Loan in 30 seconds...

One of my weakness is that though I have limited desires, but when I want something, I just want it, as fast as possible. I happened to set my eyes on my present bike in Bangalore just 45 days after joining job there. We had deposited 10 months rent as advance for renting a house (Bangalore is like that), and my share in it was already more than my first month's salary, and though I brought some money from parents, I barely had 15K remaining. I hate taking loan from banks, especially when it can be repaid in months, as the overall paperwork to take the loan, and afterwards, when u have repaid the loan is too much for me to handle. So I deliberated for 2-3 days, and then approached a close friend (who was working for a year there) on a Saturday morning. The conversation below is almost exactly as it took place:

Me: I need a favour....
Him: Yup...
Me: I need to borrow money... from you...
Him: How much?
Me: About 35K
Him: Are you joking?
Me: Nope
Him: Ok, chal bank tak.

And that was it... We went to his bank's branch on M G Road, and I got the money. I went to get bike from there, and paid in full for the bike. Next day, I was the proud owner of my bike, and that evening:

Me: Thanks yaar...
Him: Abe gaali mat diya kar... acchi baat nahi hoti...
Me: Thanks really yaar, I hate to go into troubles of taking loan from bank... EMI ka jhanjhat... Isiliye tumse borrow kiya.
Him: No issues... Wapas karne waala hai na?
Me: Hmm... karna hai kya?
Him: Some unprintable words......
Me: Abe gaali mat diya kar... acchi baat nahi hoti...

It's friendships like these which make me realize that I've achieved something in life.

How to use earned leaves?

A colleague (let's say A) joined back after taking 2 week long leave. On his first day, at lunch table, we shared general updates, and after making sure that everything was fine, the conversation drifted to movies. There were 4 of us, A, B, Me and our Manager.

It turned out that he had seen 3-4 movies during those 2 weeks on his laptop. We software engineers always have few movies on our laptops, and having seen 4 movies in 2 weeks cannot be taken as a negative thing against any software engineer :).

B : "Okay... So that's why you really took those leaves. To watch movies..."
A (bewildered): "Why would I waste my earned leaves to watch movies?"
Me: "Especially when he can see them more comfortably at office, in comfort of AC environment, without wasting a leave"
Manager: "???"
A: "We can watch movies in evenings and nights even on workdays... Why would we waste earned leaves just to watch movies?"
Me: "And if we want not to cash our earned leaves, then they would be used on much better things... like... hmm... travel... and..."
A: "Persuing girls..."
Manager: "I'm not listening..."

Just a thought...

People sometimes talk about leaving themselves to God, and accept whatever the God has planned for them. I believe that God does have a plan for everybody, but it is up to every person to realize God's wish, and make that plan successful. This reminds me of an old story:

A person (say 'X') had absolute faith in God. One day, the town he lived in was threatened by flood. As his neighbors were leaving for safe places, some came to him and asked him to join them, but he refused saying that God would take care of him. Later that day, as flood water was rising, a stranger in a boat passed by, and offered to take him away to safety. Again, 'X' refused saying that God would take care of him. Finally, as 'X' was drowning in flood waters, an army rescue in a helicopter tried to rescue him, but again he refused to be rescued saying: 'God would save me'. Predictably, 'X' drowned, went to heaven, and happened to meet God. 'X' complained to God about not saving him, even though he maintained absolute faith in God for whole life. God just replied, "Dear son, who do you think sent your neighbors, that stranger in boat and the army rescue team? Even I can do only so much to help someone. The rest is up to that person. You have to meet me halfway to enable me to help you."

I'm back!!!

I'm back after a long break. I have been busy with work, travel and miscellaneous other things, and somehow kept postponing writing the next post. To my readers (I fancy that I have some :-) ), all I can say is that it's good to know that someone is waiting for my next post.

Coming to think about waiting, let's decide what is more fun: making someone wait for you, or waiting for someone. Both things have their positive and negative aspects. Some people (read girls :-) ) make it a policy to arrive late for every occasion.

When you are making someone wait, it feels good to know that someone is waiting for you. Maybe you just want to hear : "Do you know how long I've waited?" on finally arriving, which makes you feel loved and cared for. But on the other hand, are you not also wishing to be with that someone as soon as possible? So in effect, this is making 2 people suffer simultaneously, when none should have.

On the other hand, when you are waiting for someone, you keep getting more and more annoyed and restless. But the moment the person you are waiting for appears, the emotional high you get makes the wait worthwhile. Given a choice, you probably will want to wait and get that kick again. At least I will :-)

I went to Darjeeling, Gangtok, Guwahati and Shillong in December for a 9 day trip. Also went to Rishikesh, Haridwar and Mussorie in January for 3 days. Will write about these trips whenever I get some time.

Don't always take words on face value...

This entry is being written more out of a desire to keep the blog alive, as I'm not finding enough time to write a fully original post, and this state will continue for next 2-3 weeks.

So here's a story, and the lesson which one gets from it:

A girl asked a guy if he thought she was pretty... He said: no.
She asked him if he would want to be with her forever... And he said: no.
She then asked him if she were to leave would he cry, and once again he replied with a no.

She had heard enough. As she walked away, tears streaming down her face, the boy grabbed her arm and said: You're not pretty... You're beautiful. I don't want to be with you forever. I need to be with you forever. And I wouldn't cry if you walked away... I'd die...

We need to have enough faith on our dear ones to interpret their words in right context, and not simply take them at face value.

10 Immutable Laws of Security

Rediscovered 10 Immutable Laws of Security. When designing secure software/systems, it's important to know where to draw the line. For example, it's useless to try to secure a system against an attack which required physical access in the first place. If the attacker has physical access to your system, he can always use a big enough sledgehammer to break any other security you have applied.

Things to consider before switching job...

Software engineers in India are hot commodities in job market (at least till now), and keep getting new job offers. I framed the classical dilemma of whether to switch job as a question to a good friend as a question, and the clarity of the answer simply amazed me. I'm putting it as such (with some grammatical remodeling) for the benefit of others :-)

Question:
You generally like your present job and are getting a salary X (which is ok) and generally work Y (which is comfortable) hours a day. At another company, you are being offerered a salary 1.2-1.3 times X, but you will need to work lot more hours a week.

Answer:
1) If money is one of my priorities in life or if I need to raise some money in little time, then I would take up the job.

2) If I'm not staying with my family and whatever extra time I get each day after leaving from office and on weekends, I find it difficult to spend that time, then I would take the new job.

3) But in case money... or rather extra money... doesn't figure anywhere in my priority list... and also the time I get off the office... I've many things 2 do in that time... then I won't take the new job.

4) Finally, if I'm passionate about doing the work I've been offered to do in the new job... If my heart and soul lies in that work... Then even if it would pay me the same amount but allow me to work extra hours... I'll take up the job...!!!

Security cannot be added as an afterthought!!!

Earlier this week, I attended a training on software security. In university days, security concerns in programs were non existent for me, and reflected in programs I designed. This training brought back memories of a first person shooter multi player game (loosely inspired from quake) I created as assignment for Advanced Graphics course. It had a maze like 2 dimensional world, and though players were represented with nice graphics, they were internally represented as spheres, for purpose of calculating damages when they got hit. So if you would shoot at the head of a player in game, nothing would happen to him, since each player's sphere (hitting which damaged it) was centered roughly at it's chest :-).

As stated earlier, no consideration was given to security aspects at all. The clients broad casted the starting location and direction of each bullet fired by them, each client calculated how much damage they had taken from other's bullets, and transmitted this info to the server. Server's main role was to maintain a point count, and deciding where to re-spawn a player when it got killed. Everything worked amazingly well for a week long project.

But as I learnt later, it was a security nightmare. Even if one client is breached, the whole game will go down. A compromised client shooting bullets all over the game world would result in all other players being killed instantaneously, and the compromised client may choose not to report any hits to itself to the server, and hence become invulnerable. My only excuse is, that it was one of the 3 assignments, for one of the 5 courses, in one of the 2 semesters in that year. Later, while learning about software security in professional life, this example immediately came to mind. And the lesson is, security cannot be applied as an afterthought in a software. It has to be taken into account right from the design phase of any project. The security hole I left in the game was a design mistake which could not have been modified without rewriting essentially the whole game, except possibly the graphics engine. In this particular case, one client having being compromised should not have had such adverse effects on all others. If there was a foolproof client authentication scheme, or critical decisions were left to the server, the attackers would need to breach the fiercely protected server to bring down the game, instead of finding and compromising one of the unsuspecting clients.

An incomplete man?

Belgium abolished conscription in 1994. How do I know this, and of what use is this information to anyone? As it turns out, the event had side effects, some of which were entirely unexpected. In my last post, I mentioned conversing with a young Belgian man about European life, on my way from Berlin to Paris (in July 2001). I started talking to him as I was getting bored after listening to songs for hours in bus from Berlin to Paris, and asked him about places to see in Paris. Soon, the conversation moved on to songs we were listening. We exchanged Walkmans, and listened to each other's song for some time, and tried to translate the songs for each other. He was listening to German songs, and me to old Hindi songs.

After some time, the topic of conversation moved to friendship, and I asked him whether he had many friends. This simple question triggered something, and he started crying. I was taken aback for a while, but consoled him, and prompted him to tell me about his problems. Turned out that Belgium abolished conscription in 1994, and this guy was amongst the first ones to benefit i.e., to avoid military training. He was amongst the youngest in his college batch, and most of his peers had started their conscription when the orders to abolish conscription came in. So he was amongst the very few who did not have military training among his peers, and this made him the odd person out. Either his peers avoided him, or if not, most of their conversations were centered about cool things which happened during the military training. Some even suggested that he was an incomplete man without military training, and was not macho enough to remain in their group. Then onwards, he became an introvert, and had very few friends.

One thing to wonder is, this stigma was attached only to the minority who escaped conscription in a year where most people could not avoid it, and not to people in later years, where a vast majority chose not to go for military training. If doing military training is symbol of being a complete man, why don't most people voluntarily go for it? One learns new things every day!!!

Fall of a tyrant

If you are thinking that I'm going to bore you with any political events, please relax. I have no such intentions. I just happen to remember an amusing incident, where it took just one bold girl to end a tyranny, where many others (including yours truly) had failed, and want to pen it down. This happened long back (in July 2001), when I was a summer intern at a software product company in Berlin. Many fellow interns took a week off the work, and planned to go to Italy. As I love to plan my own itinerary, I was reluctant to join them, and started planning a trip of my own.

Few good friends were interning in Paris at the same time, and I decided to go for a 4 day Paris trip instead of 8 day Italy trip. The only catch was that I was to go alone to Paris. Being a student on budget, I booked a return bus ticket from Berlin to Paris. Our story starts when I boarded the bus from Berlin at about 6 pm on a Friday evening in early July. The bus driver was a jolly fellow, but the conductor was an old woman reminding me immediately of Lalita Pawar. She made it very clear that no soft drinks or eatables would be allowed in bus. Some people, including me tried to convince her about letting us carry soft drinks and snacks with us, but she made everyone put all eatables in hand luggage, with stern instructions not to take them out inside the bus.

The bus started towards Paris, but everyone was unusually silent, as the conductor had rebuffed few people about talking what she considered noisily. The ride was very comfortable, and I passed time listening to my Sony Walkman. At dinner break, I started talking to fellow travelers in general, and eventually found a young man from Belgium to converse with, initially about things to see in Paris, and later about European Life. We resumed journey, and eventually I fell asleep. Early next morning, there was some commotion in the front rows of the bus. Turned out that the conductor had caught a young couple kissing, and was rebuffing the young man, who looked terrified, and was trying to apologize.

It was at that point, that the girl accompanying the boy stood up, and took matters into her hands. She argued with conductor for about 5 minutes, mostly in German, but I could make out that both were pretty angry. By then, all eyeballs were glued on those two. Suddenly the girl thundered (first in English, and then repeated in German): "Does anyone have any problem with me"? No one uttered a word, and the girl, emboldened, bellowed to the conductor lady: "Seems like you are the only one having a problem. Why don't you go and relax"? The conductor looked defeated, went to her seat, and the couple resumed kissing after some hesitation from the boy's side. And that's not the end of story!!! Within 5 minutes, I heard people conversing in louder voices. Few pulled out pastries/snacks from their bags, and several opened soft drink/beer cans. It was as if they had been liberated from a tyrant and wanted to celebrate. I won't debate about who was right and who was wrong here, but the point is, it proved that it only takes 1 person to instill courage in others, and to begin the fall of a tyrant.

PS: My decision not to go to Italy in 2001 turned out to be a good one, and I toured Italy for over a week in summer of 2002, with responsibility of handling most of travel and budgeting plans for the group, which I enjoyed a lot. That trip instilled in me an amazing sense of self confidence, and will be dealt with in a separate longish post.