And may there be Rain tonight...

"And may there be Rain tonight..."
The phrase is not as it is sounding right now to most of you, annoyed by the heat. Properly spoken In Irish, it means that whatever happened during the day, may it become a treasurable memory for the speaker.

It's like, you are reflecting on some moments of the day...and you realize that these moments are some of the most beautiful slices of your life, however short they may be...and the prayer escapes from your lips... "May it rain tonight!!!". They say its the final stamp of the rain, that preserves the memory for lifetime.

Well...Elaborating the meaning of the phrase or describing the beauty of Irish language is not my concern here. The moments which I lived yesterday is.

The first drizzle of the season, 6'O clock in the evening, Well I missed it. Shortly after-wards, I was out and feeling the light breeze, I cursed myself for missing it. When I reached home, I was certain that the great Lord wouldn't disappoint me and it will rain tonight. I am not putting any emphasis on my meteorological skills or on my absolute trust in God. It was just a feeling, that it will be raining tonight.

I went to a restaurant, Packed up dinner for 4 people, and collected 4 Beers on the way back. Don't get me wrong, There were 3 friends besides me. When I reached home, it had started to rain heavily, and there was no electricity.

I towelled myself dry, and then I was blinded by a flash. No it was not the power supply coming back. It was the brilliance and originality of my new born Idea. Well, for all the people who are dying to know it, the idea was to feel the rain tonight.We have a Huge terrace outside our place.

To have the beer and the dinner outside on terrace, with all the light coming from a sole candle, getting wet slowly, all the while hearing the droplets plattering by. It keeps you guessing, is it the beer or the humid breeze dashing through the tiny droplets, that's taking hold of the senses. The music of those small droplets when they hit the hard ground at terminal velocity is a soft sound "Putt", barely noticable, but if you concentrate on it, the sound has a music of its own. No wonder, they call rain as the season of romance.

We tried it, and it was truly amazing. I can't describe the feeling in words, I don't have that strong of a vocabulary. All I can say is "May there be rain tonight", so that I can do it again once more and the memory lasts forever.

P.S - For all the people who are going to try this, have some spare candles and empty mineral water bottles. Cut the bottom of the bottle, and light the candle inside it, upside down of course. It leads, air of romance, to the ambience.

Von Neumann Architecture

Von Neumann architecture is a computer architecture model that uses a single structure to hold both the data and the instructions. In other words for a computer to be totally based on a Von Neumann architecture, the CPU shouldn’t make any difference between the Instructions and the data. Von Neumann architecture implements a universal turing machine.

Von Neumann architecture defines an instruction set and details computation as a series of instructions. The machine hence becomes much more flexible. By treating those instructions in the same way as data, a stored-program machine can easily change the program, and can do so under program control. The separation of storage from the processing unit is implicit in the von Neumann architecture.

A stored-program design, as Von Neumann architecture is also called sometimes, lets programs modify themselves while running. One early motivation for such a facility was the need for a program to increment or otherwise modify the address portion of instructions, which had to be done manually in early designs. Of course, this became less important when index registers and indirect addressing became customary features of machine architecture.
Self-modifying code is deprecated today since it is hard to understand and debug, and modern processor pipelining and caching schemes make it inefficient.


In some simple stored-program computer designs, a malfunctioning program can damage itself, other programs, or the operating system, possibly leading to a crash. A buffer overflow is one very common example of such a malfunction. Memory protection and other forms of access control can help protect against both accidental and malicious program modification. These features are generally part of the operating system.

On a large scale, the ability to treat instructions as data is what makes assemblers, compilers and other automated programming tools possible. One can "write programs which write programs".

The separation between the CPU and memory (where the instructions and the data is stored) leads to the von Neumann bottleneck, the limited throughput (data transfer rate) between the CPU and memory in comparison with the amount of memory.

In modern machines, throughput is much smaller than the rate at which the CPU can work. Under some circumstances (when the CPU is required to perform minimal processing on large amounts of data), this gives rise to a serious limitation in overall effective processing speed. The CPU is continuously forced to wait for vital data to be transferred to or from memory. As CPU speed and memory size have increased much faster than the throughput between them, the bottleneck has become more of a problem.

The performance problem is reduced by a cache between CPU and main memory, and by the development of branch prediction algorithms

Harvard architecture is a computer architecture with physically separate storage and signal pathways for instructions and data. The term originated from the Harvard Mark I relay-based computer, which stored instructions on punched tape (24 bits wide) and data in electro-mechanical counters (23 digits wide). These early machines had limited data storage, entirely contained within the data processing unit, and provided no access to the instruction storage as data, making loading and modifying programs an entirely offline process. eg - A calculator.

In a computer with the contrasting von Neumann architecture, the CPU can be either reading an instruction or reading/writing data from/to the memory. Both cannot occur at the same time since the instructions and data use the same signal pathways and memory. In a computer with Harvard architecture, the CPU can read both an instruction and data from memory at the same time. A computer with Harvard architecture can be faster because it is able to fetch the next instruction at the same time it completes the current instruction. Speed is gained at the expense of more complex electrical circuitry.

Computers today use a hybrid of both :))

Date...and Lunch

I got up in the morning, and was awe-stuck at myself. Instead of the regular thoughts, My thoughts were of Her. It wasn't strange, it was unbelievable. Remembering somebody suddenly, whom I have been trying to forget, after a tenure of one year is something that generally doesn't happen to me.

I reached Office at 10. During my entire trip through Hosur Road, I just remembered her. No particular Scenes from FlashBack. Cos there were not enough to make even one single scene. Just a few glimpses from here and there. We didn't used to speak much to each other during College days. One of the reasons being, that both of us are not good conversationalist. She is a little shy and I need serious Ice-Breaking practice.

The rest of the day started passing by uneventful. An unusual start, but "All that ends well is well", I thought to myself. I went for the Lunch...and Voila there she was, in front of my eyes. She passed a flashing smile back at me. I felt my whole body going Cold and my Heart Warm. I smiled back.

She sat down. Haven't changed much, from the past, I mused. We started our Lunch. She on one end of the table and me on another. Staring at each other, smiling, and spooning the food down our throats. Of course its a little difficult when you are new at this. But she seemed to be managing nicely. I finished my lunch, being a fast eater. I just didn't know what I was eating, Of course.

Suddenly she started talking. I couldn't make out what she was saying. I was busy staring in her eyes, already bewitched by that Smile. Of course it wouldn't have helped even if I would have been more attentive. I couldn't hear the words. And making out what somebody is saying to another person just by reading Lips is difficult. Oh, by the way, both of us were sitting on different tables. But what the Heck...I could still see her the same way as if she was sitting with me as my Companion.

She finally finished her Lunch. We both got up. Me alone, and she with her friend (a Guy...unfortunately). We met at the Water Cooler and I finally had some light conversation with her. How is she doing? What are the plans for her MBA? She returned the favor by asking the same questions to me again.

I clocked it. We talked exactly 2 mins and 20 secs. I should be given a Gold Medal and an international Prize for holding a Female's attention to such a long duration of Time.

God Damn me. When am I going to learn to Handle Females?

Note - This is a back dated entry and was written on Sep 7th 2006

The Monk who turned his job for a Dog!!!

One of my child hood dreams was to own a Dog... My own Dog.
Now let me go into retrospection and tell you about my childhood memories. One of my Uncles had 2 Dobermans. He used to take them for a daily run. And sometimes I used to accompany him. He asked me one day, if I would run them for him. I was too eager. Said yes. He gave me the leash for both of them, and asked if I was ready. I nodded with my head for a 'yes'. And then he said "RUN".

I always loved to see those 2 Dobermans, Johnny and Tom, running. But, never knew that they had so much force in them. They literally dragged me behind them. Being in the prime of my teens, and not taken up smoking, I was in proper health and ran for almost 2 Kms with the dogs. It was fun, to feel the power and force on the leash, to see those powerful muscles flexing behind the well groomed fur.

That day I made the decision, "I will buy a Dog for myself when I start earning".
After a long time, I finally became employed. Now I have all the means to fulfill my long awaited dream. And, guess what? I got an offer yesterday from a fellow Infoscian for a Lab at an affordable rate. I was too happy. I was on Cloud number Nine!!!
I told my room mates that we are going to buy a Lab soon. My room mate's reply was "We can invest that money to buy a TV instead". Not letting the comment dampen my spirit, I turned to the second of my roommate. He was serious. By seeing his look, I knew that he was weighing the Pros and Cons of the offer. Finally he said "I would advise you against it". Flabbergasted, I waited for his explanation.

He said "We are in the office from 9 to 9 on a normal day. Who would feed the Dog? We don't get up till 8 in the morning. Who would take the dog for a run and the daily walks? We roam out throughout the weekends. Who will keep company for the Dog? Bro, that would be an act of cruelty towards the animal. What will it do throughout the day? It would go mad locked in the confines of our house."

When I revised his words, I found a lot of wisdom in them. I consulted another friend of mine telling him about my childhood dream and the dilemma facing me. He also had the same opinion as of my roomie.

So, I concluded that I can't buy a Dog right now. "No Worries" I said to myself. I will wait for some more time. But when I looked deeper into the situation, it wasn't so simple. For having a Dog, either I have to get married so that my wife can keep the company of the animal, or keep a house keeper for the animal, in which case the animal would be more familiar towards the keeper. In a way it would be the keeper's Dog and not mine. And I don't want to get married. More over in Today's world it would be too difficult to find a girl who wouldn't mind staying home and taking care of my Dog.

What's the use of my earning when I can't fulfill my dreams with the money I earn? The only solution to this problem that comes into my mind is to Quit my Job and then buy a Dog. So I am planning to Quit my Job soon, and buy a Lab.
P.S - I haven't figured out till now, what will I do throughout the day, besides keeping the company of my Canine friend, once I quit the Job. Any suggestions will be welcome.

Flexibility in Work… A Virtue or Vice ?

Has your immediate Manager or Colleague ever accused you to be inflexible in work? If yes, then let's say that we are in the same boat. I can't understand why Flexibility is considered to be a virtue in work. I mean it's a personal issue, nothing to do with professional characteristics. Why should my Manager or Colleague bother about that part of my personality?

I know that this sounds like cribbing. But before you take any stand on the issue, let me explain my point to you. Consider that a particular task is estimated to take 8 hours. Whereas the reality is that the task actually requires 12 hours. This may be due to error in estimation or some other issue, which is beyond the scope of topic. So when you really slog 4 hours extra to complete the job, you are doing multiple wrongs.

First you are actually giving the impression that the task was actually feasible in 8 hours. Down the line, these small deviations in each task produce an avalanche in the schedule. Also, what we generally forget is that the current estimations serve as a foundation for the estimates of further projects and contracts.

Secondly, you are actually harming your own Company by robbing it of its justified revenue. The four hours you slogged extra don't get billed and the Company doesn't get paid for that. Thirdly and last you are spoiling the work culture of the Industry. If you are slogging today for 4 hours extra, when you become a Manager, you will expect your subordinates to do the same or more, which IMHO is wrong.

Also when you slog, you are diminishing the value of your own work. Consider the scenario from the client's perspective. He knows that you are delivering good quality service, in his budget (in which he is already saving some money). So when you deliver 12 hours of work in 8 hours he, in a way has successfully cheated you. By delivering the code you are not only diminishing the value of the work you have done, you are also encouraging him to cheat you again. You are also strengthening the impression that Labor is cheap in India.

Of Course, I understand the need to slog extra hours because of your or a team members error, or when you are still catching up with things and know that you are not doing the work with as much speed as it can be done. But is this the only reason people slog?

I just can't understand the concept of Slogging. Can somebody explain it to me please?

P.S – This is one of the things I wanted to see getting changed in my company's working environment.