Can your life be like a wave?

My brother doesn't blog these days but I love this masterpiece of this blog -

http://uglyduckling1of9.blogspot.com/2009/05/its-amazing-how-ones-life-can-be.html#comments

It says that your life has the same graph/pattern as a single day in your life - like fractals - its recursive, repetitive and also that life is a series of events that sometimes double back on themselves (recursive) and sometimes result in unexpected flows.

Why I like this is for two reasons -

• For about 10 years now, in my life, each time I think I have figured out what the bloody repeating pattern is and find a way to work around or live with or beat the problem - something else crops up.
• This problem crops up with a frequency of 3 months, 6 months and 1 year
• The pattern that repeats each time is the same - something comes up, something good happens or si get a result or someone does something, I begin to take interest in that and believe that will continue - and then someone or something brings the house down.

Its fun in a way and pain in many ways - but it always surprises me that maths can explain it very easily :)

Crowd sourcing your own unhappiness

We all check Facebook - we all check it very often. Once in a while I come across a nice link on Facebook that I read and share, or a picture that I truly feel is good and appreciate it, or a witty comment. But 99% of the time I find stuff that if I take too much interest in, then I will be causing myself some unwanted sadness.

Its not bad things that make me sad, its too much happiness.

People have become so addicted to Facebook and social networking that they put up every small moment of their life into it - XYZ is at ABC with PQR, XYZ is feeling lazy, XYZ visits The-best-place-on-earth. Pardon me for being so damn rude, but sometimes I don't want to see all these happy events in your life - I just want to live in my own shell!

I know what you are saying - if you don't like it then get out of there! Yes I will - the day I truly fall sick. But before that, let me put across my point.

Back in the old days before all these websites, my cousins lived in Singapore. Obviously they visited a lot of places, were happy, had fun and took pictures and videos. I heard about all this, but never actually saw the pictures instantaneously. Being good in GK, I knew about Singapore and had an idea about the place in my head. Once in a year when these guys came to India, I would look forward to meeting them and then seeing the pictures or videos or whatever it was. There was some fun in that. Then came digital cameras and all the photo sharing and emailing - even then, there was a delay - so I saw their happy faces a week later as opposed to an year later.

In both these cases, I saw the pictures of the happy moments when I was in a peaceful state of mind. Not when I was pissed off.

Cut to today - almost all of us have a high pressure job. Everybody has tensions - real or imagined - and we are all trying to live a fast life. We have a moments attention span on anything. Inspite of all this, because of peer pressure we all check Facebook daily. Or Google+. This peer pressure is something that we refuse to acknowledge as real - it has become so much woven into our life. We do not even know that we are under peer pressure. We feel it is but natural that we should feel the urge and check these sites everyday, if you have a smart phone then even more often, and update statuses.

We will not go to a place, enjoy the place, come back, relax and write a nice paragraph - we will get into the car, tweet, post status, talk about the car, get into a conversation, reach the place and again tweet or post about it, tweet or post about the hot chick or hunk you saw, food , loo, tired, return journey and then that you are falling asleep dead tired.

Excuse me - did anyone else feel that there was more fun in writing a relaxed account rather than all these updates?

Imagine looking at your timeline and seeing all these updates - you feel people are doing a lot while you are doing nothing; Do the same thing while or after you had a bad day at work or after you spent the whole day alone; Or after you did not shop and are feeling bad. Does it hurt? What if you are the easily influenced kind? It hurts more then.

And once you are hurt, you hurt those around you with unwanted unhappiness.

The twist in the tale is that you and if you hurt someone then they too will post about the sadness which leads to a few more comments and even more sadness!!!!!

So - while we are supposed to get to know what the other person was doing, we don't stop there. Most of us don't - very few can stay aloof of all this.

And that's why I hate these platforms.

My over used ligaments - an anticlimax story

"No fracture, but probably due to overuse" - This is the cause given by the doctor here about my knee pain issues. Its funny because I am just 28 and haven't really abused or overused my legs that much.

For the last couple of months I was training hard to participate in the Oxfam Trailwalker Japan 2011 - a 48 hour 100 km walk over some beautiful hiking trails in the Mount Fuji area. I was not fat, but was not fit either. I walked a lot,ate less and pushed myself to build my stamina. I graduated from 5 KM walks home to 16 Km walks around the imperial palace. I could not run or jog like all those hundreds going around the imperial palace, but I sure hoped that one day I could. On our practice walks for the event, we did a 28 KM and a more recent 54 KM walk - I did them both with just one issue that I could not continuously climb mountains. But I was making progress.

Yesterday, this whole affair has an anti-climax when I had to drop out of the event after just 18 KM due to a stinging pain in my knees. The day started well with us four going to the track and field at Odawara - the day was bright and sunny and hydration was the only thing on our mind. I was sure I would slow down somewhere on the walk but was looking to complete the thing in about 30 hours. By the time we got to the start of the uphill trail I had a strange feeling in my knee. I pushed on and in fact walked to the top of that 600m hill without stopping much on the way. I probably stopped once for a 30 sec break. Walked downhill from the top and started the next 800m climb and did it with a surprising amount of stamina and did not stop at all on most of the uphill bits. But then, 70% into it, the knee started to hurt with each step. And then from the ankle up to the knee along the side. What the fuck! By the time I got to the checkpoint at 18 KM, I was trailing my teammates by 300 meters and unable to catch up and a stinging pain on each step.

I probably became the only guy in the history of Oxfam to give up at that early stage!

I had to withdraw, but I decided to help the support crew. And when I saw my teammates today morning at the 80Km check point making good time and looking to beat the 30 hour mark, I did feel jealous and depressed at the same time.

I got into the train home and to my horror that by the time I had to get down after the 1 hour train ride, my knees were locked and paining. Dropped off my stuff at home and went to the hospital - thankfully no fracture but a damaged ligament or to put it in the words of the doctor, overused ligaments. I am told to rest and cool my knees for a few weeks.

Wasn't the kind of ending I was looking for to this event - but life gives you a bouncer every now and then.

Impressions of Tokyo on the day of the earthquake

Unless you have been living in a long forgotten corner of the world where you don't have access to news, you probably know all too well about the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear plant accidents in Japan. March 11 2011 will be an unforgettable day in my life not because I experienced the biggest quake in my life but because I saw the kind of orderly and calm behavior that I have not seen elsewhere.

To put things into perspective, it was a normal day where we were all fighting our daily battles, some losing battles, and going about our work. It started with a slight jolt which became a shake and pretty soon we were swinging and well aware that this was not one of the usual tremors that we face every now and then. It was a minute but felt like a long time - under the desk, reaching for a ringing cell that has fallen down and trying to tell my wife that I will call her back in a minute - I don't know why I said I will call her back, but i definitely asked her to stay inside and safe.

By the time it stopped shaking, the trains had been stopped, the popular carrier which supports iPhone here was unable to take any calls, and the tsunami alert was in place. As we all gathered our emergency kits and helmets, it became clear that norther Japan had been hit by the tsunami and there was large scale devastation. I managed to reach my wife on email and tell her to come to my office and that we will walk home. She was 15 KM away on the street but could not really appreciate why I said we will walk home. The trains had stopped but she was hopeful that we could get a cab. I tried not to scare her - she would know soon how panicky it would be on the streets pretty soon.

There was news that some building was on fire, a refinery was burning, someones wife managed to save the 42 inch TV while everything else fell down, blackout, someone running to the day care to get his son, someone praying - it was a mess. The glass facade of my building began to creak and we moved towards the center of the building. By the time the security verified the building was safe and we were safest in the building than on the street, almost everyone was either planning to leave or thinking how the hell should they get home now. Down on the streets, it was full of people trying to get home. And this is where I began to admire Tokyoites.

Just to summarize,

• People stood in line for taxis that were not available in large numbers due to the rush - 100 people waiting an hour or so in a line
• People pooled for the cabs, some paid the fare on the meter when their stop came without bothering to split the money with others in the cab then and there.
• People did not rush or push; cars did not honk in the traffic jam
• Starbucks, Subway and all those places were open and friendly and no overpricing or shouting
• The police and traffic police were out and helping people find the way around as they walked - you don't know which way to walk if you take the subway everyday
• People helped each other and were friendly
• There were 300 people waiting in a queue for a bus that would come every 15 mins and at max could take 50 people
• Some people who could not walk home waited at office in hope that trains would resume soon - the emergency staff and security at the office promptly got blankets and emergency food supplies for everyone
• In some offices, people formed groups depending on where they were going and one person lead the group like a tour guide and made sure everyone reached home.
• There was no shouting or line breaking even when the few trains started late at night
• Hotels did not overprice or throw people out, in fact they opened the lobbies for everyone for free
• Apple store and other shops that sold PC's let people check email and charge phones etc

It was far from chaotic - it was just a large number of people walking. And in all the 6 KM that I walked home, I did not see one person behaving badly or losing calm. Not at the airports where flights were cancelled, not at the stations where the trains went nowhere.

And this continued till the next day afternoon when everyone finally managed to get home - some walked 30+ KM to get home or slept somewhere in some station for that night.

Most of all - media did not hype anything. Not a single scene of destruction or dead body was shown for at least 4 days following the disaster.

What I saw here made me so happy that I wonder why we cannot emulate the same in India ? Would it kill us if we thought of greater good or stopped being selfish and stayed calm for a while?

Throwing away ideas with the trash

About 2 years ago I had an idea - why not put real estate ads and Google maps together to create a mashup? The idea was born as I browsed through GumTree sitting in London. The idea was simple, and I even registered a domain name for that on the spot - http://2-let.co.in - and an idea was born.

Trouble was that I was never exposed to web development on large scale. So I needed to learn something like Rails or Grails to be able to build this quickly. Sure, there were so many sites with the usual example program and mashup. Read them and off you go.

Troubles

• I am the only guy with a clarity and interest
• Others want to get the job done, get a beer and enjoy the weekend
• The learning curve is steep and the work load in office is deep
• The examples are too simple and I do not have the help of an architect

And with these the plan fell through the cracks.

Similar fate met another couple of ideas as well. At the end of my stint in London I threw away the notebook with all these scribblings.

Today, I still don't have time for such things - all I managed was a few java libraries that I host on sourceforge, few people download and no one cares to leave a feedback.

I read somewhere that Google now puts real estate ads on its maps in US or somewhere. Well someone implemented it.

Some day....

Reliability - gone to dogs

In todays world of cloud computing and clusters, reliability is a hard thing to ask for and the mantra and buzz phrase doing the rounds is "failure is not unexpected and you need to build in such a way that you can ignore the failure and still retain system functionality" - whew!.

Google and Facebook really convinced us on this didn't they - build large server farms running clustered code on cheap commodity servers where memory and processing power are cheap, build code that can survive failure by virtue of duplication and replication and there you go - the best system on the planet!

How about Twitter going down so many times in a day? Well, scale it using some fancy cluster or cloud software and paradigm.

Great!

How about the real physical world? Batteries dying down or not charging, cables snapping, back paining etc etc? Do we scale ourselves using the Matrix?

Of late I have been hit by problems like the battery on my laptop discharging in half the time ( its a new less than 2 months old battery mind you!), cable snapping, shared rive write failures etc etc.

Why? Why cant you just buy a piece of hardware these days that works well for a good time!

I am not a stingy bastard expecting something to cost me pocket change and run for ages - I just want god damned company products to last their god damned printed life time!

I lost files the other day due to a shared drive write failure.

I lost files some time ago when a long life DVD failed because the plastic was peeling off!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

The only advice that is available - free or paid - is to accept failure.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

PS: This laptop/netbook that I am writing this post on advertised 14 hours battery life; Taking it with a pinch of salt I expect it to give me 7 hours.

I am NOT getting that - and yeah ... the answer apparently is that I am crazy enough to run Linux on this. Fortunately the guy giving this was far far away from me.

Hajo 0.2 beta released

The much delayed 0.2 beta of Hajo is now released. I had the code for this ready more than a month ago but with my moving to Tokyo and the settling down here, I finally found the time to get the release out. This version does not add much in terms of the interface but adds the two following things

• An embedded Jetty server that published the underlying DB stats on port 1122
• An option to start a multi threaded server in the Thrift code on the server - the simple tests that I did seemed to work, so this is now released. Need to test more on this for next release and add more interfaces.

The application can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/berkeleydbtools/files/ .