Always good indicator of Microsoft’s product quality is the employee’s Facebook feeds. Managers at MSFT don’t have to panic – none of my friends leak any information.

For anyone with plenty of time and academic curiosity to test my hypothesis, they should go analyse the Facebook/Twitter timelines of employee posts. One of the things I learnt the hard way in my almost-five years there is that very very few Microsofties are what you might call – true academicians (though those that exist are the ones behind what you see succeeding today.) My respect and admiration for Terry Myerson is a matter of Google’ing my past posts, and I’d dare you to find anyone of the thousands of people to whom I complain about WP to, to quote even a single instance where I have spoken against him.

The trend there is to throw around the word ‘innovation’, ‘synergy’, ‘dynamism’, etc. a lot and quote past examples, and find new process names to try. It’s pretty annoying to hear a softie promote their product at times (there was one blog out of the thousands who really questioned whether all softies speak the way Charlie Kindel does – most do in fact.) I have many analyses as to why most Microsoft people appear to be totally out of touch with reality (heck I worked on Messenger and Hotmail – you don’t even want to go there!) The problem is, for a large part of the last decade, all you had to do was build stuff, and it’d get a cool few million users without any effort and you post-justify success with MBA-speak. Windows was the vehicle. You slap some WPF on there, and it inevitably gets picked up. You never have to convince or sell developers on, how or why, WPF improved the things you could do compared to other alternatives.

Which is why when WP was announced, the first thing they did was to hold an iPhone funeral. My FB feed was practically filled with death-threats. Try and suggest one feature missing in your Windows Phone, and you get attacked with all kinds of straw-men. The same rhetoric over and over distills down to one or more of the following:

1. Whatever you ask for is irrelevant. Yes, it’s only perception that you need a compass in maps. People got along fine before, and people will get along fine without it. Don’t be such a prick and feel entitled to anything. We don’t owe you anything, so don’t suggest features.

2. The iPhone never had it in 2007. (Not sure what they try to say here, but in their world apparently, that’s a defense)

3. Maybe it’s not for you (and this is said with some kind of pride of elitism – we’re the 1% few who appreciate the true value of a magical world-saving device)

4. It’ll be successful in 2015 (this one really confuses you – I could go on and on about how utterly ridiculous it is to expect me to pay $300 bucks for your phone NOW because it’s 3rd model four years from today will leap frog the competitions model then after you’ve paid for a couple of additional $300 upgrades.)

I got sidetracked. My apologies. As I was saying, the academicians – let me clarify here. There is a mistaken belief that Academicians are people without purpose. Heck they know purpose and they know money. What it really means is people who are dedicated to building a good product, just ‘because’! In its day Microsoft did come out with some pretty good stuff just because – COM being the best one I can name right now. Even Windows Mobile was pretty impressive for its time.

I think at this CES finally, there is a Windows Phone device that really makes me “think”. I’m not saying I’ll buy it – because I recently threw out my Focus for a 4S (yeah, if you made me pay $300 bucks for a shitty device, I’m waiting till a WP offers me TWICE as much as my iPhone to make up for the difference. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.) But for once, I see a device I would have been genuinely (as opposed to defensively) proud of, if I worked at either Microsoft or Nokia.

Many of you may not know this, and it seems like a pretty childish thing to do, but one way to get softies to shut up about their ‘superior’ OS for the past year, was to carry a few hundred dollars or a couple of blank checks in your pocket. Anytime someone used the word ‘superior’, I would pull out a check for $700 bucks and put my iPhone on the table and ask them to give me their replacement. Don’t argue with me. Don’t debate with me. You know better than me. Here’s my money. I’m waiting to be impressed.

An indication of good times though, is clearly from the lack of those outrageous death-threats flying around on FB this time. After CES, they have gotten factual, and that’s a mighty good sign. The N900 actually looks pretty good, and if they can fix the app situation (which is still bad) they just might do well. I was also impressed at HTC adding the 16mp camera. Now don’t you go telling me it may not add quality. We dished it out to them when they defended lack of dual-core, and we must face it. When it comes to specs, a WP has the most powerful camera I’ve heard of in a phone.

The software though really has to deliver fast and has to finish off the remaining ‘magic’ of the equation. Apps, including Facebook’s own, must provide full-fidelity (a concept I learnt is very important, and I learnt it at and from Microsoft.) Skype MUST match the Facetime/iMessage magic. If not none, then at least minimal, signin dialogs, and stuff. Just detect what’s on the other side, and enable video and Messenger IMs without the two users first having added each other as contacts on Messenger or Skype. If they pull that off, and do it fast, and make sure they remain feature-compatible with other phones – they just may expect my few hundred bucks for my next upgrade in 2 years.

I do see a good change in attitude. Instead of speaking of killing things and being the No 1 in 10 years, they are slowly learning the reality that others have pretty decent products too and will probably be here for a while. Making a good product and selling a decent amount of phones in the short-term may not be a bad compromise to dreams of world domination in four years.

After five years of watching shitty products being promoted with zeal, I’m happy to see great products promoted calmly for what they are – simply good products. I’m impressed!

I was stuck trying to build my other wine-heater thingy in the meantime, and the job and house move was keeping me busy. Beginning next week, I’ll get back to working on the promised library to read data and allow any apps to process it. My particular interest is in plugging it into sci-lab if I can, so people can have a free signal-processing environment to process PendantEEG data and experiment with it.

That’s all for now, folks! 

As is bound to happen, I began building something of my own. It’s not until you do the math that you realize just how much specific heat water has. It’s a miracle we get it to boil at all. Pumping in that much energy into a thermodynamic system that fast was a problem. My heating elements would have to heat up too rapidly and I needed some way to control them.

The next step was obvious. A trip to radio shack, an Arduino and a fast-switching MOSFET, turned into a pulse-wave modulated heating element  - beyond which the original intentions of heating wine fast no longer mattered – I was chasing some crazy high.

I ended up building a device that gets multiple feedback readings plots them on a logarithmic function, and injects heat at the rate at which said liquid can absorb safely, without the boundaries over-heating, and can compute the rate of heat loss from the system through radiation or evaporation (before you ask, yes, at that point I was caught up in the feature-hole – just adding stuff because I could.) Microcontrollers in the hands of a software engineer are dangerous. Once you have one, you find yourself with limitless power and the ability to add frivolous sensors and features, for cheap.

Anyway, a quick survey among friends (which is a pretty biased sample – since they always tell you what you want to hear)  indicated that it may be quite a nifty little thing for home use. There are plenty of liquids that needs to be regulated in a small temperature window. Thermostats are typically fairly brutal in their operation – they turn on and suddenly heat up your elements rapidly, and abruptly shut off. You can’t really regulate them to say turn on 1/5th of a second, each second, so that you don’t get the massive temperature variance.

It’s been quite an adventure, and I practically burnt through my life savings. I am a trained programmer, but electronics has been a hobby. I’m worse still when it comes to fabrication. Fabrication is an art, and as such cannot be objectively studied. As much as I’d like to be, I’m not MacGyver. My initial tools of choice were test tubes, and beakers – stuff you’d find easily, but not stuff that makes a good product. I learnt a hard lesson – material science is a “thing”, and one that deserves more respect than I had given it for a long time. Finding a material with all the thousand properties that make a good food-safe barrier between your electronics, and… well, food, is a challenge.

So I stand here today – owner of the world’s arguably most advanced device ever possessed for the purpose of heating wines – and one that I dare not use, for fear of accidentally starting fires.

As I mentioned above, when you really do the math, it takes about 4 KJ to heat 1 liter of water by 1 degree C. Assuming you want it at near boiling (say 95C) from room temperature of say, 30C, you’re looking at a 65C difference. You need about 230 KJ to heat it up. That’s about 230 watts per second for a thousand seconds (about 16 minutes) not counting any heat losses. No way do I have the guts to  run that kind of power through anything I built at home. I have some experience with microelectronics, but those who handle power electronics are in a different league altogether. It’s a wonder we live such safe lives given how much power circulates through our grids around us at every moment.

I am however, looking for investors. I’ve filed a provisional patent, and would welcome any contacts, startups, large companies, kitchen appliance companies to revolutionalize the world of… heating wine?

Until my next project then….

An early behind-the-scenes video. The high-power circuitry comes next, and I’m not confident I won’t blow up my board though I’m taking every precaution to protect circuits with sensitive fuses. Time will tell. There isn’t anything here you can’t build out of the box. I’d say a college-student is much better equipped than me – I actually forgot that connecting resistors in parallel reduces overall resistance, and am glad to say the fuses came in handy.

http://youtu.be/YDDQ_LFfHm8

On a related note, Windows Phone just wasted the last hour trying to make the video upload and Zune’s clunky confusing interface, made finding the file location difficult when I managed to copy it with physical thethering. I could go on and on about the entire series of steps I followed (but MSFT folks know me all too well, a factual argument is one they can’t win – I’m sure I’m looking at this from the wrong “lens” or “prism” or whatever.) God damnit, I spent my savings on this project which felt more important than moving to the iPhone ASAP. Glad I got that out of my system. Phew.

Anyhow, I learnt increasing an order of magnitude for an NP-Hard exponential problem doesn’t help (an N+1 input will kill you anyway.) Couldn’t think of a probabilistic method in the 2 days I spent on it. There’s a couple of optimizations I wasn’t able to do due to the DS I choose. A sparse grid or matrix would have been the right way to go here, but reverting state is difficult on those. The one thing that would speed this up further is to proactively look at the shape of the unfilled area in the candidate box, and find one of the unplaced rectangles that would never fit in that shape. That would trim a large number of candidate boxes fast.

For what it’s worth, here’s the dirty code. More of the BCI signal-processing code to follow over the weekend. Here’s the file: RectanglePacker

Quick overview – languages have rules, structures, etc. Sometimes, the rules become too complex, or at times, they are so specialized, they turn into a look-up table (i.e., not a lot of generaization.) Whenever you can’t generalize, you add entropy. Putting aside, for a moment, the poetic beauty of a language and the art of eloqution, many rules are redundant.

Consider language as simply a tool, a means to an end rather than the end in itself, designed to express a thought. If so, the less ambiguity something has, the easier it is, and the better it solves its purpose. When one first begins to learn computer languages, or even when they think of “parsing” English, every single person that I know goes through the thought process above. Why not just have a language that isn’t as nuanced? Why not design a simpler language? Esperanto certainly came out of a need, but building out a complete new language may not have been the solution. It appears that the need is already being met by modification to English itself.

I am beginning to believe that the very efficiency computational linquists want in a simple-to-parse language, is also the kind of simplicity the human brain wants. There is a certain idea you want to express. The nuances of whether I will do something, as opposed to whether something will be done by me, while undoubtedly helpful, may not be as necessary as we think. Facebook/Twitter are helping reinforce that idea. If you look at most non-proofread contemporary speech, it almost feels like a context-free language. It appears that what NLP wants, NLP may end up getting, simply because what makes NLP so hard is what also makes language itself so hard for most people.

Texting is the classic blatant example. Most texts are simply a gathering of words put together. There is a certain amount of context and syntax present to avoid ambiguity, but overall, the tools used to elimiate ambiguity are the ones that can do it in as blatant a way as possible, with as little simplicity subtlety as possible. Similarly, few FB/Twitter posts seem to be carefully crafted treatises, but generally just words that present an idea. The less context necessary for the idea to be parsed, the better it is communicated. Five years ago, a lot of “old school” people, including me, would complain of the utter lack of punctuation in sentences. Instead of adapting punctuation correctly, I found that people learnt to phrase their text in such a way that addition of commas and full-stops became unnecessary. A modern FB post is as decipherable without punctuation, as it is with. That’s some creative adaptation, right there.

Another reason for this is search engines. Very rarely do you search for something like, “Give me movie times for today evening in Redmond.”

The same idea is expessed as simply as, “Movies redmond today”

Over time, it is not difficult to imagine this is how I might begin communication with a friend. Even the verb is implied and not explicitly stated! The parsing rules for this language are just ridiculously simple – tokenize the sentence, and you know what it’s saying.

Then again, I’m not blaming the internet or machines for this phenomenon. I think it is simply been the first time that a large population the entire earth is literate (even 30 years ago, when I was born, I knew plenty of people who couldn’t read or write.) Written language was, no matter how many people may dislike this, an elite previledge – and to some extend, an end in itself. When you are a club of handful people, you can end up in an ego-pissing match. What we might call spoken ‘peasant’ language was always utterly simple and efficient (though I find a lot of ideas I cannot express to them due to the lack of a vocabulary that can convey subtle differences.)

I’m not advocating anything here, but we have to admit that any complex and large system always tends towards reducing entropy over time. It does not mean literary art will have no appreciation, but it is an interesting thought. This would be an interesting hypothesis to test out, if only for the academic validity of the idea. Is modern human language finding a path towards reduction in the energy and ambiguity required to express an idea? Is it a dual-feedback loop where NLP systems are getting better with feedback, but also driving certain generalizations back into the human world?

Most of you are aware of my lack of love for many things Microsoft. I am happy with what I saw today, and I am in love with what the Windows team has built, and how fast they built it (24 months ago, we had Win7.) Any programmer worth his 2 cents has to know how tough that is.

When I first joined in 2006, I joined in the middle of what was heating up to be Vista. It was a different time and age in the company but there was certainly energy. I wouldn’t say much else, but there certainly was energy. A Windows that was 6 years in the making. A lot of new stuff.

Back then, and coming from heavy Linux usage for five years, I could have commented on MANY, MANY things that could have been done differently. A sort of “wake up, there is an entire world outside of Microsoft” call.

Windows 8 though – blew my mind. On more fronts than one. They seem to have picked up literally every piece of goodness I loved about all the companies/products I’ve admired and made one big culture/product/direction change – the development models, the quality bars, the communication and announcement model, the feedback model, the structure and discipline, the humility, the confidence, and the list is endless.

On the first count, the team is structured – intensely focussed, small and targetted teams, determined to win, and dedicated to a quality bar (as Sinofsky commented in his keynote a few minutes ago, much to my pleasure, “we are bound by quality, not time.”) Everyone knows what they are doing, and why they are doing it, and how it fits in for the customer. The team is also, unlike many other (or perhaps older) MSFT orgs, not looking for technology resume-fillers. Today’s keynote was about what the whole “thing” can do instead of how cool their new memory-management system is. Windows Live was about how your photos are accessible instead of how their data-access APIs are serialized on-the-wire. Plus, demo’s, not hypothetical scenarios for some  feature nobody else will have in 2016. It’s out there. It’s now. You can download it yourself in less than 10 hours. Now that’s something that I can feel proud of, and brag about as a fellow employee. The best way to respond to a critic is to give them a URL, not predictions or prophecies.

On the other hand, unlike a certain other structured company out there, the team can’t be accused of not being accessible to you either. Developer preview goes out tonight. Feedback is welcome, and will be listened to, acted upon. While the above reminds you of Apple, this part distinctly reeks of the open development models out there. I think this is the perfect balance between the Cathedral and a Bazaar. A purely democratic Bazaar leads to little polish. A Cathedral doesn’t scale. There are multiple official blogs where the teams are listening for feedback. Discussions that criticize the product are not banned or hushed-up.

However, and this is the cool part, if you do want to know about the actual APIs and the on-the-wire formats, it is coming, and it shall be given too. I’m just very excited how the scenario was the primary driver. In my opinion, when I think about whether or not I want to go on a certain platform, my first instinct is “who the heck will use this?” While a lot of people will disagree with me, and if you do, you may be making a big mistake, developers don’t choose a platform because it provides dynamic typing and annotations, or XML-defined UIs. Developers use platforms because: a) Their customers will use it and b) They can delight their customers with what they can build even if it needs to be written in Assembly Language. They will build runtimes or platforms to ease their life, sure. To steal and paraphrase a quote from Jurassic Park: “You can’t contain developers. Developers… will find a way!”

Just because I hate maintaining hyperlinks, you can figure out everything here: http://www.buildwindows.com/

I’ve spoken to plenty of people all over the company, and I loved the fact that Win seems to be the least obnoxious (if at all) of the teams out there. If you have opinions, they want to know. If you have issues, you will get guidance. If there is a decision, you will hear a justification of why they came to a certain conclusion, and if you can show a flaw in their logic, are open to reconsidering that conclusion. If you have nothing but praise, they will humbly thank you, and tell you that there is more that needs to be done, and get back to their coding. That’s one admirable team, and I am proud to work beside them.

Today, we continue on the rant against frameworks, and look into code reuse and maintainability. Unlike regular posts, this is one area I’m not too sure about, and would love comments or counter-examples. Spare no punches!

What is reuse exactly? Syntax or semantics?

Let’s start with an example. Given a procedural language, I write a framework to do the following. Instead of the coding having to decide at coding-time what operation they want to do on a float, they can delegate it to my run-time operation-definition framework that allows data-driven dynamically loaded operations.
1. The code itself will look like this:
y = f(x)
2. The executable will add a configuration file for my framework that says:
<define function=”f” definition=”System.Math.Sin”/>

This one raises a lot of questions that I want to ask, but for now, I’d like to know, would you call this code reuse? I can certainly make great arguments for this style of coding (keep quiet functional-programmers, this one’s for someone who _has_ chosen a procedural language.) It allows me to change the definition of ‘f’ at runtime. I don’t have to worry if tomorrow my computation changes, because a simple config-change will make my code work for Cos, or Tan or whatever else the user needs. I can replace the definition of “Sin” to use a different implementation whenever I choose.

For me personally, this is bullshit! It’s the worst kind of code I would ever had the displeasure of dealing with. Only the last argument made any sense, and there are ways around that. It is the most irresponsible style of coding too – the programmer, instead of taking responsibility for ensuring correctness of code, delegates every function out of their own scope. If you really want to do that, use a functional language already! People have been advocating them for over four decades now, and this is exactly the reason why! Stop contaminating my procedural code with a smarty-pants half-assed implementation of something for which robust implementations exist already. You can replace your code at runtime and any interpretor worth its two cents has a decent JITer. Semantically, what would be the difference in sending the interpretor a new file to interpret, versus changing configuration for a running program? y=f(x) is certainly not going to have bugs (and can be tested easily.) Your probable bugs are going to be inside ‘f’ anyway. So while your core ‘executable’ can be assured of being stable, it’s a false perception.

The problem with this snippet, functional language or not, is that instead of ensuring correctness, it actually reduces it.

For one, what you see above, is an example of syntactic reuse. You are reusing the syntax for making a function call. You may disagree with me on this, but to me personally, what is really valuable isn’t syntax reuse but semantic reuse. Implementing a good Sine function is damned difficult. That’s what I want to reuse. Calling into the Sine function isn’t what I worry about when I open up my editor. The correctness of my Sine function is what I want to reuse. If there’s a bug, and someone fixes it, I want the new Sine function. If I may ever need to use a Sine function from a different library/implementation, well, seriously – change references to the new library and recompile your code (I know I’m making some atrocious demands here.)

The second problem is the really serious one. When I’m writing code as y = f(x), what the heck am I thinking? I mean seriously. If I am writing a program, I write it for a specific purpose. If I’m computing some vector component across one axis, I know why I’m computing it along that axis. Which means, when I write f(x), I had better damned well know what that ‘f’ should be. If that ‘f’ is ever going to change to ‘g’, then that’s because my problem statement has changed. It alters completely what I am doing (two axes are never the same.) If I start computing Cos(x), it is very very different from computing Sin(x) and I would have serious justifications for why I want the Cosine now. I sure as hell don’t want to reconfigure a running program to do that. I may do a host of things with a running program – use a more accurate Sin implementation, use a faster Sin implementation. If I’m fundamentally changing the definition of the function, I’m in big problems from the outset because I’m changing what my code is guaranteed to do.

Copy-fidelity

I know a lot of people don’t consider the fidelity their code preserves when it is xcopied from one place to another, but I assign it a very high value. The problem with the above snippet, is that 9 out of 10 times, someone’s going to only pick up the code file, without caring what the configuration file is. This is certainly not unreasonable, regardless of how senior or experienced you are. If you see a file called “eigenvalues.java”, you think to yourself, “Hmm…. maybe I should copy eigenvalues.java and use it to compute my eigenvalues.”

I find nothing wrong with this thinking. Very soon though, you see a compiler error: “Function ‘f’ not found.” You spend a couple of days (and if you’re lucky, you’d find a comment) figuring out that you have to host this class file in another loader called ‘function-replacement-framework.jar’. No big deal you say, I love myself some helper tools! This is when you go mad. “functionReplacementParserError: Please define ‘f’ in the configuration file.”

Now you are, in effect, figuring out how to compute eigenvalues so you can define what ‘f’ should be. I’m sorry, but you really should NEVER have to write a config file to define _what_ your code does! Regardless of how much computer-sciency stuff your parser and interpretor are doing, and how they’re generating binary classes at run-time which are processor-optimized by the JITer, this is some pretty bad design there.

Maintainability

So I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks now, and want opinions on. I came to a good working definition that I think I’m going to use for a while in the near future. I draw this definition from how real-time systems are defined.

A brief overview for the uninitiated – while the common-sense notion of real-time systems is ‘they’re really really fast’, the working definition is ‘time-deterministic’. Meaning that, given what they do, they must do it in deterministic time – meaning, they have to guarantee that something will happen at (‘by’ if you’re soft-realtime) a specific time. Even in light-hearted situations such as filling ketchup in a bottle, you need hard time-determinism, to ensure the bottle is under the nozzle ‘at’ a certain time, not ‘by’ a certain time (if it passes from under it too early, you’ve got a mess to clean up.)

In a similar fashion, I was wondering if maintainability is “doing less work”, or “ensuring correctness even if it is more work.” If I had to make the choice between say…
1. Being able to replace all definitions of “Sin” with “Cos”, using a single config change, which is admittedly a lot less work, but depends on the hope that everyone has taken care to handle the cases where x=0,
2. Or replace Sin with Cos in all the code manually, which is a lot more work, but you ensure that that specific place really is worthy of a “Cos” function as per your replacement-intention. This would guarantee determinism in correctness, but increase work significantly.

If the above sounds unlikely I can certainly come up with more concrete stuff. We frequently use stdout and stderr to send output of a program. Would you prefer to control what goes where implicitly, or would you prefer to modify code yourself (there’s a difference between code consciously having an if-then based on a configuration parameter, vs, your code just having fprintf(outstream, “<stuff>”) where you don’t know during code-time what outstream could be, and can’t function without a complex config file.)

I intentionally chose the stderr vs stdout example because it is vague. I can see it from both ways. In some cases I am conflicted as to whether a warning should go to stderr or stdout. It depends on what kind of tools are going to capture the output, and how they may want to parse/interpret it (some tools, for instance, may consider anything being spit to stderr as indication of program failure.)

How would you define maintainable (or is it maintenable) code? How do you draw the line between abstraction of details vs. core purpose of the tool which is what makes the tool what it is. Does configuration at some point, become complex enough that you’re really just programming in a declarative language through your config files, whereas your “code” is simply an interpretor at that point? If so, is it configuration any longer? If declarative code is more maintainable, why not use a declarative language from the ground up?

This month it is the Jan Lokpal Bill in vogue. I understand that the laws we have are not sufficient. I understand that there is a need for anti-corruption law reform. But what we really, truly, desperately and urgently need, is the ability to enforce the law. I took some time to go over the Jan Lokpal Bill discussion on the site, and most of it sounds like one of my algorithm-proving design documents (first we send an integer as a parameter, then we check the integer for non-negativity, thereby ensuring it is always >= 0.) My computer, fortunately, is 100% reliable in performing that integer non-negativity check, which is why the algorithm works. That isn’t how India works though. We have rules. We have the law. It isn’t being followed.

I wrote before about Middle-class morality, and how we like to believe we’re better than everyone else. There is a  reason why Gandhi was such a hard-ass on most people. Before criticizing someone else, he was willing to criticize himself. After he was done with identifying all his own faults, we would narrow down on exactly what it is he wants out of others. The fight with the British was distinctly different from what is happening today, and it didn’t quite begin as an Independence struggle. If I remember correctly, “Quit India”, was a  late-comer to the party once he realized every other recourse had been attempted and proven unsuccessful.

The original conflict, the same as in South Africa was, “If we are under the British rule, we are British citizens. Consequently, we must be subject to British rule. We must enjoy all the rights, previledges and responsibilities of British rule. We want British rule. We _demand_ British rule to the last letter of the law.” This isn’t all that different from the American argument either. It started with demanding a colonial representation in the British Parliament, we they were to pay British taxes. When the Brits refused, did they make demands for independence from the British rule.

What is happening in India is similar, but not the same. Unlike the British, there are constitutional laws designed to protect us from corrupt officials. There is law designed to achieve a lot. What is lacking, is the implementation of the law. Now logically speaking, if the law were implemented, we would never find ourselves in this predicament to begin with. The Parliament represents the Will of the people. Some would claim that isn’t true. I had an argument with my mom about this yesterday, and I must disagree. The Prime Minister is right. The Parliament has no obligation to table a bill they don’t want to. If that is not the will of the people of a constituency, the MP would be afraid of not being reelected. It is a self-regulating system. The interpretation against Anna Hazare, that they are holding the country hostage is not all that far-fetched. Democracy is a hard pill to swallow when it doesn’t go our way.

Enforcement:

The first thing I did to uncover more, was to read the FAQ on the website www.indiaagainstcorruption.org. One of the more disturbing statements on that site was, “The government’s agreeing to Anna’s demands was a democratic (not coerced) victory because the tiny fraction of the people of India who participated in the action represented the hearty desires of the masses against corruption.” I find that statement a bit presumptuous. I could say Osama Bin Laden’s tiny fraction who participated in the action against the US represented the hearty desires of the masses. In fact that’s exactly what Osama himself claimed. If we are to be a democracy, and a representative democracy at that, we can never presume anything. If an inconvenient law, rule, measure is taken against us, we must live by it because that is what we are signing up for. First, we must look at the election process – a lot of measures which benefited the masses have made it for 60 years. If the masses want it, it happens.

So either of two things is happening. Either election process is screwed up – in which case, if the very laws that are supposed to protect our democracy are not enforced, what makes you think any array of new laws would be enforced? Or, as the government is saying, the lack of introduction of the bill is, in fact, the will of the people.

There’s a reason I say this. Are the masses truly against corruption? Do you know that there have been plenty of law-enforcing people I’ve seen in my life, that the masses have kicked out of office? Arun Bhatia is my classic example. We speak of lack of infrastructure in our city of Pune (where I was born.) We speak with cynicism of all that could be done if the city planning laws were followed. Arun Bhatia became the commissioner of Pune for exactly 48 hours. As soon as he took office, and began enforcing the law, the masses – yes we’re speaking of the masses – the common masses – the regular middle classes, lower-income classes, upper classes, etc. – EVERYONE kicked him out of office in 48 hours. What does that say about the will of the masses? In fact, if I had heard that not a lot of people were against corruption, I’d readily believe it. To think that people from my city of birth are against corruption is a joke! Did they hold agitations to enforce the city planning laws? Did they hold agitations to enforce laws against a certain faction that went into people’s homes and beat them up? I know hundreds of “middle classes” that lie and cheat on their income taxes. What right do you think they have of holding someone else accountable? Why should a politician be treated by a different law? Why must he not get the right to lie and cheat? Why the double standard?

What I’m leading into, is this – if we do pass a bill, will it be enforced? What happens when hundreds of these middle classes are caught in land-deals or property purchases whose value is not honestly declared? What happens when hundreds of these people’s undeclared income is brought under investigation? Will we ignore it? Will we demand that it is inconvenient to us, and it must not be enforced?

This is a very real and dangerous possibility, that may bind our country in chains for another century with a big grand farce. Do the masses with the candles on the streets realize the consequences for themselves? This is not about the Members of Parliament or the Chief Ministers or the Prime Minister. This one’s going to hit home, and hit us all where it hurts. Illegal land deals. Illegal constructions. Illegal electricity bill manipulations. Illegal cooking gas cylinders. Undeclared incomes of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, farmers. I’m not sure all those supporters have thought this through. The fight is politically and diplomatically framed against politicians, and we’re all up in arms “against” an entity that we have clearly bounded and defined. I know plenty of people who have moved vehicles across state boundaries without paying the proper taxes. It is because of a corrupt cop who is happy to take $2 that they avoid paying heavy fines. Would they really want that corruption gone? When it starts to hit us, we’re going to demand leaner laws. We’re going to have talk shows and debates about confiscating whether a poor farmer’s undeclared income is ‘fair’. We’re going to cave in. And like the host of other laws that exist, we will have another one that won’t be taken seriously.

Visibility:

Visibility is a big part of the Jan Lokpal bill being promoted. Allegedly, it will allow corruption to be brought to light, which implies that we don’t yet know that India has corruption. Do you really buy that? Seriously? So you’re sayimg, there is corruption in India, not because it is not prevented, but rather because people don’t _know_ that it happens? Are you kidding me?!

To prevent the Jan Lokpal from abusing its powers, there will be populist measures like video recordings of meetings. We’re back to the point above. Do you think I don’t act against police abuses because I don’t know they happen? Do I not prosecute people in power because there is lack of evidence? So that given a video recording of a misdeed, I’m better equipped to fight irregularities there? I’m afraid of the kind of world we live in, if this belief is widespread.

I can’t prosecute those who abuse powers, because I don’t have the means to. Whether I have a video tape or not, I don’t have the time, resources or guarantee of remaining alive long enough, to fight a case in the courts. Visibility was never the problem. I remember in my own University, I had evidence of breaking of rules and regulations by the director. I have a hatred for that entire institution not because I didn’t have video recordings, but because I could find nobody who would act on the evidence that did exist!

Such populist measures frighten me because if I ever do have a grievance, I will have that video recording thrown in my face, and told to shut up because it shows no irregularity.

Enforce, Enforce, Enforce:

I love the support this issue is getting. I know people are pissed. I know people are frustrated. We’ve had enough. We taken this for over six decades. More bills and laws and authorities are not the way to go. We need to enforce what we have. Enforce laws. Enforce rules. I’m totally in support of adding new laws. But do so consciously knowing what we are all giving up. The sacrifice isn’t the fasts we’ll do, or the protests we’ll hold in the safety of American cities (for us NRIs), or the candles we’ll light. The sacrifice we’ll give up is our own little bribes we’re so used to.

We must ENFORCE! if this is ever to work. Sadly, I’m not convinced that’s going to happen, but am holding out hope that I be proven wrong. I’ll get back to you in one year and we shall see where we stand.

Well, I have sufficient data from myself. I’m looking for subjects who wouldn’t mind me taking some of their recordings for an hour or two worth of data (and while I shall try to maintain full anonymity, I’m not making any such promises outright.)

I’m spending lots and lots of time reading for the next 3 weeks. I realized just how rusty I had become. Fixing it. Current reading list includes large-data pattern mining. Bayesian decision theory. I always go through “Introduction to Algorithms” once every year (and I hadn’t read their latest edition.) General math and calculus.

Fortunately thanks to library deadlines, I have to finish all this before the 9th of August.

Also, my dad’s a statistician, so I’ve sent some of the BCI data to him in case he can find a good classifier.

This is the non-exciting phase of any project. I know what to do. The blockers are gone. It’s just week after week of thankless work that does not demonstrate linear returns. You can help by joining in the effort and keeping me going.