Higher study blues

Guruji is pissed off as he comes across more and more youngsters who find higher studies as a mechanism to climb the corporate ladder.
Guruji =>"Prem,these Youngsters are mad ...."
Prem => " Why did u say so ?"
Guruji => "Since seniors in most organizations are colonizing , there is little opportunity for growth ... Instead of fighting it out , these people are trying to work around by going for higher studies .."
Prem =>"Even i am planning to go for one....!!"
Guruji =>"What really happens is ...you people will go for higher studies and for the rest of your life , to coverup the blunder, u will credit every thing which happens in the life as a fall out of the higher studies "

Prem-Tilak into Comic strips

Thanks to Joseph Thomas ( my erstwhile colleague , of Blogswara fame) , Now one can see Prem Tilak Stories as Comic strip. He has posted one in his popular blog ... JoCalling

My first youtube video

I have been a consumer of youtube videos. For the first time , i created some content for it.
The video demonstrates the process of compilation and linking using Visual C++ command line compiler.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SapKTkf9__8

Ability

Prem and Tilak were pissed off when Harris was praised by their boss for being some one with analytical bent. Both burried aside their differences to collude against Harris. For a second opinion they contacted Guruji...
Prem => " That bugger Harris is getting applause for everything he does..."
Tilak => " He is an intellectual moron..."
Guruji => "You people might be having better intellectual capacity... Harris seems to be more intelligent "
Prem => "Hugghh...."
Tilak => "????"
Guruji =>"Every boss will favor those people who does not question him...Harris knows that really well..!"

Faith

One day , Prem got pissed off with his born again xian friend Francis for cribbing about God. Francis is a convert from Catholicism to a new age church. Francis was all praise about Jesus ,which irritated an agnostic like Prem.
Prem => " Francis , u seem to believe that man is special among all the species in this world.. "
Francis => "Man is a special creature . He has got something called intelligence"
Prem => "I am not qualified to judge ur statement... Man is at least special in couple of things "
Francis => "???"
Prem => " Man is the only animal which drinks when he is not thirsty , eats when he is not hungry and makes love all the seasons "

a three day trip to Trivandrum

To vaccate my flat at Trivandrum, i went there last thursday. As usual , i caught Jayanti Janata ( # 6381 Mumbai Kanyakumari express ) and slept uptil Kottayam. The advantage of this journey ( which i was undertaking for two years ) is one gets three hours reading time. I read What Philosophy is and i did not even notice that the train reached my destination. After reaching Trivandrum , i called my erstwhile colleagues one by one. I had lunch with one mr. Ashik who was with me in the last company. Other than Partying at my flat , i read Routledge Philosophy series books on Edmund Husserl and John Rawls. I was interested in reading Husserl's treatment of Ontology ( which has got applications in Knowledge representation ).

Flirting with the Tractatus

The Tractatus Logico Philosophicus might be one of the most important philosophical work of the 20th century. This was the only work published ( when he was alive ) by the legendary austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I came across Wittgenstien during my teens through the works of Bertrand Russel. Back in 2003 , i once again stumbled upon Wittgenstein through an unusual source. The title of the book is OLAP solutions. One might wonder what OLAP has to do with philosophy ?. When the author was explaining about n-dimensional space ( hypercube ) he mentioned that Wittgenstein has dealt about it in his Tractutus .

A point can represent one dimension (number line ) , a line can represent 2 dimension ( a plane ) and a cube three dimension ( space ) . when it comes to four and above , cartesian geometric depiction of dimension fails .



Erik thomsen talks about a verse in the book (Tractutus ) which goes as follows

2.161 "There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts , to enable one to be a picture of the other at all"



The following image will communicate the idea much better

The above diagram is representing five dimensional point. Instead of using cartesian depiction , the axis can be depicted as distinct vertical line segements ( {D1..D5 }. Like number line , we can segment each vertical line segment by overlaying horizontal (smaller) line segment. A point in this space will be a trace on each of the horizontal line segment. Thanks to Wittgenstien , the n-dimensional representation problem is now a solved one.

I am planning to master the entire book. We can get a free online copy @ http://www.kfs.org/~jonathan/witt/tlph.html

Win64 Programming

After installing Fedora 10 using VMWARE , i am planning to take a look at 64 bit windows programming using the same approach. My friend has got a license for 64 bit XP . I will try to install that using VMWARE. This will help me to explore Win64 programming without much pain. Having worked with MS OS's from Dos16 to Win32 ( Dos 16 , Dos 32 , Win 16 , Win32S , Win32 ) , i am waiting with great excitement. Most 32 bit programs assume that pointer is 32 bits ( int ) and this can create issues when we port to 64 bit. I am curious to see how COM interfaces will perform in 64 bit. ( They say COM is dead !).

VMWARE

Today , i installed Fedora 10 as a VMware image on my Windows XP Desktop. This will help me to fiddle with Linux ( without loosing the comfort of Windows). I am planning to explore Qt , Xlib programming using G++.

I am on a Vaccation

I quit my job as a solutions architect @ Envestnet inc ( http://www.envestnet.com/ ) and got relieved from the position on August 14th. I am expecting to finish my relocation business from Trivandrum to Aluva in a week's time. In retrospect , it was a good stint from a personal and professional perspective. Now that i have not (yet) decided the course of action for me in the future , i am reading philosophy , mathematics and software architecture topics. My kid is happy about the fact that i accompany him to the bus stop from where he boards a bus to the school. My wife has outsourced some of her tasks like giving a bath to him to me. My desktop machine is now upgraded to a intel core2 duo processor and NVIDIA 9400 graphics card . i will be (re) exploring multicore programming ( using intel TBB and openmp ) and shader programming using Cg programming language.

Other books i am currently reading are

The Fifth discipline - Peter M Senge
Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
Enterprise Patterns and MDA - Jim Arlow/Nuestad