Reality continues to ruin my life - Calvin

A fresher's diary

2008-01-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

9.00 am:
Hi, I am Shambu. Today is my first day of work in a multinational company! I am so thrilled! Its my first job. I am excited by the fact that I will be attending my first corporate event and our charismatic CEO will be addressing us.

My close friend Aggro is with me. He is of the opinion that the orientation program is just a waste of time.He says its like political speeches, consistently apocryphal but sometimes entertaining .My friend is a bit cynical about most of the things. So I let it pass.

Seems like there is a small hitch in our program.Some last minute changes. Instead of our CEO, some other guy will be addressing us. If the jury had voted right, this guy would have definitely picked up the razzie for the worst dressed.

After tripping over a couple of wires on the stage, almost spilling coffee on the first row , clearing his throat in front of the microphone, he finally settled down.He informed us that he had returned from the U.S a month back discussing business with the customers.To us it seemed as if he hadn't taken a bath since then.

He started with the history of the company, then moved on to what kind of exciting and mind boggling work we do,so on and so forth. His incantations had a soporific effect on the audience.

By the time he came to the part regarding the company's expectation from the new recruits, some people in the audience had started snoring audibly.But he bravely went on for another half an hour or so.Finally he wished us good luck.

He was followed by a procession of equally inept speakers who had nothing better to add, but to our misfortune, a lot of time on their hands.

11.30 am:
The HR lady took us on a tour of the campus. I am not sure whether the newbies were interested in the campus, but they were definitely interested in her.Nobody took their eyes off her.She was a bomb!.She would have given Gisele Bundchen a run for her money. After the tour, she too wished us good luck and hoped that we would give the company our best. I don't know about the company but going by Aggro's besotted looks , he was definitely ready to give her his best.

12.30 pm:
The lunch is good, but a bit expensive.I ran into a guy in the canteen. He was my senior. He looked a bit dejected and forlorn. One of the brightest guys in our college. I asked him what he was working on . He said it was some R&D stuff and was very vague about the details. Nevertheless I was impressed. Aggro had a different take on R & D. He says whenever somebody says R&D, chances are that the poor sod has no clue about what he is doing.

2.00 pm:
I just met the guy who recruited me. I and Aggro will be part of his team. I was also introduced to my project mates. One of them was watching an interesting video on You Tube and as soon as he saw us coming he quickly switched on to the development environment and pretended to be busy. The other guy I met was busy taking a call. I assumed it was an official call.Aggro disagreed.He swears that he heard the words honey, sweety and restaurant. I am not so sure. It must be Aggro's wild imagination.

6.00 pm:
Wow! I just completed my first day in the office. Aggro says it was boring, except for the interaction with the HR. He spent most of his afternoon chatting with her on some internal chat tool. I am sure Aggro has already started zeroing in on his honey moon destination. Mentally at least.

Day2:
11.00 am:
I had my first team meeting. One of the developers told our manager that it was not possible to ship the product on the committed date. It was buggy and way below standards, the geek said. He had logical arguments to back it up.This fueled a heated discussion among the participants, that lasted for little over an hour.Even with my limited experience, I could see that the geek was right and was being sensible.At the end of the meeting, the geek was out voted and it was decided that product would be delivered on the committed date. I felt sorry for him.
12.30 pm:
Over lunch I discussed about the meeting with Aggro. He had some inside information that the geek would be moved out of our project. The You Tube guy would instead take over the responsibilities from the geek. I am surprised at the decision. Aggro says it comes with the territory. His advice to me is to never argue with the boss. This is how his weird sense of humor put it...

One fine day if your Manager says that the team needs to sacrifice a goat for the betterment of the product, you shouldn't argue with him. Common sense should not cloud your judgment. Instead of trying to comprehend the relationship between the quality of the product and the sacrifice of a goat, you should instead throw in a suggestion like sacrificing a goat is an excellent idea. In fact the whole team should light a bonfire and dance around it semi naked,arguing that it will foster team spirit. Such brain waves will get you brownie points during appraisal.

4.00 pm:
We had another marathon team meeting. This time some quality guys were also involved in it. A quick mathematics from Aggro indicates that the word "Team spirit", "Innovation" and "Proactive" has been used 256 times. Aggro is not completely sure since the standard rhetoric was sometimes punctuated by burping and belching sounds.Spicy lunch I guess.

Day 3
10:00 am:
Today I attended a technical presentation. The guy who spoke had a paunch belly like most other participants. In between taking calls on his mobile and drinking endless cups of coffee, he mentioned about frameworks, libraries, code re use and platforms. It was all overhead transmission for me. Aggro says none of the souls who attended it gave a whit about what was being presented. He was right. People were busy drawing meaningless doodles on their notebooks, dozing off, smsing jokes(I presume) and basically doing everything except listening to the presentation.

Towards the end of the presentation, there was some excitement. One portly gentleman suddenly woke up from his slumber and intended to make his presence felt. He went on some totally irrelevant tangent , which I guess nobody (including himself) understood. The presenter having nothing better do, welcomed this intervention and started arguing passionately with him. After half an hour of futile discussion, both of them felt pleased at themselves and decided to take the discussion off line. The others heaved a sigh of relief.

1.00 pm:
We are having lunch with somebody Aggro introduced to me. The guy has 2 years of experience and this is his fifth company. He says he wants to pursue his MBA and he is waiting for his MBA results.If that does not work, he will make his all important third jump in the last nine months. He doesn't want to settle for anything less than 50% hike. My remark of "Isn't it a better option to remain in a company for a few years, learn something and then make a decision", was met with a "WHERE-DID-THEY-RECRUIT-THIS-HALF-WIT" look from Mr MBA. Aggro quickly came to my rescue and changed the topic.

Day 4:
Our product was released today. Everyone was giving high fives, except for the geek. He had a distraught expression on his face.

Day 5:
11.00 am:
Today we are out on a team lunch.This is a continuation of yesterday's celebration.The lunch was in some fancy restaurant on Church Street. The right side of the menu, looked very prohibitive.I was told that I could order anything I wanted. Obviously the company was sponsoring the lunch. Most of the dishes were half eaten or just sampled , when the waiter presented us with the bill. I felt sad at the enormous waste.

Frustration and cribbing seems to be the natural state of most software engineers.Somehow they seem to find solace in constant whining. As if following some unwritten protocol, the guys started complaining as soon as they were out of the restaurant. The ambiance was not good, the food wasn't authentic Chinese. The company no longer cares about employees, its time to look for greener pastures, blah blah blah.

Week 2:
Today I was asked to fix a bug. I was excited at the prospect of laying my hands on the source code. I wanted to debug the code and understand the flow. My project mate(who sometimes reminds me of Wally in Dilbert) told me that it was not necessary. He asked me to straightaway change Line 300 of GetSingletonObjectUsingFactoryPattern() method . I was supposed to change the For Loop to While loop. When I saw the source safe history, I saw that there were five previous check outs and check Ins .Each time the For Loop was changed to While Loop and vice versa. When I asked him about this, he mumbled something about Refactoring.

This reminds me of Alan Kay's quote " Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves"

Week 3:
The customer has come back with what is being warily called as a lower-than-expected rating.As usual Aggro through his devious means has got hold of the right information. Supposedly the customer was so disgusted with the product that he has vowed never to outsource any work to our company. Mr You Tube,Wally2 and the manager are traveling for the damage control.

Month 5:
Its been 4 months since I have joined the company. Nobody seems to be interested in doing their best. Visibility, building castles on the air and internal politics seems to be the way of life. The geek has quit and today is his last day.

Having nothing better to do, Aggro with some of his friends have come up with the some interesting facts:

Supposedly out of the 1000 odd employees, around 20% are freshers(Out of which 75% are male, 24% females and the genders of a few employees is still under debate).
Among freshers five couples have started dating each other, two are on the verge of break up.
Almost all of the new inductees have added a few pounds in the past few months, thanks to the sedentary life styles.
The new receptionist is being touted as the Bipasha Basu of our company. Not surprisingly all of them barring Aggro want to be her John. (Aggro still has high hopes that somehow he will patafy Gisele one day).

Month 6:
I have put my papers today. Nothing about this company makes sense to me anymore.

The managers are power hungry and incompetent to the core. They are driving business to the ground. With the precision of Luftwaffe, they are bombing down every promising project.

The best guys have long left the company. The desperate one's are trying to fill in their shoes.

The HR is still serenading new joiners with their creative fantasies. Short listed interview candidates are being promised nothing short of Utopia.

The fact that six months of my career has gone the drain is still haunting me. One good news is that Aggro has finally impressed Miss Gisele and they are going steady. He is going on a long term on site visit. In terms of quality , he says that the work he will be doing there is comparable to data entry operators.

I have a couple of offers from multi nationals. I am not sure that I want to join them. I have set my eyes on a small start up. Nothing fancy, but far more satisfying I hope.

Somebody said "True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it". It sounds like music to my ears.

Mein Kampf

2007-10-28T20:45:00.001-07:00

In my last blog I had promised that I would be explaining about OS Threads . Since I did not find enough time this week to come up with something concrete, I decided to churn out some nonsense to fill in the space, which I hope you will tolerate. I promise to tie up all the loose ends as soon as possible.

In my opinion those four years of engineering, that metamorphosed me from a semi incompetent idiot to a complete dunce, truly deserve a mention.

When I passed out of 12th, I was vaguely aware of three disciplines in engineering, namely Civil engineers(constructed houses), mechanical engineers(manufactured nuts and bolts) and computer engineers(got paid well for doing god knows what).

But the buzzword among students was Electronics and Communication. Every one I met or spoke to, recommended this branch. They were predicting all kinds of dire consequences for people who dared to chose CS.(not enough jobs, too much competition, market crash blah blah blah).People told me that Electronics was "Evergreen, timeless and always in demand".

The brain washing worked. I chose Electronics . Unknowingly signed on my death warrant.

First year, all branches had to go through a common syllabus. This irked me a lot. I was raring to have a crack at my beloved Electronics. Instead I had to learn about boilers, chemistry(the subject), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and a myriad other useless topics.

Our first lecture was Maths. I could spot the math lecturer from a distance weaving through the busy corridor. The large spectacles, the Miss Wormwood look and a complete lack of dressing sense gave her away. I have always wondered how math lecturers reproduce...

After a quick introduction, she immediately dived into the world of Fourier transforms, Cauchy's integral theorem and such equally mind numbing topics. The rest of the class promptly went to sleep. Von Neumann aptly put it..."In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them".

I knew Maths would be my number one enemy for the rest of the semester.

However after my first work shop science practical, I had to change my opinion. Workshop was a nightmare! Shop floors in our college were located at the far end of our campus. They reminded me of the Russian gulags. Every Thursday I would reluctantly trudge towards those concentration camps awaiting execution.

First half of the semester involved, what was euphemistically called Fitting. This involved rubbing a piece of cast iron with a blunt file, until one passed out of sheer exhaustion. After a couple of hours of sawing furiously , a tiny scratch would appear on the cast iron. Whew!

After a disastrous few weeks, the lab assistants realized that there was more cast iron in my brain, than on the entire shop floor. They would watch me with amusement as I struggled with sheet metal, carpentry, welding and just about everything. Trust me, it is truly difficult to be incompetent at everything you do.

Second semester was relatively easy except for a monster called Engineering graphics. Graphics was all about drawing cylinders, cones imagining them from top view, bottom view , lateral view etc etc. No amount of tilting my head, squinting at my drawing sheet, adjusting the mini drafter or sharpening the pencil helped. I somehow scraped through it.

Putting behind all the nightmares of the first year, I eagerly looked forward for the second year. I would now be taught my subjects not some junk from other disciplines.

Little did I realize that Electronics and Communication engineering, is a sublime form of torture. The syllabus is humongous, designed by sadists who truly hate man kind for some inexplicable reason.

One could hope to understand all the electronics subjects by studying approximately for say, one million years. In my opinion every electronics engineers should be awarded for his bravery, before he gets admitted into an asylum.

With great deal of effort one could hope to remember the names of all the subjects in a given semester. Understanding the subjects was impossible.

No matter how hard I tried, I simply did not understand Signals and Systems. Our lecturer would come up with gems like "Convolution determines the system's output from knowledge of the input and the system's impulse response. It can be shown that a linear, time-invariant system is completely characterized by its impulse response". I would rather prefer a Swahili movie without sub titles any day...

Antenna theory was crap. The only redeeming factor about Antenna was the cute female mallu lecturer.

Microprocessors was taught by a senile old man. Every half an hour or so he would forget what he was explaining . So after a month or so, my note book was in an infinite loop of Push and Pop instructions. I knew it would remain so, till the end of the semester. Thanks to our amnesiac lecturer.

All theory subjects pale in comparison to the dreaded labs. Murphy's law originated here.

The only equation I truly understood was V=IR. Equipped with this profound knowledge, I would valiantly try to demystify every lab question. Implementing them was any way ,out of question. Thanks to the instruments. A carbon dating on the lab instruments would have revealed that, they were manufactured somewhere during the mesozoic era. The instruments were truly plug and pray kind.

My mini project was something called a "Musical doorbell". I worked on my project diligently. (which involved burning a lot of silicon, a few failed attempts at electrocuting myself and some major investment in semiconductor companies). The output was truly music to my ears.

Unfortunately my project guide had a different opinion.. " Idu musical door bella ? Male galladalli kappe kugida hage ide ! ".

The only subjects that I was good at were C, C++ and Microprocessors. Somehow I was drawn to it like a magnet and got addicted to it. Little did I know at that time, that these subjects would lay a foundation ,for what would be my bread and butter for the rest of my life.

Before winding up this blog, I should mention about the ecosystem in Manipal.The student life in Manipal is very interesting to watch. An anthropologist would perhaps neatly categorize the student population into the Hip gang, the Cognoscenti, the Muggers and the Amused lot.

The Hip gang were the easy ones to spot. They would always hang around the juice center , flaunting their billion cc bikes , bulging biceps and surrounded by coterie of bimbos. The collective IQ of this gang would be somewhere between that of the protozoans and molluscans. For most of them Engineering was kind of paid vacation.

The Cognoscenti(the truly brilliant chaps) on the other hand, would always be buried under a book( while most of the mere mortals would be blissfully unaware of its existence ). They were in every sense ,the true citizens of the Library.

The muggers were the ones who took ample advantage of the Indian Education system. Most of the muggers would be academically excellent because of their unique talent to learn anything under the sun by rote.

All you had to do, was to inform them that something was part of the syllabus and then throw at them a physics text book, a telephone directory or the stock market scripts. Lo and behold, they would reproduce it verbatim in the exam, without missing even a comma or full stop(And sometimes even the publishers copyright).

The amused lot (which included the likes of me) neither had the charisma to join the Hip gang, the desperation of the muggers or the intellectual capacity of the cognoscenti. So invariably my lot would sit on the fence, never venturing into any of the these territories and watch the others with amusement.

This blog is turning out to be longer than I expected. Its surprising how the human mind can spew nonsense by truckloads, but when it comes to writing something creative, suddenly you get the bloggers block. Well, let me finally wind up this blog, with the promise that the next one will definitely be about THREADS.

Hello World!

2007-10-07T21:03:00.001-07:00

I have been straining my myopic eyes reading innumerable blogs from the past couple of months. Some of them are insanely brilliant, some barely pass the muster and a lot of them are horrendous. So it comes as no surprise that even I was inspired to join the bandwagon and have a blog of my own.

But that threw open an interesting question. What could I possibly blog, that would compel people to read it?(Holding a gun against their head is ruled out). After a lot of thought, I listed down a few options and their possible outcomes.

1) People usually write about their vibrant lives and interesting experiences. I have a life style almost bordering on the comatose. About my sense of humor the lesser said, the better it is. You see, after I say something funny, I usually get a stoned look from the person on the other end. My intent to blog is not human tranquilization. So sharp, witty and humorous blog entries are ruled out.

2) I could blog about interesting stuff like say sex, booze, food etc .Trust me ,it would be as useful and informative as taking acting classes from Fardeen Khan and Celina Jaitley. So option two is also ruled out.

3) I could stick my neck out and offer opinion about social issues.But whose interested in it anyway? Our minds are heuristically tuned to occlude any thought related to poverty, illiteracy and such mundane stuff.

4) Hollywood and Cricket are adequately covered by television. Times Of India enlightens us with every bit of celebrity information, right down to their brand of underwear (unless of course it is Britney spears in which case it is not applicable). So no bollywood, no cricket and no celebrity gossip on my blog.

To cut a long story short, all popular reasons for blogging are ruled out in my case, except one. Programming!

I guess blogging about programming should come naturally to me, atleast to some extent, since I consider myself to be a programmer. (With due apologies to all the real programmers and geeks out there).

My intent to blog is simple...

Explain programming concepts in the simplest possible manner. So you can expect gross over simplifications to get across my point.

Avoid technical jargon and mumbo jumbo as much as possible. This inevitably means long blog entries.

Avoid my blog entries from looking like rehashed MSDN articles .So I am sacrificing completeness for the sake of clarity.

I will rely on constructive feed back to improve the quality of the blog so that it will help all the non geeks.

So fasten your seat belts as I take you into the interesting world of operating system processes and threads, in the next couple of blog entries...

Lets say you have to write an earth shattering program in some language, that has to add two numbers and display it..

So as a first step you get your favorite editor up and running .You crank out the following code in your favorite programming language.

static void AddFunc(int x, int y) {
int z = x + y;
Console.WriteLine(z);
} //Lets ignore the syntax and the language for the time being.

You then compile this program without any errors and you successfully get an executable file out of it called Program.exe.
(This calls for a celebration. So give yourself a pat on the back and imagine yourself to be a coding stud.)

When you double click on Program.exe on the hard drive, the operating system tells the processor to start executing your program. Assume for the time being that you are blessed with some supernatural power, that allowed you to peek into your computer with naked eye.. This is what you would see...

1) Since the processor understands only machine code, you will see your program represented in machine language and loaded into the physical memory. Something like this...

Mov AX, [X]
Mov BX, [Y]
ADD AX, BX
MOV [Z], AX
HLT

2) You will see a set of general purpose registers (like AX,BX) and memory locations with some data in it.

3) You will see a special register called Program counter. (It identifies the memory location from where the next instruction has to be fetched for execution).

4) You will see the hungry processor devouring the above program systematically in the following manner...

Fetching representations of ADD, MOV instructions (called opcode) from the memory and determining what operation it has to do.
Fetching the data associated with the instruction (called operands) from the memory.
Executing each instruction in the same manner, until it gets conked on its head by a hammer. ( In the above case the HLT instruction does the honors)

Congratulations! What you saw above with your naked eye is what operating system designers call a Process.

So what is the difference between a program and a process? Carefully look at the above items
Item 1 is the program.
Item 2 represents the various Inputs/Outputs for the program.
Item 3 and 4 represents the State of the program.

Item 1 +2 +3 + 4 represents the process.

Instead of talking about a running program in terms of its input, output , state of registers etc and confusing the hapless programmers, the OS designers decided to abstract out all these details and logically call it a Process.

In a typical multi tasking operating system like Windows, we can have several applications running simultaneously on your computer. For instance you can have some hideous looking word application explaining the intricacies about your project design. Simultaneously you can also have an internet browser showing some sexy photos of Paris Hilton.

But wait a minute, how is this possible? From whatever we saw earlier, at any given point of time the processor can execute only one instruction. Also the CPU registers and memory can contain the data and instructions related to either MS Word application or the browser application at a given point of time, but not both.

Which means basically the OS is conning us and making us believe that it is simultaneously running two applications or processes. What the OS basically does is, it switches from one process to the other so rapidly that we get an illusion that it is running two processes simultaneously. This is what OS designers call as Pseudo Parallelism.

So what happens to the state of the MS Word process when the OS switches to the browser application? Well, every damn information about the process gets written into a data structure called Process Kernel object. So at a later point of time, when you get bored with Miss Hilton's photos and decide to finally go back to work, the OS silently loads all the data from the kernel object into the memory and registers. The processor resumes execution of the word application, from where it had left and as if nothing had ever happened. This is called a Process Context Switch.

Apart from the details mentioned above, every process has the following information associated with it...

A Process ID that uniquely identifies the process.
Security information associated with it such as User Id and its privileges (You don't want a rogue program deleting all your files on the hard drive while you are busy ogling at Miss Hilton's photos. So any program that your browser downloads will not have sufficient privileges to do any such dirty business.)

I have just scratched the surface and I will be getting into a little bit more detail about processes and introduce threads in my next blog entry.