Mr. Vijay Gupta, a senior software manager in a reputed production company, is walking towards his office. He was slightly late today so he was trying to walk as fast as he could. As usual, he was dressed in formals and was carrying his laptop. Suddenly, while walking on the foot-path, he slips over banana peel and falls down. Ooooops!!

Now, coming back to our question, who do you feel was at fault here? Was there any mistake from Vijay’s end or did he pay for mistake from someone else?

Once upon a time, there was a doctor who used to enjoy making regular trips to a nearby jungle for adventure and studies. However, on his 100th visit to the jungle, something happened.

That day, he left for jungle early in the morning. There was nothing new here as, he always used to leave early for his jungle/study trip. With him, he had carried all usual stuffs like first aid, communication devise, camera and binoculars. Soon, he was deep inside the jungle.

Though he had visited this area before, on that day, he noticed a tiger in that area. The tiger was lying down near the river. The moment the doctor noticed the tiger, he got scared and cried for help. As a result, tiger got up and started staring at the doctor. The doctor, in order to save his life, started running as fast as he could.

Next day, police found his dead body in jungle….

The story ends here. We were then asked a very important question, “Who do you think was at fault? Do you think it was Doctor’s mistake? Was there a mistake or no mistake?”.

When we heard the story for the first time, we were so much disturbed that our first reaction was, “No, Doctor didn’t commit any mistake”. However, as we enquired further, we learnt a very important lesson.

I would like to ask the same question to all the readers of this blog post. Who do you think was at fault? Do you think it was Doctor’s mistake? Was there a mistake or no mistake? Kindly reply through comments.

Let’s consider few cases.

1. Traffic problems:We face traffic problems everyday and at every point in time, we blame government and police for that. If we think rationally, we would notice that the laws are already in place to enforce the lane discipline, Helmet and seatbelt usage etc. But the question is, do we follow them properly? Use of helmet or seatbelt is for our own safety but we still do not use them regularly. At this point, most people would claim that the cops should monitor and fine the rule breakers. But then, the reality is, people tend to wear helmet or seatbelt only when they notice that there is a police vehicle in front.On Mandovi Bridge, I notice this particular problem everyday. Whenever there is a traffic slowdown, people try to occupy the other lane completely without even a rational thought that this would simply convert it to traffic jam. At the end, we do get traffic jam AS EXPECTED.
2. Social Equality: We know that this problem exists everywhere. In India, since we believe that law can help everywhere, we have reservation systems in place. Most claim that certain communities did get benefits out of these laws. But a conscious and rational observation would show us that majority of people are still suffering from social inequality. Remember the participant in the show “Kaun Banega Crorepati”, where he mentioned that his community is still not allowed in village temple. All this, while the required laws are in place.
3. Criminal Activities: While the required law and enforcement agencies are in place, we still observe these cases around us.
4. Eve teasing: This occurs everywhere and to almost every girl. Even though every brother knows that his sister has experienced this trouble, he would ignore such incidents when it happens to “some other girl” or he himself might get involved in eve teasing activities involving “some other girls”.
5. Attack on parliament: We could literally say that the people involved in this have raped our national pride. As per the law, the criminal involved is already sentenced to death 8 years ago, but not yet executed.

Why am I talking about all these problems at this point in time? It’s because, all these observations bring about a larger picture. It highlights the true reality. Even though laws are in place, it has not helped in getting rid of any of these problems in first place. Now, what can we conclude with help of our rational thinking and observations?

As it could be seen, all these issues could be traced back to the individual behaviour or awareness towards social responsibility. Though we have required laws in place, we have not made any advances in raising the level of social awareness and building up of individual character.

Most of the schoolgirls face the problem if being teased by her own classmates. Most schools try to take strict actions and often follow strict punishments to avoid it. However, the problem continues. My father was principal of a school, which also happened to have such cases. However, he decided to try out a completely different solution.

While the strict actions and punishments were being taken against the students involved in teasing girls, he went ahead and started celebrating “Rakhi” festival with aim of raising the sense of brotherhood. In few days, it was noticed that it helped in making students realize their mistakes and thus, reduced the number of such cases dramatically.

When only the strict actions were being taken, students used to be careful only in school premises, but not when they used to be out of it. However, the effort to build up the character and sense of brotherhood in every boy and girl did help to handle the “out of school” cases as well.

Keep in mind, the laws can be broken and in most cases, they either help only after the incident has occurred or end up causing a bigger harm. For example, in order to make the best laws, we have only made the entire system so complicated, that a wise man has to think twice before going to court.

Law is not a medicine. Law is only a process. Following the law and order, is again an attribute of individual character or level of social awareness. Since we have failed at building up the character or social awareness, it’s pointless to ask for new laws.

Another best-known human nature is the ability to forget. Last year, there was a protest against corruption. It seemed as if we would definitely see some results. However, at this moment in present, I have no clue what happened to that protest or what’s going to happen next. There is a saying that time heals everything”. I would just add “including the good things” to it.

When there is a loss of individual character and lack of social awareness, the laws tend to be useless. This leads to a political advantage:

1. First make an issue out of any incident to gain political benefits
2. Once the issue starts affecting you as well, simply try to divert the issue with other related but less important thing, till the issue itself is forgotten. We are best at forgetting aren’t we?

Dealing with situations:

We can deal with situations either in reactive way or proper way. The reactive approach is often the result of instinct and can lead to unwanted outcomes. For example, the chance of a person getting drowned in water increases if he acts reactively. Similarly, a person beaten by snake can die before he could be treated due to his reactive actions (faster heart beats due to fear of death).

Thus we need to deal with situations in proper way. Unfortunately, we cannot think about proper way or provide proper help quickly. Thus, we should be in a position to handle the situation, till we identify a proper way, rather than being reactive.

When person is under medical emergency, First Aid is applied. If we happen to see it from other angle, we realize that it might sound stupid, as First Aid itself, does not save life. It is of no use to just apply First Aid and provide no medical aid. It just helps us in buying time before we provide the right help.

Similarly, in case of war, soldiers use a concept of cover fire. They are not aimed at a particular person, but help the group to relocate to a better location.

In martial arts, certain actions are followed only to confuse the opponent and divert his attention. Such techniques are to be followed in case the opponent is stronger as compared to you.

In industries, people try contract negotiation as a technique to buy time to properly understand the requirements and allocate team members.

Conclusion:

Lets consider it from the perspective of the recent unfortunate and horrible rape incident in Delhi. People have been:

1. Doing the March protest: Good way to unite people and express opinion, but such protests cannot be sustained.
2. Asking for a new law: On what facts and rational thinking do we believe that it would help to “Solve” the problem.
3. Discussing about what certain religious entity said about it: Isn’t it the easiest way of diverting people’s attention from the real problem? Ignoring all the efforts taken to raise individual character and social awareness by these entities, why spend time on discussing a “misunderstood” statement? It would not help in solving the problem but would indeed help political actions to be able to divert the attention.

Time has come to stop teaching others on what to do and what not to do. We all need to follow the path of proper enquiry to understand the world and the problems while increasing our individual character and level of social awareness. My new year’s resolution was not to change the world, but:

1. To follow proper enquiry to learn from past and current issues
2. Act myself whenever a thought comes to my mind saying “Somebody should do something now”.

With the help of GPS tracking in google map app, I started following the path. Everything went fine till I reached the turn identified with red circle in the screen-shot above. I was surprised to notice that there was no road for the turn at that point.

Fortunately, I was little familiar with this area and thus was able to identify the alternate route which could connect me to point B. Following screen-shot will show you the alternate route.

Luckily, I was familiar with the location and thus, was able to identify the alternate route quickly. But the people who use the app to find paths/directions while travelling to a different state or an unknown location may not be so lucky.

While using the applications like google maps, we all need to remember that it is just a tool, which help us only to find a solution to the problem, but it need not be the best or the most accurate one. In some cases, we may be presented with wrong results as well.

Thus, if you are using google maps to plan your next family trip, make sure you verify all the information properly. Otherwise, your family trip may convert into an interesting adventure trip.

• Enjoy services provided by sites like Youtube
• Download free and opensource applications
• Make video calls through services like Skype
• Share screens and work from home (I hope you like it)

Seriously, high speed internet adds significant value to our daily life. Like most of my friends in India, I use BSNL Broadband to access high speed internet service at home. It provides pretty good connectivity in terms of speed and quality as shown in the screenshot below:

However, during monsoon period, I often face connectivity issues which can cause problems, especially if I want to work from home. Thus, I prefer to have alternate source of high speed internet connection as backup. I prefer this source to be wireless and stable while providing good internet speed.

While searching for another source of high speed internet access, I came across Airtel 3G. Following screenshot will show you the speeds that I get with Airtel 3G:

These screenshots show that Airtel 3G provides internet with speed which is half of what is provided by BSNL broadband. Depending on the quality of network, I can even get better speed.

To access this internet connection on my laptop, I make use of the “Portable Wi-Fi Hotspot” feature provided by my Samsung Galaxy S2 mobile phone. It’s a great device with lot of good features and this is just one of it.

I have been using the internet provided by Airtel 3G for around a month now and I am pretty much happy with it. Now I use it for most of my regular tasks and rely of BSNL broadband only to download large files.

Personally, I do not believe in concept of teaching. Humans are smart and intelligent animals and as such, they are capable of learning new things themselves based on their experience and observations. Thus, rather than providing a training, I preferred sharing my experience and knowledge on ANN with the members attending the course.

Considering the fact that this event was organized for staff of engineering colleges, the “Joint – Discussion” was titled, “Engineering Solutions With Artificial Intelligence Using A System Popularized As Artificial Neural Networks“.

Generally, we discuss Artificial Neural Networks either in theoretical perspective or in terms of purely scientific applications. However, the world of practical engineering is always different from theoretical or purely scientific perspective. The same applies to applications of ANN in perspective of modern digital engineering.

In this joint discussion, we spent first two days trying to understand the concept of artificial neural networks. To understand it practically, demonstrations were provided using the examples developed in JRuby. The code written for this purpose is now available on GitHub (The link is provided at the end of this post).

For next two days, all the participants were allowed to experiment with the JRuby code. Participants could play around with different training sets while modifying variables like learning rate, momentum, activation functions, number of hidden layers, number of neurons in hidden layers etc. They could also experiment with performing the same training using backpropagation algorithm and genetic algorithm. This helped them in understanding the challenges faced by engineers in practically implementing the solutions using ANN.

On the last day (Friday 19th, November 2010), we concluded the joint discussion by determining the capabilities and limitations of ANN based on the experience and knowledge obtained by participants in four days. At the end, a demo of OCR written in Javascript was given by Tejas Vernekar.

During the joint discussion, some of the alternative non-neural solutions for few problems were discussed as well. A ruby equivalent of spell checker (which uses statistical language processing) originally developed in python was also demonstrated. The ruby equivalent code is available in the code in GitHub Repository.

In case you are interested in JRuby code used during the joint discussion, you can download it from this GitHub repository.

Eventually, I thought of writing my own programming language. While I was in engineering college as a student, we had a subject on language translators. This subject taught us lot of theory on how languages are compiled or interpreted. However, we never got a chance to write even a simple programming language during our practicals. According to few, it was not possible to write one in one semester’s time.

That turned out to be my main motivation. I decided to write this programming language without using any compiler tools like LEX and YACC. I ended up writing my own lexical analyzer, the grammar parser and the language using the concepts taught to us in engineering college only. I worked on it daily for around an hour and within two weeks, I had the basic language ready.

Today, the code is released under GPL license. It’s available on GitHub at http://github.com/kamatanay/MayaLanguage

I hope it would be useful for students learning language translators.

Why did I name it Maya? Well, that’s the name of my sweetheart wife. Isn’t that a sweet name?

For those who don’t know, Deepika Padukone is a bollywood actress. The article I was reading was related to removing a software (Symantec Antivirus) which was not related to film industry or actors in any context.

I found this quite funny and thought of sharing it. Do you find it interesting as well? Let me know your thoughts through comments.

Enjoy!!!

1. Include ActionController::UrlWriter in your class
2. Call the method directly on ActionController::UrlWriter

When I tried it out, only the first method worked. I was able to use methods generated from named routes in console after including ActionController::UrlWriter. However, it was not possible to call those methods on ActionController::UrlWriter. This looks like an issue with documentation to me.

It might be the case that the second method used to work in earlier version of rails. As rails is constantly being developed, some refactoring might have made the second method obsolete. I hope rails community will fix such issues in documentation soon.

method_returning_true?.should be_true

or

method_returning_false?should be_false

This is because, ‘be_true’ and ‘be_false’ matchers considers ‘nil’ to be false and anything other than ‘nil’ to be true. When we write methods in ruby which end with question mark (‘?’), intent is that the method will return boolean value. To ensure that our tests will always reflect the intent of code, use following to assert boolean values instead of using ‘be_true’ or ‘be_false’ matchers:

method_returning_true?.should == true

or

method_returning_false?.should == false