Paintball and Cycling

Wow!! I am damn tired! My legs are hurting to an extent that it took quite an effort on my part to climb railway station's steps. I got swelling in both of my upper arms and I met some really fabulous people. This pretty much sums up a wonderful day.

I learned about Paintball through an article sometime back and wanted to try my hands on it even since. Happen to play it for the first time around two months back after a TechCamp event with folks from DirectI. Unfortunately, it is bit expensive and requires a group of at least ten people. But it is something you indulge in once in a while. And that makes it an experience everyone can look forward for.

I happen to join a really interesting group of people on meetup.com through my friend Vijay. I went for my very first night trek with the group and today I met them again. It is a group of very passionate individuals meeting regularly for trekking, biking, traveling etc. Next planned event was "Paintball Wars". I RSVPed yes as soon as I learned about it.

For my preparations, I had been watching animated series of Starship Troopers (was one of my favorites and only got aired partly). After killing some bugs in my dreams I was sure that shooting is now part of my second nature ;).

Venue was Khar Gym Khana. Mumbai's definition of ground will keep amusing me forever :). For the event, there were 19 of us. So we divided teams in a biased manner. There was one group of four boys (I was part of this group) and rest of the three teams had five members each with girls in majority.

There had to be total of five games with each team playing two games and final between the teams scoring the maximum points as sum total of their earlier two games.

My team had Adi, Tahir, Sandipan and me. Adi most likely was waiting for this event since quite some time and had practiced using a deadly air gun :D. Which he was carrying with him (!). He was too good with his shots and was quite a force with Sandipan. Tahir was our protect the base dude. He played his part perfectly. We won all our matches and even the finals with Janaki on our side to balance the teams.

At the end of the day most of us decided to visit Carter road for some snacks and Malikarjun was there with a racing bike. Man!! I had a racer very long time ago and I used to ride into Delhi's famous ridge areas on it for hours. I took the bike for a trial ride first to ensure that I can still balance it. Next thought was that I should buy one for myself soon. It occurred to me that I was out of cash and to my astonishment there was no ICICI ATM nearby. I decided to explore the area on Malik's bike and was soon far away from everyone. My phone's battery died and I sure had pissed many people off because of this. Well, riding through Mumbai's roads in a traffic jam was real fun. I was easily getting ahead of everybody. At many places traffic was on a standstill but it was possible to cross them on a bicycle. It was great fun and I finally found an ATM. So, I got back after a long while and was happy to see Malik caring for his bike lesser than my well being ;). Unfortunately, Kalpesh went looking for me. That was the bad part. But fun factor makes the whole thing justifiable.

A wonderful sleep awaits..

And the World Comes to an End..

Particle physics is at a stage today where optics was around three centuries back. At that time scientists were making first attempts to measure speed of light accurately. Today, principles of optics are utilized from creation of household appliances to enabling global communication infrastructure. Numerous inventions like deep space telescopes, optical storage, laser surgery etc have been made possible because of our understanding of this branch of science. All of this must had been unthinkable three centuries back.

Similarly, it is anybody's guess where theories of particle physics will lead us centuries down the line. But that question will arise only if we survive for that long.

CERN, the leading body for nuclear research has built a Large Hadron Collider. Before going further it be interesting to note that US was in the process of building a similar but much more powerful machine around 15 years back. Project was cancelled citing the price tag of 12 billion dollars. Just to put things in perspective, cost of Iraq war has exceeded 570 billion dollars. CERN spent total of six billion dollars for the project.

From every viewpoint, project is massive and have goal to understand nothing less than the creation of the universe.

In a nutshell, project aims to collide very high energy beam of protons and lead ions head on to observe creation of new particles and to validate existence of a theorized particle.

Outcome of this experiment is purely theoretical and i.e. what keeping doomsayers happy. To an extent that there had been a lawsuit filed against the experiment. Some theorists postulates that the collision can produce tiny black holes and can thus end everything we know. CERN's stand is that collisions like these occur naturally by cosmic rays.

Experiment is taking place on 10th September. Just two weeks more or less. Bigger question is.. what if?

So it is time to figure out how to make best out of next two weeks. I go take a nap first :).

Links:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/arts/...
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx

War at Olympics Time..

War is always ugly, politically motivated and propaganda driven. Georgia attacked Ossetia thinking US and NATO would help them for their participation in "Coalition of Willing" and their role in access to Caspian sea oil. To their surprise and no one else's they didn't received any help.


Georgia was one of the topmost troop suppliers for Iraq war. 2000 men. From a country with population of 5 million. Till recently they were actively trying to get NATO membership.

Now, they have lost and making calls for ceasefire (have declared ceasefire from their end) in hopes that Russians do not cross into their mainland to create a buffer zone between the two regions. But it is unlikely that Russians will accept any peace resolution proposed by anybody without making the whole thing look like a huge win-lose situation.

It was interesting to see western media trying to play around the facts. They almost portrayed Russians as bad guys. Launching an offensive without any provocation. Initial articles hugely underplayed murder of Russian peacekeeping forces in Ossetia before whole conflict started.

War is always bad for the civilians. One side will eventually win but they always lose.

Links:
http://www.nato.int/issues/nato-georgia/index.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/war_in_south_ossetia.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7552659.stm
http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-south-ossetia-the-war-of-my-dreams/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baku-Supsa_Pipeline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Sea

Three Laws of Distributed Memory Caching

Alrighty!! I am approaching end of the project I been working on since past few months and I am damn excited about it. Now, this is the time for optimizations, refactoring and testing. Following are the generic guidelines for memory caching which I think should be followed as design guidelines. I be following them from start from next project onwards. This time I will have to throw and add lots of code in optimization step.

1. Cache should act as an optional layer between application and database i.e. in case caching servers goes down application should work without any problem. This of course will result in degradation in performance but it should not affect application logic and working. It should be noted that if one server or set of servers goes down, client library can opt to remove them from the cache server pool and subsequently should start caching data in rest of the servers.
2. Cache should have most recent copy of the data. Either cache should not get hit for a read or it should have the most recent value. In case caching servers are restarting and values are getting updated to database, application should have scheme to reload updated data back into the cache.
   
3. Never use indefinite locks while writing to cache. Synchronizing writes to a cache can be tricky but unlike applications, lock is not on the server which is executing the code. It can happen the server which requested a lock goes down after the lock is granted. In that scenario rest of the servers will never be able to acquire the lock because in cache data is still locked. This can result in whole application getting deadlocked if there is indefinite wait for the lock to be acquired. Timed locks expires the lock after a certain time interval is elapsed.

I was asked about finishing (the mammoth task of writing :)) rest of the parts of previous post. Will be doing that on weekend.