Engineers' Day..!

Hmmmmm..!!

As my dearest Mommy reminded me today ( As I say, I'm awful with "Dates"..! ;) :-| )... Today is "Engineers' Day" ...!

This is to mark & commemorate the birth-anniversary of one of India's legendary engineers & statesmen, Sir M. Vishweshwaraiah
(Please excuse me for the scary-looking spelling...!!
I feel English is very POOR in its ability to convey the pronunciation of words unambiguously and with "high-fidelity" , like say Kannada, Hindi, Tamil & other phonetic languages..!
Indeed their design itself must be a feat of great linguistic Engineering..! :))

But alas, the joy was short-lived...as I re-gained my consciousness.. ( & conscience..!! )..!

I immediately joked to my friend Vijay..

"See...in the same way as...
a Lady-bird is NOT a bird...
a Silver-fish is NOT a fish...
a Software-Engineer, is NOT an Engineer...!"

Although we both let out peals of hearty laughter at the instant analogy & word-play, we both understood..that WHAT was actually meant...was a realization that we so-called Software Engineers...are really some sort of impostors getting away with that title..!! :-/

In deed, what we are today, is the result of an amalgamation of the great advances made by painstaking ( & sometimes outright CRAZY !!) leaps of faith & intuition by people from so many varied disciplines like Mathematics, Physics, Electronics, etc..!!

It is SAD & shameful indeed to see the amount of RESPECT ( leave alone interest!) shown in things like Algorithms & Mathematics by so-called Software Engineers that we see now-a-days..!!

And it is sadder still, to see people who ARE truly interested & capable, being unable to bring out their ideas to fruition, due to the money-minded, goal-oriented world around... !! :-/

So, let us truly try and innovate in some-way...or the other...!!

And fer that to happen....we need to Do something Interesting....rather than pretend to Do something JUST fer the sake of doing it...!!!

{ Which is exactly the CASE in 99.999% of ALL our lives...( Yes, ALL of U(s)..!! )...

We just go on pretending...!
And our conflicts are never-ending..!
}

Anyway, kudos to the great engineers...
(including the Legendary ones & also the countless behind-the-scene-GEMS in our Software field too..to the people behind the great ideas, & algorithms on which we have constructed our so called Information Technology...)

It is humbling & inspiring at the same-time...to REFLECT on even one interesting Engineering marvel however big or small...! :)
It need not be the Hoover Dam or the Great Pyramid of Giza, it could even be the Quick-Sort or the Binary Search Algorithm...

Or...even simpler...one can marvel at NATURE's Engineering...our very minds, bodies, plants, or even a simple flower, or a nest...! :)

WHAT i feel is Missing in us...is that spark of LIFE, the zeal that we can see in Children & in some colleagues/friends...or even in our OWN childhood snaps perhaps(?!)...!!! :)
{ And also a healthy dose of skepticism and curiosity, as illustrated later below in one of my favourite Calvin & Hobbes strips..!! :) }

Rather than Engineers...we appear like Zombie-Robots...products of some other Engineer...! :))

Instead of doing something purely from the Logical, cunning, & biased MIND... Let us try to do something from our HEARTs...i feel THAT, is the Key..! :)

Try it..!!

Keep your Eyes "Open"...!!

With Lots of LOVE & Best Wishes,











the boy in "rags"
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For true ART...just look into your "HeART"!! :)
:- raghu.ugare
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Click on the below image..! :)

A Random Idea in Rags..! :)

Using Randomness to Achieve a Controllable Behaviour..?! :)

Phew..!!

It so happened, that, yesterday evening, out-of-the-blue... my dear friend & colleague Krishna Melkote asked me if we could design a kind of throttling algorithm, without having to worry about state-information ( such as a COUNT of how many requests have been let-through, etc..)..

He wanted the ONLY piece of state to be the "throttle-factor"..!!

Me moron..did NOT get his point..! :-(

But thankfully, he went on to patiently explain with an example that if say, this factor is 70, then it should in effect,"let-through" ONLY about 70% of the requests, & "block" the rest..!

But this, he wanted to achieve without having a count of the number of requests that have been let-in, queue-ing them up somewhere, etc..!

This led me into wondering about the use of Random-numbers...& arranging stuff such that we obtain a component, whose ONLY responses are from the set {YES,NO} ....(or {TRUE, FALSE} or whatever u want..! :) )...but it should say YES/TRUE, roughly t% of the time, where, t=throttling factor... an integer in the closed-interval of [0,100]

And when i casually simplified it in my funny style & discussed it with Rasna, another very good friend of mine, she suggested a very simple (fer her ! Though me-MORON took a minute to see her point..!! :)) method...which turned out to be a very beautiful algorithm that surprisingly ( For me..! :) ) seemed to take care of all the boundary conditions..!! { i.e., when t=0(ALL NO/FALSE) &/or t=100(ALL YES/TRUE) }

Basically, the algorithm (algoP()) uses an array which has t% of YES/TRUE, & the rest as NO/FALSE...So, assuming we now index into this array with truly-genuine RANDOMness(!?! :) ), we must have a t% chance of being let-through..!! :)

But as it always turns out, me-MORON had goofed up implementing that algorithm, & that forced me to also go through with my algorithm, which does NOT make use of any extra-storage/structures...but somehow, manages to DO the Same task..! :)

PheW..!!

Anyway, PLEASE Click here for the CODE--try it with boundary conditions & switch between algoRags( ) & algoP( )...!! :)

Note: the application where i Have shared code... is a cool Ruby-on-Rails app..! :) This episode, has really made me CRAZY about the queer phenomenon of Randomness..??

• WHAT is meant by a Random-sequence..?
• Is Randomness ALL/ONLY in the Mind..?(Like most of the things..?! hehehe..! :)) i.e., if I cannot Predict a given sequence's future..then, is it truly Random ??( or jusst being too complex-ly Computed underneath...like OLL our Congruence-modulo Linear or Quadratic Pseudo-random Number generators..?!? :) )
  

Hmmmmm..!!

That is a very interesting thing to ponder over..!!

Anyway, what a RANDOM thing that me stumbled upon this problem & somehow managed to do something about it too..!?!?!(with sheer Random-ness !! hehehe)

Ha ha ha ha ! :)))

THANK s a LoT to ALL my Dear ones for bearing with me..& also helping me..! :)

With Lots of LOVE & Thank & Cheers..

(Not!?!?!?! :)) Random-ly yours...










The boy in "rags"
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Finally, to Cheer-u-UP...& make you RELAXED..

Here's a superb, naughty Garfield -strip..to make you SMiLe...fer a WhiLe..! ;) :)
Me reeeeally Loove it, essp Poor Jon-Arbuckle.. :)