Dilbertesque attempt #2

The Manager goes to the security guard.

MANAGER
Hey Boss, Can you give me a laxative.

SECURITY MAN
Sir, I am not your boss.

MANAGER
When I want to keep my conversation very short,I use the word "boss.", you fool.

SECURITY GUARD
Sir, you can get laxatives in the medical shop.We keep first aid medicines and paracetamol here.We dont keep laxatives.Why dont you go home for purge?
(pause)
By the way, I use the word "buffoon", if an employee uses laxatives to stimulate evacuation of bowels at office.

MANAGER
Really? I can fire you , if you talk like that.

The security guard points his rifle.

SECURITY GUARD
(very stylish american accent)
So can I.

The shapely RECEPTIONIST winks at the security guard.

RECEPTIONIST
You are my hero.

The manager goes to the medical shop to buy the laxative.

INT. CUBICLE - DAY

The SOFTWARE ENGINEER is typing a size 48 font size "WELCOME", on slide #1, on a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation.The phone rings.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Hello ?

GIRL's VOICE
Hi techie, Would you like to buy a Manhattan Credit Card ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
How do you know I am a techie ?

GIRL's VOICE
All techies are stupid, boring males....

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I will buy your credit card, but on one condition.
If your company buys our software , I will buy your credit card.

GIRL's VOICE
What software do you guys write ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Stepper motor Software..

A slam of the phone is heard.

The Software Engineer resumes writing his presentation on "Effective techniques to write bug free Programs".

Another phone ring is heard.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Hallo ?

MANAGER
I have powdered the laxative and put it in the coffee machine.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Great! So shall I bring Dr.Reddy for coffee.

MANAGER
Sure, but first, I have to offer the coffee to a security guard.We have some unfinished business.


EXT. SOMETIME LATER - DAY

Dr.REDDY is a 40-ish man , very conscious of his appearance.Grey hair at the sides, casual Tee-shirts and jeans.

He walks along with the Software Engineer and the Manager, bragging his history.

Dr.REDDY
Before getting promoted to an astronaut, I was a Software Engineer just like you.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I didnt know this sir!

Dr.REDDY
But I was a very curious one....I experimented with all kinds of Software, I was brilliant!

MANAGER
Thats really great sir!

Dr.REDDY
We didnt have these Pentium Machines then. I wrote a whole database system using only 1s and 0s. Before that I wrote a compiler using only 0s.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Wow! We have a genius with us.....You are a role model.

Dr.REDDY
I used to take HUGE coffee breaks whenever I achieved a short term goal or when I solved a bug.
(proudly)
And to this day, I keep that habit!

MANAGER
We are privileged to have a legend with us, sir.Can we have some coffee.

Dr.REDDY
Sure!

To be continued

Cats and Dogs

It is raining like hell in Bangalore. Literally like hell. Non stop downpour for the past 48 hours. Traffic Jam lengths reaching epic proportions. It is all happening.Gd must have spent maximum hours today and yesterday in the bus. I heard about infy stories like leaving home at 6 : 50 in the morning and reaching at 11:45 in the afternoon.

Here I am , at my cubicle stranded because the Rishabahavati has overflown (with full of fresh rain water) and swallowed Mysore Road. A lot of people have not left the office and holidays have been declared for schools and colleges

Oh God!
Please save us from Deve Gowda and Rains.

Life is really a downpour.

Current Music: Garbage - I am only happy when it rains.

A very Dilbertesque attempt.

Tried a dilbert below :-



The performance review starts and the software engineer adjusts his tie.

SE
(narration VO)

In the early days, men and knights of strength and valor, wore striped ties and smeared their tie with their opponents' blood using the swords after killing the opponent.That explains the allignment of the stripes.That was ths significance of the stripes and the culture of stripe ties..Nowadays the striped ties are worn during the performance appraisal.I am about to face the battle for this quarter.
Lets get back to reality.


The Manager and the software engineer enter the room.
The engineer closes the door.

The MANAGER flashes the customary smile.

MANAGER
Please sit down.

The Engineer sits down.

The Manager clears his throat and starts off.

MANAGER
Your performance can be described as "simian".

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Thanks :-) I am feeling on top of a tree!

MANAGER
Hahaha....How do you consider this as a compliment ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Since our business is nothing but "monkey business", I would love to have a simian performance for my appraisal.

MANAGER
(as a matter of fact-ed ly)
Look this is no time for monkey tricks.
Lets get to what we have done,this quarter.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Allright.

MANAGER
Begin with what you did this quarter.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I wrote the stepper motor software which unrolls the toilet paper for the astronauts for the Moon-Moon spaceship project.

MANAGER
(sighs heavily, adjusts his specs)
Actually I have some doubts on this project. Who suggested this idea ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
It was your brain child.I think you roped this project after convincing the Moon-Moon Project Manager about our core competency in stepper motor.

MANAGER
(suspiciously)
Allright. So when is the testing supposed to start ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
I have done the unitary testing which ensures that the stepper motor unrolls at a uniform rotational speed.I used Rotational Mechanics Principles.

MANAGER
Okay.I have asked the test team to come up with the test plan. But they didnt oblige because they dont know how to test this.They said they were actually testing the Moon-Moon spaceship itself.
Some button on the spaceship is malfunctioning.....I am just confused. How do we test your component ?

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
How about giving some laxatives to astronauts and putting them in a 0 gravity state in the Moon-Moon simulator, and testing our software ?

MANAGER
Sounds like a great idea.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Then give me a good grade for my performance appraisal.

MANAGER
Surely, I will.But I guess we need to buy some laxatives first , for the astronauts and put some in their floor's coffee machine. They will gladly oblige for the tests later.


SOFTWARE ENGINNER
Whom shall we call ?

MANAGER
We will persuade Dr.Reddy for drinking laxative concentrated coffee and later bring him to our test chamber.

SOFTWARE ENGINEER.
So what grade do I get ?

MANAGER
B+

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Thank you.

To be continued.....

Weekend

Welll yesterday I had been to Rajesh's wedding, probably the first guy to get married from our PESIT group (I hope my facts are right...).Rajesh is famous for his devotion to extremely fast and loud black metal and thrash metal songs.I doubt whether he will continue his devotion to the genre !!
And there was an orchestra playing Kannada and Hindi songs.

I met many people from the PESIT gang (and now fellow bloogers like dhimant and chilli.)

BV was famously missing yesterday and met Harsha (Haahsha) and Putta.Met Raghuram's mom....
All and all it was a good experience......

PESIT seemed like a long time ago.


Current Music: Paula Cole : Where have all the Cowboys Gone ?

Venky

If you have played rubber-ball cricket in bangalore, then read the post entitled "motte" in Venky's post on motte .

Hilarious!

20 questions

1) Male/Female? yes

2) Male? yes

3) he taught us in college? yes ( you are given one lucky guess)

Description of the class:
a) Attendance: prof:Raghuram.
Response from Raghu: yess siiir, with various levels of intonations and syllable stress.

b) classic time pass dialogue:
Think of a day, you can think of monday, tuesday,.. friday.

Notable feature
c) prof saved most of our projects with his red coloured book.

Why do I recall all this, because I am taking a class by his suaver soulmate, with super signal to noise characteristics.

Spam to get the hype and hooplah

How do you ensure you get SPEEDY JUSTICE, MEDIA COVERAGE to a certain injustice which happened to you?

Answer :- Use the internet and SPAM it UP.

Nimish Adani, who spammed all the Yahoo! groups and journalists for getting justice has finally got the justice.

But however today's paper confirmed that some of his allegations were false and he was in an inebriated state and had not bought platform tickets and it was he who started the physical squabble by pushing around the railway guards.Hmm not surprising at all.
Eradu kai seridrene chappaale


The more important question is below :-

Now why am I taking so much pain to put it on my blog ?

BECAUSE, spam mails can be easily used/misused/tampered and create a mass opinion.It is worse than a windows virus mail.So I think , verify the truth of a mail before blindly forwarding it to another 10000 people....Just because your mail says :-

Forward this mail to everyone you know!!You will get a chance to be in bed with 5 playboy models of this month!!!

Article

I came across this article which says C programming is obsolete and procedural programming is dead. Since , I have been working on C after PROTEL , I vehemently disagree with most of the article.

C has to be taught at college level.Procedural line of thinking has to be taught at college level.Although pseudocode which is procedural is great from a "compile, execute & practice" procedural code point of view , C has to be taught. Because , I guess the other procedural languages are really older.

The points for NOT to learn C in college according to the author are :-


# It's not a skill you'll use in most of the software development jobs you'd want to have

The author uses SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT JOBS in a very loose manner. C code is STILL used in many applications , although there are elaborate frameworks of C (yeah , there are C frameworks!) I think only embedded systems and software which are actually meant to be lean and fast prefer to "implement classes" rather than use the big fat C++.

Thats why you SHOULD learn C from an industry requirement pov.C is definitely applicable even in industry level. You have energymeters, mobile telephone code , elevator software , software for hitech cars written on C, the compilers (either ported on small operating systems) or just compilers spewing out bits and bytes.


# It can give you a false sense of control

There is no such thing as "Sense of Control".Any language can be misused.In Java and C++ you ALWAYS tend to convert every damn problem into an Object Oriented Problem and have actors and sequence diagrams.So in this case, more effort is SPENT on trying to imagine every godammn problem as OOP and create classes and objects which are created just to satisfy your object oriented thinking lust. C++/Java says "You follow OOP, you will be safe, you will have control". Now tell me who is controlling whom? (Especially if you cannot think a problem beyond objects and classes).Isnt Operator Overloading also miused just like C pointers? What is the big deal? Java, currently I dont see any "misuse" as such but I am sure there will be something or the other.

# It can teach you to get in the way

This is all covered in my previous argument.C is allows you to be "intrusive" if I may use that word.That was the purpose it was written! And C++ which was written on top of C, tries to close it.Weird.

The most sensible thing to do is FOLLOW CERTAIN RULES and CODING LINES in C and you wont make a mistake!

# It can make it hard for you to love famework based development

I am currently working on a framework based development.But I have to admit , it is not as elegant as an OOP framework but it is a good one! :-) and ofcourse I cant disclose it.

Any framework based development goes on like this :-

1. Look at framework API.
2. Imagine the problem in terms of the API.
3. Identify the API,
4. Grep the source code to see the usage.
5. Copy paste the source file

Step 5 may bring smiles on some faces and some people may think copy and pasting is stupid but to write maintainable , uniform code requires a coder to actually use the cut & paste options.These tools are like hammer and chisels for SEs.

# It can teach you philosophies which will prevent you from really understanding modern programming

Fuck the philosophy. Philosophy may come and philosophy may go, but a common man uses procedural line of thought to solve a problem.

# It can teach you divert your problems from the real challenges of software engineering

Most software Engineering challenges are not generic.Ofcourse some are very obscurely technical, , some are generic and some challenges are based on "what i have right now in my hands".

The bottomline is Software Engineers gain some experience. They want to share their learnings to everybody. They write articles which are right in their own way but very different if to others.
Example, people say follow code convention.

Coding convention in Linux kernel (written in lovely C) names a variable like this :-
int i_am_an_integer;

Microsoft uses the hungarian notation :-
int iCountForMaxEmployees;

Both are right in their own way!So all you C-programmers out there ( ;-( ) we are not obsolete.
Read this book and enjoy !

To summarise , choose your language based on what you are writing and LEARNING C is NOT DETRIMENTAL. Learning LISP is not detrimental. But changing the language you code is something you gotta watch out for!

Sneezy day

I have sneezed so much, that my neck has sprained like hell and I am down with fever and it has affected my driving speed (you cant turn your head around when your neck is sprained). Because of a lot of work, I am at office.

I am taking a break from blogging atleast a week, because I think it is getting very much into my life

Indians good only at theory : Microsoft

"Computer engineers are more into theory and less in managing businesses, building businesses or writing source codes, the key to software development," Mundie told Business Standard.

I dont think this statement is wrong at all. Most of us are good at Mathematics but not innovating or thinking for what is needed to the market point of view.

That will continue to be a piece of cake for the college dropouts who will become future billionaires.

Google , I am afraid is heading towards the same direction.(This is a gut feel, and I humbly accept if I am wrong at this analysis of mine.)

Take for example Google Earth. Great Innovation.Great technology.But, What is the use ?
It'll just be a passing fad and an extra cost to the company very soon, like other products like Froogle etc.Or most of the Google labs products.

America, will continue to be the epi-centre of innovation.They are damn good at innovation.We will continue to be the service providers.

I am no education expert, but I think emphasis should be given more on assignments (like what the post graduate(ME,MTech,MS etc) students have) at the BE level itself. We can become better engineers.We just had 15 programs when some programs were first written/printed out in practicals book, later we used to understand them. Worse, we remembered them by-heart.

I remember the LRU method or the Strassen's Matrix Multiplication which was really complicated stuff.

All these boil down to having REALLY good teachers. I disagree that a large number of students can be autonomous at Bachelor's level, even if they have an IQ of Einstein.

See the whole article here

This reminds me of the movie se7en => Gluttony

Stupid Snake

Generally emails have some moronic pythons eating something.Eating a huge crocodile - height of overestimation.

Infrastructure woes

The never ending debate of who owns the responsibility of infrastructure developemnt of bangalore finally ended with a PPP (Public Private Patnership) model.

We recently recieved updates on the proposed changes from none other than MD Pai - the CFO. The updates are about plans and more plans and a few clearances for the existing plans, budgeting, fidgeting ;-) etc .. By the time these get resolved and all the measures adopted to successful completion, Banglore would have quadrapled and we wont even feel the diffrence

goodddddddddddddd when would I travel from BSK to electronic city within an hour.
Are you listening ?? God says ask me anything else .. GRRRRRRRRRR

Unbelievable!

Disgusting