Airtel Sucks!

Well,
I think title tells everything that this post is about. I got an airtel SIM on 9th May and submitted all required documents. I got a call from airtel to verify the details I had filled in and I gave appropriate answers. The trouble started when I got an SMS on 29th July saying that my documents were not in order.

I went to Airtel Customer Care at Malleshwaram, Bangalore. Resubmitted all of the documents and filled the form again. They assured me that my mobile connection will not be affected now. 10 days later, suddenly, without warning, they barred outgoing as well as incoming connections. When I went there to enquire, they said that it has been barred due to 'Zero Usage'!!!!

Needless, to mention that I was using this number the whole time. Neither I ran out of balance nor validity. They made me talk to their "(mis)manager" and he asked me to submit the document, yet again!!! I do not see any connection between "Zero Usage" and my documents. After enough shouting, they told it will get activated within 4 hours. When their 4 hours did not get over after my 20 hours ( may be Airtel operates in some sort of parallel universe! ), I went again to Customer Care at Malleshwaram.

Not to my surprise, there were couple of customers already shouting for one reason or the other. I took my turn to shout at them, and now they reduced the time to 30 minutes. I am yet to gain a knowledge of the way time operates in their parallel universe. I am still waiting for my connection to get established.

It is a loot in broad day light, as they even refuse to return my balance in the event of them not able to provide me connectivity!

I have been using vodafone for last 4 years, and used MTNL 3 years before that. Never faced a problem like this. The only thing I would recommend is to keep away from Airtel.

May they rot in Hell!!! Oh, wait, I forgot that they are themselves the creators!

The Persuit of Happyness

Hi,
Well, today I am not here for posting a gazal or a puzzle. I watched a movie which forced me to write over here.

Today I watched "The Persuit of Happyness", well the 'y' in the "Happyness" is intentional and someone who has watched that movie would understand why. The movie is based on the true story of Chris Gardner who is a self made entrepreneur and a millionaire. It is really a must watch movie. The movie is not for entertainment but for inspiration. Will Smith truly gave justice to the character of Chris.

It was amazing to watch how Chris managed to take care of his son and manage to do his unpaid internship even when he was broke. How he convinced his son to sleep in a 'cave' through his 'time machine'. When everything was going wrong, he continued to see the bright and pursued the right. We find it very convenient to blame it on the circumstances when we don't have enough guts and courage to fight through it. The movie really teaches a lesson to never give up and to believe that "everything's gonna be fine".

I don't know how well I can follow the ideas depicted in that movie. But I will definitely remember this movie for it's unforgettable inspirational appeal.

Sherlock Holmes

Lately, I have been reading famous "Sherlock Holmes" stories. What a nice piece of literature it is! Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is truly a master of creating writings that hold the reader till the end. It really takes a true genius to create such a timeless character like Sherlock Holmes.

Though, some of the inferences employed by Sherlock Holmes in unleashing the truth seems to be unrealistic, I especially admire the literature for the flair with which the author wrote it. The description of a scene creates enough impact on your mind to force it to weave a virtual world around as if you are witnessing the entire series of events. Author has put to use his vocabulary so perfectly that it does not drive away a reader with average vocabulary and yet maintaining enough variations to make it far from banal. I wish I could attain at least 1/20th of author's writing skill.

Now I know, why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was awarded knighthood. :-)

Parzania : A distorted reflection of Gujarat Riots

So I am back to the blogs after a long break. Life is going on as routine and events happening not worth mentioning. But something happened that forced me to write today, something that evoked memories of gujarat riots. Yes, I am referring to movie "Parzania".

Last sunday evening me and pranjal went to see a movie at PVR Saket. Though the movie has been praised by critics, I did not like it much. It seems to be a fashion to make movies on "sensitive" issues and show that you ( producer / director and the whole league ) are "concerned" about those who suffered those horrific series of events.

The thing I did not like most about the movie is that they depicted the police force as an evil spectator and accomplice. I am not saying that police was acting like an angel during the events and may be some incidents might have happened which caused the notoriety the police has gained. Bollywood keeps on depicting our police force as a demon and then we all yell that police does not perform its duties very well. If someone who has done good deeds is always been criticized for his/her wrongdoing, will there be any motivation to keep on doing good? Isn't it the case that lack of appreciation cultivates a tendency not to take pain in doing something right ( because no body would care/mention/appreciate )?

I had been there in gujarat. I am born and brought up in gujarat itself. And I must say that the biggest villain was media. Stating baseless rumors as facts, presenting events in a sensitized form, showing provoking clips/statements this is all media has done. Should not they act responsibly? But who is to blame, after all, we like things presented in this manner. We always try to hide our irresponsible behavior by criticizing someone.

So called "Top class" reporter barkha dutt was standing on a lonely highway and screaming there is no security force there? What should I say about that asinine woman? Gujarat has thousands of kilometers of highway, what did she want? A policeman at every 50 meter on the highway and leave the burning cities unattended?

Army batallions were air lifted from Jodhpur to get them as fast to gujarat as possible. Those army men did not took a rest. But did we appreciate? My friends were stuck in vidyanagar because of curfew. No mess, no shops and no food. It was the police who came to the rescue, searching for such caged souls and escorting them to Anand railway station. They did not ask whether the students that they are helping is hindu or muslim, the just performed their duties. Alas! it all goes unnoticed. When the mob came to our place and burned shops at the ground floor, police did came. What do you think a group of four people, three carrying a lathi each and one carrying a vintage pistol could have done against a mob of 3000 people? I have seen police officers begging the mob to keep cool. And the way they depict in the movie is that police watched the entire scene taking satanic pleasure in whatever was happening.

Is it police' fault that we do not have enough policemen? Is it police' fault that it is not well equipped and poorly paid? At the time of riots, they were staying in tents in a sensitive areas so that people could feel safe, but no body cared asking them even for a glass of drinking water.

Well, may be I had a lot to write but my anger towards the movie was subdued because of the delay in this writing. And even from a movie point of view, having english as a language while you are filming on a lower class background???

Besides, I still don't understand what was the point of making this movie after years of those horrific past. Did they want to revive the wounds of victims? It is such kind of distorted and exaggerated representation which had damaged gujarat's reputation irrevocably. Gujarat was pushed to a sixth place in industrial investment, because they say gujarat is an "unsafe" place.

For me, gujarat is much much safer than any other place in india where girls can stroll at almost midnight without worries. May the peace prevail!!!

Unique Role of Java in Programming Language Innovation

I was lucky to attend IBM IRL workshop on Next Generation Programming languages and Environments on 20-21st of Nov at India Internatinal Centre. Writing below some details of the first talk. Though, there were many talks in the workshop. I am able to recall only a few so wont be able to write about all the talks in my posts.

Unique Role of Java in Programming Language Innovation
------------------------------------------------------

Dr Bob Blainey of IBM Software group being a distinguished engineer and chief java technologist was no doubt the right person to talk about role of java in driving next generation programming languages and environments. He said that at least three mejor extension of java coming up to aid different programming need.

X10
--

X10 is a java extension which is designed to address the need for
concurent programming. One can not ignore the major shift towards
exploiting parallelism as much as possible. Next generation
programming languages can not ignore this shift and they have to
provide programmers construct which make use of underlying
parallelism.


There are a few constructs added in java, some of which I am listing
below.

Place :- This is a logical construct which can be mapped to physical
place in a sense that a place could be mapped to different processor
or a different machine altogether. The X10 framework assumes
distributed memory model and gives control to program in a GALS (
Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous ) environment.

Activity :- Activity resembles classical java threads. An activity can
access or modify only those objects which resides in the local place (
place in which the activity is residing ). So if an activity wants to
access a remote object, it has to first create an activity at the
remote place and then have to communicate with that newly created
activity to get the desired result. BadPlaceException is thrown in
case an activity tries to access a remote object.

Clock :- Those who are familiar with typical multi threading/multi
programming environments would say that this object acts as a barrier.
Different activities can register themselves with clocks and use it
for the purpose of synchronization. A place can have multiple clocks
and different activities can register for more than one clocks as
well. There is no global clock in the framework which makes it
globally asynchronous.


A container (e.g. array ) can be distributed across places. For
example programmer can decide to distribute array in such a way so
that an array of size 10 ( 0..9) its elements A[0] A[5] A[6] belong to place1
and
A[2] A[8] A[9] belong to place2. This distribution makes it difficult
to construct a simple for loop which will go through all the array
elements and update it because there is a possibility of a
BadPlaceException. To take care of this situation a projection
operator is introduced. For example,

for( point [i] : A | here )
where "here" refers to the place associated with the given scope just
like "this" refers to the object. This way one can iterate through all
the points ( elements ) of array A only residing within current place.

async( place ) { //some code } - This construct allows programmer to
execute a certain task at a remote place. It is not like a remote
procedure call in a sense that the calling module will not be blocked.
In fact, the code will run as an independent thread which may or may
not communicate back to the calling module after the invocation. In
other words, an asynchronous thread of execution is created at a
remote place to execute certain piece of code.


Many more constructs were described but unfortunately I am not able
to remember other details :-(.


XJ
--

XJ is an augmentation of Java is designed to address need for XML &
Web services. It extends Java syntax as well as semantics. One example
may look like :

Article A = new ( <>
<> getTitle() < /article_title >
getArticleBody() < /article > );

I am not able to recall the exact syntax but it looked much like the
code I mentioned above.

Metronome
--------
Java with a real-time flavour. Major feature is handling garbage
collection with real-time constraints. I really wonder what kind of
algorithms would it take to perform garbage collection with such
constraints. What happens when the GC is halfway through marking the
live nodes and it has to relinquish control to another thread to
satisfy the constraints? Or what is GC is halfway through the
compaction ? I would really like to know the underlying details which
handles these intricacies.

I would like to end this post by a quote which Dr Bob Blainey
mentioned during his talk.

"Claiming that Java is easier than C++ is like saying that K2 is
shorter than everest" -- Larry O' Brian