The Joy of Being a Developer

Being in this profession for almost 11 years now, Sometimes this question runs through my mind as who are we? As it appears or as the world thinks of us, We (Developers) are a bunch of very very analytical and logical thinking guys. We try to analyze all the problems in the world in a logical manner. But nobody cares or gives a thought about the creative side of ours.

As a part of the developer community, I often think why we develop? There are thousands of reasons for many developers around the world. For a big chunk this is to earn for living. For few of them they develop to earn extra cash which can give them a rich lifestyle. I develop because I like to do it. Its not something which I was forced to do rather I love sitting in front of the comp and writing code.

But for most of us we are missing the fun of being a developer. The real fun of being in this profession is the creativity. I am sure we all must have jumped with joy when our first Program (Hello World) worked properly. But then on I personally experienced the satisfaction when a C-code of 4 line could restart the old DOS PC and we cried our heart out (with anger) when we found that the program which is crashing is because of the poor code written by the Tool Developer itself (which we relied on). Because those lazy programmers just wanted to get the job done.

More often than not we don't realize the amount of satisfaction we(developers) could get out of our profession by changing the way we look at our job functions little bit. Why not take the new task as a challenge for doing it better way than just doing it. The challenge could be anything, writing a code with fewer key-stroke, writing an optimized code etc. While this generates the excitement while doing the regular work, it also increases our Knowledge-Base.

All it calls for is some sort of out of box approach towards our regular job. The Joy of Being a Developer :)

Until Next Time.. :)

Sun OpenSources Java

These days almost all developer sites have only one News on their front page. Sun Open-Sources Java. I am sure as a reader you must have also heard / read this by now.

Available today are the first pieces of source code for Sun's implementation of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) and a build-able implementation of Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME).

Details are available at: at http://www.sun.com/opensource/java.

In addition, Sun is adding the GPLv2 license to Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), which has been available for over a year under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) through Project GlassFish(TM).

Sun is expected to release a buildable JDK in the first quarter of 2007, following established free software community practices for licensing virtual machines and their associated libraries.

What does this mean to the developer community? Now we as a Java developer will have chance to participate in evolution of Java platform. This was a much awaited move from Sun and the talks were on for quite sometime now.

Until Next Time...:)

Human Brain and Quantum Physics

A while ago in office I was having a discussion related to Quantum Physics and modeling the human brain. It was a good discussion where Brian was explaining his experiences with modeling and representing realities in terms of partial differential equations.

Human brain is a collection of nerves tissues and they have a very unique way of storing information and retrieving it. Considering the fact that the number of such tissues are in order of billions and there is a mesh kind of structure they form. But then again as we study more about humans and the way human brain work. Few questions pop up immediately:
1. How does human brain stores information?
2. What is the format in which the information is stored in the brain?
3. How does it relate one information to Other?
4. Why do we remember something which happened long back but forgot something which happened recently?
5. Why it is easy for us to work with images and pictorial impression and difficult to do lengthy calculations?

There are many such questions which can be asked about it. But one of the question which I am very interested (personally) in knowing is how does it relate one form of information to another?

While studying books on Knowledge representation I did come across few pointers which tell me how the informations can be inter-related. At this moment I am not in a position where I can comment more on that. But as I progress further on this topic I will keep posting what I learn.

There are many such questions I am coming across these days. As I am getting more into the world of Semantics and ways to interlink informations with each other too many HOWs and WHATs are popping into my mind.

Until next time :)

Knowledge and Its Representation

It was a while ago when Someone asked me whether I know about something (related to the topic we were discussing at that time). It immediately triggered a question in my mind as:
- What do we mean by Knowledge?
- How can I say I Know something?
- Is Knowledge something we can relate to in Real-World?
- How do we represent a Knowledge?
- Is there any standard way to represent Knowledge?
- How will computers represent Knowledge?
- Can Knowledge ever become obsolete? If so then can we still call it Knowledge?

What I understand is that Knowledge:
- Is not a Physical Object
- Is an abstract product of the human consensus
- Cannot be measured
- Never becomes obsolete, even though we don't use it. The Knowledge about not using a Knowledge is again a Knowledge
- Can have different representations in different language

Many people talk different thing about representing knowledge. But in a nutshell it is a medium of human expression, medium of effective computation.

What I feel is there has to be a universal way to represent knowledge. Sign language (Semiotics) have managed to achieve this upto an extent but still lots of work needs to be done in this area.

Until Next Time...:)

Back To Brisi

Back online after 2 weeks vacation in India. Had a good but hectic holiday back home. Was home after 5 years for Diwali celebration with family :).

Will Start posting again soon. So keep watching for this space.

Until Next Time ... :)