I received a mail from Anish in morning with the subject an appeal for help. It was about his colleague from previous firm – Aricent (formerly known as Flextronics and Hughes). The text of email went as follows -

Hi all

A dear friend of mine, Shantanu Goel(from Chandigarh) has met with a very unfortunate personal tragedy.
your help could not be more welcome for him and his family at this time of crisis.

please don't hesitate to forward this to anyone you think can help.

Blog link:
http://iamhuman.blogspot.com/2007/03/desperate-call-for-help.html

you can mail him (shantanu goel) at shantanu.goel [at] gmail.com

He is working in Aricent, Gurgaon.

And then went the Blog post CAP (Copy And Paste).

I visited the blog myself and happened to read the post titled with the same subject line – A DESPERATE CALL FOR HELP.

The post describes a story which has happened to guy named Shantanu and his family. Shantanu is a Software Engineer presently working at Aricent, Gurgaon. He belongs to Chandigarh and his family resides there. He writes that his brother, who is working at Bangalore, was married to a girl in November 2005 (no mention of love or arrange…so don’t think about that perspective). Soon after the marriage of his brother, their family started receiving different un-expected demands (which ranged from money to control over his brother) from the in-laws of his brother. After fulfilling them for sometime, when they started refusing the unacceptable demands like signatures of his brother on blank papers and demand for lakhs of rupees, the family was threatened for life, from the in-laws. And very soon, they were attacked by in-laws family at their home. There is very pitiful description of the situation when the family members of victim were physically assaulted at their own home. How can the role of police (Indian Police to be specific) be ignored in such cases. Police arrived after sometime of the attack but it kept standing outside and watching the drama. It was only after members of community tried to interfere in the matter that police intercepted into the situation. And at police station, instead of taking any action against louts and filing any FIR, the victims were accused for causing this traumatic situation. There was no consideration of hundreds of witnesses.

It happens only in IN where police, instead of taking it as their duty to protect people, takes it as their right to harass, threaten and loot their own people (who pay salary to police through their own pockets in form of taxes) – truly said that in IN, Police Raj is equivalent to Gunda Raj. It is only because of few honest police officers that Indian Police still has managed to maintain its image at some level.

Shantanu writes that FIR was not filed until they visited SSP (Senior Superintendent of Police) and DSP (Deputy Superintendent of Police) – now the question is how a common man can manage to file an FIR in our country.

I request fellow bloggers to spread the word and also put their own version of this story on their own blogs because we as blogger happen to be a powerful source of information to media sources.

The brainfuck language is an esoteric programming language noted for its extreme minimalism. It was designed to challenge and amuse programmers, and is not suitable for practical use. Its name has been variously euphemized, as in brainf*ck, since its name contains the expletive “fuck”. The name of the language is generally not capitalized, despite the fact that it is a proper noun.

Well, I love programming, no matter what kind of, it is. So Let us go a bit deep in the historical as well as tech details of this language.

History -

Urban Müller created brainfuck in 1993 with the intention of designing a language which could be implemented with the smallest possible compiler, inspired by the 1024 byte compiler for the FALSE programming language. Several brainfuck compilers have been made smaller than 200 bytes. The classic distribution is Müller’s version 2, containing a compiler for the Amiga, an interpreter, example programs, and a readme document.

Technical - 

The language consists of eight commands, listed below. A brainfuck program is a sequence of these commands, possibly interspersed with other characters (which are ignored). The commands are executed sequentially, except as noted below.

 

The brainfuck language uses a simple machine model consisting, besides the program, of an array of 30,000 byte cells initialized to zero, a movable pointer into the array (initialized to point to the leftmost byte of the array), and two streams of bytes for input and output (most often connected to a keyboard and a monitor respectively, and using the ASCII character encoding).

 

Character	Meaning
>	increment the pointer (to point to the next cell to the right).
<	decrement the pointer (to point to the next cell to the left).
+	increment (increase by one) the byte at the pointer.
-	decrement (decrease by one) the byte at the pointer.
.	output the value of the byte at the pointer.
,	accept one byte of input, storing its value in the byte at the pointer.
[	jump forward to the command after the corresponding ] if the byte at the pointer is zero.
]	jump back to the command after the corresponding [ if the byte at the pointer is nonzero.

 

(Alternatively, the ] command may instead be translated as an unconditional jump to the corresponding [ command, or vice versa; programs will behave the same but will run more slowly.)

 

Brainfuck programs can be translated into C using the following substitutions, assuming ptr is of type unsigned char* and has been initialized to point to an array of zeroed bytes:

brainfuck command	C equivalent
>	++ptr;
<	--ptr;
+	++*ptr;
-	--*ptr;
.	putchar(*ptr);
,	*ptr=getchar();
[	while (*ptr) {
]	}

Another thing that I liked about this lang is -

Nonetheless, like any Turing-complete language, brainfuck is theoretically capable of computing any computable function or simulating any other computational model, if given an unlimited memory store

If I am right, it can be used as a compiler for another user-defined language based on Brainfuck platform.

While going through its Syntax and Semantics, I am really feeling like f***** up. Better not to write anymore about it! Wouldn’t advice you to go to its page unless you have got interest from above description.

Thank you, Vivek.

A weekend when you have to work on both days.

Which means you didn’t had weekend at all.

A weekend which happened in my life on Nov 04, 2006 and Nov 05, 2006.

Right now, there are 2 definition appearing in my mind as goes down -

55 hour programmer – A programmer (rather a refining developer/programmer) who remains engaged in continuous programming in zeal to learn and implement more and more things for a particular domain which could be a feature or can be a typical piece of code (*refer to it as program/package/software). This appears in the case of those beginners which want to learn as much as they can without getting out of hot seat. I was one of this kind during graduation

40 hour programmer – These are the matured programmers who know what they have to do and how it has to be done but still they want to make their part of code (refer to *). And in that fervor for a special code or a smooth transition of code, they create masterpieces at times although those pieces remain out of reach of real world most of the times.

FYI, this post is on the lines of a post about “The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer“.

Let me define blank mode – You feel that there are many things (thoughts, ideas and blah blah) running inside your brain. You want to put them out of mind by any means. Then all of sudden you find that everything is gone. There is nothing inside mind. More precisely, it is BLANK and so am I!