aditya kumar's weblog

I will be hosting a Windows 7 launch party at my home sometime around the 22nd of October – The official launch day of Windows 7. The aim of the party is to see Windows 7 ultimate, the first day, first hand. Those of you who have had their experience with Windows 7 RC should also consider attending an event like this because there ought to be many refinements from Windows 7 RC’s journey to become the final box release.

So if you are in Bangalore around the 22nd of October and have been hoping to get your hands on Windows 7 and don’t mind coming to my place for a round of free coke and snacks with some like minded people, drop me a line on email and warm up to the idea of attending a Windows 7 Launch Party.

While I have been away due to affairs related to matrimony (no, I am not married yet!) there have been things happening around.

One such thing that caught my notice today, in my inbox was a petition against the fair usage policy that has been set out as terms and conditions of broadband usage by at least two operators here in India — Airtel Broadband and Tata Indicom Broadband.

What they are doing is this — in case you have a monthly unlimited data usage broadband plan and if you end up using it beyond a certain “limit”, you will either be browsing at a “slower” speed thereafter (Airtel) or you would be asked to cut down on downloads, asked to upgrade your plan (so that you can download more until you reach a similar threshold) and eventually get your connection terminated because of this.

Airtel Broadband limits you to download 15 GB on a 256kbps connection. Tata Indicom has set itself to 45 GB on a 256 kbps connection.

This has come as a shocker to the subscribers of the unlimited data plans. I am unaware of any such limitations set by broadband service providers out there in the west and it defies logic. They should NOT be calling it an unlimited usage plan for starters.

In the long run, I would say this would turn out to be two-step backwards. A move like this would turn out to be ridiculous. As computer applications and their usage becomes more and more internet-centric, it is imperative that the user won’t be able to keep a tab on the usage and download of data from the internet. Enable Windows updates, check the automatic updates for the antivirus, browse youtube while having a laugh, check out some music at last.fm or the online indie radio station, talk to your friend in the US over skype and before you know, you have already downloaded close to 1 GB of data. Now, consciously, you have not downloaded anything. You don’t have any new data that you can use for yourself on your pc.

This is an example of computer usage becoming more internet-centric and the fair usage policy they have come up with, goes very much against it.

There are restaurants where you can “eat-all-you-can” for a certain amount of money. If someone abuses it — pays the amount everyday and then guzzle up food that’d be sufficient for 10 guys, the management would find ways to discourage him from entering the restaurant. This is exactly what our broadband companies are treating this as. And this is exactly what they should not be doing.

Meanwhile, if you are aware of any such thing happening in the USA, please tell!

In the three weeks that saw this blog, the writer of this blog and the world’s largest democracy grow an year old there were a few things that we could have done without. To name a few:

1. The bombs in the city were too many and enough to spark a debate, yet again, on how safe we are. A few more days of debates and now we are going back to our comfort zones until the bombs show up again, which will bring us back to square one.

2. The internet doesn’t work at nights. Why? Well, after three successful attempts of stealing the local internet server and numerous unsuccessful ones, the local service engineer had had enough of the robbers. Refusing to take any more chances he decided to do what I thought was strange (if not absurd) but at least safe — he took the internet server offline and shifted it to a safe house every night. That I access internet at night doesn’t matter, of course.

3. My yahoo email spam has increased by more than 10 times. Right, that would be 1000%. I believe this was a “revenge” taken by a website. All I did was unsubscribed their newsletter earlier forced upon me. Now they have forced upon me 10 spam emails everyday. And these are those emails that bypass the spam filter and land in my inbox. Right from “Malasian Lottery” (Not Malaysian) to Microsoft announcing Cash rewards. Whatever it is, it surely exposes Yahoo’s Spamguard’s failure. Yahoo’s yet another failure while trying to get the spammer off its back. One failed attempt worth reading here.

Some more things that I remember(ed) but fail to make the cut now. Too hectic at work these days. I should write more.

Sometimes at work, I pause.

And I wonder, if this is the thing that excites me. If I like being here in the first place. Because if it does not then there is a problem.

Apart from one or two instances when I was really down, I have never doubted my decision to be a programmer. Unlike many others of my time, I was privileged enough to own a personal computer, an 80286, back in 1994, when I was 13. I could not do much on it, apart from dbase III plus, Lotus 123, Wordstar and Prince of Persia. But that machine’s contribution is something which I can never underestimate. It made me a programmer.

Yet, I think, I am 20 years late. Why? Because, I believe, the 1980s were the best times to be, for any computer programmer. There were no idiot project managers, no stupid team leads and most of all, no CMM Levels and Quality standards for code.

My statements are not based on any research (though how I wish they were) but it is pretty evident to me that Software engineering practices and theorizing it to an extent to what we have done already, has done more harm than good to the art of computer programming. And if you feel like showing any resistance to the claim that I have just made, you are either a project manager or aspire to be one. God bless you, if its the former. Good luck, if you happen to be the latter.

The 80s stood up for the programmer. It was the time when computer programmers were allowed to do what they wanted to. It was the time when the judgment of a programmer carried value. It was also a time when programmers spent most of their time, well, programming.

CMM was made to improve the quality of the processes that an organization followed. It’s a process of continuous refinement. Nothing wrong with that except that it comes with a lot of clutter. CMM adds cost because it adds bureaucracy. Nothing wrong with that either, except that it adds it at wrong places of the hierarchy.

CMM, and the likes, are a failed attempt to theorize Computer Science.

Then of course, it takes away much from the programmer. One of the things being the value of his judgment. No, please don’t blame it on the project manager. He is trained on CMM, after all. Ask him and he’ll tell you that CMM or whatever standard they follow, is God.

Software engineering, I’d like to think, is still in infancy. It is a relatively new science which is constantly in conflict with the art that programming is.

That is why, I think I am 20 years late. I am just a poor, ordinary programmer and I’d just like to code. Please?

So I haven’t been spending much time on the internet updating my blog and not reading much of others as well. A few other things keep cropping up that need my attention and I have seldom had this sort of “break” or “time-off” from blogging. I can’t promise regular updates for now!

Anyway, I had this opportunity to attend a talk by Dr Vint Cerf, last Wednesday. For those who don’t know him, he is said to be one of the “Founding fathers” of the internet, as we know it. The thing about listening to people like him is that you can’t afford to miss out a single word, yes, a word of it. A talk of one hour can give you subject matter for months of research. Their words are short, concise and to the point. They know what they are talking about and more often than not, apart from the ideas being a brainchild of their brains, they have well researched content to back it.

Getting a little ‘geeky’, Dr Cerf is also credited for writing the TCP/IP protocol. The most important thing, I felt, was not the technicalities associated while developing a network standard but was the foresight which went into it, while its development was going on. I think that holds true for any “standard”. We’ve seen the Y2K problem and it is one of the best examples of what lack of foresight can land us in. Hence, the challenge was not just to develop a standard for packet routing on the network. The challenge was to make it a common protocol — such that any piece of hardware or software, irrespective of the environment it is set in, could make use of the protocol to communicate with other devices, which may be set in other, completely different environments. No matter what device you use it on, the expected results must be invariably the same. The result is that today most of the devices that you use to connect to the Internet use the TCP/IP protocol. That includes your mobile phone, laptop, the PDA, the MP3 player. Tomorrow it could be your refrigerator and your bread toaster. I am not kidding.

A single protocol, though, can’t be expected to solve all the purposes that it is designed for. Because needs keep changing, sooner or later, something comes up that the standard is not capable of standing. An ideal protocol, therefore, would be one that solves not all, but most of the purposes that it is designed for. In that respect TCP/IP has been a very successful standard, for it holds true even after more than 30 years of its existence. At the same time, it has had its own share of problems, one of them being that it is not as secure as we’d like it to be.

Apart from that, according to Dr.Cerf, if the planets didn’t rotate on their axis, we could still use TCP/IP for inter-planetary communication through space. Again, no kidding here.

I have always considered myself lucky to be on the Internet while it was in its infancy, at least in India. I made my first email ID, back in 1997 and we used to connect to the Internet using a phone line. I think that era is still not gone. Much before that happened, I spent a lot of time browsing the few BBS’es hosted in and around New Delhi. Most people today do not even know what a BBS is. At that time I used to hear that one day we would not need to connect to the Internet using a phone line. That we will be able to login on the instant messenger, chat for hours and go to bed while being still logged-in, because we will not be billed on a per-minute basis. Not a question of “if” but only a question of “when”.

I am glad that it has worked out much before than expected my many of us, including yours truly.

Though I have always believed that Indians have been, on the whole, more open to changes related to technology, I have also found out how various (Indian) organizations, which would have otherwise benefited from people using more technology, have failed to realise this and have lost a lot of money and goodwill, on the way.


I regularly use the Netbanking service of the bank that I bank with. Today when I accessed their website, instead of the usual login page, it showed me a message that promised a “host of new features” and gave me a brief account of each one of them. Everything alright except for the fact that since they were “busy”, “incorporating” those features in their website, I would not be able to access my account till the 22nd of December. That is tomorrow and I am not sure for how long this message has been online.


I can’t imagine this is real because these guys don’t appear a wee bit apologetic about it. Whats worse is that when you sign up, these banks portray Netbanking facility as a “substitute” for visiting the bank. So in effect this is equivalent to “closing” the bank for those number of days. And there is no apology whatsoever. To me, this is an indication of how strongly they feel about this mode of banking and how seriously they take it, nevermind those “new features”.

And the talk about “being busy” while “incorporating the features”. Maintenance of a website is not like the maintenance of a bike or a car, where you can’t use the vehicle until the job is done. It’s more like filling the air in your vehicle’s tyres while the engine is running. In effect, during the upgrade, certain features might be unavailable, but that is all. In websites (web applications) that handle data of a much larger magnitude than of a typical bank, the maintenance job never takes more than a few hours. And in here in this case, the same thing has gone on for more than a day.

Update:In a bid to give a quality Banking experience, things may have to be double checked and it could take a while. The Service Quality team took the initiative of talking at length about the whole issue with me. I must mention that they promptly addressed this issue by explaining me why it took so long, the causes that were responsible for it and it gave me a picture of their commitment to their customers for a better quality of service.

A friend I know, one of the many programmers in the city, told me over dinner that he is facing problems with his job.

What kind of problems I asked.

The company he works for has barred the employees from using the Internet. It is common, of course, network administrators keep on applying policies to block certain websites, I said.

No, they have not restricted the access. They have completely barred access to the Internet. Any website. Even Google is not accessible.

According to my experience, this happened, well, maybe 5 to 6 years ago. Mostly for cost reasons. I must admit I was surprised to hear this from him.

As a programmer, I realise how important it is for me to connect to the Internet while I am at work. There are a thousand serious reasons, even after you exclude the Instant messaging to your friends (Yes, that too, is serious, to an extent).

The prevalent thinking in his organization is that a programmer should be able to program without referring to the Internet. S/he should be capable of that. In a way I am glad that they have such faith in the people they recruit for the job, but beyond that, it is, well, stupid.

Companies like these need to realise that 1980s are gone. When the only programming languages used were C++, Perl, Cobol or the likes. When you could use a single programming language for the whole project and you could buy a big fat book of C++, keep it with you while at work as a quick reference. And that was all that was needed.

Today technologies are changing with the speed of light. There are at least three entirely different technological aspects to every project, however big or small it may be.

While talking about this, even if I dare to keep aside the aspect of technology, the fact remains that there is always more than one way to do a thing. How is the programmer expected to know that?

So where does a situation like that lead us, in the long run? The programmer is stuck for longer time on problems that could be solved in a matter of seconds after a Google search. S/he tries to convert a String to an Integer to feed it into a method when s/he could have called the same method directly with the Integer. But for that to happen, one has to know that the method supports Integer as an input as well.

It takes more time. It goes on to increase the frustration for the programmer and the people involved in it. Whats more, the programmers reputation is at stake!

One of the reasons why companies come up with stupid policies like these is that the people who make the policies for a company (which has 80% of its employees as programmers) have never written a single line of code in their lives.

In contrast to this, if you have ever worked in an organization which has been founded, nurtured from its beginning by a bunch of techies, you will feel that issues like these aren’t an issue at all! These are small trivial things. The focus should be on getting the job done without writing trashy code. That’s all.

But it’s very rare.