Journey to home

Packed my stuff...reached PUNE CENTRAL with whatever I planned to carry along. Still quite some time left; the sense of boringness already creeping in my mind. All of a sudden the following verse came to my thoughts (From "Turn the Page", Metallica):

On a long and lonesome highway,
east of Omaha...
You can listen to the engine
moaning out it’s one lone song.
You can think about woman,
or the girl you knew the night before...

Your thoughts'll soon be wandering
the way they always do...
You're riding 16 hours,
with nothin' much to do...
You don't feel much like riding,
just wish the trip was through.

...WHISTLE...came the moaning train, intervening my thoughts...everybody rushing to board on to it. I got my seat. After everybody got settled, the train moaned again and left the station.

My cubicle (Oops! 'compartment', I mean!) and the next was occupied mostly with college students. This was really good. You enjoy a lot interacting with students, listening them talking their lives in the college...last semesters events...affairs...blah blah. You recall yourself being one some time in your past.

It was fun playing games like word-scrabble, hangman. Well, to be frank, the most of the fun was in talking to those pretty girls and teasing them a bit!

They were going for vacation after the semester-break in their college. Surprisingly, they got only 15 days' leave and were to come back in the Jan 1, 2005. But, they had other plans. They'd rejoin their classes 15 days late, paying late-fee of about 1500/-, making it a vacaion of 30 days! Good Heavens! I thought, for a student this amount is pretty large!

We reached the destination....didn't realize how the time flew away! This was the best of all the train journeys I had in my life.

From flashback

The Home Coming

Yeah..finally, the day came when I'd be boarding the train to my home town, Kanpur (India). This year it has been almost nine months of my being far away from my mom and dad. I feel it's more of a kind of an injustice to myself.

Yet to pack up my stuff...lot's of things to carry! For myself, I am carrying some home-work to be done. That includes reading new stuff. I wish I could carry my chap (My guitar, I mean), but I guess that'd be more asking from a journey in the Indian trains!

My home is located in the famous area called the Kanpur-Cant. (Cantonnment). There are only two lush green places in Kanpur, one where I stay; the other being the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology). You find lots of peacocks dwelling in these areas. In fact, who ever comes to IIT campus falls in love with the amazing sights of the peacocks. These birds are not scared of human beings! You might find people feeding peacocks(peahens, as well!) with their hands, near some dhaba (small restaurant similar to a hut) or the Fac-Lounge (faculty lounge). You might find passer-bys partiently waiting for a flock of peacocks to cross the campus road...a mother followed by small, cute baby-peacocks running across the road. Or you enter some hall and you may see some peacocks dancing in the hall-garden with all feathers up (trying to attract some 'she' of their species)!

It's too cold in winter at Kanpur (when I compare with cities like Pune and Bangalore). People enjoy basking in the sun after lunch!

My dad is a bit extra towards the discipline in daily life. He insists me getting early in the morn and get ready for the breakfast at the right time. I know...now(as a software professional) I am too out of synch. to follow his strict instructions (in school-days I really had no choice, or else my dad 'd kick my ass out of bed!).

My mom is very considerate. She says, "Beta! It's OK if you want to sleep more, just somehow get ready at the breakfast time. Just as your dad goes to work, go sleep as much as you like and again get ready just before your dad comes for the Lunch!". That's cool!

Hmm...Let me come back from kanpur. I'll share what I get for you from there.

- Sujeet -

Looking at yourself...

Everybody sees himself or herself naked every day. I wonder what thoughts come to one's mind when he(she) is stripping off his(her)-self inside the bathroom to take a shower. yeah, I know it's something usual everybody does everyday! But have you ever consciously noticed, if there goes any change in your thoughts that moment?

How many of us actually see ourselves naked standing in front of a mirror, alone inside our rooms? Is it a matter to be discussed in public? But, I wonder how many of us feel the pride in seeing onself. Think about it.

I believe, a human being has an amazing capability to improve itself. This is a scientifc process...called the feedback-correction-mechanism. We are never perfect, but we want to move towards perfection. We need others to correct us. This is the feedback-correction-mechanism! If you want an example to support my point, ask yourself why there's a need to have examination in education. It's because you need to be assessed of how far are you from the perfection level. The examination-evaluations correct us.

I just talked of a typical human behavior. But, not every human is conscious about this. He(she) may use it unconsciously...but I believe you achieve more when you use it consciously. Take an example; not every body you see around has a perfect body. Why? It's not the question of the ability to achive a perfect body, in most cases, but it's just the ignorance of the feedback. The feedback here is the definition of a perfect body....Hmmm, I see you are bubbling with comments and controversial thoughts!

I know you are wondering what the hell this has got to do with what I discussed in the very first paragraph. Can you imagine a gym without the mirrors. Why do you think the mirror-walls are necessary, when you can see your muscles without a mirror? Is it that you want to see your face? Think about it. Do you perceive the difference in the feedbacks about your body to your brain with and without the mirror?

Let me come back to the original discussion. There is yet another subtle difference in the feedbacks looking yourself into a mirror, when you are alone in a room and when you are in a gym with others around. Let me discuss what usually happens when you are alone looking at yourself into a miror. It may not be pleasing for everyone to see onself. This is a feedback that one gives to onself. "look...my butts doesn't kind of look good...", "My thighs are OK, but my biceps really suck!"...kind of instances. It's what you do next really matters! If you ignore this feedback, you know you are not perfect and perhaps start believing you can not ever become! Perhaps you'll never(or seldom) look at youself again. If you can't look at yourself alone, how can you imagine doing it in front of the others? Next, how can you expect the others to look at yourself?

If you use this feedback to have a path towards perfection, I am sure you look yourself naked, periodically, in from of a mirror. You see the improvement every time you see yourself. And the day comes you say "Look! This is the man(woman) I wanted to see...".

Too many things to do

This life, sometimes appears to be too short...So many things to do!...Hmmm I feel hungry...time to go for food.

XY-Transformation

How do you translate? Oh yes, I am talking about translating one language into another. Let me throw few jargons at you…have you heard of 'grammar'? I am sure you do have. What about 'Syntax Tree'?... 'Binding'?... 'XY-tranformation'? Ok! Ok! Let me first mention my target audience. If you don't know what is a 'Context Free Grammar' (CFG) then you probably don't have a Computer Science background. That, however, does not disqualify you from reading ahead. But lemme clarify that, If you don't know what's a programming language, you may leave!

Let me begin with the problem. We have programming languages A and B. Our aim, when we say translation, is to produce an equivalent code in B for any given code in A.

Let me simplify the problem to a great extent by assuming, for every semantic construct in A, there exist at least one semantic construct in B. Hah, You perhaps now realise that it's a very easy problem. In fact the translation is carried out as a linear tranformation of the syntax-tree-A to syntax-tree-B. You may recall, the linear being synonymous with Y=mx+c.

I call it, the XY-Transformation. The Y-axis transformation means the change in syntactic placement and the X-axis transformation handles the binding or scoping.

Let's start with this simple example:

A piece of code in Language-A (Well, I couldn't gather the patience to describe the whole language A here, but I assume that one has good observational skills to learn any programming language by example; so going to the example directly):

var3 := var2 := var1 := 2 + 3;
var4 := var2 * var1 + var3;

The equivalent code in Language-B:

add 2 and 3
assign_to var1
assign_to var2
assign_to var3
multiply var2 and var1
add var3
assign_to var4

The above example just shows the Y transformation. Color has been used to distinguish keywords from the variables or place-holders. The transformation seems to follow a logical pattern in replacing the constructs in A. Try translating "var4 := var2 * (var1 + var3);" into B as an exercise.

Now the moment I introduce block-execution (say, procedures or functions), we need to care about the scoping rules. Mostly the scoping rules followed by the programming languages are similar. The difference is in accessing-semantics and scope-resolution syntax. It's just my perspective. But this helps in visualizing the translation (the scoping part) as X transformation.

Consider SQL (as language A). The SELECT constructs are meant to project or throw you some tuples (or records). The scoping-rules in SQL bother a nice, innocent SQL programmar only when is comes to sub-queries or otherwise when he or she supplies range variables (what he or she might call as aliasing). Say for instance,

SELECT COL1, COL2
FROM TAB1
WHERE COL1 < (SELECT COL3 * COL2 FROM TAB2)

Let the TAB1 contain only two columns COL1 and COL2, where as the sub-query-table TAB2 contains COL3. The scoping rules say, if COL2 is also present in TAB2, then the COL2 referred in the sub-query is bound to this one (the one of TAB2). Otherwise, if there's no COL2 in TAB2, then the binding of the sub-query-COL2 is done to the one in TAB1 (since, the immediate parent query has COL2, else the process of searching continues till there exists a parent query with COL2 in one of it's tables in the FROM clause; this mostly happening in case of huge nested queries). The latter case we discussed, is called a co-related subquery.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Wooaaaahh....this works cool! Me too a blogger now!

Wow! So, finally, I have also started blogging!

Saw many writing blogs...perhaps the way they write their diaries...sort of keeping track of personal records. Never felt like writing any such myself! What a boring task, nah? Like an everyday-prayer at the end of the day (EOD), script yourself and your 'today' activities in your personal notebook. And for what...for whom? Myself?? Never!

But this looks different! How come? I could never imagine myself to be a blogger, for the reasons mentioned. But..Hey! This is not that boring stuff! No other blogs did change my views as did his own...Oh yes!...I am talking about Adam Bosworth! He writes well...or rather he blogs well! Well, how do I know him is a mystery (not to me of course! But to him)...but, the very thin, fading line of the possibility of a relationship got severed as he left BEA. I don't want to look ridiculous by describing Adam here, but I do enjoy reading him. His talks (or rather, blogs) reflect ground reality.

So, is it a kind of reality, that's exposed through the blogs? I believe so, not sure though! But, other than reality, which is subject to various parameters, creative writing is what inspired me more. Let me clarify that, I don't mean to say that there exists no good blogger, other than Adam. Certainly they do, but I don't know...I never cared to know. I knew about Adam first and then this activity called blogging! That's how I cared to see what's blogging!

Finally, do I have to explain why I chose the name "InsideOut" (well, Java programmars would have noticed the camelNamingConvention!)? Hmmm...what do the diary-writers do? outside_in (No! not, the change in naming convention, I mean)....they grab all the outside stuff around them and converge all into a notebook, which no one else has access to! I see the bloggers do the reverse...they bring their inside stuff outside.

Finally, it's been fun blogging my first BLOG! Didn't know how to start. May be later, I'll try to put myself insideout...

Happy Blogging!
- Sujeet -