My interrogation with Q

iFlow backend is going to be changed to Q, and the guys in New York have already started their part of work. Couple of weeks back, even I attended Q training just to find out that it is a manifestation of brain of a guy called Arthur Whitney. It is a highly complex language which is supposed to do all kinds of calculations superfast.

Jeff Borror did give us a lot of examples, told us lot of funny stories/incidents (some of them I believe are fictitious). My favorite one is the sudoku one of course .

So, there is this conference wherein people are coming up with shortest solution for a sudoku puzzle. Of course, the Perl guys were the first ones in line as they are famous in writing abstruse code and having sadistic pleasure looking at mortals trying to make sense out of it (after seeing the Q code, I have nothing against Perl guys doing this). Perl guys got their solution in 121 characters and were on the top of the world when Q guys came into the picture. The Q gods got their code down to just 99 characters and were ecstatic.

After all this, there came Arthur boy who managed to squeeze in the solution with just 57 characters, and a variety solutions saying something like "ok, this one takes 17 characters more, but is twice as fast"

I feel this is something very impressive. As I will be doing more hands on, I will be get to know whether my brain is meant to do this or not. They say this langauge is not really for object oriented brains which is exactly what I am.

There will be more on KDB+ and Q as I get my hands dirty with it...

Global Slowdown

There have been lot of sacking done citing the aforementioned reason. Yes... we are amongst those too. There has been firing globally... consultants, service industry everyone has fallen prey to this. You know you are good, but you also know that if time comes, you wont be spared. There is this sword hanging on top of your head which can slit your throat any time.

You see people around you who are really good performance wise and personality wise losing their jobs. Its the times like these when you lose confidence, start doubting yourself and the attitude "Oh... I am special, nothing bad is going to happen to me" doesn't work anymore.

After this was written, Nikhil called me and I went to Morokko (which is a sheesha place near my house btw, don't mistake it for a country). The thought process has been broken and I have no views on this anymore. Feeling just plane numb.

VB6 Deco

As the month of April is approaching, we are getting ready to get rid of VB6. Microsoft has announced that on 8th of April, they will be decommissioning VB6. That means no more microsoft certified support groups, no more hotfixes. Finally they are officially getting rid of something archaic.

We, in office are totally geared up in decommissioning the VB6 based apps. We started the whole getting rid of TFA a while back. That had nothing to do with VB6 deco. OMS deco in Asia was the main reason for doing that. It being a VB6 app is just going to fasten the process now. Anyways, we are almost there now. And we have taken PFA in the umbrella too. So more so, a reason to celebrate.

Actually, I am not very well verse with VB6/macros. I have never really done it. People say with macros you can do more than timepass programming. But I never got such a use case to apply my knowledge of macros, until today. Today there was a randomly color coded list of users in excel and I wanted to sort it colorwise. Now excel does not support sort by format menu. So I was supposed to write a macro to do that. But my limited VB scripting knowledge was a hindrance to that. I was actually contemplating about sorting the list of 150 odd users manually, which actually wouldn't have been such a big deal. A little donkey work..yea... but better than spending a lot of time figuring out 'M' of macro. Finally my manager wrote it to make it easier for me. I have to say he is a really good manager.

Tech Expo '08

Well... lot of hard work, and we are finally through. This was the second year in succession when I was handling a booth of our project at the annual Tech Expo. Here we present the technologies that we use in office to the BU as well as to the grads who have been recruited to join next year. So a real good variety of target audience. Its tiring, talking for so long when you are not actually a talker types. I was assisted by Sneha who was not even part of my project. She is really enthusiastic girl. But I was somehow showing signs of fatigue at the end of it. And as I am really bad at faking, it was visible on my face. That might have driven some of the people away from our booth. Nevertheless it was overall a good effort.

After that we had a party at The Grand Hyatt. It was a good break because we were really sick and tired of Marriott pool side party. And food there was getting more and more insipid. I, along with the grads, started our commute in a bus which was actually meant for the visitors. Kind of grabbed empty seats in there. I finally found someone on the floor who has similar taste in sitcoms as me. Before this, I was kind of having hard time getting along with him because of his sarcasm. More so because he was really being derogatory remarks towards Sneha, and as she is a good girl, she was just smiling and ignoring it instead of getting back at him. I actually suspected if there was something going on between them because I haven't really seen a girl taking such poignant remarks nicely unless and until she is smitten. So I was feeling a little uncomfortable being my rude self with him, with the fear of hurting someone. But once I made sure that there was nothing like that, we kind of hit off well as sarcasm really turns me on.

At Hyatt, we had a open air place booked which is generally used for corporate parties. It had small fountains in the middle. It was covered by really tall walls on the two side. In the front, there was water flowing along the wall to give a waterfall sort of feeling. And the side opposite to that was the entrance, but just behind that was the actual hotel building. So the place was kind of giving me Jallianwala Bagh feeling. Certainly not meant for a claustrophobic person.

Finally they had spotted a non-dry day for Tech Expo. The only VJTI soul recruited this year was looking completely lost, understandably so. He was in a kind of dilemma with Microsoft offer in his hand. But I think I did quite a good job in promoting my company. Will soon come to know if he actually joins us or not. All in all, the event was pretty good. As usual, I feasted on soups, salads and desserts keeping the main course aside.

After this, coming home was a sort of Herculean task, thanks to the traffic at 12 o'clock in the night. We were stuck at domestic airport signal for about 45 minutes and the rickshaw guy kind of gave an intimation that he won't have enough gas to make it all the way. So changed the rick on the highway and finally made it home in a couple of hours after starting the journey.

P.S: Today is my couple of friends birthday. I am trying to call them, but none of them are picking up the phone. I am so mad at them!

Down And Out!

Today was a completely mind fucking day in office. There were thousand things to be looked at, things to be fixed, pending issues to be addressed. Not that I didn't like what I was doing. It was just too much of an energy sapping exercise.

It was one of those days when you are glued to the chair, staring from one monitor to the other without even blinking your eyes in the hope of finding answer to your questions, trying out things and failing. You tweak something and feel that, ok, this is it. But more often than not, it is just not it. At the end of the day, you feel the heat of the day's work. Nothing extraordinary done in the day physically. The net displacement was zero at the end of it, literally. But the mental exhaustion is not even funny.

All said and done, one thing for sure. I am going to get into deep slumber mode today the moment I am horizontal on the bed. And this is going to be a good one, hopefully without any confusing, disheartening dreams.

Aamby Fuckall Valley

I got a chance to visit Aamby Valley, Lonavala, courtesy, my firm. I was considering myself lucky as I was one of the few people who got to visit the otherwise inaccessible place to common people. The place is really beautiful, very well maintained, good weather, but sadly, hyped up than what it should have looked as.

We had kind of negative reviews about Aamby Valley from some of the people who had visited it before. In spite of that we decided to go ahead with it just because of the aura around the name. We were 200 odd people, managing whom should have been a piece of cake for such big organization. But as it turned out to be, the hospitality was completely garbage. You expect such a big name to know at least A B C of organizing corporate events. But they fell short on all aspects. Food, booze, service and even in dealing with the contract that we had.

All in all, the thing which I was looking forward to, turned out to be utter disappointment. Hoping the Grand Maratha Sheraton to be a hit at least.

Prime and Subprime

I can clearly remember, there was a point of time, when in order to convert dollar to rupees, you used to straightaway multiply by 50. But guess what, now it is down by almost 20%, 39.6 as of today. Well... there are a number of factors contributing for this.

1) Baby boomer - The products of baby boomer after world war 2 have now gone past their past retirement age. Somehow I am kind of bamboozled over the concept of baby boomer. May be, after the world war was over, all the soldiers started for their homes and fucked all the women they could find on their way back. Thats the only reason I can think of. Anyways. So, these so called products of baby boomer didn't really added to the population because "staying single" was in air at that point of time. So effectively, now as these guys are dying/on the verge of dying, there is no one to take over. You might say there are Indians and Chinese to work there. But come on, most of us are there in reputed jobs, and even if we are providing some of the labor/cleaning work, we are not good enough for the whole of USA. And we have this policy of "sending money back to home". So knowingly or unknowingly, we do end up helping our economy and screwing their economy by a bit.
According to the policy in US, government takes care of the old/retired people, with the money they make from taxes. But no people to do job, no money to tax. So we have a lose lose situation there.

2) Subprime - Subprime is basically a low value asset in which you end up investing in the hope of getting good returns. As it has been rightly proven now, its only a short term profit plan and might just slit your throat in long term scenarios.
For instance, during the property boom era, the banks ended up giving humongous loans to individuals with no net worth. They did charge higher interest rates, but they ended up giving benefits like no principal payments. When these individuals found themselves incapable of paying back, the banks had to acquire the property they had invested in. By this time, the property bust balloon had burst and it was more cumbersome for banks to get rid of it. So finally, it was the bank who has to incur the loss.
Isn't it really shitty way to make profit.. Only American idiots can do this. Somehow I love to see them making fools of themselves. May be that is why I enjoy watching Family Guy so much.

Its a well known truth that when something matures to a level that it cannot go ahead, it breaks silently and just fades away. Well... I am not saying their economy is screwed and they will vanish sometime soon. But they are surely falling behind in the rat race of BRICs. Who knows, someday in near future, we might end up getting cheap labor from the US of A...

Waste of resources

Well... I know its a no. 1 financial firm known for its IT on Wall Street. But frankly, do they need that kind of expertise? Grilling someone in 10 rounds of technical interview is not funny. Anyways, they take a person who have worked on log4j and make him work on XYLog. If all they need is a person to work on AXB, why cant they take a bloody commerce graduate and teach them that shit. Where are the core java strength applied in that???

Most importantly, what will be your value once you get out of the firm? Nobody knows/uses their proprietary products. So, at the end of whatever years at the firm, you will be still a rookie at core technology. And after knowing/experiencing this, you can't really blame the people for the high attrition level.

Thanks god at least I get to work on core java. As long as that happens, I am happy.