Musing from a star studded night

I am writing this blog post almost after 2-3 years. This long weekend, forced us to get out of hectic, noisy, busing city life into a nature’s oblivion. We along with three other families chose Sakleshpura as our much needed break from the city’s monotonous, routine, 9-to-5 lives.

The home stay we chose was amidst a lush green coffee plantation far away into the wild. There was no mobile signals (yes such places do exist 😉 ).  This was the much needed ‘Digital Detox’ devoid of whatsapp, facebook, news and other distractions. And truly speaking, we did not miss any of those, removing our false notions that we cannot live without our ‘alter digital egos’.

What triggered me to write a blog is the night sitting under the star studded sky, bringing the nostalgia of my childhood. Looking at the far away stars, planets, asteroids, and meteoroids brings in a deep sense of silence and a brief moment to look within, a trance so to say. That profound moment enlightens us as to how small we are in this fast universe and what we are doing with our lives, the things we are fighting for in our daily lives. A moment to step back, introspect our lives.

That serene night, effortlessly brings your multitude of thoughts to a standstill and forces a deep silence upon you. You could easily spend hours staring at the stagnant boring stars and yet get more and more amazed.

The biggest take away for me this weekend, is to spend less and less time with my ‘alter digital ego’ (mobile and social media) and spend more and more time with my-self.

Thank you for reading, talk to you at my next blog.

Ciao,

Dr. Deepak

Simple Rules for effective Relation Building

Developing or nurturing a good relationship between two individuals does not always happen naturally. The fact is that, all of us are right in our own perspectives. Our intentions are always genuine and true to any relationship. But to meet the common frequency, to share perspectives and to simple understand the fact that the other individual is also true and right is not an easy intuition to have.

Good relationships between couples can be cultivated by few simple measures and below we try to explore a few possible such measures.

1. To say sorry when we are right: Saying sorry a hundred times, even when we are right is not an easy thing to do. It can happen only in genuine relationships where there is no race to prove each other wrong. It happens only in relationships where there is no ego. So practicing this art is to let go your ego for the betterment of the relationship. This is hardest thing to do, but will fetch the maximum brownie points in any relationship. Saying sorry a hundred times even when we are right, is a very profound and beautiful way of saying that the relationship and the person is more valuable that the argument.
2. Expressing gratitude multiple times: Everyone contributes goodness in all relationships, to thank or express a sense of gratitude, and remember the goodness many times takes a relationship to much greater heights. To subtly express that, your actions are well received and remembered multiple times, gives a incentive to create more and more greater, and happier moments. This is the lifeline of any relationship. A small thank you for your thoughts, your actions, and your love goes a long way in a building a building relationship.
3. Closure: Having arguments are perennial in any relationship. Picking up that phone and ending the fight before sleep is the secret to good nights. To crush the ego and pick up the phone to provide closure will only happen when there is love in any relationship. This has to happen mutually, with both individuals taking 50-50 chances to pick that phone. One person doing all the time is the best recipe for disaster. Initiative and trust are the only virtues that can foster confidence in each other that if I call this time, the other person will call after the next fight. Fights that go longer than a day have no closures and add stress into relationship only complicating issues.
4. Uncomplicated issues: Human mind is trained to complicated simple issues. To sit back and pause for a moment and think of the core problem will give simple and great answers. Un-complicating issues is an art of resolution. We are simple individuals with minuscule reasoning, complication and bringing past issues into an argument is only to prove each other wrong. To step back and speak straight is possible only for the brave hearts, but practicing this will solve problems more easily.
5. Clarity of the situation: Many times our heart’s desire are wrapped by our mind and it is presented in a convoluted manner. The other person will not be able to decipher these intention and will spend their energies in solving unrelated issues. If we gather courage to speak our heart and say our real intentions, solutions could be closer and simpler than we think. For this to have clarity within us is also important, to know why we are adamant on certain matters, what is that really we want is for us to look within. When we know the actual problem is face and express it succinctly, the other individual can put honest efforts to resolve it.

If the reader has more points to add, feel free to contribute.

Download jars of a Maven project to another folder

If you have to download all the jars of a maven project into a separate location.

First install maven on you operating system.

Locate the pom.xml of the project you wish to download jars.

Execute the following command in that location.

mvn dependency:copy-dependencies

You will find all the jars in the folder target/dependencies under that location.

Conference Travel Log: Day 5

The 28th International IEEE AINA 2014 conference started today at the university of Victoria. It started with the keynote from Prof Shojiro Nishio from Osaka university. He spoke about Humanware: the third ware which creates innovation in Information technology.

Humanware is a new terminology introduced by them which is the flow of information linking information among human relationships.  This involves understanding the biological dynamics, cognitive dynamics and information dynamics about humans.

Prof Shojiro compared humans and machine with respect to memory capabilities, data transfer rates, performance among which humans are insignificant when compared to machines, whereas in the aspect of energy consumption they suggest humans consume much less energy than machine to do the same work. They reasons that, genes and brain do not remove noise but utilize noise or “yuragi” to achieve highly energy efficient and adaptive behavior.

Yuragi enables information and communication technology, which is highly adaptive, robust and energy efficient.

These concepts they have implemented in dynamic routing algorithms and prove that “Yuragi” reduces complexity and energy consumption.

After the keynote we attended the workshop in Trust Computing and Social Networking. The first talk gave a detailed explanation of email system and proposed a new advanced mail system using correspondence model. This proposed a framework through which different level of policies could be enforced for different contexts and users depending on the situation. The author also explained the working of the email system, which was very insightful.

This was followed by a talk on introducing a 3rd party auditing for Cloud computing. In my opinion this concept was not realistic and the author was not very clear about the kind of SLAs they where addressing. My personal opinion was that the solution they proposed was not viable.

The last talk in this workshop was about a user-centric  highly reliable personal website portal.  This was very similar to many password management systems. But it was unique feature where the service reads the contractual documents or the terms of service and presents them in a user-friendly manner. The author suggested that this will be implemented through NLP. One of the audience also suggested have a zero knowledge proof for the same, which was a very interesting suggestion.

We attend the many other session where the papers where more concentrated about the security and privacy aspects.

The day ended with a welcome party, which was good way to meet many professors and authors and discuss their research interests. It was a good way to end an eventful day.

 

 

 

 

 

Conference Travel Log: Day 4

We visited today to University of Victoria. The university is full of greenery with a very nice campus.

We where right on time and the talk was about to start by 11 am.

We went straight into the seminar room. The talk was well attended with around 20 people including around 3 professors.

I started my presentation with starting with an introduction about Clouds Lab and then speaking about Cloud Computing and then introducing about workflows and finally presenting my work.  The presentation lasted around 15 mins. After the presentation there was a brief Q&A from the profs, there was some inquisitive question about my work, which I addressed.

Following my presentation Chenhao presented his work to the audience. After the presentations Dr Pan’s student Marayam took us around different labs and introduced us to the research students. Some of them where working on Cloud computing into energy efficient resource allocations.

But mostly the lab was working in wireless networks, mesh networks and vehicular networks. Dr Pan was gracious enough to take us to lunch.

After lunch we returned to hotel and refreshed and thought of exploring Victoria’s downtown (the city center). Marayam, Dr pan’s student was very generous to show us around Victoria’s downtown and introduce us to some important locations.

Then, we explored the shopping malls, souvenir shops around the downtown. We also ventured into a chocolate shop called Rocky Mountain. I tried the English Toffee Apple, which was green apple coated in caramel, dipped in chocolate with nuts on top. It was my first ever encounter to such a things and it was amazing a truly fulfilling experience.

After this, we roamed a few more street and ended up in a Indian restaurant called Sizzling Tandoor. Indian food to end the day was the most perfect way to end.

The conference starts officially tomorrow. Looking forward for it.