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Programming and lateral languages.

Programming languages are like your everyday English- or Spanish, or hindi if you prefer. All languages C, Java, Hindi and English come with their own syntax, rules, grammar, constructs and idiosyncrasies. All languages have their strengths Latin for the courts, Pidgin English for the common folk, Java for the web and C for systems.
“I ate a mango” is syntactically correct and compiles with the English compiler V 3.1 of your head. But try running Hindi, Spanish, or Java compiler on it and you are sure to get an error message. A program written in java won’t compile with an English compiler. “I ate a play” is syntactically incorrect even with the English compiler. Did you eat or did you play. (It will surely violate some rule of English, but my grammar is too poor to find out what). “I ate a man” may be syntactically correct but has a logical error. It compiles, it does violate no rule of English grammar. But really are you a cannibal?
Really is a programming language anything other than a natural language minus redundancy and verboseness and no ambiguity. How long before we are able to program in English. Or will it be the other way. We learn to talk in Java?

A zen master once dreamed that he was a fly. Now this so shocked up the zen master, ever in search of the elusive truth that he immediately woke up. He then asked himself whether he was man who was dreaming he was a fly or a fly dreaming to be a man. Whether he had just woken up from a dream or just went back to dreaming.

But I am coming to the point. Have you played a simulation game- AOE, Civilisation, heck even Need of Speed. The people in there, those sims, how can they know that they are not real. That they are just bits in memory, created solely for my enjoyment. How can we know that we are not part of some computer simulation, that our universe is not only finite but just the ram of some computer. That the rules of our universe “thou shalt not exceed the speed of light” are limitations imposed by the simulation engine. That god is not some punk kid high on beer and adrenaline. But before you dismiss me as another Matrix junkie, consider the Moore’s Law. Computing power doubles every 18 months. It has held for last 40 years. If it holds for another 50 years, we will have computers capable of simulating the universe. So why are you so sure that the universe did not arise 50 years earlier, and we are simulation of that universe.

But now consider this. Take a shoot-em-up space game. How is it coded? You shoot a missile at the baddie ship. If you manage to hit it, the missile sends a message to the ship- hey buddy you have been hit. The ship calls its destruct function and dies.

If(missile_hits_ship){

Pirate_ship_n.destruct();

}

What if god coded the universe this way. A person shoots a bullet at me. The lazy-bone I am, I don’t get out of its way in time. So the bullet sends a message to me, that I have been hit and need to die. But what if I refuse to call my die function. BTW, is this what is called will power, refusal to call my destruct function? Also, my isAlive variable is private to me. The bullet can hit me all day long but cant set my isAlive variable.

Its our world now..
The age of the electron and the switch.
The beauty of the baud.....
-"The hackers manifesto"


Do you believe in magic? Do you believe that holding a wand in your hand and saying something like abracadabra or Expelimus or anything equally bizarre can have any effect except to get you branded mad?
What is computer if not magic? The magic wand in your hand. Say the correct word and it does your bidding. Just know the correct spells and the world is at your fingertips.
You gotta know the correct spells to work your wand. You gotta write the correct code to work your computer. A good spell caster can work a weak wand, though a strong wand may make it more effective. A good hacker can work a weak computer and any computer is only as good as the human behind it.
It has got every thing the good wizards(hackers), the dark wizards(crackers), whit magic the software which make your work easier, black magic the varus which just makes you want to tear your hairs out.
You only got so much mana and you only got so much bandwidth, computing resources. So if you believe when I say that there are a billion stars, why wont you if I say that some one may fly.
And yes I compared the good wizards to the hackers. If that shocked you probably you do not differentiate between a hacker and a cracker. Hackers build things, Crackers destroy them.ESR tells the difference

Or for that matter why does anyone blog? Like don’t you have anything better than to sit in front of your computer and waste your time hurting your hand typing? Go play out, watch nature, get a date whatever. Probably that’s one reason I blog. I never seem to get a date. I don’t like playing, at least not any out door game. I won’t see a scenery until it has a nude woman in it. In short I am your nerd next door.
But still there are many advantages. What ego boost do you get when you see the server logs and see that your blog has been visited by people from ten different countries. And imagine the size of my ego when I find that two of them stayed reading my rants for full 10 mins. Oh it almost makes me forget the time my English teacher gave me a full half marks out of twenty on my essay test.
And I hope I make some money out of it. I dream of the day when a publisher reads this blog and signs me a million dollar book deal. (BTW if you are a publisher even a hundred dollar book deal will be okay, really). Failing that I have adsense installed with my blogs. So you see some text ads on my web pages. If you click any of them Ill make money. And I sometimes place text ads on my blogs for money. If you are a blogger or web master and would like to place ads for money visit them, Text Link Advertising. Beware though, I make a lot of money if you signup, but at no cost to you. And yeah the more I write the more of my webpages get indexed. I rise in link popularity and pagerank. More people visit my blog. My ego inflates even more. I write even more. Ah, it’s an endless cycle. But don’t I love it.

Today I completed reading Dan Brown’s digital fortress. The more I read him, the more I seem to dislike him. Like Da Vinci Code was ok, but nothing to be the bestseller it became. But if you claim to read books these days you cant afford not to read Dan Brown. I mean everyone is reading it. So to discuss it with friends and others who share your interest, you must have read it.
But Digital Fortress was intolerable for me, at least intellectually. If you write a fiction, you must get your real world facts correct. Like it would be absurd if in a novel you read that New York is in China. But Dig Fort is full of such bloomers. If you know anything bout cryptography, I mean anything, you would be left wondering how can anyone write such bullshit. And did you know that when viruses attacked networks, they ate away security like real world walls. And firewalls fall bit by bit, with hackers inching closer.
But whatever I say you are going to buy and read that book, right? Once a book becomes bestseller, it remains so.
But this one was a nice touch. On the last page, there is a code given (it’s a book based on cryptography ).128-10-93-85-10-128-98-112-6-6-25-126-39-1-68-78.
Haven’t yet tried to break it. But it surely is Caesar’s cipher(16 chars, square of 4) along with numerals for letter substitution

These dussehra holidays I took on a new work. Graphology. Have been trying to learn it for some time now, but these holidays its official. Bought two books, read them in the vacations, and am collecting samples of peoples writing to analyse them.
Read my notes on graphology here