A byte into “the real World…”

Note: The text ahead may make no sense whatsoever and tht’s pretty ironic since it’s all about logic….so if you’ll read ahead with a mind to understand something then think again

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Was listening to a team mate of mine as he explained how the different musical instruments were mixed after recording using that signal mixing console. I asked him about adjusting the ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ levels and that what in God’s name were those two knobs for.

He launched in on a summarized explanation of how the low, deep notes like that of drums are controlled by playing with the ‘bass’ while high pitched, shrill sounds sometimes like that of guitars are smoothed over by the ‘treble’…As he carried on about how the inputs should just match the range set for any of these or other options…my mind flicked through the graphs and figures in  Digital Signal Processing and the responses of various filters that we studied in them.

I smiled in spite of myself coz i had always loved those subjects that made logical sense   I remember i was in eternal awe of ‘Digital Logic Design’. A friend and I were making ‘4-way traffic signal’ for our DLD project and for the life of me i couldn’t understand how to convert the zeroes and ones into blinking , working lights…..until the journey from deciding logical states to truth tables, then equations and k-maps gave us our circuit…amazing!! the natural highs could be so damn exhilerating!.. The world of digital electronics has always mesmerized me because at the base of it lies the simple concept of presence or absence of a signal, very precisely timed. There is that software to hardware interfacing along with the tiny wonder machines called microprocessors and Digital signal processors that could do something as simple from sending a signal to an LED to acting as a complex speech transaltor… but at the base of these all lies the logic which tells when to or when not to send a signal.

In mathematics it’s a zero or one, in Computing a bit and in physical world a mere switch that turns on or off according to the defined patterns and that brings me to the wonder of having just the ‘right’ pattern…the proper sequence can regulate something as ordinary as accounting, tagging and shelfing of books to something as complex as booting of a pc…so at the apex of it or at the root of it all lies the sequence in which one command follows another.

I’m so keyed up now that i can’t even put together a decent and literarily respectable sentence to express my admiration for the magic, the tricks that logic and numbers are capable of…. I dont know if there is even a central idea to this post…it’s just a random set of words to pay my ode to virtual world of bits and frequencies that are making the companies run, control engineering the milk that goes into tetra packs, refreshing your monitor every fraction of a millisecond and ofcourse teaching u to be v careful and sure coz small mistakes in this environment mean big troubles in our world!!

Along came a Spider!

They said the advent of technology was supposed to get everyone connected and make life more relaxed….hehe but from what i see this networking thingy has got everyone webbed in to be forever more busy….no nobody has an excuse for not bieng able to work since they did not go to office….what the heck is the online Sharepoint repository for!!! …you should have just logged in with the account and have had a live conferencing with your peers.

You were not able to get your assignment done because you were sick, no problemo, email it just before the clock strikes midnight and the magic of this byting world will save you from the evils of an ‘F‘

You would just be glad to be lost in the wild, mad rush of the world but the ring ring of the tiny cellphone is the muse’s song that will have you hit the jetty of reality in 1 min flat, what with all the call rates being per min or per sec based. Yeah no wonder this tiny oracle of the modern world gives you a thousand and one excuses to be not there where you are supposed to be…but still you are connected and you cannot live without it neither live with it!

And yet when it has become so diffcult to run away from each other we are all so lonely or a bit lost atleast…no GPS to find the mind’s peace really…if  this or could tell the depths of moods then no wonder the computer would be a wonder machine but it’s so ironic that when we have to exchange small niceties with our neighboring colleagues we open up a chat session on VYpress and send an IM:

[3:41 PM] PS & QM – Rabia Sameem [533]:
AoA
[3:41 PM] PS & QM – Rabia Sameem [533]:
hru :)
[3:42 PM] ET-SAMRA [437]:
f9:) wht abt u?

 

Yeah people we are very busy coz we gotta make life easier for people so they can have a smart interface to communicate with machines..no miscommunications and no flawed protocols can be allowed when working a machine.. Why machine language isn’t very convenient to understand, now is it??

Who’s the machine btw, the smart humanoids or them…umm this question is no more in the boolean domain now…better search the Fuzzy logic:-P

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Warped time!

I remember some five to six years ago when we had the Daylight Savings Time (DST) implemented in Pakland for the very first time, I couldn’t for the life of me understand what problem did people have with rotating the screw of their watches and clocks just one complete 360˚?….To me it was ludicrous that people should think it cumbersome to follow the ‘new’ time while the other half still went by their routines according to the ‘old’ time. My limited intelligence and understanding then (which by the way are still not that wide and deep either), simply could not associate any big dilemmas with DST except for a jet-lag sort of feeling the first few days.

 

However now as I move around in the world as a professional adult…I can see some issues that can, if not handled properly, turn into big monsters. I work in a flourishing software house whose core domain is providing banking solutions: switching, e banking, IVR, Mobile banking etc …..and THIS is the very domain where DST is not a very comfortable thought…one of the domains where the Y2K could have wreaked havoc….one of the domains where literally “time is money!” or is it vice versa???

Of late I have realized the importance of a fraction of a time…a millisecond which can  trigger a signal, start a process, save a record, authorize a transaction, transfer thousands of green bills ….just while the seconds needle limp to the other digit.

 

 No! DST for the countries like ours is not a very convenient transition….not until our plans and policies for this change and the reverting back have been properly devised out. Otherwise the smallest loophole is the largest doorway to enter for the wise wanderers of the cyber world.

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Note: Even I am confused if this was a hi tech observation or just a tickle of the brain but I am telling you the complex relationship of time and the digital world is still opening over me in a whole new light….and I like this rush of  understanding …wouldn’t you??       

Pic from www.deviantart.com

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Sniff and bug!

 

No it’s not just your next door  meddling aunty who likes to know what you do with the time of the day but there is a whole world out there, keeping tabs on you. If you are a celebrity the tabloid hunters are counting your each step. If you are a politician no journalist or TV reporter is going to let you exhale in liberty. If you are a sportsman, people will catch you at every nook and corner and either rave about your latest play or, those who have much more cheek, would give you tips as to how you could make your catch better. But if you are a commoner like me, then you are still at a risk of having your privacy breached courtesy of the wild worldwide web (makes a cool tongue twister, no?). Actually the minute you have your computer connected to any network be it a LAN or the internet…you come under the surveillance of the technology Interpol. Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said:

” You are born free but everywhere you are in chains”

In the case of getting connected, you happily embrace this chain…take the good with the bad. However there is quite an interesting perspective to all this sniffing and sneaking, it gives you a much larger domain to pull great gags on people around you ….Having been in a very computer oriented university with the hi-tech geeks around, there were continual trick or treating within the networks….I can recall a few incidents, others I have forgotten but these playing around of the young computer scientists and engineers often make me smile whenever I think about them.

I remember how a mail asked for the Valentine’s day to be celebrated in the university forwarded by an elderly now expired (God bless his soul) teacher of ours. According to the mail everybody was to wear pinks and reds to show the spirit of the day. Our poor teacher was the one who was shocked the most when he discovered he had sent the mail!

I also remember the various notices that were often posted on the website announcing there to be a holiday the next day and by none other than one of our professors…but it was never them, however it was fun to have a day off and with the best of the excuse…Superway said it was so. Not to mention that sometimes you typed in the official website’s address and get routed onto some fashion advisory website!

Hina once told me how she scared the hell out of a friend of hers when she got to controlling her computer from her own. Her friend did get a bit of a shock since rumors about a spirit roaming our campus were floating around a bit, as result of a tragic accident that happened last year.Then at another instance Rakesh once told us about how they took back at a fellow webmaster who had taken away someone’s shoe…or maybe it was his own shoe that was snatched away during class. Anyways, whenever the poor victim logged onto the university’s website using his password the URL was routed to a page showing  a picture of a shoe!

Also it was Hina yet again who once proudly told me that they were making a virus as an assignment….and though I can’t specifically remember but I’m sure there must have been cases of home made viruses let lose on our poor Xeon and the crash of all the computers being fed from it.

There is a quartet of my juniors of whom, two take hacking as a hobby…lemme not take their name for the world is too small and on the net, even smaller! Now this one person really likes to get into peoples’ inboxes and read their mails..talk about being nosy…but since I like them too well so it doesn’t make me angry either. This young guy once while talking to Lubz very casually remarked: “Oh Lubna Baji your password is like__________ and what’s more you have it for ____________ “  Lubna stared at the naughty boy and then laughed it off, afterall what was her password if the guy had snooped into the mailbox of our own Mr. Microsoft . Well Imad was on their hitlist too but he is totally very wise for them even…hard to believe but true

A friend of mine who was a senior, was once trying to tell me how I could hack a password while chatting but since I’m not much of a chatting buff and unfortunately too full of conscience and not to mention a dunce at times I paid little heed to what she said…although I was immensely impressed that she had tried this good deed quite a few times.

Being at the server end is a much coveted position….being on good terms with the network Incharge of our university, Rakesh and Om did a survey of the sites that students visited, for a stats project. They smugly claimed while giving the presentation that they had omitted the student numbers of few students to keep their privacy. Even though much effort was made to block a few sites from being accessed on Xeon, but using the proxy every other person had Orkut open on their computers….thanks to the WiFi setup throughout the uni’s premises the laptops gave much more ease to work around too.

Well these little harmless digging in gives us something to laugh about but on a more serious note, how vulnerable everything has become…the digital data is always at a risk of falling into the wrong hands. I researched quite a bit about DES algo for my FYP and though it seemed complicated to a novice like me but even the 3DES, its successor, has also been broken using the brute force. Port knocking is a fave with the techies and putting a flag in another system a challenge they all like.

What amuses me is the fact that the plunderers of the cyber world are no stupid, ignoramuses, they are the well learned, digital world’s geniuses. It’s a war between the enlightened and the well enlightened…a very balanced and a fair clash. Some other time maybe I’ll list down geeks who wreaked havoc with the famous banks, firms and databases just for the heck of it but for the time being let me leave you with this thought:

“Big brother is watching you……”

Generation Next de` Camouflage!

The best thing about visiting different blogs, across the globe, is that you get to read about such a vast blend of topics about which otherwise you wouldn’t have time to explore over by yourself….So when I went at this one blog, I was intrigued to read about what is the next generation of camouflage going to be and how dangerous is it going to get for the enemy..

UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) conducted some secret tests last week under the supervision of Prof. Sir John Pendry to make an ongoing tank invisible! Well the concept utilized is pretty basic, in that they cover the vehicle or a person in a special light refracting and reflecting material and then project the images of the surroundings from special cameras and beams. This tends to reflect the images being thrown over the material and so for any observer there is only the plain ol’ scenery around, not the cleverly camouflaged, mighty killing machine….

However I suppose there have to be projections made from all directions so as to completely hide in plain sight the weapon or soldiers and for that, the experiments are still under process. The technology won’t be going into actual live usage before 8 to 10 years, so we still have to wait and see. I do have one question in mind though: “what about the noise produced by the heavy vehicles, or do we have noiseless vehicles as well?”

This is kind of exciting, a step up from the stealth technology which in itself is quite intiriguing….and a step towards to the achieving of the, as they say, Harry Potter Style Invisibility Cloak.    I remember sometime back I read an article about scientists sucessfully testing a prototype of an  invisibility cloak working in one frequency only, in an e newsletter of the New Scientist (I’ll recommend getting the free subscription). So scientists are hard at work in decoding the universe and the deciphering and tampering of the visible light is soon going to render this phrase invalid: “Seeing is believing!”…..Oh really?

Thanks to Mr. Chris for this piece of news

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Btw you people could visit this Telegraph website of UK and the Daily Mail of UK to read the reported story….or better yet Google it.

Cell phone , Me and Eid!! :)

Sometimes I thank God for the cellphone and  the VAS on .No it’s not because I’m cellphone nut or something but it’s because it has become a near alternative for human beings!

 My mom tends to call me crazy for my even crazier notions and theories and I tell her that she simply has no respect for philosophy, she always ends up with rolling her eyes and asking: “So do you thing this color embroidery would work with this color” God nobody takes me seriously!! Anyways so cellphones have become like a second ear and mouth to us… When need be the phone takes up the form of any person we know, we pick it up and talk to it and we put it on our ear and listen to it talking to us back…sometimes the Bluetooth even eliminates the need for picking it up. Some fifteen years ago when landline was also not very much in use we use to go and visit people when they were sick, depressed or happy. The walking talking human in flesh was required to be there to know that the person was actually there but now all anybody expects is a ‘ring’ from the other person.

I mean how many of us keep on dreaming about ‘rings’ only the one I mention tends to be rather musical. Even though the rates of using cellphones dropped dramatically, so much so that my mom exclaimed one day: “I think soon enough they would be paying us to make a call on our mobile” but thanks to PTA the monopolizing of rates by the mobile users especially Jazz was put a check upon, because I had seriously started to worry that if the rates started to decelerate with such a big gradient, what would the companies pay us, the future telecom engineers? Turns out I did not have to worry about that, Despite all the schemes and special offers Mobilink still has enough dough to start out a charitable campaign.

Well regardless of low call rates the SMS is still the rage infact they have become an outrage. With such a fad of forwarding messages I think there should be an Akismet spam collector for the short messages as well. Lately I realized that most of my friends had a Uphone connection, ignorant me did not know why until a little waking up made me aware of the SMS deal of Uphone, then there is Djuice of Telenor  and I remember the 300 messages for just 6 Rs. started by Warid last year and which Novy, a friend of mine exhausted very nicely. 1Re. per message is charged by my Jazz and Lubz keeps on telling me that I’m being robbed…but I’m not really thinking about using MNP just now either. I do have a Telenor connection as well which I had to buy to use with a T Series mobile of Nokia direct from America. No other connection was compatible with it and since this was some two years ago so people were not much into opening the codes either, sadly though my little ‘disco’ mobile, which my Dad bought for me so lovingly, got a serious short circuit….it died L….So I ended up with two SIMs even though one is being used by my 10 year old sister…these kids of today…they are born under the shadow of  computers and mobiles…

Anyways since I have this really annoying habit of digressing from the topic due to the uncontrolled flooding of ideas that’s why I did not further elaborate why I think mobiles have become an alternate for humans. One thing…they are TELE phones reaching far and wide and making you stay in touch with whomever you want and whenever you want and not to mention that with the IMEI number you could be traced out even if you don’t want to be traced haha. If you are feeling lonely or bored you simply punch in an SMS and send to your friend in the middle of the night, or you tune into a radio station and get in touch with the world or as I remember happened during a class of mine in University, if you have a really mind boggling quiz then rather than asking a friend you could simply connect to web via the GPRS and viola…..the paper is out!

Saturday night I sat at home feeling somewhat pensive for the finishing of Ramazan always leaves me a little saddened. Being not much of a Chand Raat shopper, infact not being much of a shopper at all especially when you have to fight crowds and crowds of people I sat at home and brooded ironically wanting some hullabaloo….until my Mom asked me and my Li’l sister to put together a fruit trifle. When working with my hands and not my mind except when using my mind to solve numbers, I love to work with the beat of some catchy song….that’s what I did when I punched in a key to bring on FM to life on my mobile. I had to do a little drive cum walk test around the house to find the proper diversity for any channel that would come on and FM 103 suited the best with my geographical locations….. I had a hilarious time listening to the utter nonsense of the two presenters…lots of slapstick humor just right up my alley J

On Eid day too my cell phone kept me plenty of company by delivering a message every now and then till the afternoon and I was mighty thankful for that. Since we don’t really have any relatives living in Karachi so Eid day was kind of dull…like dressing up and sitting on sofa the entire day sending sms and sending sms….especially since all our neighbors were also out or busy…. This little rascal beeped in from time to time to remind me that there are people out there and so it took the form of one friend or another for me that entire day and that day I realized we really were having an increase in teledensity however not in the country but the mobile networks which literally get choked with the special days’ traffic….imagine a 140 million people across the nation and out wishing each other EID!! However I so not enjoyed resending the messages since some of them got pushed and shoved out of the networks as SMSs stampeded through the electronic Megahertz….

Well nothing can take the place of the God’s most loved creation, the human and in spite of all the cyberworld connectivity I still miss those who are far away yet in the meantime I thank God for the mobiles and the VAS even more!!

 On that note though HAPPY BELATED EID MUBARAK!!!

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 And even though mobile companies claim to have so many users that I can’t even count that high…it is still a matter of understanding that people who buy multiple numbers don’t use all of them all the time, infact most of the people discard their old numbers….but with the advent of dual SIM mobiles maybe people with two numbers would get more advantage especially my few friends who each have two numbers