I recently finished reading John Battelle's "The Search", which chronicles the rise of search as a valuable business asset and how google helped in making it that way. For someone who has always been in awe of google for a long time I found the book a very interesting read. The rags to riches story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and the background in which google captured the search market is wonderful.
Bringing comic heroes to the movie screens seems to be all the rage now. And the latest, to hit the screens was Iron Man (well, technically as of today it would be Speed Racer). I wasn't a great fan of Iron Man after all he was only a normal guy in an iron suit. He has none of the interesting mutations of the XMen nor the supernatural powers of super-hero aliens. The movie was pretty good and I enjoyed it. It lived up to its 92% rating in rotten tomatoes.Robert Downey Jr. portrayed a very convincing millionaire playboy genius and Jeff Daniels as the backstabbing executive was good. The narrative and screenplay din't wander off or slouch in between as it usually happens. The only misgiving I had was that after sitting through all the initial build-up to the final suit Iron Man had to resort to a clever trick to defeat his adversary in the other suit of armor. A little display of energy shields, sonic blasts and holographic decoy generators would have been exciting though. If you are a fan of comics and cartoons you will not regret watching it. Oh! don't forget to wait till all the credits have rolled past (and almost at the point where you are sheepishly edging to the door wondering why you even believed that rumor about it on the internet) you will be treated to a small cameo featuring Sgt. Nick Fury. So, don't miss it.
You put n monkeys in a cage with a banana (or any food that is of interest to the monkeys) and for some defined period of time discourage the monkeys getting to the fruit by splashing them with cold water till none of them attempt to reach for the fruit. Now, one by one replace the monkeys over a period of time where the monkeys will not be splashed with cold water at all. Now, because of classical conditioning each of the new monkeys that will instinctively reach for the fruit but will be beaten up (or otherwise restrained) by the remaining monkeys by the fear of punishment in the form of a cold water splash. Subsequently, when none of the original n monkeys are in the cage and the ones that are there have never been subjected to the punishment, it will be observed that none of those monkeys try to reach for the fruit in fear of retribution by the other monkeys.
The wet monkey theory seems more of an urban legend than an actual theory. Its actually based on the famous Pavlov's salivating dog experiment on classical conditioning. The little Albert experiment is perhaps the closest human counterpart. But, apart from that there are several examples of this in real life.Especially, in large software development shops where you have every kind of programmers (all of the 26 programmer predilections-link doesn't seem to exist now so, heres a digg posting of the same), all the 3 types of consultants and hordes of PHB's. The reasons why a particular approach/technique was chosen over others is often lost when the pioneers of the system leave or is buried in huge mounds of documentation. Now, documentation is always an icky subject when it comes to software systems the people who are in the best position to do it despise it with a vengeance and the ones that do write it (or are forced to write it) usually cover it up in layers of cruft to make the document appear important than it actually is. Signal to noise ratio in documentation is alarming low, the concept of code as documentation does not stand to reason if you have a half a million lines of code to read!! (notwithstanding the fancy design patterns and xml configurations distributed liberally over the codebase) All this leads to any question on anything is answered by thats 'the way its always been done'.One way to bite down and bear it to turn to the Tao of Programming and rest on the wisdom of the ancients before us.The programmers of old were mysterious and profound. We cannot fathom their thoughts, so all we do is describe their appearance.
Aware, like a fox crossing the water. Alert, like a general on the battlefield. Kind, like a hostess greeting her guests. Simple, like an uncarved block of wood. Opaque, like a black pool in a darkened cave.
Who can tell the secrets of their hearts and minds?
The answer exists only in Tao.
