Democracy in Pakistan

I see Pakistan as a failed democracy and to some extent even India is not that far(based on where I stand).
When political system itself is corrupt, honest individuals will not be able to rise to the position of 'Leader' and 'voting' becomes thing like that obligation in a broken marriage, and a tool to legitimize corruption. If the system is so corrupt intellectual act hardly helps, example is the lawyers strike.
Ordinary people are not intellectuals, they just want to live, and it is sad that they are caught in the this, neither voting helps them nor they are Gandhi

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7600917.stm

Interview

These are the things that I have learnt, over the years, about technical interviews.

1) Tech industry has broad divisions like: server side, security, GUI etc. It is would help if the interview knows these so that he could pro-actively inject these in to conversation, so that interviewer could latch on to these.

Ex: Here is piece of conversation
interviewee: I wrote an IMAP client.
interviewer: Was it designed run on Server?
[this gives me a clue that interviewer was interested in knowing whether the person being interviewed had any server-side experience]

2) Interviewer might want to know, how well the candidate, can apply technical knowledge? So they usually ask the candidate to describe the practical scenario where she/he had do apply the XYZ technology.
Example: Describe me a scenario where you had to use 'Synchronization' objects?
In response it is better to use a scripted example so that it sounds compelling. One way to prepare these scripts is thoughfully go through the past experinces, pick a RIGHT one and decribe it as if one is being interviewed.

These are the things that I have learnt, over the years, about technical interviews.

1) Tech industry has broad divisions like: server side, security, GUI etc. It is would help if the interview knows these so that he could pro-actively inject these in to conversation, so that interviewer could latch on to these.
Ex: Here is piece of conversation
interviewee: I wrote an IMAP client.
interviewer: Was it designed run on Server? [this gives me a clue that interviewer was
interested in knowing whether the person
being interviewed had any server-side
experience]

2) Interviewer might want to know, how well the candidate, can apply technical knowledge? So they usually ask the candidate to describe the practical scenario where she/he had do apply the XYZ technology.

Example: Describe me a scenario where you had to use 'Synchronization' objects?

In response it is better to use a scripted example so that it sounds compelling. One way to prepare these scripts is thoughfully go through the past experinces, pick a RIGHT one and decribe it as if one is being interviewed.

http://www.lookupanyone.com

This is a serious stuff, http://www.lookupanyone.com has all the personal details for sale. They will show preview of it without payment and buy full details after paying 40$. This site is held by a company located at

Intelius, Inc.
Attn: CUSTOMER SERVICE
500 - 108th Ave NE #1660
Bellevue, WA 98004

Do they have SSN?
They claim that they have SSN but that seem to be lie because of following reason. When I searched for my name, they showed two results with different postal address, and both address were correct, I have lived at those addresses; my point is if they were to have my SSN, they would have linked those two results in to one. I am almost tempted to buy my personal results and see what they have.

spitting & throwing

There is a subtle difference between 'spitting' and 'throwing'; before 'spitting' the object should have been welcomed to come inside the mouth and to take that step the object must have been a thing of desire, and consequently 'spitting' is more painful version of expulsion, and it is like 180 degree turn around compared to throwing, which is lot more casual act :-)

What made me think about this?
Peter Murphy's song "cuts you up" made me dwell deeper in to spitting. Note that his songs does not convey the same meaning as I described above.

Personally I associate this song with frustration that one undergoes while learning any creative thing. My favorite lines are.... 'it takes you in and spits you out' when you start feeling that you know everything.

Cuts you up - Peter Murphy
.............
You know the way it throws about.
It takes you in and spits you out
It spits you out when you desire
to conquer it, to feel you're higher
.............
.............

Legally unethical?

Looks like TECH especially S/W companies are releasing the products prematurely just to meet their share-holder's deadline. And most of managers are just saving their skin by satisfaying their superior instead of standing for the quality of s/w, and in that zeal to appease they do not mind letting a crappy product go to customer.


Unfortunately there is nothing illigal about it... and I attribute this to overwhelming influence of wall-street.

Aging in to a cynic

People tend towards cynicism as they age, and usual things do not seem to make them spring like they would have done in younger years.
I see art as an exception; music, literature and paintings might still be able to move even the aged. So to be on safer side, when mind is still open for ideas, it is good to develop a taste for art(in addition to sex and money) .

War and Victory

For an outsider, victory is minuscule in the vast theatre of war, a shiny chair in the big auditorium. In real world, one can not say when exactly one tresspasses victory and how it looks, so in a way victory is a blur.

Days that we need are...

Step-father day
Step-mother day
Son day
Daughter day
Step-son day
Step-daughter day
Maid's day

Should certainly boost the economy.

What if either India or China cease to exist?

There are many movies on what happens a city in US get wiped out, and I am sure that is already is sated subject but there are unsatisfied viewers.

More worrying this if there is a natural disaster in either India or China, big enough to wipe the country out of the map, world would have have serious problems. The disaster that I am thinking is something like some celestial object hitting those country or great Everest bursting out. In such a scenario following are the things to worry...

a) What happens to world's economic balance. Currently China is world's biggest factory and we are all have been made dependent on it?

b) Will UN secure the borders of affected country against vicious neighbors? Take an scenario where India gets wiped out of the planet earth, and then expatriate Indians would like to rebuild the country, will the UN help them secure the nation against China/Pakistan?

I think Hollywood should make a movie on this subject.

Do we need Natural disasters?

In one word I would say "YES". It has advantages, one is that it reminds humans that they are not the masters and that might make them behave little bit decently. If were no natural disasters, I am sure humans would have pruned the nature completely.

There is another tiny advantage of bringing the population down, but I am yet to see the result of this because people who dies in these accidents are usually in terms on 1000s++ which is nothing compared to billions++ population. Also if you take in to account the money that goes in to reinstate the affected people, it is not worth.

Needless to say that people affected from it this is insensitive, but in broader terms these these catastrophes should make us more responsible.

paint scoop size

I have started learning to have better control over color mixing, and this is small part of my effort to apply Munsell's color theories. During this i will have to be able to measure the amount of paint that is going in to mix, and do this I do not have a measuring cup, instead I have to somehow use the pallette knife, and when ever I scoop up the paint, I have to memorize scoop size and count how many scoops. This is very crucial for mixing and somehow I never did this in past. I do not know why Art schools do not address these issues forget about letting the student practise. I am realizing that this is very crucial.

Overcoming still harmony of life

There is a string-instrument that also resembles a lady showing her back to us, and neither the string-instrument nor the lady is defined distinctly using crisp edges. Presence of strings just hints about the String-instrument and similarly hair just hints that there is a lady, and every thing in between the string and hair represent neither human body nor string-instrument.
Strings of the string-instrument's are broken and also been depicted as chain. And the fresh breeze, shown using green colour represents arrival of fresh energy, and the lady's hair color is indicating that she is absorbing it.

Now, let us go beyond this visual description to the meaning; Life style, especially the ones adhering to the popular social templates could be sounding like a perfect hamrony to neighours but be boring to the owner of life. And the lady, shown here is one such frustrated individual, and under the influence of fresh breeze, she has broken the chains of her monotonus life and has also decided not to play the music to sooth others. Essentially I have tried to depict a person who is over coming monotony of life and I hope you are also able see it.

Diorama - Dear brother

This song is by Diorama and this remainds me of song "Sinner in me" by Martin L. Gore, and both these songs are about the Sinner inside us. We cannot define this sin using generic rules of our society, and the sin that I am referring to is rather personal and might not be sin at all, according to society. This Sinner does not have shape so we can neither kill nor expose him/her to be prosecuted by outsiders. We continue to carry them and live, hoping that they would die one day, before us.

Coming back to the song, lyrics is compelling and also impersonal compared to some of his other songs. I have marked my favourite lines with <->

Diorama - Dear Brother
I am your doubt
Your constant sin
The swollen shape <->
Of your regrets <->

You make your way
To where I am
As you remain
Inside the cold white room


Brother shoot me down
Kill me from within

I am the void
Carved in your face
All eyes and ears
Are bouncing off

Don't let a sound
Seep through the wax
You left a friend
Inside the cold white room

Brother shoot me down
Kill me from within
Brother shoot me down
Kill me once again

I'm the hurricane <->
In your water glass <->
Stir me <->
Stir me <->

I am your first step
Into no man's land
Walk me
Walk me

Brother shoot me down <->
Kill me from within <->
Brother shoot me down
Kill me once again

As I write this I am listening to this song, wish I could post the mp3 file. If you get to listen to the song I am sure you would get bitten by scream "Brother shoot me down... Kill me from within.."

painting "due to reckless virility"

This is painting is about impact of over population on Nature. A twig is being chased by phallic pistol which symbolises over population. Twig is jumping over the fence to escape from man. Blue block on the right edge is a human body(see the shape of obdomen and navel) and is approching the twig, totting his pistol/penis. As he moves, he is lifting the land underneath(see the furling ground) . Man's foot is coming down from the top, crushing tree trunks.

In broader terms is overpopulation is an unquestionable hollistic weapon that humans or nations or groups use for various purpose( say to conquer the land).

Final painting



Practicing 1


Practicing 2

Cheap black-mail

Why these people want to someone's rights...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5275866.stm
By using holocaust for such trivial cause one just cheapens the history.

Spineless Indian Govt. descends to Chinese Govt. side

This is news is shocking...

"...Beijing said Mr Narayanan had reiterated that the government in Delhi viewed Tibet as part of China...."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7321899.stm

Giving work to Chinese Govt's inet blocking s/w

Tibet dfdhsadhsdavfhv tibet bnzcxvgzdxvchgsdfhdsvfhdfavb
tibet dsjkdvfjksdbvbadjcb

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080317-great-firewall-of-china-expands-as-tibetan-riots-continue.html


:-)

Audio-dictionary project

This is about my Audio-dictionary project who's goal is to convert English dictionary in to a mp3 file. English dictionary contains far too many words and frankly I am not interested in all of them, in fact I need just tiny part of it so this audio dictionary holds selected few words.

Simplistic view
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(M-W Dictionary) ----> (Text-To-Speech Engine) ---> (WAV file)


Detailed steps
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
0) Installed AT&T Text-To-Speech or "TTS Engine" on my PC
1) Choose the words from TEXT version of Merriam Webster Dictionary,
to make files like a.xml, b xml.. etc
2) Wrote a program to
a. read words from XML file and feed in to "TTS Engine"
b. programmed "TTS Engine" save the words as WAV file.
3) Convert the WAV file to MP3 file.

Current status
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have prepared the WAV containing the words starting with letter A and yet to repeat this proven mechanism on the words starting from other letters.

Why.....?
In my profession of software engineering I use few words for everything and feel lacking when I try to write paragraphs, especially the compound sentences are open pits. So to do something for this I am trying to improve my grammar and also vocabulary and this audio dictionary is part of that town.

Collecting Word...
Two years ago, I started thinking about making an audio-dictionary and began underlining the words on paper edition of pocket sized Oxford English dictionary. Next was to transfer the words from paper to PC by manually typing(note that I had chosen only few words under each alphabet). I had two concerns about this methods namely: I was using abridged version of dictionary with subset of words and pocket dictionary did not have examples; I believe that best way to keep a word in memory is to listen or read it being used.

e-Dictionary instead of paper version..
I started searching again for different source of words, a dictionary, and this new slightly ambitious agenda required me to transfer plenty more words from paper to PC and that looked impractical, and that is when I focused on e-Dictionary so there would not be need for me to type words in to PC.

Web-based dictionary or Text-based dictionary....
I started with www.m-w.org, a Web-based dictionary and thought of programmatically querying the web server for word's meaning, and this strategy did not go anywhere, moreover www.m-w.org lacked examples so gave up the idea of using www.m-w.org. No other online dictionaries,like www.dictionary.com, were worth pursuing because they lacked history of publishing any paperback editions.

Cleaning up Gutenberg's project dictionary....
Then reluctantly, I browsed Gutenberg project site and found text-based version of 1903 edition of Merriam Webster dictionary. There were 26 files, one for every word, and these files were big, with elaborate information on every word, including examples, and also found that these files had syntax similar to XML. I decided to use Gutenberg's files as source of words and started deleting the unnecessary details about words, using my C# scripts. In addition to this I also deleted hundreds of words completely.

Regular Expression
Cleaning dictionary was all about searching for patterns and replacing, and Regular Expression is made for such kind of work. I used Visual Studio 2005 editor to search & replace based on patterns.

At present I have done this for file containing the words starting with "A" and need to repeat for other files. So I have A.xml and A.wma

Right Text-To-Speech(TTS) voice....
WindowsXP comes with a synthetic voice, sounds too robotic to comprehend. Then I came across sweet sounding AT&T natural voices, at first I thought they are expensive but costed just 40$, and I think cheap for so much natural sounding voices named: Mike16 and Crystal16.

Program using TAPI ....
Now I had both TTS voice, A.xml ready and just needed a program to take the lines from A.xml and feed them to TTS engine. I reading TAPI, a COM based Microsoft's voice library and wrote an application in C++. TAPI is scalable in sense one can set different volume to words contained in same sentence, and TAPI also has XML syntax to spell the words, and my program is able use these features of TAPI. Last surprising thing was TAPI is able to save the voice in to a WAV file and had not expected this from TAPI. Now I can add TAPI to my resume.


Is this all useful?
I have listened to WAV file several time and surprisingly I find the XML file more use full than the WAV file. XSLT made a.xml very much readable, here is snapshot of it.


View of a.xml

Grip to go back

It seems that distinct times of our past are like texture on rock, they provide us the grip to go back.