Paradigm shifting without a clutch. That’s what it felt like.
I was ported from a world comfortable to me into another world. Partly out of choice, partly out of situation.

The Jungle

I was having a great time with the computer systems. Developing major components for the top selling anti-virus. I was into the jungle of bits, bytes, pointers, crashes, heaps, stacks, network connections, file handles, segmentation faults, memory dumps, data compression, memory leaks. C++ was the language of that jungle. I understood it. So did a few people around me. The gang was small, but it fought the battles ruthlessly. My typical nightmarish day was being handed a 16kb crash dump file. for the uninitiated, that’s a mini dump file generated by Microsoft Windows. It is generated in response to an exception which could not be handled by your application, so finally it was handled by the OS. if OS did not like what your app were doing, it’ll promptly shut the app down and generate a crash dump. The file generally contains the application stack the time of crashing and exception information. Many times, the mini dump files reported through the web (ever seen, the dialog by windows, which asks you to send the error report to Microsoft?) are corrupt. You’re left with nothing but a tool called WinDbg to analyze those dumps and fix the error. It was a gut-wrenching battle. I tried to guess which function caused it. Or, what parameter on the stack screwed up. Or, what pointer went rogue. Reproducing was often impossible as exact conditions on the user’s machine were unknown. A lot of guesses, nail-biting and food. The chances of success were low. 1 in 100 was fixed with complete accuracy. Most of the times, it was a lonely fight. It was raw.

The City

I arrived in the city. It has cool looking websites and smart people. They speak Java here. Sometimes, Javascript. It seemed all alien to me. And I seemed alien to them. I was baffled at first. Fast changing websites. Tall structures of struts, hibernate, spring, jboss, sessions, request, response, jQuery, REST, HTML, headers, footers, GET and POST. A lot of people talking about a lot of things. As a newcomer in the city, I watched in amazement. I bumped into people talking in Javascript. I watched them huddled together. I did not understand what they were talking about. I listened to Java, I could understand some of it. It was very similar to my native language. But, far more polished. I looked at those tall structures of web technolgy and wondered which one should I visit first. It was confusing. My jungle insticts were out of place. Soon, I figured it out. City was rude, but agile. It was running and responsive. City was easy. Picking up the lingo was not a challenge. The difficult part was to choose my area. So, I chose my place and entered it for once. It was different here. No fight for survival. It was about business. Customers want to get their things done. And we did it. People worked closely together to get things done fast.

What is good?

Sometimes, I think of the jungle. to the enchanting morning mist. Back to the hunting the most obscure bugs. Back to stalking the prey for days before finally finishing it off. Then, relaxing in my cubicle like there was no tomorrow. That’s the jungle. Raw, yet peaceful. Green, but presented you with a battle for survival once in a while. I can go back to it. It might take another paradigm shift back to it. I’m a better hunter now. Armed with the tools from the city. Equipped with better team skills.

The city is not such a bad place either if you know how to find your way around. You’ve to be cool here. You can get to meet a lot of random people around here. It can be a rush at first, but soon you’ll figure out how to talk. It offers it’s own joys. The city is ripe with assortment of opportunities for business and pleasure. This is my new home.

That’s the question I ended up with at the end of this sci-fi genetics thriller: Next.I picked it up one evening. Started reading. Before this book, I had read only one book by Michael Crichton, Airframe. I was impressed by the amount of technical detail and the suspense part of the story. I expected the same or rather, better from Next. I was once more, impressed by the level of detail in genetics. Mr. Crichton goes to extraordinary lengths to get all the technical details on the story. The genes, the diseases and the related news items have been well studied. But, I think it loses focus in covering details about legal issues and relationships. In anticipation of super interesting end to the novel, I was quite disappointed by the abrupt closure. But, “Next” did open my mind up to the genetics. A lot of new developments in genetics (fact / fiction) made me read more about it. And another book “Genome”, which was on my book shelf for some time saw the light of the day.

Note
During the time this article was written and published, Michael Crichton departed us. His work has always been a source of inspiration, insight and intelligence.

The other day I was talking over phone and the person at the end exhaled heavily into the mouthpiece. I usually don’t get too excited by this kind of behavior, but I got thinking.

What if there was a phone in which you could just the blow of air from the other end and pass onto the phone at the other end of the communication channel? That would be an interesting communication. Imagine your girlfriend exhaling gently into the phone and you at the other end, getting all the sensation to keep you up all night.

Or imagine somebody in a hurricane hit area holding phone in the heavy wind and you using all that power over phone to blow the dust out of your furniture. I would love that kind of application. I’ll take my phone all over my house to blow the dirt out wherever I haven’t dared ever. And considering all the devastation that hurricanes do, this will be a productive work coming from them. People might even start to like hurricanes. I can visualize an exponential increase in the number of storm chasers. But, instead of scientific instruments, they’ll be just driving into the hurricane holding out their phones. I can already see several “Discovery” series titles “The Storm Power Chasers”.

So much for an invention.

And we haven’t considered the sucking action yet. I can have my vacuum cleaner suck the wind out of my phone and somebody at the other end could be cleaning their car or themselves. Just think. You’re travelling with your laptop and it gets really dirty with dust on the keyboard and everywhere. Not many people travel with vacuum cleaners. So, you can call somebody who owns one and get cleaning.

I feel an extension to tihs invention coming already. The smell.

If that phone is equiped to transmit smell as well, that’ll be just great. You can smell what perfume the other person is wearing or what your mom is cooking. Or, if you’re longing for a coffee, you can just call a local coffee shop and feel mildly caffeinated. But, there are pitfalls. Please do not fart while using this kind of phone or use it from the restroom. I’d recommned a “mute” like button for smells.

Another extension: communicating heat.

Do not imagine the girlfriend scenario here. Stuck in a jam on road on a hot day, you can just call office and get some cool air over phone. Save some petrol by not using the car air conditioning. I think this one is a killer feature. We can just transfer heat from one part of the world to another using phones and maintain an average ambient temperature all across the globe. This can mean an end to excessive use of air cooling or heating to make your surrounding better. You just keep talking to people all over the world and the temperature just balances itself.

I think I have just found a solution to global warming. I’m waiting for my Nobel. Does it arrive by post or do I get a call?

Tackling Terrorism: the Factories of Fear

Battlefield Mumbai now seems to be getting back to businessland Mumbai.

Everyone knows what happened. TV, newspapers and the Internet is filled with the excruciating (and often conflicting) details. I don’t want to write about what happened. I am proposing a workable solution. It’s a dual layer solution. One layer tries to prevent such mishaps and the other deals with it live.

I. Collective Observation

We have the Internet, mobile phones and a billion people to use all this. A website can be setup where people can post information about unusual observations. The major concern here is trust. Such a system will obviously be misused. And I don’t see a point in registration (i.e. people register with their names, address) based system. It just gets in the way. In fact, the approach should be exactly the opposite.

Let anybody post any information they come across. We need only the basic data: information, place and time. Let the people post it on the site or via sms. It’ll be totally anonymous. Now, how do we make meaning in this information? Answer: AI.

Today, text processing and pattern matching algorithms are very smart. (See Google). They can hunt for unusual patterns in huge amount of data. And get smarter as they do this. These algorithms work really well on large amount of data. So, if a suspicious activity is being reported by 1 or 2 users, it may not matter. But, if considerable number (this can be tuned) of people start reporting similar information and also via sms, we know we have something fishy. Now, local authorities can be informed to investigate further.

Algorithms can be fine tuned as follows:

1. Location
Obviuosly, cities are the soft target. But, cities are also the places with dense population, good Internet connectivity and mobile phone penetration. So, the chances of gathering good intelligence in cities are appropriately higher.

2. Borders / Seas
Borders and coastal region are porous and that’s where the bad guys come in from. Even sporadic messages from these regions could be treated seriously.

3. Time
While terrorist smuggle their weapons during the night, they generally attack the cities in working hours. This time factor can be used to filter out information.

Potential issues:

1. Terrorists attacking this site with excessive information or other attacks
Terrorists are small in number. And excessive information from few sources can be tracked easily. Hence, if anybody tries to attack this site, it’s a good news. Not only, we can track the miscreants, it’s much better than losing human lives.

2. Public usage
People will only use this if it is dead simple. So, free numbers for sms, something along the lines of 100 can be arranged. If people want to talk, we can have automated voice lines converting speech to text. And these facilities can be advertised in public places so that people keep it mind.

II. Media Mask

The product of terror is not deaths, it’s fear. They kill 100 and a billion are living in fear. And gues who’s marketing this product?: Media.
To shut down this fear factory, we need to hit where it hurts. We’ve seen how to block it’s supply chain and people. Let’s see how to block it’s marketing and finances.

We can’t shut down the media. But, they can be definitely regulated when terror strikes. Solution would go something like this. As soon as, a terrorist operation is in progress, we allow only 2 TV channels to broadcast news about it. One government channel and one private channel. Govt channel have been reporting news as they are since they don’t have silly corporate goals. And a private channel with track record for decency should be involved to maintain transparency.

This way can spread the required information, but keep mass fear at bay. This applies the most to TV channels, since the fear inflicted in these panic hours can last lifelong.

Terrorist organizations are like any other organization. They have goals, they have people and they have their finances. Once, their financiers realize that they are not effective at producing fear, their money supply will be cut. Their activities would slowly cease as they struggle for resources. They can’t make it full scale war, since they are not country and lack resources, will and strategy for a war.

These solutions are too simple to believe, but often answers to complex problems are very simple. Fighting terror is a teamwork between the people, the government and the intelligence. Bullet for bullet will only leave the whole world dead.

Like Isaac Asimov wrote: violence is the last resort of the incompetent.