Archis's Blog

Damn me! I of all people should have known better than to oblige juniors and check out ISSC’s website, when I was the first person to have identified and isolated a VBScript virus on their pages on the 25th of January 2005. The website is http://issc.unipune.ernet.in/ and the virus is not exactly on the very first page. Browse around and you’ll find it (it’s on the admissions page prominently) – just make sure you’ve got your AV’s running with full scanning options before you do this.

I just know I’m going to get flames from ISSC Alumni containing words like “great”, “scientific”, “theoretical” and what not but utterly pointless and completely off-topic (which is generally their style), in response to this BLOG entry. But hey, this is MY BLOG and I’ll post anything I want here. If you feel it’s unfair, write something against me on your own BLOGs. You’ve left no stone unturned in the ‘Archis Gore Defamation’ department and there’s nothing worse you can do to me anymore (what would be worse than having driven me almost to suicide, and permanently damaged my emotional balance, just six months ago?).

I’ll bet there’s some greater world-saving scientific purpose to this virus than meets this eye, a purpose that is incomprehensible to my puny non-scientific brain (oh yes, using the world ‘scientific’ a hundred times is all they know how to do – you’ll find out soon enough when you see the responses to this post). Now I admit I’m the dumbest person on earth (according to the world-acknowledged intelligence-certification agency known as the ISSC), but hey, leave poor guys like me alone! I just visited your website to view the merit lists. Exclude me from the great world-saving scientific experiments and please let me live in peace.

Microsoft is probably using some stupid antivirus program which identifies a pointless script on your pages as a virus, and so was Norton Antivirus at my house, and F-Prot at a friend’s place. Please exclude us stupid poor souls from eternal scientific salvation, and let us be. My project depends on caching systems and I just had to clean the entire IE cache and recreate it (spent one hour on this), after an AV scan (which took 2 hours).

Looking at it one way, I must admit that it is a feat beyond my wildest dreams. Their webserver is Apache running on Linux, and even the stupid non-ISSC-certified Linux Torvalds himself could not have managed to run VBScript on Linux. But they did it. Kudos to you. I bow down and accept defeat. This was beyond all my abilities as a Linux user and hence your decision of whom to make the lab administrator is fully justified. Absolutely no contest there. Even Linux Torvalds would not have lived up to these standards.

I know they’re going to deny the existence of a virus, which they did do (else they would have removed it by now). The virus may be gone by the time you visit the page, but you have to trust me on this, because that’s all I have. I cannot control their webserver, and for public safety, I’m going to give them the process to remove the virus finally after six months of waiting for their scientific minds to figure it out.

BEWARE: This process is developed by me, a non-scientific person (I dont have the ISSC-certification-of-scientificness) and hence may not contain a lot of complex fancy words or impressive stuff, but you just have to trust that stupid people can be of some insignificant use in this world. Especially when scientists are focussed on complex questions like designing SQL queries at ISSC, pathetic mortals like me must pitch in and do whatever little we can.

I finally took the time off, opened the HTML pages in notepad and isolated this junk piece of pointless VBScript code in them (which is at the end of this post). A simple ‘dd’ in VI, or a select-delete in notepad should be sufficient. (I warned you it wont look impressive or fancy, but hey, I’m a stupid person remember?)

Now please, exclude us from this great revolutionary experiment, and allow us to surf the web in peace.

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It’s the old cliched thing that’s been said in all novels again and again. Dumbledore knows that there’s good in everyone – even Voldemort and feels pity for him. Yoda knows that there is good in Anakin Skywalker (lets leave Padme out of this because she might be claimed to have a biased opinion – although such bias would not be in her character).

Just today I realised that I’m not as arrogant as I had convinced myself I was. My arrogance was a way of hiding my insecurities (which is what arrogance mostly stems from). I was always outspoken at Fergusson, and had a huge fight with ISSC when I was criticised unfairly. I had completely convinced myself that I’m a self-obsessed and self-centered person. I have lived with being told to keep my mouth shut and not go about shooting opinions, especially against “higher people” than me. I was totally convinced that I would have trouble adjusting to the world due to my big ego. Surprisingly, I was wrong.

And today, my boss here asked me to be more confident about my convictions. I guess that my reactiveness was simply a result of frustration at the system and at being oppressed all my life. In an atmosphere like Microsoft, I’ve completely lost it all. I’ve lost my tendency to raise hell when my opinions aren’t agreed with. I’ve lost my tendency to get mad at others when they dont agree with me – and the simple reason is that there’s just too much freedom.

Six months ago, if the HOD at ISSC would have told me that there is such a thing as having “too much” freedom (which she did), I’d have gone ballistic (which I did). Now I seem to be not entirely convinced I was right. I’ve always been a big liberalist, and perhaps too much liberality simply drives out the reactiveness in people – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is beyond the scope of this article.

One of the reasons I was so confident and so full of conviction was because I knew that the smallest chance anyone got, everyone was out to show me how crappy and worthless I was. It made me very very careful. I would read every minor detail, work out every minor outcome and evaluate every eventuality before speaking (which was one reason they got mad at me – for not being able to find fault objectively). Out here, I’m not forced to prove myself all the time. If I tell them something’s not possible for me, they just say, “Ok” and move on. It’s a very different culture altogether. I dont have to keep a careful vigil about mistakes and to some extent they’re tolerated.

This atmosphere is making me more human than I ever was. I guess we’ve all got good in us. We just never got the right atmosphere to be able to observe it. No matter how much we convince ourselves we’re arrogant or egostic, there’s always some part of us that doesn’t like this behaviour and only forces us to behave in that manner to maintain our sanity.

We all have our model of how the world works. For people like me, the entire world is purely parameteric in nature. Everything is logical and works according to defined rules. I dont say the rules have to be amiable, and they certainly dont have to be defined by me – but once defined, they must be uniformly applied. It’s not fair for one alumnus to be great because he’s in a big company and come and criticise all his juniors, while if one of his juniors gets a job in a bigger company, they’re still called stupid. It’s not fair to set a mathematics test yourself, and then declare in the classroom that scoring marks in maths tests doesn’t mean anyone knows maths. Every event must have a parameter. If some property makes one person good, then that same property must make everyone good, if they have it. There can be no subjectiveness.

We all invent different defense mechanisms to deal with the fact that the world doesnt work according to our theoretical model. And my way was to keep everyone at bay by being a threat to them. To constantly slog all night getting better results simply to prevent anyone outsmarting me at college. I spent twice the amount of time on all assignments at ISSC, because I knew one single mistake would mean that I would be unfairly humiliated in front of the entire class by the alumni and the teachers, and my model of the universe would fail. My defense mechanism was arrogance. To keep them threatened constantly while trying to be a perfectionist myself.

But this defense mechanism is neither healthy, nor good. I never really had “confidence” in the sense of a Jedi, but more out of hatred and anger like a Sith. At Microsoft, possibly for the first time in my life, I’m exploring confidence as an impersonal and impassionate property instead of one generated due to fear of persecution.

The conclusion? Liberalism rules! We need more of it. There’s no such thing as too much freedom. More is better. We need a western society. We need a society where opinions can be expressed, there are no “standards”, and everyone can do whatever they want – without prejudice or criticism. It will reduce all the frustration and anger and ill feelings that are currently out there. We need strength, but with the force as our ally, not through anger and hate. Anger and Hate make us strong, they give us focus, but they also ruin our very soul.

I was admittedly much more powerful, focussed and stronger when I was not in MS. My frustration gave me great source of ability to work and push myself harder. And now I realise that when people are not constantly hell-bent on insulting me, but simply want to speak in a meeting and treat me as an equal, I have no confidence to present myself. Because I never knew real confidence. I only knew self-defense.

All c4b interns here are attempting to find a nickname for themselves. Already taken are Zulu by Amit Yadav, “Dat” by Arjit (cause he’s a database of Microsoft), “TC” by Harsha (TopCoder), etc.

So I thought my name should be Yoda. So please refer to me as Yoda, Master Yoda or Master Jedi for the coming two weeks. I just need to test it out and get a feel of it and see how it sounds. If it works, I’ll notify you all of the same and you can call me Yoda permanently. Thanks for your cooperation with the same.

Moving to Hyderabad was fairly easy. I’m generally a highly unemotional person, so didn’t miss many people (in fact, I didn’t miss any people).

However, insensitive as it may sound, I really miss Miku, my Dog. He is such a huge, fluffly, and loving creature with big brown eyes. I’m probably going to get a small puppy when I permanently shift here if and when I get a permanent job.

I perhaps also miss all the college politics. The stuff here is easy and simple in that sense. There’s no backstabbing, there’s no politics, there’s no secret meetings in the cafeteria. These people are all just really really happy. Now that is a big change in the positive for me. I’ve not felt angry or frustrated or all my standard set of negative emotions for the last four weeks. I just feel so calm and absolutely inert to everything. A part of me got used to all the fighting, politics and strategising.

Now, it’s just a lot of plain, straight-forward people all day long. All my evilness is getting no outlet, and the wierd thing is that I dont care either. At one time, I took pleasure in my cunningness and manipulative abilities. I was the king of politics, the grand master of manipulation and the ultimate contributer to some of the most popular controversies of all time.

And you know what? The reason I guess is that a person must be given enough freedom, and he loses all interest in negative thoughts. Perhaps Anakin Skywalker should have been trained by Yoda himself. Actually, it is a bit surprising why Obi-Wan would be his master if he was the chosen one. I still think that if Yoda had been Anakin’s master, he would have been a better person.  Obi-Wan was too restrictive of him. “A trait more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are…. even the older, more experienced ones.”

This is the moment of truth. Peri (my boss) is a very big fanatic of information processing, neural networks, systems theory, etc. Damn it! I am NEVER leaving this place if I can help it. You guys can say whatever the hell you like! Microsoft rules! I think I’m going to get along very well in here.

For those of you who have been following my blog regularly, you might have read the really long post about my first two weeks at Microsoft. Well, one of the key points that made Microsoft so different from every single company I had seen so far, was that we had no “coding standards”, “guidelines”, “conventions”, etc when we came here. This is a great power that Microsoft gave us. And I enjoyed it for the first three weeks. It felt great to be in control of everything. To have nobody tell me how to do things. To be treated like a programmer, instead of an educated typist.

However, at the end of week three, I have begun realising the kind of responsibility this power puts on us. You see, these people are actually going to use our code, code that we’ve written completely according to our own initiative and by our rules and with our ideas liberally put in there. Initially I had imagined this internship as consisting of some hypothetical simulated problems that we’d be solving. I am beginning to see more and more that our bosses are actually keen on using our code in production environments. Believe me – there is no greater feeling in the programming world than to know that the code that you have written is being trusted upon by the top people in Microsoft and is going to be deployed in a real-world scenario – under Microsoft’s name, with their endorsement. It feels brilliant. The first two weeks I took very lightly, as you may have already read in my previous BLOG entries. To make it clearer, I learnt to play pool (ok ok, I tried) but I hardly learnt any programming. Me – the great self-proclaimed academic purist – ignored all academic work here for two weeks.

However, during the review meeting, Peri (our Mentor) told us all that our projects are being monitored by many teams who are interested in these problems and we’re actually attacking problems that are currently being faced by our users as we speak. This is no simulation. This is real life. The stuff we’re working on is actually going to solve someone’s problem in real time somewhere tomorrow (and when I mean tomorrow, I mean it literally – not in the sense of ‘possibly sometime in the next ten years’). It did give me a huge boost in productivity. I’m weighing my opinions much more carefully before I express them. I’m considering every option and possibility in high detail and documenting it for future reference.

And you know what? I’m actually following all the Software Engineering practices that I hated in college – and I’m doing it with my own accord. I dont know whether they deliberately knew this would happen, or whether it happened accidentally. But they have found a way to make people more responsible – by giving them great power.

Naturally, it goes without saying that all the interns here are the best of the best and hence whatever code they write is naturally clear, concise, commented, structured, organised and all that without them having to make any concious effort to follow all the text-book rules. Most of them have experience with large projects, complex algorithms, and tough decisions. So without saying so, and without enforcing it, most of the code being produced does follow many standards and conventions.

You see, the feeling of a greater purpose to our coding, makes us far more responsible than any enforced rule by Microsoft could have made us. There might come a time when the stuff I’m writing will actually be used by hundreds of end-users. Microsoft gives me full opportunity to do what I like. It is upto me to make my product attractive for thousands of end-users, or to be rejected by the same number. I’m doing this for me, not for the company! There is that excitement and motivation of having a purpose, of having a direction, of having an objective. If tomorrow, I find a good review of one of Microsoft’s products on the internet, and if it infact originated from my project here, then that pleasure will be far greater than absolutely any amount of  perks they can give me. The challenge is no longer to please some examiner or reviewer in a closed-lab scenario. The challenge is to make the user say, “Oh man! You just solved an issue I have been having for the last two years.”

When you’re developing for an end-user, you’re on the frontline defense of your company – no longer an arms manufacturer, but a soldier. What you do is directly commented upon by the general user. It necessarily forces you to take your work very seriously – not for Peri or Microsoft, but for yourself. There shall come a day when my code will become legacy code. It is easy to write code today that works today. The fun here is in writing code today that will work tomorrow. Some new interns should be able to leverage this very code five years from now. It is such challenges that make us naturally use our abilities to the fullest in terms of design patterns, architectural decisions, etc.

From a social point of view, the funny thing is that while I’m thinking of myself only and my personal pleasure, I’m directly becoming a team player. I personally wouldn’t care much for an agreement, legalities are easy to follow. It would be easy to follow rules for the sake of an agreement – and do very ineffective work. However, I can’t just go to an end-user and make them like my software based on agreements. If they can’t use it, if they don’t like it, if it doesn’t work according to the way they imagined it, I’m screwed! The thrill keeps on increasing day by day.

This also brings in a great deal of accountability. I can no longer say, “You told me to do this and I dont care if it failed”. They never tell me how to do things. So if the product is rejected or receives criticism, I’m totally accountable for every decision that went into it. It is both a gift and a curse. If it works, I get credit. If it fails, I must answer for my decisions. Now is this damn exciting or what!

I was recently talking to someone about their career choices. This particular person is highly interested in studying psychology seriously and professionally. However, they think that people think psychology is bad.

And I could not control my instinctive response to blog about this mentality. I mean come on! Since when do “people” know anything? 300 years ago “people” thought that some women were witches and they were hunted down and burned alove. 50 years ago, some people thought jews were the reason for Germany’s loss and jews were systematically exterminated. Around 4 centuries years ago, people thought the earth was flat and the Coloumbus was a fool. Two centuries ago people thought that Thomas Edison was mentally incompetent.

For god’s sake, why the hell do we learn history in school? A nation like USA that did not even exist 300 years ago has managed to learn from our history, and we – a country with a culture of thousands of years before Christ, are yet to learn that “what people think” is utterly worthless. When will we learn? When will we evolve? Haven’t we learnt anything from the poisoning of Galileo? I mean, calling “people” stupid would be a gross understatement.

The only way this will change is if “people” stopped caring about what “people” think. And this means you and me. Afterall, who are these “people”. It is us. We cannot shed responsibility – it is cowardice. It’s easy to say, “I want to do this and I know it’s right, but people wont think so”. Who the hell are these “people”? It’s you. It’s me. It’s all of us. The minute you dont do the right thing because “people” dont think it’s right, you are becoming one of those same “people” and frightening away the next person who would have done it.

In fact, the reason our country is in such a terrible state is because we dont have good people. A nation needs good lawyers, good psychologists, good counsellors, good physicists, good theologists, good historians. Unless we start following our passions and becoming these very people and start thinking in a different way, “people” wont change.

So my personal opinion on this issue? Well, I read history and I studied it and based on the facts presented in paragraph two above, I have come to the conclusion that people necessarily have proven themselves to be stupid time and again. They criticised coloumbus, they were wrong. They criticised Edison, they were wrong. They criticised Galileo, and they were still wrong. And I hold a person accountable for his actions. I am sick of hearing this on a daily basis. I am constantly told to consider what people might think. Why am I nagged constantly, when history has shown us conclusively that what people might think has absolutely no relevance to reality or rationalism?

Fergusson’s placement program begins, and begins with a big bang (which is an understatement). I think it only gets better from here on. Placements are like a rollercoaster ride full of adventure, competition, challenges and fun. The beginning seems to be at a very high peak so the ride is surely going to be a really exciting one. Fergusson never ceases to amaze me. Every year, there’s some new bang to make me feel proud of being there – and a different band each time.

I _knew_ we had potential and nobody gave us an opportunity to show it all these years. From what I hear, IBM ISL visited Fergusson and picked up three students, one of whom was a good friend of mine. So I hope other companies are willing to give us a chance also.

Way to go FC! The best college in the world just got even better! Fergusson Rules!

We can do research. We can make products and we can innovate like anyone else. In fact, I claim that due to the unique cultural background – a life serious of studies mixed with plenty of kattas, functions, dance, music, etc. makes us really innovative and creative out-of-the-box thinkers. Of course, for the study-20-hours-a-day types, it appears like we’re diluting studies. But that isn’t even remotely the case. Good work has no compromises in Fergusson, and finally the placement program is where everyone gets to know how good we all really are. And I think the beginning itself is showing a lot of what we can expect from what is yet to come.

Ok, for those of you wondering where I was during the 2-day absence spell on both orkut and messenger, I just hit upon a brilliant plan to solve a certain problem which was driving me nuts the last week. The code is going to be really long and extremely tricky to get working, so I might be this way until my monday review meeting for this week is over. Sorry about this. E-mail is still there if you need to communicate and dont mind doing so offline.

This breakthrough could potentially solve all my future problems in the current project and might even end the project within the next week (cause I’ve got two more problems to solve during this internship). Microsoft has still not managed to piss me off (the way practically every place I go manages to), and hence I’m not yet in my super-angry mode which is the mode in which I get most of my work done (YODA, Code4bill, BCI contest, etc. are all results of the anger and humiliation of my institutions).