14th April, 2014

 One of those date blogs again. More importantly, another post for this year. The amount I blog is directly proportional to the amount of happiness in my life. I have blogged a lot in past few months... :)

 So today was 14th April, 2014, Monday. A day which everyone hates, first day of the week to go to office. For me it's a week off. There are lot of perks in production support. You get one week off on Monday, it helps for a movie buff like me, you get cheap tickets and shows are never full!

 Today was the plan to watch Rio 2. Also that I had watched Rio before, I was looking forward to this one. It was up to the expectation, liked it. After that, had my favorite Mexican cuisine food for lunch, and off to another movie: Bhoothnath Returns. I had not seen Bhoothnath, and did not have any expectations from this one, I went because my friend recommended it as a good movie. Well he was damn right.

 It is a laugh out riot movie. Amazing performance by all, especially the child artist. Really fun to watch movie, and it also has a message in it. The importance of voting, and what happens when you consider Voting day as a holiday and go out on a picnic or just relax. This is a very bad mentality among us Indians, first we don't vote and then we keep blaming the government.

 Well for starters, this movie did inspire me to go to Mumbai, just to vote, I won't have a holiday, as voting date in Pune and Mumbai are different, I will still try my best to go to Mumbai and cast my vote. I want to make a difference. We all should make a difference, and work towards betterment of our society, rather than just complaining and criticizing the government for not doing anything.

 The difference between us and the developed countries is that, in developed countries, everyone not only cares for upliftment and betterment of their surroundings and country as a whole, but they also come forward and take action. This is the thing we should practice too, I know it is easy to say and no one really cares. But to start with, lets just make sure we all make our vote count, let our vote make a difference...

Diwali 2011,OURS!

Jindagi jine ke do tarike hote hai, aur Duniya mein 3 tarah ke log hote hai. It’s because of dialogues and movies which have such dialogues in them, Aamir Khan is aaMIR kHAN, and that is the reason why one whole country can proudly say…oy teri…every time they burp, rather than saying I am sorry, or peeing in their pants and not burping at all.

Diwali 2010, My to Diwali 2011 OURS, I have come a long way indeed. Long way in my life, long way in character, long way in attribute and long way in mY continuum called time!

I had a dream to come to US, I had a dream to pursue Masters, I have lot more dreams. I quit my wonderful job at Infy to pursue further studies, I wanted to control my life, choose my destination and choose my path, and this far ir ir going pretty well.

What next? People asked me many times? You want to settle here? What will you od after mASters? Well to begin with Masters is not as easy as I thought and I have just started putting on my strides, so the future is declarative and not imperative, it’s all about learning, implying the learning and doing the do!

Also today was a wonderful memorable day. Every weekend in US is and always will be memorable for me. I found family like friends in my sisters friend circle, you find a connection and a sense of relvaration with the. Relvaration is a new word I coined today, one after a long time!

A Religion called Humanity!

 Religion and Politics are two topics which I normally choose not to discuss. Frankly, I never imagined I would actually blog about one of them here.  As far as I am concerned I believe all religions are equal and I respect and appreciate all the religions. For me it’s more important to be human first than to implicate to any other religion. Well, this is the way I see it, I am fortunate to have got all the education, and the knowledge I have attained, still there might be more than 50% people in the world who do not even have college education and an online presence.

I don’t wanna state the number of religions present in this world or neither will I criticize or compare any religions. This post is about what it states; it’s about a religion called Humanity. We have reached a level of evolution where we can actually do away with religion. There are over 700 million people on FB right now, I don’t think many of them would actually check the religious view of a person before adding them!

 I am a big fan of Dan Brown and the work he has down, the research which he would have done to bring out the master pieces that he has is just unimaginable. He has also managed to keep a low profile despite writing five awesome books. Many times I wonder, what is this guy, who is this guy? Does he have a day job too, what’s his background like. I myself love writing and if you see from the point of view of an author, writing those book ain't a walk in any park!

Coming back to religion, many battles and sometimes even world wars have been fought on the name of religion. The chances are that the wars may actually have more of a financial motive to it. However, the fact is there are still many places and countries around the world, where people are discriminated on the basis of their color or religion.

Why can’t we all be just humans? We are all same after all! Why to be so precarious about each other. Why to create differences among ourselves when there are not any present? We are all children of mother earth. We all get life from the same sun. We all are exactly identical biologically as well as chemically. Evolution is one thing, but if you see other mammals and animals, they might actually have few things better than us.

Religion gets associated with politics somehow. There is lot of power in politics. Lot of power transcends to lot of money. Greed and violence is something which the human race needs to overcome for  faster development and survival. We are our biggest enemy if you see it that way, at least currently. The notion that:  ‘Only when our existence is threatened, we choose to change’ is a universal actuality. However, sometimes it is too late and that itself may cause into extinction of species along with extinction of the planets.

I did not quite expect to jump from religion to Dan Brown and then to Astronomy, however the point is they all are related and I never actually wanted to write about religion in specific. I am a human first and the day the rest of the world will be mature enough, wise enough and tolerant enough to understand and digest this fact, it would be a completely different world, a world where Humanity would be the only religion!

10 Years of 'vyaskartik2001'

The year was 2001 and I had given my 10^th standard board exams. There is a 4 month vacation after that if I remember correctly. Well I would have played hell lotta cricket for sure, but there is something else as well which happened in the year 2001….ten years ago.

Internet was kinda novelty thing and not everyone was online, atleast not even half of what it is today! Damn I didn’t even had a rig that time.  I wanted to learn a few things and I used to go to the nearby cyber café. I still remember my first date with internet.

Yahoo was the buzz at that time, Google was not that big I believe.  I went to the café and asked the guy there to help me create an email account on yahoo and rediff. First I went for rediff…had to create a username, tried kartikvyas..booked…vyaskartik…booked.  Then I went crazy and made the id myheartwillgoonkartik@rediffmail.com ……lol another one was borntowin@hotmail.com  . I don’t use these two anymore. For Yahoo, I used vyaskartik2001@yahoo.com ,that somehow stuck and I still use vyaskartik2001 to create email accounts J

A lot has happened in these 10 years.  To the internet, to me and to me with respect to the internet…hehe. Those were the days of yahoo chat rooms, I remember having made 122 friends in the yahoo messenger.  asl pls is how it used to start…hehe.Now I don't even used Yahoo, Google is my life now! I hope to work there some day! 

The results of 10^th grade came, I scored a very good 81%, damn I had slogged a lot too! After that I did two years of junior college in science stream. Still continuing with the Yahoo messenger and hell I also gave the IIT-JEE!

Remember the SP classes which I had joined, I was in the vocational batch. It implies all super scholy people who had taken vocational subjects…I was a rare breed there with Biology. I always believe studyin or working with people who are better than you is good for you!

Did my Computer Engineering after that. That was the time when my interest for Computers grew a lot. Used to read a lotta magazines in the library like Digit, Electronics for You and Linux. I used to be one of the few whi used to be there in the library most of the time. Yes even now, even in Infy..I spent lotta time in the library. I somehow feel very comfortable and happy in between hundreds and thousands of books.

I did my Engineering and got an oncampus job at Infosys.  The period at Infosys has made me what I am today.  2 blogs, 1 review site and 1 online startup. Also authored around 11 research papers there from subjects including VPN, SOA, Cloud Computing, Ruby on Rails, Comparison between active directory and Fedora. Wrote book of knowledge on MySQL and IBM WebsphereMQ. The time spent at Infy was just….simply fantastic. Access to lots of resources was the main factor. We all have access to the internet, the thing is identifying your passion and going for it!

I remember I was not doing very well in Infy training, not even feelin that good. Toppers from all over the country competing against each other and surviving through that was certainly not a walk in the park.

One thing noteworthy and certainly by which every Infoscion can relate themselves is the awesome facilities they provide in campus. Having a 1040 seated multiplex screen which is circular from outside just gives you an idea of the magnanimity and  the standards which this company has set in India.

I have taken lots and lots of pictures of Infy campus and when I upload them on Fb, I get reactions that there are not such campuses even in the US. Hand cleaned roads, 5 star guest house accommodations, every sport facility you can ever think of, world class and huge gym, international standard cricket ground are just some of the factors which give you the jaw dropping feeling. And this is prevalent in all the campuses across India.

I indeed consider myself fortunate to have got a chance to have experience all that. I have done part with it to further gain expertise in my field of interest. From going to an internet café first time to going for graduate studies, 'vyaskartik2001' has come a long way indeed! 

My First Android App on the way!

  First things first, the title says "on the way" and it is on the way and not yet arrived! :P This is something in my mind since long long time,to develop an android application. I did download Eclipse long back, but the exe was corrupted. After that I got busy with other things and somehow the android app slipped out.

 Well today I downloaded another Eclipse exe and it worked fine. Hooked it up with the r11 android sdk installer for Windows. Some archived versions of the SDK like the 2.2, 2.3 along with the current 3.1. Currently playing with the Android 2.2, API Level 8. The 3.1 is the latest available version, however 3.0 onwards have been designed specifically for tablets and the avd for that is very very resource hungry, so sticking to froyo for now.

 Tested a few demo apps and works fine in the avd. Now its time to make one of my own. I am thinking of either a utility app or a quote kinda app, where you get various inspiring quotes. I was also thinking of a sticky notes or a Hangman game for android devices when the idea of android development came to my mind first. However, there are already loads and loads of similar application available in the Android market.

 May be I will ponder a couple of days more on what to build. Most probably I will build something simple to start with and than get innovative successively. Development, especially of a complete application is not that simple and I hope I will be able to make something good. Hopefully one of my next post will be titled: My First Android App Released! :-)

If you are interested in Android development too, if you wanna learn or if you wanna join me, feel free to contact me. 

The Rational Philosophical Thinking

Yes I am in raat paali, the paali where I blog the most and today I just saw Stephen Hawkings special and I am reading a book on Quantum Computing, so guess for yourself :) .

 Since more than a couple of years,I have been following Stephen Hawkings. Following on Discovery channel that is. How he speaks about the Universe and all. Today there was a Stephen hawking special, unfortunately was in Hindi, but still I did see around half of it.

 First thing first, and the the first thing on Earth and the how of it is still perplexing. What am trying to say is that there is still no single acceptable theory about the origin of life on earth. There is a vague explanation about origin of the Universe, but that is, as I said vague. The two most acceptable theory about origin of life on earth are beneath.

 First they say, that life evolved from water, yes correct, many people agree. However today I saw, Stephen Hawkings saying it was muddy water to be precise and it had loads of amino acids. I presumed amino acids are the constituents of the DNA, however I found out that DNA is made up of nucleotide and each nucleotide has three parts: a sugar molecule, a phosphate molecule, and a structure called a nitrogenous base. No amino acids, however amino acids are pretty critical for life with regards to the metabolism process. Ok, so I guess these facts make the first option feasible.

 Second theory is that life travelled to Earth via some extraterrestrial object like a coment, under the assumption that those life form had the ability to survive the hostile conditions of space. However if that were so, then how come, we humans who are the highest form of evolution cannot survive without an atmosphere? I disagree with Mr. Stephen on this one!

 Also there was the usual search for life beyond earth section with reference to Mars and Europa, just wondering if I would every get to see someone get out of our solar system in my lifetime?

 So this is the extreme end of dimension, the Universe and than there is another extreme, the cellular physics. Yes I am talking the physical cell, not the biological one. In one of my previous post, I talked about powering spaceships for intergalactic travel using anti-matter. Yes, you may realize that is too in raat paali..hehe. Point is power can be supplied via anti matter, which seems kinda fiction, more realistic may be nuke or plasma. What about the technology to be used in such spaceship? Well power is not enough rite, you need some intelligent computing for such a big thing, both in terms of size and purpose, and that is answered by Quantum Computing!!!

 I started reading about it and couldnt help my impatience and excitement to make a status update on FB which read: :"An algorithm that could factor a 140 digit long numbers a billion times faster than currently possible, a search engine that could examine every nook and cranny of the Internet in half an hour and a "brute force" decoder that could unscramble a Data DES transmission in five minutes! How? Quantum Computers! THAT'S HOW!!" Yes it is true, and it is magnificently amazing. To get slightly more detail on it, I can say it is using the concept of making a subatomic particle, like an electron store bits of data and also act like a gate. Well gates are a concept in Computer Organization and Arhitecture subject, there are various gates like the AND gate and all.

Also historically speaking physicists and computer scientists have been investigating the properties of quantum superpositions and their application to computing since the late 1970s, too bad nothing concrete has come out yet. We have millions and billions of transistors on a chip but still no progress in quantum computing!

 End of the day, I guess everything is set!!! There's gonna be a USS Enterprise, powered by nuke or something, having the brain of a quantum computer and me as The Captain, with my DNA biologically mutated to stop or reverse the aging process, as required... B-))