Mahboob's Journal

Been in the thick of many a fun-filled action at work and outside. As I write the last post for this calendar year, a lot of thoughts and ideas swarm my mind. Like this one immediately after I wrote the previous sentence - what is a thought and what is an idea, and why am I using two words to describe what goes in my mind? Heck, let me stop it and get ahead with this post. I have mental notes (wow, better phrase) about technology, software development, society and life, management, and creative pursuits. Those will take considerable time to flesh out. For now, I will just report three events I had attended during December.

Asymptotic notation is used to classify and rate algorithms. I have never learnt Algorithms as part of my academics. So, when I started learning the subject outside the hallowed walls of the academic world, the asymptotic notation was a hurdle in the quick learning of algorithms. Yes, people, the asymptotic notation was the main culprit why it took me so long and why I felt very difficult to cross the waters of sorting, searching, graphs and reach data compression and natural language processing. Perhaps computer science students also have the same problem in college. Is there an easier and better way for rating algorithms?

Early this year I had written a Perl program to fetch the links to Rupa Subramanya’s blog entries along with the links inside the posts. I wrote the program as I found that the material she references is quite exhaustive and scholarly. The Perl script, available at https://sites.google.com/site/mahboobh06/home/rupa-blogs-links-perl-program has undergone a few changes since its first version.

Continuing with the Computer Society of India initiative of organizing guest presentations in engineering colleges, I coordinated a second one, this time by Ameen Khwaja. The session was held at CMR Technical Campus on 13-Oct-2012.

There was a core Java certificate course by Computer Society of India, Hyderabad chapter on 6th and 7th of October. My colleague Nandini and I conducted the session at the CSI office, which is located opposite Secunderabad railway station.

The trigger for the workshop was to have the Computer Society of India chapter inauguration at JNTU - Anantapur, Pulivendula campus. Prof. G. Murali from the computer science department sent an email request to CSI, Hyderabad chapter asking for an advanced Java workshop to be conducted to mark the chapter inauguration. CSI forwarded the request to me and at first I did not respond. He contacted CSI, Hyd chapter again who told him to talk to me directly. On a Saturday, when I was having breakfast, he called me and I agreed. The workshop dates were finalized as 21st - 23rd of September.

Every year we at 4S have a certain intake of trainees. They are asked to do a Java EE course at a training institute during their vacation before they join the company. The students do go to training institutes and come back with certificates. But when asked practical questions, we get blank faces. Despite whatever reputation and revenue they have, the Ameerpet training institutes just cover theory in classroom sessions. In fact, students are not even made aware of simple things like where to put the app files or the war file in the Tomcat container. This happened with the last year’s batch of management trainees too.

As a management committee member of Computer Society of India, Hyderabad chapter, I want to do my bit to bring the academic world and industry closer. I’d be conducting guest lectures at various engineering colleges along with professionals from the corporate world. The first session I could do was on 15-Sep-2012 at St. Peter’s Engineering College. The expert who gave the main talk was Vandana Waghray, Director - Information Technology at United States Pharmacopeia - India.

Back in August, my kids told their mother that, a newspaper will be given to them daily in their school. Mahiba did not show much interest. Later Rayyan told that the principal was listing names of students who will take the newspaper. Rayyan said he told the principal that his mother will decide and inform. The principal knows both Ruwayda and Rayyan well. She said that she will write Rayyan’s name in her list and talk to his mother.

As the dryness of the ground recedes, as the vibes of spirituality peek and as the joyous occasion approached, we tasted different dishes. Chiefly haleem. This year we enjoyed haleem from Hyderabad Restaurant (a local Madhapur eatery not to be confused with Hyderabad House), Paradise and Bawarchi. Sarvi bakery had closed their branch at Madhapur. Last year (or the year before, I don’t remember) I had gone to Sarvi after office hours only to return empty handed. Banjara Hills was a bit far to go just for haleem. But we still wanted to taste Sarvi’s haleem, so what do we do?

Last Saturday, 11-Aug-2012, I watched The Dark Knight Rises with my family at the Cinemax in Inorbit Mall (Screen 2, 10:30 pm). In the movie, as the villain Bane hits the city, a kid is shown singing before a football game. At first I did not realize what he was singing. But when the sub-titles showed star-spangled banner I realized it was the American national anthem. It ends with the words o’er the land of the free and home of the brave. My brain multi-threads. The words are patriotic. People understand those words. And what power they would have on the citizens. Every time they hear it.

I had attended two events in the week gone by. The first one was Lunch with Rashmi Bansal at The Park on 09-Aug-2012 organized by blogadda. I reached ten minutes late but no worries, Rashmi herself came ten minutes after me (delayed flight). The Park is a splendid hotel and through the glass wall, one has a beautiful view of the Hussain Sagar.

I was looking at Spring Security recently and thought I’d quickly put it in a sample project. I poked around on the web and got quite a few examples. However, though they were good, I could not use them as is. The examples don’t use the latest version, Spring 3. The data persistence is not covered adequately, and many a time do not use Hibernate. They put emphasis on details, but do not summarize the important steps.

Global attention (my attention actually, don’t know how much part of the globe) was caught by Slut Walk, Pussy Riot, Tavi Gavinson, and Marissa Mayer. If you haven’t heard about them, well, here’s brief information:

During the past few days, I have realized one thing about my relationship with books. There's no need to read book recommendations or go about book stores to find good ones. I don’t have to reach out to books, they have their own way to reach me. In a recent post , I wrote how I got a book at the Startup Saturday event. My acquaintance Hemanth S, with whom I had gone to the event told about the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There . After listening to his praise, I bought the book (on flipkart.com, where else), took the time out and read it fully.

A light-weight hands-on-coding kinda post this one, and that too not in a mainstream language, Grails. The use case is a familiar one on social networking sites like facebook or linkedin. Let's say you have pending friendship/connection requests. Adjacent to each username you will have a button ("Accept"). Once you click the button and the server has done its job, you will see text in place of the button saying something like "Mr. X is now a connection". I call this pattern as the disappearing button pattern.

It’s always a refreshing experience to attend startup gatherings. I mean, as opposed to the ones held by corporates in which people parrot lines off of standard ppts. Headstart conducts a startup event every 2nd Saturday of the month, across major cities. I attended July’s session last Saturday (14-Jul-12).

Until now by blog home was http://mahboob.livejournal.com Initially, there was one problem with LiveJournal. When I made updates to a particular entry, it used to take hours (felt like ages) to sync up with the logged out view. That is, I could see the changes when I logged into my account. But if I logged out, I would see the older version of the post.