Uncertain Again

Life's a struggle,
My logic's are right!,
But so much of effort,
so little has changed!

The pain, the struggle, the thorny roads,
but this is a race, I shall not loose!
for there are mountains to climb, and dragon's to slay,
and glory, and riches, at the end of it all. 

I run, I sprint, sometimes jog along,
too tired at times, but life moves on,
sometimes I stop and start to wonder,
Is this the right path, is there a destination at all?

Sometimes you see a passerby
hopping along, to his merry tunes,
lost in his world of utter joy,
innocently happy for nothing at all.

Then you stop and start to wonder,
if the logic's were wrong all along,
if there ever was a race,
if the end, the path, does not matter at all.

With a new found wonder and cradle of joy,
you smile for nothing and look around,
the meadows, the birds, the tender flowers,
Alas, the worlds beautiful, after all!

500kbs of Magic!

We all are helplessly in love with our dearest pal, the internet, but what is internet without a search engine?
I always wondered, about the mysterious ingenious behind the simple search engine's that magically pulled out, any thing I wanted, from a plethora of online data, in fraction of a second.
Lately I have had the pleasure of working in a search team, where I discovered this beautiful piece of software called Lucene, and I have been in awe of it ever since. It is like a priceless gem, given away for nothing, for the benefit of all (yes, it is open source).

What is Lucene?
by definition it is "a free/open source information retrieval library", or in english, it is the heart of a search engine. It has a beautiful way of indexing and searching data to return highly relevant documents in blink of an eye. All it takes is a few line of code, and you are good to go. Most of the search you see in services is actually built on Lucene...... Yahoo, Facebook, Fed-Ex, Amazon, LinkedIn...list is endless (not google ofcourse!).
It doesn't take much to build a search with it, but that is just the start, diving deeper, opens up a whole new world of possibilities and the power to do amazing things!. It is beautiful to see how such complex problems are solved so elegantly.

Let me discuss one seemingly mammoth task, that was solved effortlessly with it. My friend, who knew I had some knowledge of lucene, presented me with a problem. He wanted me to take a piece of news article online and collect other article's on net, that displayed the same news.
Now I cant even begin to think how I would compare millions of articles, and find out the ones that talked about exactly the same news as this one. No other article would use the same words to describe the same news as mine, and most articles would partially match my article because, common English words exist in all of them, it is very complicated to establish relationship between articles that convey the same news, but may use entirely different set of words to do so. But guess what, a little bit of exploration into lucene, solved this in a blink!.
To get a over view, Lucene turns every article indexed, into, kind of vector in 3-D space, and uses complex scoring algorithms to establish relationship between them. The mechanics is beautiful, but I wont go into it, because anyone interested can google it out (and, I'm not entirely certain it yet :P). The end result was simply beautiful, it was very exciting to see, our code go through hundreds of articles and return articles that talked about same news with amazing accuracy.

Now in case you are wondering, why I am trying to scare away, the few readers I do have, with this technical mumbo jumbo....then, don't worry I am not!.
This post was more to express my elation, on finding this glorious new toy, and express gratitude to good old folks in open source community, than to talk about search engine's. My post's shall not get anymore technical :)

Tributes to Doug Cutting, creator of Lucene. Long live the open source community!

Bounded

There are walls, all around,
only to be felt, nothing to see,
I feel like a captive all my life,
freedom being a distant dream.

Too much noise, all around me,
I barely hear the sounds within,
Too long have I ignored these thoughts,
now, they're barely a whisper to me.

bounded by money, bounded by job,
bounded by the fear to loose it all,
bounded by future, bounded by past,
bounded am I all along.

There is no light, there is no end,
darkness is all I see,
All I have is a candle of hope,
hope to break the walls I see.

Fighting have I always been,
and too long have the battles been,
for there is a whisper in my head,
endure it all, there shall be a win.

As stupid as this poem might seem,
trust me friends there is a wall,
bounded will we always be,
without the courage to break free.

There are walls all around,
only to be felt, nothing to see,
I feel like a captive all my life,
freedom being a distant dream.

An unbelievably false poem..

I read this poem few days back and cudnt stop smiling at writers brilliant word play..

An unbelievably false poem..

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back-to-back they faced each another,
Took out their swords and shot each other.
One was blind and the other couldn't see,
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And killed the two dead boys.
A paralyzed donkey walking by,
Kicked the copper in the eye,
Sent him through a rubber wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

Believe this lie its really true.
Ask the blind begger he saw it too!

chk out these links if u liked this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense_verse

KCK

Watched a typical bollywood pakaau film, it deserves some criticism, so here I am with my rotten tomato's. First of all I would like to say ":balls" to praveen, for asking me to watch it in a theater, I cursed you all through the 2nd half.

Coming to the movie, it's all about Japanese technology, really....the whole movie is based on that!. With Japanese phone you get a smarter avatar of yourself, giving you life changing advice for free! and the phone works even when unplugged, brilliant!
1st half of the movie would manage to keep you interested, but 2nd half is brutally boring with over dosage of utterly lame emotions. To top the stupidity, the girl beside me, freaked out on every stupid phone call in the movie, I wondered if she misunderstood this to a horror movie. Only thing that got me through was, that lovely, gorgeous face of Deepika padukone, aah...I'm in love with her again!
Farhan Akhtar tried his best, but was not enough to makeup for the bad direction and lack of content. The emotional aspect of movie was out of place and chemistry between Deepika and Farhan was just not working (how could it?, Farhan is a foot shorter than her!). I do credit the movie for its ending though, It managed to explain all the "magic phone" drama convincingly at the end.

My friend, who was sitting in the front sent me a text message during the movie, it said - "Japanese tech + Indian brain = pakao movie", I burst out laughing, caz it pretty much summed up the movie.
My verdict - It not a fun movie, not a intellectual movie, nor a "timepasser", but a "moneywaster".

Few good books

Chennai is a lonely place for any non Tamilian (or anyone remotely cool)...any one who has read "Two States" would know what I mean....
I started reading a few books to kill my spare time, here is a short review of a few -

1. Two States - Chetan fan or not....this is a must read....especially if u live or moving to chennai...this book might just change ur mind. Very humorous...there are not many books as entertaining as this. Satisfied by this book I went on to read "5 point someone" and "3 mistakes of my life" too. Though I loved "Two States", I wouldn't say the rest are must reads.
   
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad - It teaches some invaluable lessons about entrepreneurship and money management. It's the kind of book, that challenges the most basic ideas we take for granted, this book messed with my head for a few weeks...it will surely mess with yours too....read it at your own risk!
3. Twilight - I loved the movie, and just couldn't resist reading the book. The chemistry between Bella and Edward is just as spicy as on the screens. Its a good romantic read...all those fans for Edward and Bella will surely enjoy it.
   
4. Fountain Head by Ayn Rand - Finally this is the book that inspired me to write this post. I'm not through with the book yet, but....fist 120 pages were astonishing and this a rare piece of work and a must read for any remotely intelligent creature (which ofcourse eliminates majority of our population).

Untill my next post happy reading :)

Dont be Evil?

About a decade ago, a new name called "Google" took on the search giant Yahoo, and the rest is history. What followed was almost a fairy tale, Google became the predominant name in the internet world, moving wider and deeper into every conceivable field of computer science technology.
Google was a revolutionary phenomenon in the internet world, it changed the cluttered ad filled websites to simple, free web based products. We all loved it and loved the moto "Don't be Evil". We trust google with all our email, search query, documents, voice chats,chats and a hundred other services.
When Gmail was released we said...wow...free mail service with 2GB space!
then came -
- Google docs
- Orkut
- Youtube
- Picassa
- Gtalk
- Google Maps
- Google Earth
- Blogger
- Books
- Google wave
- etc etc and we kept saying WOW!
I have been using Mozilla for past 5 years, I was in love with it, until.....Google decided to say..."Hey...lets get our own browser", I heartlessly dumped Mozilla and flocked onto Chrome....its was simply WOW.
Then Google says "Hey...lets get our own OS"..and so Android was released and Chrome OS is in the making.
Hmm...I thought Google to out to dominate the whole internet....then Google come up and says..."Hey we got a brand new smart phone!"......and for the first time I thought.....what the hell....dont u guys stay out of anything?.....Google basically knows more about me than my mom these days!
In the past few years google has acquired hundred's of companies, orkut, picassa, youtube being a few popular one's, but if we look at the companies Google is pocketing, we will realize how wide the Google domain is getting. It has a new language too for its developers.....Google Go.
At this point I think its considerable for us to start getting skeptic that should a company be allowed to get so powerful, of course till now it has hung on to its "Dont be Evil" moto and Of-course we cannot do anything about it, Google has the best minds in the world and very capable CEO and founder's guiding it, but it is something to think about....what will happen when Google forgets to "not be Evil".
Until then lets continue saying WOW and admire our favorite company "Google Inc".