12 Dec

Muirs words

” I often wonder what man will do with the mountains… will human destructions like those of Nature–fire and flood and avalanche–work out a higher good, a finer beauty? ” – John Muir.

I believe no one else could have told this “humans are an part of Nature” better!!

And who knows what are we doing with it!

12 Dec

right word!

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

– Mark Twain.

08 Dec

Code Comments!!

We Can Do This!

That’s wonderful indeed! But, hold on for a moment, pardon my knowledge which is like oxygen at high altitude! Who can do what?!

A little curious investigation into the souls of deeply buried application and found this piece of brilliance. It’s a exhibition model of a code documentation of course. You silly stupid! Can’t you see, put that array list length greater than 4 and assume its never null even if nothing is returned from database and no code is written to fill it. And iterate that data struct to get some more good looking code, 80% of which is debug statements!! wo!!

I feel this bit is certainly well written code. It has certain amount of documentation when compared to the 7185lines of wonderfully formatted code without a single line of english saying what’s it all about. May be the author thought its a piece of generic component that you can use it in any application and viola! its working!! Ye ye, I know. There are a few bugs. Tell me which software does’nt have one?! hmmm! If everyone start writing things where everything works what you gonna eat?

Ok, lets not deviate from the fact that a component can be plugged into any bigger component and sometimes it will have less bugs if the smaller of the component was meant to be plugged into the big one otherwise you will have some more bugs when the smaller one tries to provide a functionality which the bigger one never meant to be. Anyway you can twist all those silly code to bring them into some sync. May be this time you will have to change all the lines of that small program.

Enough difting from the topic.

While wandering in those dark tall woods for un-refactored and yet highly qualified code jungle found another gem. ‘Click_Ram_march17th(…)’ . Hey Ram , this is absolutely fantastic. It is given in the guide book of coding standards that the code documentation starts with the names we choose and use. Isn’t it? The method name itself carries the whole weight of substance, you see. It says whats being done ‘click’, who is the auther of the code ‘Ram, i guess’, and when it was written ‘anyones guess’. I bet even with a 18 years of experience in building systems, you can not beat this thought process.

Another bit of lesser known documentation which is obtained is something like this ‘ TL told me to do this’ or ‘This is ML’s idea’ Luckily you don’t see ‘god save the client’ along with that! Jokes apart, tell me when else can you make use of the SCM more efficiently if you want to find at all the who’s who of the code!? By the way you won’t notice all this unless you have taken some path of execution which was never taken earlier. Oh! Come on! this one was left for that team to enhance it further in R3…

Next bit of wonder are the 4 lines of well formatted, well written english for a getter, ofcourse there is not a word anywhere near the property declaration. Hmmmm.

Code comments! I think that’s something the code does (somehow) Right?!

08 Dec

Sahyadri

As one starts traveling from northern parts of Sahyadri inside Karnataka, one feels the pressure on the Sahyadri by the humans and development. Though there are and have been people living on the resources from these places, as the number grew the need for more resources is quite inevitable. Sadly knowledge has not been playing its role in terms of planning and executing the development activities.
The pollution and deforestation by the paper and other industries, the building of dams and nuclear power plants for energy, the quarrying and mining, roads, communication channels and pipelines implementations, encroachment of land for coffee and other crops and building communities.The list will probably end when the Sahyadri itself ceases to exist.

Often I start thinking, What will I tell my daughter when she finds what wonderful piece of bio-diversity we had in our hand and lost it and the people of her generation has only picture and bottled samples of the same. What will I answer her when she asks me “Why did you let it happen? No one of your times did care for anyone except themselves?” I still don’t know what I am going to answer. Do I have an answer? I doubt.
Probably its easy to blame anyone for not caring enough, easy to blame media for not doing its job, teachers thinking teaching is just a “job”, and vote and elect “someone” and then blame the system. …
What are we waiting for? Someone to come and clean the garbage in our home for us? Some overnight phenomenon to happen like the ending of a movie and then everyone lives happily everafter. Mark me, urbanisation has killed and is killing the civilisation. We are just frightened individuals living in our own islands only watching our shores in this “cement” societies we have built. World will become a better place only when we all realise what beautiful ocean of Life we are living in and gifted with. When we start living beyond our selfish selves there is a chance for the mankind to survive.