If you are a hero @ work

There are two ways to work and technically both ways can yield same results visibly.

If you wanna be a hero, you make a lot of noise, trying to be relevant by being irrelevant, always trying to be little far from reality, overly obsessed with perfectionism (and bosses) and hyper-reactive.

The other way to work is by just being simple, making mistakes and introspecting those mistakes and little pragmatic.

Most of us tend to be of mixed type, doing both but the question is ratio. It could be 9:1, 5:5 or 0:10.

The ratio decides the destiny and the happiness that we derive out of work.

Perception Profiling

Now, it gets very interesting when you witness the crux of you undergoing a change. The change by itself is not so satisfying. The moment that you get converted is so enriching. When you move from the camp of understanding to actually doing is something very important.

I have told you before (couple of weeks back) about Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational" (here and here) . Since the book discusses about decision making and human behaviors, i was thinking that i would get some insights on how people are in general and what forces us to make certain decisions than others. I never thought that it could affect me so deeply and give a breakthrough.

For past few days, i tend to profile my thoughts and profile the way i perceive others' action and my interactions with them. Note here, that i m not profiling or judging others but my own perceptions on others and my interactions with others. Though not consistently, i change my perceptions but the good news is that i m at least willing to change my perceptions after analysis/thinking.

In some cases, knowingly i was able to recover from my usual half-baked thinking/reactions and soon i think should be understanding those hidden forces. I stop building up perceptions (my own perceptions) and i think the next step would be not to mix the perceptions when making decisions (a difficult job, though it is worth trying).

I m glad that i m able to profile my perceptions on others and i think it will help me to build my relationships with others - may it be friends, relatives or friends @ work.

By the way, don't ask me what is perception profiling. I don't know yet what it is. I tried to draw parallels from software (you know, i m a software guy ;-)). We profile applications when it is slow/consumes more memory. I joined perceptions and profiling together to make it perception profiling. Disclaimer: I haven't searched for a possible prior art :-))

[if you think Dan has hired me to sell his book, you perception is wrong and if you are not thinking like that, my perception is wrong :-). I was awestruck with his experiments and trying to understand why we are totally irrational and what can we do about it when we come to know that we are irrational. Here is the book]

About Image:
I first saw the image (young lady/old lady image) in the book "An introduction to general system thinking" by Gerald Weinberg.

Wikipedia - Fundraising

What is the cost of a magazine that we buy? May be few bucks when you buy from the stands and you get few cents off when you subscribe through the publisher's website. It is a business. Are you going to buy the magazine the next time? Well, it depends on the perceived value. If you recognize that there is value, you buy it next time.

But what about Wikipedia? Why should i contribute to Wikipedia?

Unless it is a cutting edge research (and if it is a recent one), Wikipedia equally a place where you look for information. It is not just information but it is so accurate one as it is contributed by subject matter experts and verified/modified by numerous subject matter experts. It is not a business but a community. It doesn't differentiate between donors and non-donors. It is free for everyone. Free doesn't mean that it is cheap. Here free leads to accessibility. Think of people who do not have privilege to access information. For the amount of value that we get, i think, we may need to pay at least hundreds of dollars in return (may be more) if it is a standard magazine.

I would like to point you to the Wikipedia's fundraising page where it says why Wikipedia do not show advertisements. Being fourth largest website, it would be easier for Wikipedia to just build the advertising network or at a very least to insert few ads and start making money. But it is not the case.

For the past years, i have used Wikipedia everyday and the amount of knowledge that one gains is so huge and i felt that i should contribute.

I request you to think about donating to Wikipedia. Here is the page to make contribution in case if you decide to donate

Wikimedia Foundation

Thank you.

2011 - Looking back & Looking forward

I never intended to write something describing what i did the past year. But a quick thought arose now. I have two things to share that i feel so happy about it. One that happened at work and another in life (i should say internet life, as each of us have two personal lives - one in internet and another ordinary/common life :-))

By the starting of 2011, i took up something at work and i feel that though it is not super hit, i realized that i m playing the game to my strengths. All the situations thought me that i should always be level headed. Sometimes, i felt the situations are custom crafted to make by temper to reach its tipping point. Unlike my usual thing, i somehow played by emotions low. Towards the end of the year, i really liked the way i handled things. I only hope that i should improve from here. It was an year of low profile and great learning (particularly the time i spent with fresh professionals just out of college).

Next, let me talk my internet life. When you want to know about something, i think usually we hit Google and most likely the first link would be LinkedIn and Facebook (if you are searching for people) and Wikipedia if you are looking for informative articles. Wikipedia is beyond Encyclopedia and it gives us authentic information. This year i contributed towards Wikipedia fund to keep it for free and i m looking forward to next year (and hopefully, i m planning to double my contributions). When you have a great place to look for information and when the people wiser than you writing/building it, it makes sense to contribute and it is wonderful feeling being part such an initiative.

For the next year, i think i should blog more (with interesting topics) and do something that makes me feel that i m constantly stretching my limits.

I constantly think about this blog and my readers who constantly make me better everyday and each time i blog.

For all the wonderful readers, wishing you a very happy new year. I m looking forward for the new year to learn more. Together, let us learn more.

Now, it is Brain Rules

For the next few weeks, i m going to read two books which i think will have great impact.

I have already wrote about the book Predictably Irrational here and here. (not in an any journal or magazine, these links are below the current post :-)) I feel that i should read the book again at slightly slower pace.

I just read a chapter in another book which i found equally fascinating and has great insights. The book "Brain Rules" by John Medina. The book talks about various principles on how to keep our brain fit. I think, the book will be useful for those of us who use it. So, first, i got to use my brain in next few weeks and all the principles and then come here to write another review.

If you want to hear the author, here is the website and videos.

Brain Rules Introduction from Pear Press on Vimeo.

If you have noted, both the books are written by researchers and you could see all their points are backed by solid research.

Hope that i start using my brain from next year and then rule it :-)

Predictably Irrational Again - Video

Again, it is predictably irrational. But this time it is video. Watch the following video of Dan Ariely speaking about predictably irrational.

I think, from the whole of this talk, i tend to like the portion he talks about cheating.

Even though we have thousands of mirrors in us (and conscience), we still cheat (for example, how we cheat insurance companies. I think, the insurance companies know this and again they cheat us the following years). We don't bother whether it home, street or work, we are going to fudge to an extent that will make us still have a great self image.

If you have the book, the above video could be a companion and makes the reading/understanding a lot easier. While watching this video, i could recollect whatever i read and i m going to read the book again for the insights.

This is one of the books that i thoroughly enjoyed.

 

Predictably Irrational - New Perspective

How many of us make decisions everyday and how many decisions we make everyday?

Do we apply common sense before making the decisions and how often we regret for the decisions we make. How many times in our life we fool ourselves that our decisions are in fact correct. How often we justify the decisions we make and why do we want to appear intelligent to ourselves (leave alone trying to be intelligent in front of others). Is there a reason why we want to be a super man in a group and boast about our contributions or things we own.

 The book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely talks about the forces that shapes our decisions. The book talks about various factors that shapes one's thinking fully substantiated with a lot of research work conducted on real people. The experiments that are discussed and the conclusion drawn opens up a lot of learning on how we make certain decisions at certain conditions and how quickly we change to a different decision (a true 180 degree) when the conditions are changed only a bit.

I really like the way in which the experiments are presented and the presentation of experiments by itself is a great learning. If you read the book, i feel one will get at least couple of value adds (how to conduct experiments for research, how to present them and how to draw conclusion from the experiments) apart from knowing a bit on decision making.

If you find the book in your library, I would recommend you to give it a glance.

While many of us thinking of starting the new year with new resolution and trying to be better, i feel so happy about reading this book and the way i m bidding farewell to 2011. I think, this book is a good investment i made in 2011.

Wish you a happy new year

.

Puzzle - Mega Substring

Scenario #1

Given two strings - string1 and string2,  write a program to find whether string2 is a part of string1 (substring of string1). The above puzzle may seem to be very simple as it is. If this sound silly, read on.

Scenario #2

Assume that you have to write above substring program to compare the contents of two files whose sizes put together is more than the size of your RAM + SWAP partition (let us say 10GB of contents). If you feel like you can solve this with bit of try, move on to the next scenario.

Scenario #3:

What if I want to exploit the number of cores? Will it be better if I have few threads to do the job. If i choose to go with multi-threaded way, what are the special conditions that i should take care of?

Watch out this place for answer (probably this weekend - 20/Nov/2011)

Time Server - Network Programming

Happen to flip first few pages of Unix Network Programming by Richard Stevens. Wrote a simple time server and client.

The server listens to specified port for incoming connections and sends the current time in seconds since Epoch (midnight of 1-1-1970 UTC).

The client is written to connect to the server, gets the time and displays it.

Here is the screenshot of the output (server is started as background process, netstat shows the server is listening in port 12000. The client connects to server and gets the current time).

The source files (with comments, so that one can follow) are uploaded to my Dropbox account. Sharing it here, just in case if you want to look/run the piece of code.

Server Source
Client Source

Compile the above programs (gcc client.c -o client & gcc server.c -o server) and run it as shown in the pic.

Palindrome in Haskell

This is probably a week after i started to read Haskell (a functional programming language). Having tried few examples from the book and writing few on my own, i feel like it is a different world. If i m successful enough to keep my interest with Haskell and continue to practice, i think it is going to improve my thinking at a very least. I m not so sure of using this language at work (but who knows). More on Haskell later.

Here is the code that says a given String (list) is palindrome. (see, how expressive Haskell (FP) is). The first two line is to reverse the list and the last line is the one that decides whether or not the original and reversed string same (you need to write probably 10 lines in imperative language)

rev [] = [] 

rev (x:xs) = reverse xs ++ [x] 

palindrome x = (x == rev x)

 Here is the sample output (from WinGHCi)

*Main> palindrome "test"
False
*Main> palindrome "madam"
True
*Main> palindrome "123321"
True
*Main> palindrome [1..100]
False
*Main> palindrome "a great good haskell"
False
*Main> 

You can find my Haskell notebook (and my daily progress) here. (thanks to Dropbox)

Scala - The Scalable Language

I stumbled upon the programming language Scala few months back and haven't got a chance yet to work with Scala (just download Scala last night and installed Eclipse plugin in my laptop this morning). I happen to watch a video on Scala by Martin Odersky. It is a great presentation - both the language and the presenter.

If you are looking for some alternatives for Java, check out Scala. Companies like Twitter and LinkedIn are using Scala in their products and seems like the list is growing day by day.

Scala is both object oriented and functional language and the code compiles into bytecodes which runs on a Java Virtual Machine. The main advantage of writing Scala program is that you will end up writing lesser amount of code as Scala is more expressive than Java. The adoption of Scala is in early stage and i hope (should say, rather want) it replaces Java.

You can find more stuff on Scala from here.

Overview on Scala, might help you to embrace Scala - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqFryHC018k
Geeky Stuff - http://www.scala-lang.org/node/198
Scala Home - http://www.scala-lang.org/

Needless to say, i m so confused on whether i should blog about Java or Scala :-)