a common man ಸಂಜಯ

Nothing wrong in imagining… as John Lennon would agree…

This morning it was so depressing watching the news. I really wonder
how much these Indian news channels are helping (the wrong party!) Many
of the scenes from the idiot box are showing with full zoom where
commandos are hiding – wouldn’t this give a clear idea to other remote
part of the terrorist gang who’re watching the same channels, and are
surely in radio contact with the perpetrators in some way? With some
common sense they should prefer security instead of sensationalisation! But otherwise they’re doing a marvellous and really courageous job of going out there and letting us know what’s going on.

I’ve hardly found entertaining the graphic
violent movies that make a game of death. And this is hard reality –
its so terribly painful just watching it – I can’t imagine people who
are going through it. One of my friends called and we spoke about it,
and he said he’d dedicated his one hour morning meditation in the to
all those affected in Mumbai. Much more practical way of dealing with
it I realised.

Going one step beyond the obvious, if we reflect
on Herman Hesse’s words “You only experience that which is within you”
– I feel that in a way (but what way I don’t know) – in a way –
humanity on the whole, of course including me, is responsible for this violence.
May we individual basis cultivate peace in our hearts.

Once up on a time even the terrorist had surely started off as an innocent man. Somewhere in some circumstances, maybe holding on to some past incident, someone exploits him – manipulates his intelligence. Makes him believe he’s fighting for some noble cause. To the extent that he rationalizes his merciless butchering of his fellow human beings. How much he has to steel his own heart, ignore its crying and try and stamp it out, and act like a machine to be able to do this. What a terrible burden of anger and hatred this unfortunate man is carrying… where did it come from… so much of it? He cannot escape the fact that he too is human, he too has a heart that can love – yet he is moving further and further away from it…

What kind of ’emotional insensitivity’ training they go through to ‘inhumanize’ themselves. They may
celebrate their ‘success’, but how long before it hits them – the true the gravity of what they’ve done – not just to the victims, but to themselves.

Too big for my shoes….?

Originally uploaded by common man.

Too big for my shoes? I may end up thinking so sometimes, but this picture proves quite the contrary… !

When my wife brought up this picture we took in a tourist center in Innsbruck, couldn’t resist posting it here. Now I’m back in Bangalore, after having taken a sort of somewhat risky step quitting my job, I’m working as a freelancer Software Designer. Luckily have been quite busy so far.

Still, the ‘some day’ hasn’t yet come when I sort out my pictures and write more details about my trip and lots of other things!

In one of the daily kaggas, one of the things I felt is its warning us that detachment should not deteriorate into negligence. Of course, I know a lot more about negligence because I’ve been better at it 😉 But there have been a few detached moments as well have an idea about the difference, so making a note here…

In detachment there is strength and devotion. Detachment is energetic and active. There is a distinct sense of clarity and alertness.

In negligence there is weakness. Negligience is passive… it just comes from lack of energy and sheer lethargy. There is no gratitude for one’s own existence – its all drowned in indifference, apathy. There may be a cloudy dullness. There is selfishness, which may even deceptively be disguised as a wonderful idea.

But they appear to be so similar – there may not be much visible difference at all!

Maybe only a very thin line between the two? I don’t know how to discriminate easily. I often think I’m being detached or objective, when I’m just being negligient. Maybe one check would be to monitor the characteristics (Eg ask ‘Am I being active or passive?’)

Both of them strengthen over time.

Allowing negligience to strengthen leads to deterioration. Progress lies in strengthening detachment.

There was once a school-going little boy, who liked to answer the
teacher’s questions in the classroom. Whenever the teacher asked any
question, he would lift his hand enthusiastically “me me me I know I
know”. The teacher being bored of seeing his hand go up, would
look around and pick someone else or maybe some unfortunate victim who hadn’t been paying any attention. But this boy would all but stand on the bench hoping that he’d be asked. Eventually would ask this boy if nobody else lifted their hand.

Not that he got the answers right of course, but he would usually want to try
anyway! 😉

But however sure he was of the answer, there was a usually a certain
discipline in not giving out an answer unless the teacher asked him.

Somewhere down the line, Sanjay seems to have lost a bit of that restraint over the years… He better try to get it back again!

This site was really getting bogged down with spam (though maybe not all of it visible easily) and it was pretty slow. I even got a mail from google… unfortunately for the wrong reasons…

For almost a couple of years this site was the first hit for many keywords like ‘sanjay m’ (When I couldn’t give an email to a new contact, I’d just ask them to google for my name! 😉 ) but not any more heh heh!

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Google Search Quality
Date: 2008/9/9
Subject: Removal from Google’s index

Dear site owner or webmaster of msanjay.weblogs.us,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at msanjay.weblogs.us:

lots of crazy words
[…]

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some of your webpages from our search results. Currently pages from msanjay.weblogs.us are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.

Looks like I need to resubmit the URL again to google using their webmaster tools. Also some readers had complained that this site dosen’t open in IE at all I myself had seen this some times though I had no problems with firefox.

Anyway now I’ve FINALLY upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and hope that these issues are addressed now. WordPress upgrade was so beautifully effortless, kudos to the team for such an excellent effort. The UI and user friendliness was really cool esp the automatic upgrade of plugins was just beautiful.

Having been out of touch with this site for a while, have lots of things to write about, and should be back in writing action soon with plenty of pictures as well!

I’ve always found a lot of benefit in open, honest communication. This was a really nice article that highlights the advantages and definitely something worth attempting…

Living With Radical Honesty, Brad Blanton

Monday, July 28, 2008 5:30 AM

I learned that the primary cause of most human stress, the primary cause of most conflict between couples and the primary cause of most both psychological and physical illness is being trapped in your mind and removed from your experience. What keeps you trapped in your mind and removed from your experience is lying and we all lie […] all the time. We’re taught systematically to lie, to pretend, to maintain a pretense because we’re taught that who we are is our performance. Our schools teach us to lie, our parents teach us to lie. We’re all suffering from mistaken identity.

We think that who we are is our reputation, what the teacher thinks of us, what kind of grades we make, what kind of job we have. We’re constantly spinning our presentation of self, which is a constant process of lying and being trapped in the anticipation of imagining about what other people might think. Our actual identity is as a present tense noticing being. I’m someone sitting here talking on the telephone right now and you’re sitting there talking on the telephone and writing or doing whatever you’re doing. That’s your current identity and this is my current identity and when you start identifying with your current present-tense identity you discover all kinds of things about life that you can’t even see or notice when you’re trapped in the spin doctoring machine of your mind. So radical honesty is about delivering yourself from that constant worrisome preoccupation of, “Oh my god. How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing?” Then you can pay attention to what’s going on in your body and in the world and even pay attention to what’s going on in your mind. […]

Just look at what you notice in front of you right now, your environment, wherever you are in an office or wherever it is. Noticing is an entirely different function than thinking and what we do all the time is that we confuse thinking with noticing. When we think something we act as though it has the same validity as something that we see. I’ve got a bumper sticker on my truck that says, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like your thinking just goes on and on and on and on.

–Brad Blanton, Center For Radical Honesty

~ Charityfocus.org

A picture says a 1000 words. This is quite true even of UML, the Unified Modeling Language that’s used as a diagrammatic representation of software artifacts. One of the key advantages of having a diagram is to convey a lot of ideas with a simple glance. Diagrams usually simplify one’s perspective, and can give a holistic view of the entire system where one may can instantly and intuitively see how different aspects are related.

For some engineers, career growth may mean getting into people management – leading bigger and bigger teams of people. There are some of us who like to stay rooted in technology, and even as an individual contributor, growth of course is still inevitable. Apart from being fun, it is a fundamental necessity to avoid the decay of stagnation.

In any case, one of the key areas we need to grow is in our ability to communicate ideas to others.

UML provides an effective means to help us do just that. The diagrammatic notation enables engineers to communicate aspects of the entire software lifecycle, and is intuitive enough to give even those unfamiliar with the notations a fairly good idea.

Sequence Diagrams are one of the types that depict a time based flow of events. Here’s a nice tutorial by IBM Developerworks, and another one on the agilemodeling site.

Long long ago I used to use Rational Rose, that was a pretty cool and intelligent tool to work with UML. This usually was purchased with a limited floating license, which meant that one of us on the network had to close it in case another one wanted to use it 🙂 Once it was taken over by IBM, an organisational policy discontinued its use. An alternative we had was Microsoft Visio. This was a very very far cry from the intelligence and flexibility offered by Rose, and our average quality of diagramatic representation deteriorated to convenient block diagrams. Visio did provide good templates and support for UML, but seemed to usually be completely out of sync with any kind of understanding of what I wanted to do and quite a few times I found myself fighting with it esp for Sequence diagrams with dragging the mouse around resulting in items elusively moving around! (I found that changing some of the default settings made things easier, more info on the arcane topic available on request)

Anyway currently I have a license for neither Rose nor Visio, so to create some sequence diagrams now, I needed to look for something new. As I’m short of time, before that I first gave Microsoft Word drawing a try (aaack even though I could find workarounds like grouping text boxes and making everything I need in one place, and kept making copies of them, this approach was still horrible!)

Then I tried umlet( heh heh almost sounds like Omlet 😉 ) This was an excellent piece of software, I particularly liked the Eclipse integration. The amazing thing about umlet is that it converts simple text into a sequence diagram. So, all the intelligence of putting in the arrows and objects and lines is built into the software 8)

But I got stuck with having no control of object lifelines. The diagrams could be exported as JPG, and I was almost prepared to get into jpg editing using something like Paint (ugh) but luckily found another tool on the net: Quick Sequence Diagram Editor (sdedit).

This was conceptually similar to Umlet, where we enter text and it generates the diagram. But this one was soooo amazingly cool and elegant, using it made me feel like I was literally falling in love all over again! What a lovely piece of software, it definitely saves me tons of time and effort, and especially provides a lot of maintenance and flexibility!

It could be added as an Eclipse plugin as well, I’m sure lots more people would benefit from that added convenience (just a thought, though its good enough for me right now as it is as a standalone).

Try out both these tools, and see which one you like. What follows are just some more details.

One roadblock I hit in sdedit was what seemed to be an inability to specify something that’s being returned – but after a while looking closer at the comprehensive example, it turned out I could use an = sign to display that text. Another problem was that export to JPG resulted in a red tinge (I even tried to explicitly set a white background going to options while exporting, still same output). But export to GIF was perfect (white background). Calling a self-message is forcing an additional return value that comes at the end.

When I’d compromised on that minor annoyance and settled down for this one, I was about to close my umlet window when I suddenly figured out the reason for the lifelines. With every line of text, one needs to put the lifetime of the object to be extended for that one line in a comma seperated list (in the examples there were only two values).

It looked like Umlet is more sophisticated and customizable, while Sdedit text is more lightweight, elegant and readable.

While helping my newphew-in-law with a physics astronomy assignment, and came across this amazing video of something that I’d posted earlier.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home, That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
– Carl Sagan

ನನ್ನ mobile screen ಹಾಳಾಗೊಗಿದೆ – ಅದರ ಮಧ್ಯೆ ಒಂದು ದೊಡ್ಡ ಕರಿ ಚುಕ್ಕಿ ಆಗಿದೆ. ನನ್ನ ಪುಟಾಣಿ ಜಿಂಕೆ ಮರಿ ಅವನಿಗೆ ಕೊಟ್ಟ ಆಟ ಸಾಮಾನೆಲ್ಲ ಬಿಟ್ಟು ಇದನ್ನೇ ಬೀಕೆನ್ನುವಾಗ ನಾನು ನಿರಾಕರಿಸದೆ ಕೊಟ್ಟಿರುವುದಕ್ಕೆ ನನಗಾಗಿರುವ ಶಿಕ್ಷೆ.

ನಮ್ಮ ಕಛೇರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾರೋ ಕೇಳಿದರು – ಯೀನೈತು ಸಾರ್ ಅಂಥ.

ಹೇಳಿದೆ… “ಅಪ್ಪನ ಮೊಬೈಲ್ ಗೆ ಧುಷ್ಟಿ ಆಗಬಾರದು ಅಂಥ ನನ್ನ ಮಗ ಕರಿ ಚುಕ್ಕಿ ಇಟ್ಟಿರೋದು”