlook. But if I were Google...I would have not shut down Google Wave, and if I would have done that, I would work on it and I would come up with a new avataar of it, may be integrate it with Google plus? May be Integrate it with all the other Google products? May be...just might be!

 If I were Google , I would think of getting into the domain of networking and cloud computing more deeply and with  more aggression. Going by the notion of private Internets to take shape in near future, I would be aware of the awesome features I already have set up for the users in it, well then again the question is May be....or Might be?

After all we are talking Google here! \m/

Thank you Rahul Dravid!

Yesterday 16th September, 2011, Rahul Dravid announced his retirement from one day cricket. Another great cricketer retiring who has done wonders for the Indian cricket side, not to mention, all happily under the shadow of Sachin Tendulkar. While writing this, it actually reminds me of my article on Sourav Ganguly , which apparently is the most popular post in this blog, all time!

 Rahul Dravid is however different than Sourav Ganguly in many ways. Technically, with regards to batting, it seems that Dravid would have worked a lot, and practiced with uncanny patience, to reach the epitome of success, however Sourav Ganguly had this immaculate gift of timing. Also the fact that, Sachin Tendulkar has wonderful hand eye co-ordination(read natural talent) coupled with passion, patience and hard work, he is where he is. 

Rahul Dravid has been The Wall of Indian cricket and we all know that well. There is a general assumption that, there is a good chance, he does not hold a good record, can be easily debated just by looking at his stats. Well, for starters he has third highest number of half centuries (82) in ODIs in world cricket, which is superseded only by Sachin Tendulkar(95) and Inzamam-ul-Haq(83). Well and if you thought he was a slow player in ODIs?...well he did score a 22 ball half century against NewZealand, in Hyderabad in 2003, which is the second fastest fifty by an Indian in ODIs.

I still remember two of his best test knocks. One was the knock of 180 against Australia following on at Eden Gardens in 2001. He and Laxman made merry of an Australian side which was probably one of the best Test side in the world and at their peak. Another noteworthy knock would be the 331 run partnership with Tendulkar against NewZealand at Hyderabad in 1999. 

Rahul Dravid has played remarkable well for the country, and with great attitude and humility. 10,820 runs in over 340 ODIs and 12775 runs from 155 matches speaks volumes, not only of his talent and persistence, but also his humility. Also how can one forget the facts that he was the highest run scorer in the 1999 World Cup in England with 461 runs and probably is the only player who has more percentage of runs away then at home, now how valuable is that?

Rahul Dravid. Thank you for all the wonderful games, Thank you for all the victories, Thank you for making our nation proud! Jai Hind!

Why facebook should start counting their days!

 No doubt facebook is an awesome piece of thing. The number of users it has is frustratingly unimaginable. It is unbelievably unconceivable that at the end of the day it is just a website. With regards to evolution of internet, it is technically one step back and it reminds of the days before google search engine when people used to use just one website to do lotta stuff...so dats not good actually!

 Facebook has been buggy and a hell a lot too! Before Google plus was launched, the contents of the wall used to be misplaced, and you can’t really blame your browser for that as the presentation layer and the application layer is not that intelligent, hell it's not at all intelligent. So basically, the facebook servers were not giving proper header information back to us I guess...

 Then came their image viewer...and it was like LMFAO! It was horrible and they took long long time to finally upgrade it to something decent, but still the new sucker has lots of semantic bugs and logical bugs. Try to read any notification or chat while viewing an image in fb viewer...can't do that maan! Compare that with google plus, I just replied to a comment and that too on my friends stream, without even opening google plus in the browser, now that's what I call evolution!

 After the advent of Google plus and all the buzz around it, somehow all the application layer bugs got fixed...well they had too, din't they...lol Then there was the big day, facebook integrating with skype...wow that's awesome. But then again I was attending the webcast of that lunch and the same problem as with the image viewer...can you really multi-task on the same browser tab while doing a video chat???

 Also the new interface of facebook has 3 things to do on the wall instead of 4, namely update status, ask question and add photo. Now try to do this, try to upload a photo. Select a file from your local machine and then stop. Now if you decide that, hey I don't want to upload this pic or any other pic...WHERE THE HELL IS THE CANCEL BUTTON? C'mon facebook guys, such a single thing missed your interface!! :P One of the few workarounds would be clicking on home or facebook, but that sucks if you consider from the point of view of software designing and engineering....and especially for someone of the might of facebook which is worth billions of dollars??? what type of developers do they have??? really!!!

Another fact if you consider Google plus in this regard or even google company as a whole. They never release products out of beta till it's perfect. How many times did u actually encounter a problem with the Google search engine or your gmail? Do you know that Google plus is actually called a project still and they are going systematically one step at a time, while maintaining super sleek interfaces, providing 100% availability and a perfect piece of design from the software engineering perspective!

 Well this is all for now, I have a blog on Google blogspot, but somehow felt it exciting to bajao facebook on facebook…hehe and it is really ugly actually that such simple bugs are so easily visible on a website with 700 million users and worth 50 billion dollars?? You gotta be kidding me!!!                             


~Kartik Vyas~


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