oops

1.+(2) = 3

Making of a leaderless country

The entire world should be shocked by the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto and salute her courage and dream of making Pakistan a country with Moderate Islamic values. In fact she is not the first leader to be assassinated. This time the entire world should take notice though. If we are finding difficult to deal with a rag-tag leaderless Taleban, think what you will have to deal with one nuclear capable one? She was the first Pakistani leader who was widely respected in India too for her courage to work towards normalization of relations between these arch rivals. Two young leaders of their times - Rajiv and Benazir did give the hope to the entire region that these two countries can be friends. They both are gone, sacrificed to the menace of terrorism.
It is important that the entire democratic world stand behind the democratic forces in Pakistan. Benazir was one of the very few faces left who believed in a Democratic Pakistan. That dream has moved miles farther. With Nawaz Sharif virtually inactive, Benazir gone and Musharraf acting as an American representative but a leader, Pakistan is in a making of being a leaderless country.

No wonder Amir is still the best

A must watch movie - Taare Zameen Par (Stars on Earth). I watched myself in this movie - Different characters at different times. Sensitive issues like what a 8-9 year old kid goes through is very difficult to portray and Amir has done just a phenomenal job. I would be surprised not to find this movie an entry for the next film awards.

History of Kayasthas

2 AM in the morning and Googled the city my Family belongs to and ended up finding some interesting articles about Kayasthas: On Wikipedia and, A List of famous Kayasthas.
Its like searching the ancestry on ancestors.com. Few things earlier I had no clue about:
1. Srivastavas are originally from Kashmir near Shrivaas region of Srinagar.
2. There existed a Kayastha dynasty and they even once ruled the region we belong to. Hmm! Hmm!
3. Historic cities like Chittor and Chitrakoot were established by Kayasthas.
4. Pandya Kingdom of South India were established by Kayasthas to all the way to Madurai.
5. They ruled Ayodhya before the Raghvanshies (Shree Rama).
6. That Kayastha are Brahmins and Kshatriya together for whatever that means.
7. That they were not only traditionally Scribes but warriors too (Saxenas - Shaksena who once ruled Kabul, Afghanistan).

A few famous ones:
1. Dr. Rajendra Prasad - First President of India
2. Lal Bahadur Shastri - Second Prime Minister of India
3. Bal Thackeray
4. Munshi Premchand - One of the best Novelist of Hindi Literature
5. Mahadevi Verma - One of the best Poetess of Hindi Literature
6. JC Bose - Father of Radio Science
7. Amitabh Bachchan and,
8. Subash Chandra Bose

I don't know why am I blogging about it but a few minutes donated to some history. Enough of history, Stop! And look at the future :)

India lifts ban on Woman bartender

India allows Woman bartenders. What else can I say but:

मुहब्बत याद न आये इसलिए मैखाने में जाना था,
जनाना हैं वहां भी अब, किधर जाएँ किधर जाएँ?

-Shayar Nawab Mirza Ashish Lucknowi

I kinda like Ron Paul

This story of keeping $500 from a white supremest just only raises my respect for Ron's approach to the Presidential Candidacy. A very good response and a lesson to those candidates who end up returning the donations.

"Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money," Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. "Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom.
"And that's $500 less that this guy has to do whatever it is that he does," Benton added.

Ron Paul has always been good to hear. And this story with $6M in a day stuff is positioning him to be one strong candidature.

How Come?

How come we approve billions of Dollars to help Iraqis "build their homes" and raise eyebrows to bail sub-prime mortgage perils?

Disadvantages of Remoteness and problems with Space

One problem that almost all the Distributed applications suffer from is the concept of Remoteness and lookup. One of the toughest problem in Software Engineering is to design a system with a single Interface. The Remoteness of an application should be hidden from the client application. How many components have we worked on where we need to do a "Lookup"? EJB, JMS, JINI and they all suffer from the javax.rmi.Remote interface. Even though powerful but these technologies expect not only the managed domain object be of type Remote but also to do the discovery to find them. The Remoteness is a behavior of the container not of the application. The Application should behave exactly the same way with or without a specific infrastructure. Of course I don't consider JVMs to be an infrastructure, some may disagree. Isn't Serializable interface enough to tell the container(?) that the application could be Remote?

EJB3.0 addressed this issue to some extent. At least the annotations remove the requirements to have some specific remote interfaces implemented. The EJB classes can then be used in a standalone applications too.

Even JavaSpaces suffer from the same problems. JavaSpace expects the Object to implement net.jini.core.entry.Entry interface. Of course the Space has to identify an Object type. But what else does the Entry interface contribute to?

1. Its a Marker interface that extends Serializable. This architecture pretty much blocks users to make the Serialization any more efficient than what the default provided by the JVM is.
2. The operations read and write on a Space works similar to the get () and put () operations on a Collection. take () is a little different but can be categorized as a specialized get (). The "Space" is made logically more close to a Collection. The use of a Space should be like a Map not a Collection. A space with houses, have defined addresses. Template based lookup is inefficient. It should have been a much better design if net.jini.space.JavaSpace had extended java.util.Map interface and read () and write () were renamed as get () and put () respectively.
3. The third problem is the concept of Discovery or Finding the Space. Why? Why should the client application know that there is a Space out there that needs to be found? Isn't the discovery a role of the container and not of the end-client's?
4. At last what does it take to migrate your existing application to a distributed environment? Not easy with JavaSpaces. That will require a lot of changes to your application. If JavaSpace extends Map then migrating could have been a trivial task as to just replacing your HashMap, TreeMaps etc with JavaSpace.

Oracle Coherence has a better approach. Its NamedCache is not only based of java.util.Map but there is no concept of Discovery. Coherence is infact a distributed application, but by replacing the discovery by a Consensus protocol the product has made the entire architecture much easier. Even though NamedCache and JavaSpace are designed to function the same way but the design approach makes NamedCache much scalable.

PS: Of course APIs can be built on top of JavaSpace to address these issues.

Its my girlfriend

The beggar asked $6 for a cup of tea. Why? The tea only costs $3 said the passer-by. Ah, the rest 3 is for my Girlfriend's. Huh! You are a beggar and got a girl friend? I was not, before I met her!

Why did you marry that 90 year old? Asked someone to a 20 year old blonde poetess. First for his high Income second he has "din kam". (First for his high Pays second he has less days).

What you call if your girlfriend ends up marrying you? - Treachery.

My new hero - Tyra Banks

I do not watch Tyra Banks show. I deliberately make sure not to look Sissy in anyways and not watching a "fashion" show was always on my cards. I was wrong. I did watch one episode and Tyra is my new Hero. I always felt these skinny models have some sort of disease, they just don't know it yet. Tyra represented them. Not anymore. A healthy body with healthy taste buds is a new beauty. Please tell me girl please! That a man with a tummy looks equally handsome and I will stop my push-ups.

Review - Speed 2007

I feel Ajaa Nachale was so better movie after watching Speed 2007. Nice songs but what a poor execution. Also, Jayed introduced himself as Sandeep Malhotra to the Taxi driver and Sandeep Arora to Gayatri Devi. And the presidential suite hahaha. Has anyone seen how a presidential suite looks like? And MI5? Give me a break. MI5 agents I am sure don't look buttery weak like Sid. In the last four bolly movies I watched - Ajaa Nachale, Speed, 16th December and Johnny Gaddaar, JG still is far better than the rest.

Review of Aaja Nachale

Aaja Nachale - A weak movie.

1. The teacher and Madhuri more seemed working for a third rated Circus instead of a Kala-Kendra where Art is worshiped. She seems for 'Sanskruti' but what kind of songs did she dance on?

2. Madhuri acted like a typical Indian who live here in US and think they are the better Indians just because their 'Rs' are more twisted.

3. Her first speech to the people of Shamli was a fiasco. No power, no substance.

4. The director could not decide if Shamli is a small village or a decent town.

5. The half hour Laila-Majnu drama was better than the rest of the movie.

6. Even though this can not be a come back movie but Dance in bollywood is back.

Google co-founder to marry

Page to marry - Wondering what took this SEARCH so long?

Sorry NRA - You kill people.

Hawkins the teen who killed eight people in Omaha mall got the AK-47 from his Step-Father. Something seriously needs to change. How can you allow fully automatic weapons for civilian use? And if yes, how come there is no control over who would end up using it? Does the person who gave AK-47 to Hawkins not have any responsibility to what he did afterwards? Shouldn't any criminal case be filed against him? I may buy in to a theory of keeping Guns with Freedom but at least make license laws tougher and if the Gun is transferred by him/her to someone who is not a licensed user will be a party to crime if committed? If your laws end up killing innocent people then the law has to change.

The dream of being a Daaroga

This was an interesting true story I came across, inspirational as well equally funny. So let me blog it:

There was a small village that had a Thana (A Police Station) near by. The villagers were mostly laborers and illiterate, including the family which this story is about. The parents were very fascinated by a Daaroga (The Police In-charge) for his power, clout, lifestyle and the respect he demanded and unequivocally got. The Daaroga controlled the truth. Nothing was possible if he said 'no' and his 'yes' was a command from the God, what we see in a typical western cow-boy movie. The parents wanted their Son to be a Daaroga - Their ultimate dream. From an early age they sent him to a near-by City to his Aunt's for his education. With the inspiration of the Parents on his side, the boy was good in studies. After his graduation he successfully qualified for the Civil services and became a Commissioner. During his training (before the posting) he visited his Parents in the village. Even though happy, he did not find any relief on their faces. Something was missing and he was not sure what? As if their dreams were not fulfilled. The news of him becoming a Commissioner had spread fast. One day, the Daaroga came running to visit his family and to introduce himself. An usual arrogant Daaroga looked humble as he paid his respect to the Commissioner and his Parents. First time in their life had anybody shown any respect to them. They were not only happy but relieved. We didn't know a Commissioner was bigger than a Daaroga, said the deeply touched Father.

At the time of Thriller

Can't believe it has been 25 years since the Thriller came out and made Michael Jackson a Pop-God. I did not hear that music the same year though. I rarely listened to any 'western' music then. But even without internet, Cable or mp3s what a reach that music had, heard it in '84 during a school fare and what a ecstatic moment that was! My first introduction to a music world beyond the shores of Bollywood. This RnB killed all other forms of music as the hip-hop returned the favor later - for a short while. And then came a series of copy cat songs in bollywood produced by some junk music producers. A new beginning of trashy music in India that lasted almost a decade inflicted further by the death of Kishore Kumar in mid 80's. But the melody is back in Bolly and Michael remains one of the most well-known faces of pop/RnB and an icon of many Hip-Hop artists. Michael is gone and oblivious to the current world. Media's trick of isolation, expectation and pushing to the edge has worked on yet another artist and remains an unpunished culprit. Either way, a salute to Thriller and Michael for the profound affect they had on how we heard our Music.