The Big Programming Hurdle

This small article is meant mainly for novice programmers and for the ones in a novice-to-level 2 transition phase.

What we do when we start out making a project. Let me tell you what I did. Some years ago, I had to make a small project. The first thing I did was to search on the internet for similar ones. I got a few code snippets. I tried working with them but all were useless. I searched for more, found some more useless things. I kept on searching and discarding what I found, until finally after around four months, I decided that the web had nothing useful for my project.

But, during all this time I did not try to understand the technique that I could use to implement the project, just trying to search for an existing one. Moreover, looking over all those existing useless projects made me think of something similar to the existing ones. I could not finish that project due to that jamming of creativity, and just ended up with a bunch of useless existing projects. 

I just abandoned my work and retried after two months and guess what it was easier than I first thought, just to implement it myself. 

The idea is that in this age of Internet, many of the programmers get so dependent on it that their creativity is clogged once they do not find an existing solution to their problem. So, they just keep on working with and trying to mend the existing code rather than writing  their own source code, that could have been easier. Internet is a very useful resource for beginners but excessive dependency on it is harmful.

Please comment back with your views and suggestions.

CWC 2011 Quarterfinals: Stunning Indian Win Over Aussies

As I anticipated, India beat Australia in World Cup 2011 quarterfinals. This was a big match in the sense that two of the top three contenders for this world cup were competing (third one being SA). A great innings came from the bat of Ricky Ponting who made a century after 13 months, and this let Aussies put a fighting total of 260/6 on the board.
Aussies got a good start by Brad Haddin and Shane Watson, but could not capitalize thanks to their slow run rate and fine bowling by Yuvraj, Zaheer and Ashwin. A great innings of 104 from Ponting and a quick 38 from David Hussey let the Kangaroos put 260/6 on board. Again, Zaheer proved himself as an enemy of left handed batsmen picking Mr. Cricket Mike Hussey early.
The Indian reply was firm and steady. With Lee clocking up to 158 kmph and Tait and Johnson also touching 150 kmph, it was never going to be easy. But, another good innings came from the Master-Blaster Sachin Tendulkar, giving India a very good start with Sehwag. Everybody played their part and then the World Cup 2011 specialist Yuvraj led Indian to win along with ever energetic Raina. What a world cup Yuvraj is having!!

Overall, it was a very good cricket match with both teams performing well in all cricketing departments. That means Indians performed well in their fielding too, even better or more energetic than Aussies today. But, now comes a thrilling encounter, India vs Pakistan with a warning: "Please do not watch if you are a heart patient".

Please comment back to share your views. Keep reading.

LinkedIn: A Professional Alternative to Facebook

Saying that an alternative to Facebook exists might seem like a joke to many people especially the Facebook fans. Facebook has been an ultimate success story for Mark Zuckerberg and in the context of social networking in general.
But, to many professionals and other busy people, Facebook seems like a waste of time. Things like posting on the wall, sharing unnecessary updates, making friends, playing games, and visiting people's profiles feels like doing nothing fruitful but spending a lot of time. Also, people in general cannot avoid doing this on a regular basis, because there is a sort of addiction. But, whatever our opinion may be, it is the best place to broaden your network and socialize with people from distant places.

But, for people who are interested only in professional talk and not in over-socialization, an excellent alternative exists and that is LinkedIn. Linked has mainly been designed for professional interaction with facilities for making groups for a particular task, carrying out discussions, posting jobs, group moderation, question-answers and building a professional profile, side by side providing limited features for social interaction like sending private messages, posting updates on your profile etc. Also, you can find top professionals from the industry on linkedin. And, what's more... you can find me also on linkedin.

I welcome all your comments. Keep reading.

www.iisc.ernet.in : The worst website I visited

For all those who do not about this website, let me tell you this is the official website of IISC (Indian Institute of Science). IISC stands as the top research institute in India and as one of the topmost in the world.
Let me tell you what actually happened. Yesterday, I applied online for a postgraduate engineering degree (ME/M.Tech) at IISC. I access internet using a dial up connection, that is not among the fastest, but gives a fairly god speed to surf (around 25 KBps surfing). When I filled up the application form, it was like a battle of the ages. It seems like the webmaster does not know about the variety of internet users. On every choice that you fill, you get a javascript doing a processing for around 2 mins, downloading-uploading about 300 kB of data, and there are many choices to make on every page. Whats more, there is a session timeout and no caching. So, you see a lot a javascript processing, click on submit after 15 mins of hard work, and what you see - "Login Again". This is frustrating as you have to fill that page again.

It took me around 100 mins to fill just 4 pages. This was so frustrating that I am writing it down. However, this post should not affect one's opinion about the quality of education at IISC, the only issue is the website.

All your comments are appreciated. Keep reading.