2Comments Buttered cat paradox

Facts:
When dropped from some height -

• Cats always land on their feet.
• Buttered toast always lands buttered side down.

The paradox arises when one considers what would happen if one attached a piece of buttered toast (butter side up) to the back of a cat, then dropped the cat from a large height.
The experiment will produce an anti-gravity effect. As the cat falls towards the ground, it will slow down and start to rotate, eventually reaching a steady state of hovering a short distance from the ground while rotating at high speed as both the buttered side of the toast and the cat’s feet attempt to land on the ground.
With a giant buttered cat array, a high-speed monorail could easily link New York with Chicago.
[The one obvious danger is, if the cats manage to eat the bread off their backs, they will instantly plummet. Of course, the cats will land on their feet.] 

-- 
I read the quote first time in book named 'Don\'t make me think'.
Checked the wikipedia for concept.
Image is taken from tambayan.ph site

6Comments Oops. The flight you have requested...

Today something funny happened... At least I think its funny :)
While I was coming back to Mumbai, my flight number was 404.
At the boarding counter me n these airline guys had following conversation-
'Sir, just go down stairs you'll find our bus. It'll take you to your plane.'
'And what if I couldn't find it?'
'huh?'
'hehe. I was just kidding. you know, because the flight number is 404. hehe.'
(they looked at one another)
'well. 404 on internet means file not found. forget it... thanks anyways.'
n then I went down-stairs silently but rapidly.

Seriously, was that a lame joke? or they just didn't know what 404 means..
come on.. everyone knows what 404 means :)



-----------
Just another thought -
May be they should use same protocol.
400s n 500s are may be not common but well known in case of airlines.
Technical issues, not able to connect to the tower, not able to find a flight (like LOST for eg), internal engine issues..
yeah, right? what say?

7Comments The Butterfly Effect...

परवा match मधे प्रवीण कुमार out झाला अणि माझ जेवण संपल. नंतर मला कळल की मी १ तास जेवत होतो. Normally मी १५ मिनिटात जेवण संपवतो. पण जेव्हा जेव्हा match अशा critical moments ला असते तेव्हा तेव्हा माझ्या actions slow होतात एकदम...
अस एक feeling असत की आपण इथे काहीतरी केल तर तिथे out होइल.. काही लोकांना वाटत की ते match पाहत असतील तर India हरायला लागते. मग अशा वेळी ते त्यांच्या त्यांच्या room मधे जाउन बसतात अन मग तिकडून ओरडत राहतात "काय झाल? out झाला का ??". काही लोक उभे असतात. अन मग त्यांना वाटत राहत की आपण जर परत खुर्चीवर बसलो तर wicket जाईल.
कोणीतरी just काहीतरी आणण्यासाठी आत खोलीत गेल आणि इकडे कोणी sixer मारली तर संपलच "तिथेच थांब! तू तिथे असशील तर ते चांगले खेळत आहेत.." बिचार्याची फुकट एक over आत बसून जाते. मग तो हळूच परत येतो..
Seriously, हा Butterfly Effect वरचा विश्वास, हा कमीत कमी हालचाल करण्याचा प्रयत्न match संपल्यावर next instance ला funny वाटायला लागतो. पण (मला तरी) हाच विश्वास पुन्हा match आणि जेवण एकत्र आल्यावर "एक घास बत्तीस वेळा चावावा" म्हणीची आठवण करून देतो...

9Comments Long time no c..

Some day.. yeah some day when someone says "long time no c" on IM, I wanna reply with -

Really? read this then.. #include "stdio.h"

But I can't.. I can't because of my own rules..

Lets go through our basics first. IM, Instant messaging is build in such a way that we can type only one line at a time...Well, there's a reason behind it.. humans can read only one f*kin line at a time... I hate when people copy paste something in IM. In my case, most of the times, this copy pasted thing is some huge snippet of code.. (huge snippet, is this a valid phrase?)

Hey, can you have a look at this ? DHAM!!
Hey, please check this. DHAM!!
Looks like there's something wrong in this. DHAM!!
Hey, any idea why this is not working? DHAM!!
.. and then I changed my function to this. DHAM!!

now replace DHAM with that "huge snippet" but keep the DHAM sound ringing in your ears.

Taking it to next level, some people write something in between..
//huge code
this is better or this is -
//again huge code.

I takes me like 5-10 mins to find the text in-between...

I really can't.. I won't use IM for debugging.. this is crazy.. one second you are looking at nice lil chat window with text that you know, next thing you have poor lil window cluttered with non-sense code..
Even a smallest bug looks like really crazy, creepy bug in IM. And yet, every time I try resizing my window to fit the length of that code and try to understand it. No need to say I don't understand a thing in it..

So people.. IM is not for sucha things.. may be you have wave for that (yey! found first use of google wave!)
Think about person on the other side... think about your children (huh?), think about poor lil IM window and stop pasting code in chat window...

[Else I'll start pasting wikipedia articles in that window]

7Comments <Music />

Ultimate question I wanna ask today is - How many of you listen to music while coding?


Today I listened to one of the podcast on similar topic. (not while coding..)
They said, if the room you are coding is too noisy then listening to music while coding actually helps concentrating..
And its actually true.. works for me..
Our brain takes chunk of concentration in noisy places rather than coding while listening to music. Reason behind this is pattern recognition. its very hard in case of random noise so takes brain's power to run that algo. :) but if you're listing to song you already heard, it'll not need that much brain power...

My experience says -
* If you are sitting in noisy place - you can hardly concentrate.
* If you are listening to music that you always listen - you can concentrate much better.
* If you are listening to same song over and over again - concentration at its best until you realize you are listening to same song..
* If you are listening to song that you've never heard - concentration is ok, but you really will have to listen to song again to know how good/bad it is..
* If you are listening to audiobook while coding.. waste of time.. you'll hardly code n listen to same chapter when you are free..
* Movie, TV serial somewhere in the vicinity, you'll close aptana n start watching it..
* Sitting in Conference room alone? you'll do whole weeks work in an hour..


Some people prefer White Noise for concentrating.. but that noise irritates me after some time.. :(

What do you guys prefer ?

4Comments Undefined

Yeah long weekends. People just love them, right?
I hate those when there's nothing to do. I'm not saying I enjoy working 24x7. I'm not a robot. but sitting at home spending time in front of computer watching movies, listening to songs doesn't do any good either.
Just 1-2 years back, in college days, I used to spend time on these things and was enjoying. But m not enjoying it anymore.
Repetition sucks... In case of coding, in case of life-style.
I need some holiday.. Not just long weekend.. more than that.
The problem is, I tried the same few months back. And i was in same state of mind after only a week of that long holiday...
Gotta learn how to live in this corporate thingy.
n its not life if you are getting answers to your questions easily.

damn.. life isn't simple.. its not meant to be.



---- x ----

“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.”
George Bernard Shaw
hmmm.. well.. ok.

2Comments hmm.. white's new black

I was bored of my previous blog styling. Just shifted to some default template.

3Comments long time no blogging..

Twitter  नावाच्या एका 140 characters च्या microblogging प्रकाराला पूर्णपणे addict झालोय. बास आता.
/me is gonna start blogging again.
frequency कमी असली तरी blogging बंद नाही करणार अशी शप्पथ घेतोय..
[अन ती शप्पथ पाळली नाही तरी तुम्हाला काही करायचा हक्क नाहीये :D ]
~ Praj