India has a odd situation with respect to politics and government. Most well educated people don't want to have anything to do with it. These fields are not considered 'good' or 'respectable' career options. The people who run the administration and drive the policy making are the ones who were the bottom of your high school or college class. No one who has the skills to be anything better considers politics to be a respectable enough life goal. While I was in India I thought this was normal and maybe even the right thing.

Why is this? In large part because we see the ugly side of our politics too often: the crudeness, the outright dishonesty, the corruption and the incompetence. "I don't want to be in there, fighting the pig in the mud".

Case in point: Growing up in Kerala I have heard this man  make too many inappropriate and distasteful comments on the state TV channels. He is the sort of textbook politician whose uncouth manner paints such a low picture of politics in my state that it deters most well to do people from having anything to do with him and his ilk.

Last week we had the terrorist situation in Mumbai that left everyone saddened and apprehensive of the future in the region. Mr Achuthanandan, who is currently the Chief Minister of the State of Kerala, shows up at the home of one of the commandos, Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who died fighting the terrorists. Why? To use a rather blunt metaphor, its a bit like a dog pissing on a pole to mark its territory - the obligated visited to show your solidarity and to establish your political presence.

The deceased Major's father decides that he does not want to entertain any such display in his house and he tells Mr Achuthanandan to leave. What would someone who truly felt for their loss do? What would someone who is touched by the situation in Mumbai and for those who lost their lives there do? And what does Achuthanandan do?

Major Unnikrishnan's father refuses to meet Kerala CM

Kerala CM insults slain Major's dad.

Never underestimate the stupidity of people. Over many years, I believed my bar had fallen sufficiently low enough that not very much surprised me. Then along comes something like this!

ps. Sid, if you are reading, this is your doing: After that link from your blog about PZ Myers, I ended up wasting a major part of my evening browsing around looking at the foolishness. Thanks!

pps. What does the blog title mean? Its the from the banner of the "Landover Baptist Church".

After talking to Pooja, I felt it necessary to mention the great mathematician G. H. Hardy on my blog. Hardy is most famous outside of mathematics for his "A Mathematician's Apology". The book, written in later in life by Hardy, talks among aother things about how mathematics is young man's game. He is also somewhat know for his association with Ramanujan and for being the person responsible for bringing him to Cambridge where his greatest mathematics unfolded.

Quoting one of the mathematicians, C Snow, that Hardy worked with:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Hardy.html

A mathematicians apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again. I know nothing like it in the language: partly because most people with the literary gift to express such a lament don't come to feel it: it is very rare for a writer to realise, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished.

Hardy was a sort of purist mathematician, one who did his mathematics not for the sake of its applicability to anything, but for the sake of doing great mathematics. Hardy, along with Littlewood and Ramanujan,  is also mention in Apostolos Doxiadis' "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture". The link above gives a short summary on his life.

Some quotes:

Asked if he believes in one God, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy:

It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Many years back I worked full time at Microsoft on one of the many projects related to Vista (or what was then called Longhorn). Last December I was visiting friends in the Redmond area when one of the jokingly observed how the code I had written for Microsoft still hadn't seen light of day, while two and a half years later, I had moved on and completed my Masters and had started on my PhD.

This wasn't a sort of accidental slip, but I remember we were told at that time that if we had any ideas to suggest for Vista, they better be ideas that will be new and interesting 3-4 years later when the OS actually ships. This is a tall order for any sort of idea, much less for the volatile world of "software project" ideas.

While this seemed like very ironic humor at that time, over the past month or so, once in a while I thought about what that meant. After all, I had spent a year writing all that code. A very busy year at that - I had spent 15+ hours a day, I daresay, that was my average day, struggling with the turmoil of the massive engineering effort that was Vista.

I wasn't a *great* programmer by many standards, but I'd like to think that I was better than many I had encountered. 15+ hours of my time for about a year, took a lot of out of my life and it didn't seem to have amounted to anything! Sure I was being paid a handsomely, but one one like to think that one's efforts contribute to the world in some way as well. After all that year was full of deadlines and things being rushed to be completed and such. What came of all of it? If it came to nothing, what a waste of life that was...

A few weeks back, I got a call from Steve who works with Google (who has a fascinating blog btw), about coming back and working with them on some stuff. I casually asked what happened about the last thing I had worked on, when I was there last summer. I had made some extensions to the Rhino compiler, the largest part of which was adding the yield control operator to it. Steve said that they were using it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I said "What?!".

Maybe my programming has matured over the years. Maybe the ~6 hrs a day I spent in office as an intern produced production quality code. I somehow assumed that it wouldn't see any real world use. Was it really that special that it was ready for real world use? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad code. But it was code that only written, not "baked" for years.

Maybe there was another reason. Maybe, it wasn't a property of the code at all, but of the fact that there was something radically different about the outlooks of both these companies. There are many thing one can say about this "difference in outlook", positive and negative things things about both. But a shift that causes developers to feel effective by default as opposed to feeling ineffective by default, is an empowering thought. "If I build it for you, what will become of it?"

Maybe mine was an isolated case of wasted engineering effort and this is nitpicking. If that's so, I'll be happy for it.

I am very moved by "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture" by Apostolos Doxiadis. It's a work of fiction that makes several references to real people and real mathematics. It seems the author has done a fair bit of research to write this book. The book is about a mathematician "Uncle Petros" who spends his entire life trying to prove the Goldbach Conjecture.

In the course of the book, Doxiadis touches on the lives of G H Hardy, S. Ramanujan, Cantor, Kurt Godel and much of the pain, isolation, failure and achievement that is involved in doing research. The book is a fascinating read and is in many ways very true to life though the main characters are fictious.

The Goldbach Conjecture simply states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Wikipedia has some more detail. The conjecture has been known for about 250 years now. There is still no proof, though the fact has been verified for very large numbers. It is a conjecture and not a theorem because it has no proof. Work still continues on this. Dare to try solve it? You may also enjoy looking at the Goldbach weave.

In the early 90's a long standing famous problem, Fermat's Last Theorem was proved by Andrew Wiles. It took him 7 years of exclusive work to prove the theorem. The theorem has been know since 1637! And has escaped all these centuries without proof despite many many mathematicians working on it. One of the things that made Fermat's last theorem famous is that Fermat has scribbled in the margin of his notebook a comment to the effect that he knew a proof but that the margin is not wide enough to note it. (Wikipedia) Wiles's proof is 150 pages and uses mathematics discovered in the 20th century - this is most likely not the proof that Fermat had in mind, if indeed he had a correct proof.

The interesting things about proofs like these are not just that they confirm the truth of statements that we always suspected to be true, but that they advance the state of mathematics. In the course of chasing hard problems, often new theories and new approaches to proof theory are discovered.

I am taking a Computational Complexity course this semester, taught by Prof Daniel Leivant. The course had not been going too well for me - I felt that though I understood many of the details, I didn't really learn anything since my intuitions drew a blank.

Towards the end of the semester (actually in the very last week), I got my hands on Dr Christos Papadimitriou's text on Computational Complexity. This was such a nicely done book. What also struck me was the subtle elegance of many things. In class, Dr Leivant had mentioned that Papadimitriou was a man of much good taste and style, and this does seem to reflect in his text.

For example the books cover is a the painting of Venus by Botticelli. The front cover looks complex and confusing. It is not immediately apparent what the picture is, much like the subject of computational complexity.

But if you were able to look behind complexity, if you turned the book over, you would see the beautiful face of Venus.

Today I came across what is described as the Indian Cyber Pornography law -

http://netsafety.nic.in/cyberlaws.htm

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees and in the event of a second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years and also with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees.

I keep looking at this and saying how unethical is this? Lets look at this a bit

any material which is lascivious:
Dictionary.com defines lascivious as:

1.inclined to lustfulness; wanton; lewd: a lascivious, girl-chasing old man.

2.arousing sexual desire: lascivious photographs.

3.indicating sexual interest or expressive of lust or lewdness: a lascivious gesture.

How many things can you list in the category of "arousing sexual desire" - surely in India it should be forbidden to arouse sexual desire.

appeals to the prurient interest:
From Dictionary.com:

1.having, inclined to have, or characterized by lascivious or lustful thoughts, desires, etc.

2.causing lasciviousness or lust.

3.having a restless desire or longing.

Of course, lustful thoughts and desires are bad... look at our population, we managed it by cross-pollination, not by sexual intercourse. Well, there might have been some intercourse, but it certainly wasn't lascivious or lustful in any way.

Certainly causing restless desire or longing is wrong. If anything you see online causes restless desire, let them know who put it up. They shall be taken care of.

Can somebody please arrest Kushwant Sigh? He gives me lustful thoughts. Also, next time a woman ogles at a sweaty cricketer on TV, arrest him. Get the television network too while you are at it. And yes, the 8.00 o' clock serials certainly have to go. They shall be replaced by non-lustful Vatsyayana tales. After all Indian women certainly shouldn't have any lustful thoughts.

or its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons ...
What does that even mean? How do you know what might deprave or corrupt someone? You might as well have have said "or whatever else we like ..."

I've got to stop picking flaws in it, because there is nothing right in it. Seriously, what were they thinking? Calling the above law wrong is inappropriate because that would imply that it deserves some amount of credibility. Will the genius who wrote the above law please stand up for the recognition you deserve. Maybe we can can just focus on you instead of the quality of your legal skills.

I hope in a few years, hopefully within our life times, India will come to terms with pornography, prostitution, nudity, indecent exposure and stop having stork- stories around them. When India comes to terms with the notion of sexuality we can look back at absurdities like this and laugh.

Maybe a first step to doing that would be to stop pretending that we had it all sorted out in our 'great ancient culture'. The world of mass media, global communication and a global economy was not the world of 2500 year ago. These things affect our notions of sexuality as much as they affect any other aspect of our lives. We must look at the world as it is today, and at our personal values, and start making careful measured choices.

If laws like this weren't so blatantly unethical in what they impose, I could think of them as being funny. Like how back in the 1800s Indiana State in the US tried to establish mathematical fact by passing laws. They wanted a law that states that in Indiana  the mathematical constant Pi would have the value 3.2. Fascinating! We look at this and laugh today, but I don't see the Indian Pornography law as being very different. The Indiana Pi bill was after all a state bill that never got passed. The Indian Pornography law in a national law that is in effect, due to which the CEO of one of India's largest online auction site was arrested (its quiet funny how some of this is worded ".. had obtained the controversial act by Local Area Network (LAN).. " ) when he flew into India, from the US, to help work with the local police because someone sold "pornographic" material on his site.

I am so glad we come from a civilized country with well thought out laws that seek to protect the innocent and punish the immoral. Yeah!

Joan Baez, 1966, singing Dylan's "With God on Our Side".

After being relatively upset about Parzania, I found myself at the RSS community page on Orkut. Needless to say, that was even more disturbing. It was without a certain amount of morbid horror that I looked at their polls, their organized report-as-fraud activities, their cyber-lynchings and such.

I usually don't like to deal with this sort of thing. I am complacent, cowardly and comfortable in my relative safety. It bothered me to think that if I had no fear it would be dishonest, or just plain stupid.

I happened to look at my blog and saw Star Trek and the Q next to Parzania, it struck me what the Q might say about India and the RSS. "Your species is always suffering and dying", he would say in his How-entertaining--What-do-you-expect-anyway attitude.

And indeed, what do I expect? The world has always been a barbaric place. We express surprise and shock at the slaughter of Delhi by Nadir Shah, the slaughter of the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Ghandhi, the India-Pakistan partition riots, the Bombay bomb blasts, the Ghodhra riots, (and hardly just India) the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the occupation of Iraq, the massacre of the Algerians... and on and on and on. Just too many to list. In fact so many, that one should ask, what's the big deal? This is, after all, human nature.

People have been always mercilessly wiping out entire populations of "others" based on some definition of identity. Why are we so surprised by this? Why do we expect that in the times of our generation the world should have magically become a "civilized place"? Hardly, if you look at the evidence.

It will be a long time before we turn into a species that is not always suffering and dying. Something truly deep and fundamental has to change about us for that.

In the short term however, in a few hundred years or maybe in our own lifetimes, the vices of our day shall blow away to be replaced by other ones. To make any of them to go away, something fundamental needs to change that invalidates their cause of existence. A little like the way Frown Power and Superman destroyed the Ku Klux Klan, might there be an Indian equivalent? Prosperity? Accountability? Can we motivate such a change?

Q: Let us pray, for understanding and for compassion.
Capt. Picard: Let us do no such damn thing! What is this need of yours for costumes, Q? Have you no identity of your own?
Q: I come in search of the truth.
Capt. Picard: You come in search of what humanity is!
Q: I *forgive* your blasphemy!

Functional Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for I have side-effected.

Logic Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for I have temporized.

System’s Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for it crashed.

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

One of my professor's, Dan Friedman, once said in class, "Some people are of the opinion that computer scientists should choose to work on problems that are *useful*, and that working on your pet problem that has no apparent use is not right. I myself am not of that opinion." After about a year, I must say I agree. In this spirit, some people are of the opinion that people who write blogs should choose to write what others would like to read. I myself am not of that opinion. (My apologies to Dan for not quoting him verbatim, but its been a year)

A romance with musicals which started with Jesus Christ Super Star a few years back, is coming back. JCSS was brilliant – amazing music, amazing lyrics, very interesting characters – a very interesting shift of perspective. Very cool. I remember watching JCSS completely for the first time at Deepak’s place back at Bangalore – at one of our many of dinner + music sessions where Deepak would treat us to the pleasures of the local vegetarian home delivery service and his beautiful taste in music.

If you have not watched JCSS, it is highly recommended –

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275434/

Since coming to Cambridge I have had a chance to sample many interesting things – vintage wines, abstract mathematical models such as pi calculus and category theory, involved pieces of software such as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, programming paradigms such as STM and monadic yield, London, beautiful medieval cathedrals, beer festivals etc and some musicals.

Its the musicals that this entry is about. A few weeks I got to watch Rigoletto the opera – a live performance at the “Cambridge Corn Exchange”. I had originally expecting nothing – only by the mild curiosity that the brochure was and also intending to sample the often heard “stiff upper lip” British formal occasion.

What I saw were a lot nicely dressed older people who were very polite and very at-ease. Rigoletto was in Italian with English subtitles displayed on a screen above the stage. As I watched Rigoletto, minor details like there actually nude women on the stage got swept aside and the power of music and metaphors started to take over. I started not to notice the gasps from the audience about the directness of presentation and more on what would be going through these characters in the play, if it was all real.

After I left the opera, one of the last pieces “La donna e mobile” played in my mind for days afterwards. This is an English approximation of “La donna e mobile”

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

Always a sweet, pretty face,

in tears or in laughter, always lying

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

and her thoughts, and her thoughts

Always miserable, he that trusts in her

who confides in her, his unwary heart!

Yet nobody feels fully happy

who on that bosom doesn't drink love,

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

and her thoughts, and her thoughts!

This is being sung by an overly licentious Duke who is about to be murdered by an assassin paid by the jester of the Duke’s court. The assassin’s sister who usually woos his victim’s for him such that he can stab them when they are distracted now pleads with him to spare the Duke’s life. The assassin consents on the condition that someone else should come through the door who he will murder instead of the Duke. The jester wanted the Duke killed because he had dishonored his daughter. The jester’s daughter however overhears the conversation between the assassin and his sister and decides to sacrifices herself to save the Duke, despite knowing that he had cheated her. As all this unfolds one can hear the Duke singing in his room awaiting his mistress for the night, the assassin’s sister. Its delicate and is one of those climaxes that’s not easy to forget.

Beautiful.

Two days back I saw the Phantom of the Opera – honestly I don’t have many ways to describe this other than that it sent me reeling ever so often. Its brilliant, its powerful and it is so exquisitely done. Its one of those things that one has to put on their “to do list before you die”. As you watch the Phantom of the Opera so many layers unfold. It one of those things that awoke many sleeping ghosts in my mind.

In sleep he sang to me,

In dreams he came,

That voice which calls to me,

And speaks my name.

And do I dream again?

For now I find.

The Phantom of the Opera is there-

Inside my mind.

This is the version I saw -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293508/

Many tracks in the Phantom of the Opera hit you with the raw pathos comparable with Mukesh Chand Mathur (aka Mukesh) singing “Dost dost na raha” in Sangam or “Baharon Phool Barsao” of Mohammed Rafi in Suraj. Brilliant.

In short, I am hooked. Any suggestions for what I can watch next? I know that comparing with Verdi’s Rigoletto or Andrew Loyd Weber’s JCSS or Phantom of the Opera is a tall order – I don’t expect it to. I just want to sample some more real music.

Some quotes and thoughtlets collected over the years. Some are my own, though I don’t know which ones exactly – over time it has all got mixed up in my head.

From Roshan to language designers of the future, on the topic of programming language types:

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

(adapted from Douglas Adams).

I just fixed the last bug!

Any sufficiently advanced bug, is indistinguishable from a feature.

-- quoting Prof Andrew Lumsdaine, Advanced Operating Systems (P536)

Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."

Zem: "Er, five."

Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"

The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.

-- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Ok, so what the answer?

Its 5,1,1,3,2…

No, no, no, I don’t like it..

You don’t like it?

It doesn’t mean anything, what does it mean?

Now that’s a different question.

-- solving the universe selection problem, Quantum Programming

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Would you like tea or coffee?

Mathematician: Yes.

-- quoting Michel Salim

What do you mean its third party fault? I can’t get my work done and you are partying?

It’s an idea so simple, that understanding it messes your mind.

-- adapted from Dan Friedman, Principles of Programming Languages

Creating a great language doesn’t involve assuming that your users are less smart than you.

The language that you use defines what you can most easily think of. Languages instill patterns of thought. Certain languages make difficult the understanding of certain ideas.

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly- "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

-- AI Koan

Lambda the ultimate.

-- Dan Friedman

The only law in physics that we know of that has a direction with respect to time is that of entropy.

-- QP class, B629 Computer Science, Indiana University

Accept it. We are Labor.

A style makes explicit what a language makes implicit.

-- Dan Friedman

What I was coming to is that its something that cant be expressed in the lambda calculus.

But that’s obvious.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

-- Richard Feynman

This is not even wrong.

-- Amr Sabry

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

There exists no reversible classical function that coverts a quantum superposition into a classical state.

-- above paraphrased by Roshan

Misguided rambling from Roshan: Computer Science to Physics and Back Again

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one. This is roughly equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics - the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. This is also our only formal notion of the quantity called time. Here the law is rephrased as follows and things brings out its directional property with respect time, more clearly - It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object. This is roughly equivalent to saying that there is not no notion of a partial computation without a notion of sequencing with respect to time – this is the ‘.’ (dot) sequencing operator of the pi calculus. The lambda calculus does not define sequencing. Are all closed systems pi-systems?

Don’t worry, we are just playing games.

Summary of the known laws of the fictitious universe –

- There exists at least one notion of fundamental duality. Using this all other forms of duality can be derived.

- There exists at least one notion of self referential quantification. Using this all forms of self referential quantification can be derived.

- There exists an order of relationship of things among themselves. There exists an order of relationship of events among themselves. In other words there exists at least one notion of ordering or sequencing.

The Tao that can be described in words is not the true Tao

The Name that can be named is not the true Name.  

From non-existence were called Heaven and Earth

From existence all things were born.

In being without desires, you experience the wonder

But by having desires, you experience the journey.

Yet both spring from the same source and differ mostly in name.

This source is called "Mystery"

Mystery upon Mystery,

The womb giving birth to all of being. (1)

- Tao Te Ching, as translated by John R Mabry

All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions ...

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved ...

- Gödel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

I almost made a (potentially) very expensive mistake today. I have been hoping to buy a digital SLR for a while now and in the past few weeks that seems to be the only thing that on my mind. Most people around me are a little wary getting into a conversation with me these days because the only thing I could talk about was the camera I was hoping to buy.

After a lot of ruminations between going Canon or Nikon I finally decided to go with the Canon EOS 350d a.k.a. the Canon Digital Rebel XT. Now I cant really afford this stuff, and it a rather tight stretch to get myself one of these considering my present status of un-rich grad student.

I am also no novice to using the web and to using computers, so I was so stumped by how I forgot the cardinal rule of doing anything on the web – never believe a webpage. Unless you know the entities behind the webpage and you trust their reputation to serve your purpose – never ever ever trust a webpage.

Case in point, this is what you see when you Google for the Digital Rebel XT:

I took a walk down to the nearest camera shop and I mentioned to the friendly gentleman there about how the website prices are about 450$ when he is charging me about 800$. Here came the first piece of news – he says that if you have a Canon USA warranty, in other words if something happens and you want Canon to fix it for you, then there is no way that the camera can cost so less. It must be some international warranty which you may have to ship back to the country of origin.

So I take a look at the website again and the website says that it has a USA warranty – very explicitly. So I feel considerably relieved. I however wanted to check out one or two of the lenses I was interested in getting and so I visited the shop again and I mentioned this fact to the person there. He stuck by what he said – he said that yes they might offer a warranty to you in the US, but it will not be Canon’s warranty. It will be someone else’s.

What? Now I was going to spend what is presently a non trivial amount of money for me so I put things together and I decided to call the online store I was planning to buy from.

I was feeling a little pressurized into getting this purchase done because Canon is offering some interesting mail in rebates which multiply when you get multiple items in combination and so I was planning to through in a decent lens with image stabilization and such.

So I call the store and I had to hold onto the line for a whole 20+ mins. Hmm hmm… what are these guys an airline booking service? And finally I get a most disinterested sounding guy. I ask about the warranty and yes, the shopkeeper I had been talking to was right. This was not a Canon warranty. ‘If something happens, who will be fixing the camera?’ ‘My technicians will work on it’ and that gets me thinking – gee, if I have to hold so long to just speak to one of them how hard will it be for me to get them to fix something for free? And then he says it – ‘my technicians have been fixing these for the last 50 years’. What??? And then a sentence or two later he hangs up while I was in mid sentence. Nice.

So the whole conversation was a little like being hit buy a snowball when you are busy picking your nose. I kind of snapped out of my self hypnotized state of mind and I did what I should have done first – search for reviews on the seller.

Every website I could find had people expressing very strong negative opinions about these guys. I search for some of the other sellers offering similar prices – they all had similar comments. What???

I remember the shopkeeper I was talking to mention that they cant be authorized Canon dealers because there is no way that they could get the cameras so much cheaper from Canon.

So finally, let me point some fingers –

This is the seller I was looking at and the one that I called up –

http://www.infinitiphoto.com/

(Yes they have a reasonably nice looking webpage).

Here are some others -

http://www.bestpricecameras.com

http://www.geniuscameras.com

http://www.usaphotonation.com/

Here are some seller review pages –

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews87615.html

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10678

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-7031.html

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-72.html

http://www.price.com/vendor_review_display.html?vid=-2147483120

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10918

and so on, there are many pages out there that tell similar stories.

Well this was a clincher –

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller9662.html

Moral of the story – make sure that you search for the seller when buying online always. If in doubt call them up, maybe even multiple times. This is a handy website that gives you seller information –

http://www.resellerratings.com/

More practically, simply search the web for “review <seller name>”.

Ensure that you are not going for opinion bases of 5 or 6 reviews. Averaging over 100s of reviews is decent. Another thing that you could do, is use resellerratings.com or similar to search for the product to see which sellers give you a good price.

And before I change the topic, some good information. I have heard good opinions by word of mouth and in terms of reviews about B&H. They are on the average a little higher in cost than the cheapest semi-reputable seller you can find.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/

I have heard good things about Adorama.com as well.

If you are looking for Canon EOS lenses to buy, take a look at this link (thank you Deepak for pointing at this). This is a good starting point for a beginner in digital SLR photography and is a beginners guide to lenses for the Canon EOS series –

http://bobatkins.com/photography/digital/10d300dlenses.html

Finally, now that I have broken free of my obsession (for a while) I was trying to think of why I got so convinced into buying this, without doubting the seller and other things. The last time I bought a camera online I was very careful. I have two ideas in this regard and they are a little touchy, but here they are –

What changed since the last time I bought my Sony P150 that caused me not to scrutinize the seller as much? One answer – Google. See people form an emotional bond with their search engine – it is their bringer of information, of right information, of truth. It is not an intellectual bond, it is bond formed out of the force of habit. So when something shows up ‘on top’ on google – I think that that information is credible (for some values of credible). If any of the shoddy sellers above were ranked first or second on Google, that would be true. But, they were sponsored links and they were right on top on Google.

When a link is on top by paying for it, of course its not credible. Of course, Google never does vouch for the credibility of the people who it sells ad space to as well. While all of that is correct, the point is that being on top on Google is a powerful selling force. It can slip past the best of us. The same goes for Google’s Froogle – I don’t think any form of paid advertising is involved there though.

Can Google do something about this? Should they check credibility of the ads they host – I don’t think they can if they want to sell ads in bulk the way they do now. I think this is hard for anyone on top – be it Google or MSN or anyone else. But if they don’t, there will be more like me who trust Google ranking and information finding abilities to magically lend credibility to their sponsored links.

However, here is an opinion – if you plan to be a popular website on which resellers can rely on to sell their goods, then you need to have a credibility system in place. Something like Amazon’s seller feedback and buyer assurance. How much do you think I am going to value sponsored links on Google in the future? Maybe on the whole, advertising on websites would take a big boost, if there was a credibility system.

The second point I wanted to make is one that is best described using Ken Thompson’s ‘Trusting Trust’. How can you trust or mistrust one website based on another? What if the review site you are looking at is faking it? What if someone is trying to make one of the above sites look bad by posting fake reviews? Or is someone trying to make their own site look good?

There is, in my understanding, no way out of this. One almost always ends up implicitly or explicitly trusting one system to make a judgment about another, like KT demonstrated in his Turing award lecture.

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

The only thing you can do is mitigate the possibility of being cheated is by looking at several review sites and by calling up your potential sellers. I can’t think of very much else.

Finally, if you are from one of the sort sellers this is what I have to say - get smarter. If I were you and I still wanted to defraud an occasional gullible customer, I would minimally do the following –

- Have more fake reviews in my support

- Sound more endearing on the phone

(despite the bad reviews, a good phone conversation and the price would have got me). You see going on top on google gives you a much larger window of opportunity to get at customers than you realize. Think a little bit – there are many many things you can do. Of course, you will eventually get caught or get sued – but I am assuming you are willing to entail that risk considering some of the reviews I read.

As of now I am not buying my Rebel XT, it a little outside of my budget. But I guess the prices will come down and my budget will go up, in time.

First principles, Roshan. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask this: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does it do, this matrix you seek?

A faceless Marcus Aurelius with the voice of Anthony Hopkins and the intensity of Hannibal Lector kept repeating this to me most of this week.

Last Sunday night something interesting happened – I believed I had a solution to something – a problem in quantum computing - a way by which I can take any arbitrary quantum function that takes ‘m’ bits and produces a superposition of ‘n’ bits and construct an equivalent reversible function. The interesting thing that happened was that I realized was wrong – when I started looking at the matrices that my solution generated, I realized it would not work for any function that produced more than one output bit.

After some amount of thinking about it, the problem was narrowed down to looking for a matrix that was involuntary, the first row of which was decided by the function I was trying to model. Though the problem could be stated in a simple way, it was surprisingly hard to solve.

It kept running in my head everyday, all the time, for a major part of this week and it just didn’t make sense. I could look at the problem from many angles but the matrix kept eluding me. What is the nature of this matrix? it is involuntary. But that did not help me solve the problem.

The idea that finally helped me solve it came from a friend, Abhijit Mahabal, one of the smartest people I know in the department. Abhijit got me to look at the involution represented by a matrix as the reflection of a point about an ‘n-1’ dimensional hyper-plane in an ‘n’ dimensional space. I knew that given a function that produces ‘n’ bits, the matrix would be a ‘(2^n)x(2^n)’ square matrix and hence I was looking for the reflection of a point about a ‘(2^n)-1’ dimensional hyper-plane. That was the true nature of the matrix, the fact that it is useful to construct a reversible function was only incidental.

Of course, when Abhijit first explained this to me and did the math in 2-dimensional geometry, it was a little too much for me to get my head around. I refrained from this approach for two days since the math seemed too hard. But after looking at the problem in several different ways, I went back to asking myself about the nature of the matrix – then it was simple. I worked out the math for the multi-dimensional geometry and coded it up and ran it - and it worked at the first go. Ah, the pleasure of first principles.

Yesterday I had a chance to look at my Professor Amr Sabry’s, approach to the problem and I was stumped. I was used to being stumped by the things he did (after knowing him for about a semester) and I was often reeling from the effects of what a few well thought out lines in Haskell can express. However this time I was stumped because I thought this was something I understood and yet he had a very different solution - one that wasn’t even an involution!

For a major part of last night and today it bothered me that I spent all that time trying to solve the wrong problem. It annoyed me a lot – what was the point in putting in all that energy to solve a problem if it was the wrong one?

Thinking about this caused me to realize something important – in research, unlike in the commercial software world where I spent the last several years – it is equally important to understand why the problem exists and to question to nature of that which causes the problem to exist, as it is important to solve the problem itself.

This should have been obvious, but it was not. The world of commercial software or in general the world that practices software engineering in a way that is not research oriented has certain rules of problem solving that are different  from those of research. The more creative and intellectually challenging of those environments let you take your problems and solve them in any way you want. The lamer environments put too many bounds on how you solve your problems. Very rarely, almost never, in commercial software do we get the freedom to ask the following question in a non-trivial way ‘why is this the problem that we need to solve? why is this its nature?’. If you are not in a position to make decisions about the nature of the business, you are not in a position to question the nature of the problem. 

This will be tricky lesson to unlearn when I go back to an environment that doesn’t give me this freedom.

Last night I was writing some for OS161 – I was implementing a fork(), execv(), getpid(), waitpid() and exit() for the OS161 kernel. I was using Visual Studio Express VC++ edition beta2 to write the code and I had a little ruby script to upload changed file to my linux (gasp!) box and a little script there that would build the kernel whenever the files changed. That way I get to develop code on an OS that has a notion of a unified clipboard and such pleasantries and get to build it wherever the tools are available. I also got a minimal shell like first process done.

Don’t get me wrong when I say this, but I sometimes like to think of myself as a fairly decent imperative programmer – I would be comparably good to many people you might meet. Ever since I came to college functional programming has been rewiring my brain. And its beginning to hurt. And I am enjoying it. And sometimes you need a break.

Hence writing missing pieces in a simplistic os kernel is a nice break. And I am going “Ooh! Look I have variables! Ooh! Look I can reassign the value of this thing. Look, I have loops”. And that’s a nice world to be in, if you can think in terms of state well – for those of you imperative programmers don’t know what that is, it means that things have changable values (like x=5 and x ++;) – and those of you who don’t realize you are imperative programmers, here is a simple test: if you are not a Haskell (and similar) programmer Or Scheme programmer (without set!) Or mathematician Or someone who goes from day to day without anything in the world affecting you, you are a imperative programmer of some device.

So I was enjoying being imperative for a while and then when I had it all going halfway into the night – I had multiple processes forking and execing and waitpiding and exiting – the whole crashes. And then it crashed again. And this was crazy, because all the of the pieces were things I had tested separately and yet they crashed when they came together. Somewhere in the back of my head there was this little elephant called lambda laughing on the floor ignoring his cons-kit for a bit. But wait a minute, I thought all this functional programming was making me a better programmer – I thought I could think more clearly about composition.

After about 2hours of meditation and atleast one or two sets of forays into the debugger as a last recourse, I realized what the problem was that I was not writing things back onto the user space stack in the correct alignment in some cases – and the this was some dword alignment requirement of this machine that was not mentioned anywhere. Lambda and the Turing tape looked down, looking a little sorry. I was in a bad mood by the end of it and that wasn’t fair – that was my little imperative break.

All of this, gets me to some of the conversations with some of my professors here. Dan Friedman is one of the kindest gentlest people you can talk to – and pretty much every other sentence some brain mutilating idea, said in the kindest subtlest way possible. So it happened that I needed to prove that something is not possible (it is related to the hypothetical apply-iterator operator I speak of here). Fifiteen minutes after the conversation I am thinking about higher order programming with continuations and my brain is hurting. (do you know what that means? If you don’t you need to go though the experience of hitting upon an idea that changes the way you look at the world. Changes the way you look at the world does not mean that the next time you eat a burger you look at it slightly more from the left, it is a little more encompassing an idea.)

An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.

Programming languages are devices to express thought. The fact that you can also create software using them are only secondary to this larger idea. Languages carry ideas of meaning and operation and you can compose these things together to create larger meanings and wider operations, or compose them to narrow down their scope. If you are a starting C programmer or an accomplished C# or Java programmer, it maybe hard to see things this way – but that is ok, you don’t always have to know the full import of what you could be doing. (I will write about Haskell and the wizard called Prof Amr Sabry some other time.)

One of the hardest things or like Prof Friedman says it is probably the simplest of all things is the idea of a continuation. It is an idea so simple that it drives you crazy trying to understand it. Imagine that if you did something, anything, it has rippling effects across the rest of all time – now imagine that you can take this ‘rest of all time’ and assign it to a variable and pass it around through all the operations you do, such that at some time you can go back to that rest of the world. That is a continuation. That as a programming device is good way to inflict some brain damage if you try to internalize it.

That’s about when I thought I should quit. That I probably should not go functional. All of this was too hard – you start out with something because you feel that there is some beauty and some truth in it. And when that fails you, maybe its time to betray you way of thinking – maybe its time to quit. By this point, you realize, that I might be quiet crazy, and that it might be rubbing off on you since you are still reading this. Betray the temple of Lambda?

That’s when Judas’s song from Jesus Christ Super Star (which I have been listening to a lot these days) plays in the back of my mind, when he does to Caiphus to betray Christ -

Now if I help you, it matters that you see

These sordid kinda things are coming hard to me.

It's taken me some time to work out what to do

I weighed the whole thing out before I came to you.

I have no thought at all about my own reward.

I really didn't come here of my own accord.

Just don't say I'm ... damned for all time.

I came because I had to; I'm the one who saw.

Jesus can't control it like he did before.

And furthermore I know that Jesus thinks so too.

Jesus wouldn't mind that I was here with you.

I have no thought at all about my own reward.

I really didn't come here of my own accord.

Just don't say I'm ... damned for all time

- Damned for All time, Judas’s Song, JCSS.

And then something snapped back in place and I was at it again. Why have such a device as continuations? Why bother? Well we understand little of continuations in my opinion. They are a thinking tool for the future. How can something so mind bogglingly hard be useful?

A long time back I remember seeing a beginner book about BASIC programming. That book had an example of the quicksort algorithm in basic written using gotos. It was a only a few lines. I spent a whole evening trying to understand what that was doing. And I didn’t succeed. I could execute the statements in my mind and see how they work, but I could see how such a beast could be created. I couldn’t see the way you would have to think to create something like that. Several years later I saw copper bars by Tylisha C Anderson and it was the same death by gotos. I could not understand it.

Many years ago they got together and killed off gotos and created a new-kid-on-the-block called structured programming. They took gotos and created a set of patterns that are sufficiently expressive to do anything that you could do using gotos. And then they killed off goto. The offspring forms the basis of almost all imperative programming today.

The real value of something powerful that we cannot tame yet is in what you can derive out of it. That’s when you say, in the conventional sense, that something is sufficiently mature – when people who don’t understand the first thing about it can use it to solve their programs (that’s the sense in which I sometimes say that windows is more mature than linux…). I think I should stop now. As you can see, college has been fun so far.

What then to do about this Jesus-mania?

Now how to we deal with a carpenter king?

Where do we start with a man who is bigger

Than John was when John did his baptism thing?

- This Jesus must die, Song of the Priests, JCSS

I dreamed I met a Galilean;

A most amazing man.

He had that look you very rarely find:

The haunting, hunted kind.

I asked him to say what had happened,

How it all began.

I asked again, he never said a word.

As if he hadn't heard.

                        - Pilate’s Dream, JCSS

Its been a little over a month at IU and the experience has been overwhelming. As has been since when I can remember I have gotten myself involved in more things than I can handle – which is another way of saying that things have been fun, atleast when I am able to keep up with them.

Like Hogwarts, the university is dotted with signs of greatness from antiquity. And every once in a while you come across some one who can do things to your mundane set of ideas that is no lesser than of Gandalf.

 
Pictures from around the Indiana University Campus

I have been hit by some hard ideas and fortunately I had been preparing my mind for a while to handle these – had I not and had I tried to absorb them at the same rate now, I might have been in for some hardship.

Lindley Hall, Computer Science Dept

 I have formally enrolled for Operating Systems by Andrew Lumsdaine, Programming Languages by Dan Friedman and Quantum Programming by Amr Sabry.

OS is primarily to scratch an old itch – because of that incomplete OS I left behind in college – this course gets to complete is half done os161 kernel – so there is a lots of traditional C programming there.

Programming Languages essentially covers the whole of ‘Essentials of Programming Languages’ with Prof Friedman saying things like ‘I will let you know when you need to think’, on day one. Most of us are thinking pretty hard already. This year the course also covers the new logic system he worked on with Will Byrd and Oleg Kiselyov called Mini-Kanren (source-forge is not as updated as it should be). This also forms the basis for his third ‘little’ book – The Reasoned Schemer.  

Quantum Programming is … well a course about magic – it’s a huge thinking exercise about creating a model of computation for possible ‘quantum machines’. I will not venture to say much more here, except drop a link to an introductory paper.

OS and PL are supposed to be among the hardest courses in the CS department, many people don’t advice taking them both together. To put things in perspective, I am finding QP the hardest simply because of the breadth of the computer science from which the ideas in QP are coming from. The present state of QP is a little like the state of classical computing in the times of Church and Turing.

 
Kirkwood Hall and the walkway by Lindley

That aside, I am looking into some of these things as of right now (this is not a complete list)
-        join calculus, pi calculus and other process calculi
-        squiggol (Bird and Meertens formalism)
-        quantum circuits
-        grokking functional programming Haskell-style
-        logic programming

All of this aside, Bloomington is a beautiful place - small university town with lots of charm and a pleasant weather (for now). I am told that this place has bad winters with lots of snow.

I have a small single bedroom apartment that is a ~12 min walk from the university.

The red square is Lindley Hall, the main CS department building and the green square is my apartment.
(Courtesy: Google Earth)

And among other things, I have a new weapon – its called Qubit. Qubit is a Dell Inspiron 9300, UXGA 17” monitor, with 1Gb ram, 256 mb Nvidia Geforce 6800 graphics card and a dual layer Dvd writer. 

This is the sort of thing I have avoided writing about and thought I would not be, for a long time to come – I was afraid to too, mostly because I felt I would be able to or would get too involved in warding of the slack I would get for saying this. But reading this article that Sriram had linked to in his blog brought a mountain of stuff tumbling down. (I don’t know why I am so much into this software-ethical-stereotype thing these days, I have work to do you know). Before you go ahead and read the article linked above, here is what I have to say. This is not a long story, but one of those minor incidents that have stuck on to gnaw at my phsyche.

Rewind several years back to when I was in my second year of undergraduate studies. I had just got my first computer (yes) and Pooja had got hers. We didn’t really have internet connections those times, though we did have the modem and required hardware. We eventually figured that if we needed to talk to each other, we could use one of those direct modem-to-modem dialup software. After a lot of tinkering with dialup software and modem settings, we had something going that mostly worked for us. I had a copy of some old dos based software – I cant seem to recall its name – that we used to dialup each others computers and basically ‘chat’.

The software was the most reasonable one I could find for our purpose, but was however seriously limiting and got rather frustrating after a few weeks of use. God-geek-in-the-making that I believed myself to be those days, I figured that the only way I would get things to happen my way is by writing a modem communication software of my own. (I know what most of you might be thinking, but those days it wasn’t too surprising to see how often this particular approach was the panacea to all my ills).

Those days I also got a chance to talk to one of the few men who seemed to know everything, or atleast had a damn good idea about how to get to know the few things that he might have missed. I got a chance to talk to Jayakrishnan K about the modem’s idea that I had on my mind. JK would know about these things – he should because he had written Kerala’s first BBS (bulletin board service) by hand (as a couple of COM files on a DOS machine doing all the multitasking and all). A short discussion later, I had my head full of X-Modem, Y-modem, Z-modem etc and I was reasonably charged up. The error control would be hard, he had warned me, but that was ok.

So I got home and start off, eventually I figured that I probably wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I was using intervue (Ralf Brown’s fabled Interrupt List (Ralf Brown is now Professor at CMU)) for reference. Somehow some things didn’t seem to make too much sense and I needed more information on how to initialize the modem correctly.

This is where GPL stepped in. I turned that in the pile of commonly shared source and software in the college students circles I had a piece of software that did modems communication. I wasn’t really sure what the full intent of the software was, but It has what I wanted – it had assembly code to initialize a modem and set all the settings and such. And being assembly code that manages a hardware device there weren’t too many ways about – you had to load some registers, write to some ports, call some interrupts etc in a certain fixed sequence of ways. Well if you are creative, you can think of several ways of accomplishing the equivalent of

Mov AX, 10

But that by itself didn’t mean that the code to initialize the modem would be written very differently by me, once I had seen how it is to be done. It also turned out that the software (as you would be expecting by now) was GPLed.

After the excitement of reading the ASM snippet I had a look at ‘COPYING’, the GPL text file. It seemed to me that if I were to use this piece of code from here to write my modems software to talk to Pooja the entirety of the code that I write would have to fall under the GPL license. It would not be my code anymore. Which is to say, that I would not be free to decide what I do with it – weather I sell it or hide it or share it – that choice would not be mine anymore. That was really disturbing for a while, because here I was wanting to write that piece of modems communications software to talk to a friend and I had a solution in hand, but there was nothing I could do about it – without subjecting myself to legal risk, had I written the software and shared it around without giving away my code. That was my first introduction to the viral nature of the GPL, though at that time the only word I could think of was ‘unfair’.

Then I figured that I probably needn’t tell anyone and I could write my software anyway. But then I wondered what would happen (with the notion of fame) that I had this famous piece of software and then one day someone realizes that I actually did have this piece of software on my hard-disk and then they would say that I stole this code illegally. This bothered me a lot because I like to think of myself as an ethical person and tend to get reasonably bothered by the converse. Immature as it may seem, I also wondered if no one could ever write modem’s communication software again.

And in time the feeling came to pass, and my code never got written and we used the same old piece of software until we bought ourselves internet connections and things blew over. I still wanted to know if there was a way out.

Years later when I had my first chance to meet Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project and author of the GNU GPL, I wanted to know if there was a way for me. But in the passing time many other things were beginning to affect my thinking and I was beginning to be more bothered about the small programming communities and their spirit of unbounded sharing and coexistence with the commercial world that the rising tide of GPL acceptance seemed to be wiping out. I feared for those communities and I felt I was part of them.

When Stallman finally did come, he was visiting model Engineering College to talk about the danger of software patents – on his first ever visit to India. And then there were people there at the talk, who were asking Stallman how they could detect if someone has used GPLed code in their own software, maybe after modifying it. How they could track down these people and bring them to court. And there I was, wanting to ask the exact opposite – about how I could be protected for using GPLed code because there was no other obvious way to do something esp once you have seen one approach that solves the problem. The question about who protects the programmers.

My question never got asked.

People around me told me that my concern was unfounded. Things like that don’t happen. Nobody is bothered if you take from GPL code they said. Its just there to be a moral standard they said.

Last year, for some uncalled for reason, the topic came back again. This time over train ride home to Cochin from Bangalore when I was traveling with Sidharth. He didn’t see the problem and I was going on raving from the Karnataka border to Ernakulam railway station that its getting dangerous that there is so much GPLed code out there just lying around on the web, crawled by search engines and popped up at you without your ever intending. And if you took from these – copy paste from your browser that smart little three line snippet – you are strictly speaking, subjecting yourself to illegal usage of GPL code.

Over the years also I have developed this habit in programming when I am stuck I usually search the web for a solution. Maybe a smart little hack or a piece of advice on how to do something and I am chugging along smoothly again. After joining Microsoft two months back a few colleagues here advised me against doing this – you never know the legal implications of what you are doing they said. It seemed a little odd then, but then maybe I had been forgetting where I was coming from. I do use the web a lot – but now with this additional fear factor and layer of caution – and I wished I lived in a world where ‘freedom’ was a different, more real sort of freedom of choice.

Then I found this article : http://www.icsharpcode.net/pub/relations/amatterofinspiration.aspx

I do not know who is right and who is wrong in this debate, but I can empathize with the factors that caused it to originate. This is from the group that creates the rather well know .Net IDE called #develop – an alternative to VS and commercial IDEs and is often recommended to students…

I had been procrastinating making this post for some days now. Esp Chris Pratley’s words ring so close to my fears “I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making...”. Hopefully this will be the last thing I need to have to say about this entire topic for a while. My blog is getting increasingly dedicated to writing stuff that I get dragged into rather than stuff I like getting into.

DO NOT hold this in perspective of my employer or any previous employer or any other context - these are purely my OWN OPINIONS done on my own steam and is not nor was ever was part of any job description of mine.

If I missed something in the above set, I apologize.

You can read it all and more here -

http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2004-October/002484.html

The reason this applies to me is because I often talk to my juniors at college and to students as well as professional developers about .Net. I do talk about it as an open platform and I believe that they should adopt it, learn from it, use it and develop on it. (A few days back I had come across this)

Sriram, now you know why (like Jack Nicholson) says ‘we can’t all get along’. I have tried and fell flat on my face, several times.

Noufal, now you know why I don’t think that MIT’s AI labs success has nothing to do with the GPL and think that the FSF is a political agitation/movement more than anything about technology or software. Unfortunately their sphere of influence is around technology.

If the things I do warrant that the above apply to me, then I am not ashamed of any of them.

Kids, if any of you in college are reading this, then here is a piece of mindspace – you are in college/university to be learning, not to be religious or have political ideals. Learn the goods and bads of every system – but more fundamentally try to learn about as much as you can about the art of computer science – that is so rare and there seem to be so many fewer people who know about it.

Now, here are some basics, you just need to be able to read and think to understand these. If you know how to use a web search engine, then you could have

Standards

The open/free standard - http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/

I intentionally use the words above, because there is No definition of the English language use of the above words that is violated in the way they are used above. If word x means y in a certain political ideal, in my personal sense of ethics, followers of y cannot call those who understand x as x to be non-conformant. Your mileage on that may vary.

The standards document – the Common Language Infrastructure – which is to say the way the runtime should work.

Its architecture.

Its file formats

Its API

Its opcode / IL / bytecode – whatever you call it

The C# language.

The above are also ISO standards under ISO/IEC 23270 (C#), ISO/IEC 23271 (CLI) and ISO/IEC 23272 (CLI TR).

Microsoft does not own or run ECMA or ISO.

Patents

About the patents, here is a mail by Miguel of the Mono project.

http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/msg05784.html

And look at this

http://samgentile.com/blog/archive/2003/02/19/2647.aspx

Implementations

Microsoft offered the SSCLI source code

http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli/

Works for BSD, Mac and Windows

The BSD bit patched for Linux is here - http://www.macadamian.com/products/sscli/download.html

These are governed by a non-viral not-for-commercial-use license

http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm (print it out, it fits on a page)

Mono

http://www.mono-project.com/about/index.html

http://www.mono-project.com/about/faq.html read the faq, before you ‘decipher’

Maybe I am a fraud who is lying about all of the above. Do you love the .Net technology; do you talk to others about it? Do you write commercial/proprietary software? Maybe you are a liar-fraud too.

Btw DO NOT hold this in perspective of my employer or any previous employer or any other context – these are purely my OWN OPINIONS done on my own steam and is not nor ever was, part of any job description of mine. Maybe I am writing this hastily, if I am wrong, I will correct myself. Personally, I have an objection to being called unethical.

"The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited. It is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated."
(Alan Kay, 1984)

Alan Kay was awarded the ACM Turing Award for 2003 –

http://www.acm.org/awards/taward.html

“For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing.”

Are you the sort who finds these automated download installers irritating? I like them in spirit that they let you download only the files that you need, instead of downloading a huge installer upfront. However if the downloader + installer combo is there so that it prevents you from physically acessing the installation files, then it is rather irritating.

MS has released the Visual Studio 2005 express editions. These are betas of lightweight versions of Visual Studio. I had a look at one of these at a friend’s desk it was pretty amazing. They seem much more developer friendly than previous version of VS. They have a certain limited support for refactoring as well.

However the issue is that the express editions have an installer than does the downloads the installation files, does the installation and deleted the files. You need to provide you passport id to the website to be able to download the installer. My guess is that MS wants to know who all are actually evaluating their product. Which is all fair – but the issue is that after this installer automatically downloads the files required, I have no way of actually accessing them – the installation is automated.

This has been really irritating me and for a genuine reason - I would like to install the express edition and play with it at my home machine. However, I don’t have the sort of bandwidth required to download it at home. At office I do have the  bandwidth required, however I don’t want to clutter my work machine with beta-ware.

I would like to download the actual installation files at office and take them home somehow.
That is what this post is about.

Examining the Installation Process

A little peeking at the installer showed that it runs as a process called ‘setup.exe’. That is good.
Setup.exe goes on to display two progress bars, one for downloading some files and one for instllaing them.

After a careful look you realize that is downloading the .Net Framework 2.0 using the BITS api of windows. The BITS api is the Background Intelligent Transfer Services api that windows uses for downloading things like patches, in such a way that it uses only unused bandwidth of your system and does not hog bandwidth from any other running applications.

The funny thing is that when I am watching the download happening I notice that there is this folder created called

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP

It is here that the framework is being downloaded. The download file is shown as “bit< something>.tmp“. The funny thing is that filemon does not show the setup.exe as the process that is writing to this file. My guess is that work done by the BITS api is not tracked as IO done by the process that made the request to the API.

However, this should be the part that is of interest – The framework 2.0 installation is downloaded into the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP\wcu\dotnetframework

It would be named dotnetfx.exe. So that is one file that you need to save.

The other file that should be saved is vcssetup.exe in the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP\

Both these files will appear when the BITS api has completed. Ie is when the first progress bar has completed. The second progress on the same page is the one that tracks the progress of the framework installation. At this time the installation files are ready copy out.

vcssetup.exe – 28.9 mb

dotnetfx.exe – 24 mb

The framework installation is spawned with the following command line switches –

dotnetfx.exe /q:a /c:"install.exe /q /watsongenman=gencomp18.txt"

I figured that out courtesy of the log file maintained by setup.exe which is called dd_vsinstall80.txt. It can be found in the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\

One thing that was puzzling me was that two exes appeared after the progress bar completed. The progress bar only said that that the framework is being downloaded. The second exe is called vcssetup.exe. I don’t know when it downloaded vcssetup.exe.
Files are
C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP\wcu\dotnetframework\dotnetfx.exe

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP\vcssetup.exe

Anyway the framework installation requires a reboot. After the reboot I noticed that both files have been deleted. The installer starts again and then the BITS api runs a second time. This time the file that appears in the download folder is again called vcssetup.exe !! The folder name is same as before :
C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP\

I have two copies of this file now and I think I need to do a file comparison to see what the difference is. I expect the first one to be a dud.

I think with these dotnetfx.exe and vcssetup.exe files, it should be possible to install the express editions and be able to copy the installation files around. I am afraid that they may not work if the original setup.exe had created some registry entries that these installers check for before running. If that is the case then I may have to go through this whole process again, but this time with regmon running. That will be a pain.

The vcssetup.exe was run by the installer with the command line args –

C:\DOCUME~1\< user name>\LOCALS~1\Temp\VSESETUP\.\vcssetup.exe "C:\DOCUME~1\< user name>\LOCALS~1\Temp\VSESETUP\.\vcssetup.exe" /q:a /c:"install.exe /q /watsongenman=vs_setup.dll.txt /msipassthru MSI_ARGS_FILENAME_BEGINC:\DOCUME~1\< user name>\LOCALS~1\Temp\tmp21.tmpMSI_ARGS_FILENAME_END"

I am not sure what any of that means right now, but I might need that to do another installation with the installer.

Ok I just ran windiff on the two versions of the vcssetup.exe file.. surprise surprise.. they are both the same. But how can that be? Does the installer actually the download the same ~30mb size file twice?

While the file was being downloaded the second time I did do a ‘ipconfig /release’ and the download did not seem to progress, so it does seem like they are actually doing a download a second time. (Damn I should have started a packet sniffer to check).

Trying to do the install with the Installer files

vcssetup.exe – 28.9 mb

dotnetfx.exe – 24 mb

I ran vcssetup.exe on a machine where I already had .Net 2.0 installed (the version that came along with Monad) and the installer refused to run saying that .Net 2.0 is not installed. I am guessing that this is a later build of .Net framework 2.0.

Ran the framework installer and it complained that an incompatible version of itself is already installed. Fair enough (considering that 2.0 is sill under development).

And bingo it works.

To Summarize

If you want to install VS 2005 express editions on a system where you down have a fast enough internet connection, this is what you need to do to get the installation files –

Start the installer program that does the download for you. At the point in the installation where it says that the download has completed and that the installation process is starting you should copy out the contents of the folder

C:\Documents and Settings\< user name>\Local Settings\Temp\VSESETUP

Specifically, you should find 2 files

vcssetup.exe – 28.9 mb

dotnetfx.exe – 24 mb

These should let you install the VS on any other machine of your choice. This entire process is applicable for VC# installation – however I would expect that similar approach exists for the other parts as well.

The information provided in this blog is for informative purposes only and is intended to help people who are facing a genuine issue. I am not responsible for any misuse of this information.

Folk, after a few mails we got confirmation from Jeffrey Snover himself, architect of Monad, clearing up any NDA issues. We are free to blog, write articles, talk about it etc etc.

Among other things watch out for the next .Net show on MSDN, they are covering Jeffrey Snover talking about Monad. Here is a blog entry by Robert Hess:

http://blogs.msdn.com/theshow/archive/2004/05/19.aspx

Also there is a build of Moand that might be made available in July which is more complete in the shell language than the present build is. That’s a lot to look forward to.

Meanwhile on a personal front this, gives us the personal freedom to explore Monad and talk about it

Since yesterday I have been thinking about NDAs. Yesterday I wrote the entry below about Monad and Pooja wrote hers, and I have been thinking.

The reason is this – MVPs before being awarded the title have to sign an NDA that says that certain information that Microsoft may reveal to them may not be publicly disclosed. The NDA is one in good spirit where employee of Microsoft who are part of product teams and doing such other core work may freely interact with MVPs about future products and ideas that are still being tested and such. A lot of MVPs actually give direct feed back to the product teams which reflect on the products that you see tomorrow.

The MVP program by its very nature is an award program and the winner of the title doesn’t directly commit anything to Microsoft. So a lot of the feed back from MVPs is neutral and critical in a very constructive sort of way, because MVPs really love their technology.

The problem with the NDA is simply that of late most MVPs (at least in the India circuit) don’t have a clear way of saying what is under NDA. We actually get to hear SO much about so many things happening that we are really not sure. So breaches of the NDA do happen simply one did not know that an item is under the NDA.

One thing that we were told of is that when in doubt – check with your MVP lead. That happens, but sometimes that is not very feasible. Sometimes you don’t even think of checking about something. Which is when another ‘rule of thumb’ was proposed at the India advocates day, 2004. At IAD it seemed ‘common-sense’ that what ever we can find on the web already is simply not under NDA – if we know something and it is not on the web yet (duh?) then it is under NDA.

This makes things a little tricky. Like when writing about Monad, I realize that a lot of information is actually available on the web – admittedly in bits and pieces, but still there. Now that I have access to the stuff as part of the beta program, can I write about it or not? We had a discussion last night with the India MVP lead and the ex India MVP lead and some of the Bangalore MVPs and to my surprise I was hearing that none of the stuff from the beta place could actually be disclosed. Also the above ‘rule of thumb’ stands corrected to ‘anything found on the Microsoft site is not under NDA’. !

Now that has some obvious contradictions – how for example do I know that I am talking about confidential information when the information is publicly available in some form? If there is a document that marks it as confidential but I do not have access to the document, does that make me in violation of the NDA? If I do have access to the confidential document, then what happens to conclusions I can draw from public information that is not explicitly stated elsewhere (though deducible) but is present in the document?

Some of this got me thinking today morning at the hacker Knight Lightning’s trial a decade back. Knight Lightning was brought to trial by the US secret service for stealing a confidential AT&T technical document that was estimated at 70k dollars or more (forgive my fading memory). The document was the centre of the debate there and in some sense was treated by the prosecution as being too sensitive to show even during the trial. The then newly formed Electronic Frontier Foundation under John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor came to Knight Lightning’s aid in the defense. It turned out that the document hardly discussed technical details of a sensitive nature. The cost of the document was a grossly over exaggerated figure, piled up as sheer administrative over head costs (things like the cost of the computer system used to typeset the document were added as the cost of the document). And as a final blow to the case it turned out that AT&T was actually selling documents of a similar but more technically detailed nature for hobbyists and enthusiasts to use (for about 13 dollars?) – which neither the prosecutors nor Knight Lightning knew about.

The issue about information being confidential while still being available in some form publicly is a very tricky one.

My own first exposure to the term ‘NDA’ was when I heard the recording of a speech by Richard M Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation) at Slovenia. RMS was talking about how an NDA imposed by Xerox for the printer driver software hurt the guys at MIT who were trying to fix a faulty laser printer that kept getting jammed. Stallman’s message was that NDAs “do have victims”. He did make several valid points and after listening to RMS several times I was sensitized to the issue of NDAs. So admittedly when I signed my first NDA with the company where I work, I did so after reading the document over several times and did it with shaky hands.

The issue about writing about Moand itself is a simple one – I had dropped a mail to the one of the contacts on the Monad team and I got prompt response. A few clarifications are left, but it seems to me that everything is in good faith now. In the case of Monad itself it is not an issue, especially when most of the folk at MS are so approachable and prompt when it comes to an relevant issue. The MVP crowd and the people around the MVP program are also were receptive and quick to respond about any queries.

However the general issue about NDAs itself is a relevant and could because serious issues really quickly, if communication between parties is not as transparent as in cases like mine.

Add to that I heard this rather recently – you cant reveal that you are under NDA? What? There is a lot I don’t understand. The thing about systems programming is that opinions are fact clearly distinguish each other – at least they are only a compilation away. Matters like this…. 

How many of us recognize the name of this man?

Mitch Kapor was the founder of the Lotus corporation. He was the man who designed the Lotus 1-2-3. If you know you history, Lotus was one of the only large applications companies that was a serious challenger for Microsoft in its early years. There were years spent over the battle for the spreadsheet that was fought on both the old Mac as well as the old DOS machines.

Microsoft’s offering those days were called Multiplan. Multiplan was fairly beat by Lotus 123 in almost all fronts. Microsoft eventually thought through their faults and strengths and eventually released Excel – the spreadsheet battle was over.

Mitch Kapor himself, is one person I think of as being fairly amazing.

He was co founder of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation along with John Perry Barlow. The EFF was the organization that for the first time stood up for hackers rights and digital rights. This was of significant and epic proportions in the early 90s when hacker arrests and crackdowns were gaining a witch-hunt like momentum.

“The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.”

The EFF was the organization that for the first time took the American Secret Service to court over the ruling and prosecution of the ‘hacker’ Knight Lightning. The EFF won and it literally brought the end of an era about how people of ‘hackers’ and the rules for information security.

I highly recommend reading this book called the Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. The book reflects the ethos of a time when the parameters of information security were very different from how we think of them now. Considering the license of the book, what it intends to convey and what I hope it may change about your thinking, I would recommend downloading a softcopy of the book.

Today I happened to come across Mitchell Kapor’s website and blog.

Website: http://www.kei.com/homepages/mkapor/

Blog: http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/

I found this entry, right on top and I couldn’t help smiling:

May 09, 2004

Now I'm Mad

Some idiot Atkins Diet spammer just posted 53 bogus comments in this blog. I'm disabling comments (globally) shortly and figuring out if there's any recourse.

They don't know it yet, but they picked the wrong person to do this to.

I thought of putting together some of my old mails and user group posting as blog entries, with some patches so that they are’ blogopatible’. They would have ended up on my blog, if I had a blog when I made these posts. I feel some of these are of lasting importance, at least with respect to the impressions they had on me.

All of these are personal opinions, probably more relevant in the context that they were originally written.

-----Original Message-----

From: James, Roshan

Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 5:37 PM

To: MVP Mailing List

Subject: An Audience with Miguel

written in a hurry:

An Audience with Miguel

Hi, yesterday Pooja and I got to catch a part of Linux Bangalore, the annual Linux convention, and I thought that it would be nice to write to mvplist and share our experiences. We had missed the dates for the event and I was rather shocked at having missed a chance to see Miguel De Icaza in person.

Miguel, for those who don't know about him, is the creator of mc (the Midnight commander), Gnome (the rather popular open source desktop) and in recent days the lead for the Mono project. The Mono project is the only other major (when I say major here, it is not that I don’t know of dotGNU and other attempts, it is because I personally feel that Mono is more complete than those) .Net implementation outside of the Microsoft world. Mono runs on Windows as well as on Linux and probably other Unix flavors. This guy has been famous/notorious in the open source community for writing papers like 'Lets make Unix not suck' and has a rather 'misfit' personality for the typical religious ramblings of the free software types. In short this man has written his own windowing systems, his own .Net, his own enterprise servers and was running his own company called Ximian.

Ximian has been recently bought by Novell making Novell a major player in the open source world. Novell has also bought Suse - major Linux flavour and Novell seems to be on the path of becoming a significantly important open source company, along the lines of maybe Red Hat and such. However unlike Redhat and many of the 'Linux companies', Novell has a focus on delivering products rather than making Linux distributions and delivering them dirt cheap or free if they have to, to get into the market. So in short Miguel is as much a demi-god as our own Anders Hejlsberg, or Don Box.

The above paragraph was to set things in perspective. This is the mono website (http://www.go-mono.com/). Having been rather disappointed to have missed Linux Bangalore dates and missed Miguel, I happened to check their talk schedules by sheer accident around 11.30 yesterday. As fate would have it, there was a talk by Miguel, his last one, scheduled at 12.00. After a ~12km drive and some conversation with the registration counter we were at the IISC Bangalore venue – the last time I was here, I was attending the Microsoft Tech Ed.

One thing you notice up front as you enter is a big banner of Abdul Kalam, our president. The poster quotes him saying that it is probably not good to have important national software depending on proprietary solutions as proprietary solutions and highly dependant on the market that the vendors cater to and that sort of unreliability is probably not a good thing. And also that free software would really help a poorer country like ours as prices of commercial software are rather high. At least that was the message in spirit - don't think I have got any of his words right.

The crowd, as far as I could say was probably the same caliber as the technical crowd I usually get to interact with at UGs and various .Net technology events. Probably not as good in some respects - but there was this thing in the air that they were all up to 'something important'. Also one other thing that was noticeable was the set of demo computers setup, where people could sit down and try out many of the software that was being talked about in the talks.

Miguel's talk was at the main hall of the IISC venue (those who know the place will know what I mean). He was accompanied by Nat Friedman of Novell, a fellow mono-ist. What happened at the talk was something I wasn't prepared for. For those of you who have a mental image of Miguel by now, this guy is young, in his early twenties. He was carrying a digital SLR camera with a hefty lens and flash addons and was dressed in baggy jeans and black t-shirt. So was the other guy Nat. Now these guys hop on stage (literally), sit down on the floor - one of them rolls out a length of cable that he had wrapped around his neck the whole while. They pull out two laptops and they get a network setup between their systems and the presentation starts up.

The presentation showed of some parts of C# , web services, GTK# for windowing, GTK + for generating XML markup for the UI (and some jokes about how XAML is a copy of their own 6 year old idea) and more. These guys did the whole presentation sitting or lying down on the floor of the stage, sometimes editing the presentation right there in front of the audience, pulling jokes on each other and writing code the whole time for a full hour - and the whole thing was on their own Mono. Awesome.

After the talk Pooja and I met up with Miguel and introduced ourselves as being from the ‘dark side’ (He asked me if I was an ASP.Net developer because of all the questions I was asking from what otherwise seemed to be a relatively .Net ignorant audience. He was interested in the fact that I was an MVP.) and asked him if we could meet him sometime later, maybe over dinner or so. He was fine with that – that however was not to happen as his schedule did not allow him to. Various activities were planned for him for the whole of the next day (today, Friday) and he was going to flying on Saturday. He did promise to talk to our .Net user group the next time he is in India (expected to be in the second quarter of next year). I had to get back to office so I had to leave then; with the intention of returning for Jani's talk a little later in the evening.

I managed to sneak out of office again to attend the talk by Mr. Janakiram (I hope you know him - he heads Microsoft India's academic/university relationship program). Along with Jani was Mr. Gaurav Daga (he is a Program Manager of the famous Services for Unix team at Hyderabad; SFU won last years best open source software of the year award). Their venue didn't do any justice to their talk. Their talk was scheduled at one of the smaller halls and the crowd was so packed for the talk that I couldn't get close to the door of the hall. Jani and Gaurav as usual pulled a great show. They were talking about the new 'Unix' being built in windows ;) (Their demo was rather awesome: they took a Unix app ran it on windows literally, they wrote .Net code and exposed it as a web service, they built a proxy around the service and consumed the proxy as a COM component which was used by excel which was used to dump – did I miss anything?)  

All the while, from when he finished his talk, Miguel and his gang were there in the main lobby, showing off code or sitting or taking photographs or ready to talk to anyone at all about anything. When he was not doing that he would be sitting around in some corner with Nat typically typing away at a piece of code he was working on.

Since I couldn't get to listen to Jani at all due to the crowd and having driven the ~12km stretch in Bangalore traffic for the third time that day, I was walking around looking rather moody. Miguel then walks up to me, 'Microsoft dude', and gets our picture taken together. He kept calling me 'Microsoft dude' and he himself wanted to be called 'The Dude'; it was interesting talking to him.

I wanted to introduce Jani and Gaurav to Miguel and Nat after their talk. It was funny because on meeting Jani and Gaurav, Miguel seemed to freeze up a little bit - I think it's that Microsoft-effect. But on the whole they were nice folk. And Jani and Gaurav were good too. Jani mentioned how he wrote a wrapper around the 'Tk' widget library and called it a windows forms assembly and got to run some regular winforms code on Linux’

In retrospect, if I wanted to pick faults with the event I could and I could say that the organizing was bad, because the projector was shaky and the stage wasn't setup properly and the food was bad and all that and be complacent about the whole thing. But looking at the good side, you see guys who are probably the gods of their community actually sitting around with the developers showing off their code and laughing and talking rather that running off after a talk or sitting in a separate area. These are probably something's that we could learn from these folk. The number of people who Miguel touched that day and the number of people who will remember him are much more that those who will remember any of the speakers at technology forums where I have had the opportunity to speak or attend.

Miguel was different from my vision of the open source advocate. Probably because he was less of an advocate and more of a real programmer.

Miguel said that no they don't say that they are going to beat Microsoft or that Microsoft is going away or anything - which is normally common talk for OSI folk I have previously met. There is place for both he said. He said he has friends at Microsoft. He said that Dave Stutz is a good friend. We talked a little about Stallman and Free software. I asked him if he would be joining MS like Don Box offered and he said probably not. He would rather be doing his thing like this and be 'helping out the poorer countries'. He says they will keep on writing software, take good ideas wherever they find them and give it out as dirt cheap or free. There was this time when he said that 'they took out the GC and put in a toy GC in rotor and took out the JIT and put in a toy JIT in rotor - but the GC in Mono is your GC as much as its my GC' and he said that to Jani - 'its your as much as its mine and I would like to keep doing that'. There is this certain element of real sincerity which I find so missing in my work place and often at our technical seminars.

Free wheeling aside and sorry for all the typos and bad language in my writing, one thing that I probably miss from speakers and from many of our communities is that people hardly seem to be doing all that for themselves as much as for the community - I haven't seen anyone sit down and give all their time and energy to the community they are trying to foster. I don't see anyone on our side actually be there with the people and spread that sense of what they are doing - most of the audiences at our talks see us as speakers on podiums, rarely as people, we don't usually give them the room for that. I wish we could do that. And I wish that when we work on our user groups we can do it for the sense of community, rather than for the sakes of meeting numbers and budgets and revenue targets and stuff. I wish we all do this because we like our technology first - the Microsoft communities have never been able to do that the way these guys have. (This was probably rant, but reading this months later I feel that a lot of human touch is still missing in the communities. Somewhere the communities are built around a carrot culture and people who do things for carrots. Miguel has his carrots, but the way I saw his carrots were from a kind of passion that I personally feel in speakers I have known, myself being equally at fault. Something about what happened there that day felt like the spirit of those things I have thought about so much – hackerdom, the free hackers, the hacker ethic, mentor’s manifesto. Something is missing here and I am sure we can fix it because we have some extremely smart people who are so passionate about their technology)

I hope I have not tipped off any one by writing all this; this is probably something that could use some thought.

Cheers

Roshan

(Left to Right: Natt Friedman (Ximian/Novell of the Mono Project, cofounder of Ximian), Me, Miguel De Icaza (Ximian/Novell - author of Mono and other great feats of hackerdom, cofounder of Ximian), Gaurav Daga (Program Manager, Microsoft - Services for Unix Team), Pooja Malpani (CTS - programmer, Microsoft MVP .Net). This was taken at Linux Bangalore 2004, the annual Linux convention.)

(President’s quote put upon a hoarding at Linux Bangalore 2004)

This was recently posted on Miguel’s blog (there is more - go read the entry):
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Apr-24.html

Jeff seems to like Cringley's statement of "The central point was that paying too much attention to Microsoft simply allows Microsoft to define the game. And when Microsoft gets to define the game, they ALWAYS win."

A nice statement, but nothing more than a nice statement, other than that, its all incorrect.

Microsoft has won in the past due to many factors, and none of them related to `Let them define the game', a couple from a list of many:

·         They leveraged their monopoly to break into new markets. The most discussed one is when they used brute force and anti-competitive strategies to get their products into new markets, but in some other cases they got fairly good adoption of their products with little or no effort: just bundle it with Windows: MSN messenger, Media Player.

·         Competitors were outmaneuvered or were incompetent (See HIgh Stakes No Prisoners).

·         People were sleeping at the wheel.

In 1993-1994, Linux had the promise of becoming the best desktop system. We had real multi-tasking, real 32-bit OS. Client and Server in the same system: Linux could be used as a server (file sharing, web serving), we could run DOS applications with dosemu. We had X11: could run applications remotely on a large server, and display on small machine. Linux quickly became a vibrant innovative community, and with virtual-desktops in our window managers, we could do things ten times as fast as Windows users! TeX was of course `much better than Windows, since it focuses on the content and the logical layout' and for those who did not like that, there was always the "Andrew" word processor. Tcl/Tk was as good as building apps with QuickBasic.

And then Microsoft released Windows 95.

·         A few years later, everyone is talking components: Netscape is putting IIOP on their client and server (ahead of their time, this later became popular as web-services on the browser); Xerox ILU; Bonobo; KParts; the Borland sponsored event to build a small component system that everyone agrees with; language bindings are at their top.

The concensus at that time? Whatever Microsoft is doing is just a thin layer on top of COM/DCOM/Windows DNA which to most of us means `same old, same old, we are innovating!'.

And then Microsoft comes up with .NET.

Maybe, sometimes, rarely, one man can change the world – or at least make a significant dent.