Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: "I call a spade a spade " If you came to this post by reading the title - You are one of the following: You are seething with anger, wondering what nonsense is written in this post. You are getting worked up and aching to fire up some comments calling me an insensitive bigot, communal and what not. You are also readying some choice expletives You have adopted a holier than thou attitude and are ready to give me advice on how we should all live together happily or throw words such as " I did not expect this from you " You secretly don't like Muslims and are here to read what I have got to say You are still unbiased and are simply curious to read what is in this post Once you have put yourself in one of those groups, continue reading... Let me clarify at the outset that I just wanted you to realise that we all belong to one of those categories. But tell me, is what I have said here wrong in any way? Isn't it my prerogativ...

Swami Nikhilaananda said: " All work and no play makes Gulagulaananda a dull old man... well duller " With every passing day, I am beginning to like JavaScript more and more. JavaScript is very easy to learn and with one language, you can write front-end applications, back-end scripts, run servers and even write mobile apps for Android, iOS, Tizen etc. I think that's incredible! I have written a couple of simple games with JavaScript and thought I should write a post about one of them. So, let's have a look at a simple game I wrote, called Crates . The objective of the game is simple. There is a "hero", a character you control with the keyboard arrows. There are some crates and some targets (golden balls). The goal is to cover all targets with the crates. The hero can push a single crate but never pull one. Only one crate can be pushed at a time. A crate that is against the wall or another crate cannot be pushed. So it gets tricky when you push cra...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " You can't negotiate with, threaten or blackmail a person who has nothing to lose " If you observe, you'll see several similarities between a company and the human body. Just like organ systems, you have teams. And just like complicated interactions among organ systems, you have interactions among teams. All these interactions need to happen very smoothly. The final objective is the survival and growth of the overall entity - The company or the body. I remember an old story, perhaps from Aesop's Fables - Where all the organs fight among themselves. The heart says it is the greatest, for it helps pump blood all over the place. Without blood, what can you do? The stomach says that it is the greatest, for it digests food and gives energy. Without energy, the heart cannot pump. The limbs say they are the greatest, for they get food - without which you can't digest. The brain says that it is the greatest for making all of this poss...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Think like a child " The problem with most techies is that we tend to seek out tech solutions for all problems. I don't blame technologists for this - I think this is a general problem. Just to explain in a clearer fashion, here is an old story I had read a long time back. There was a soap factory that had large machines that would do everything end to end - from manufacturing soaps, to making bars of them and putting them in boxes. They would run over conveyor belts. Now it so happened that occasionally there would be one empty box that would slip into the lot and that would create problems - You can't sell an empty box. Now where was this error? And how would you exactly debug and fix this? I actually asked this question to a bunch of people and typically you would approach this like a tech issue - Probably some counter was wrong, or try to figure out and see if there is a pattern in the empty boxes - that would give you a clue. Ho...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: "" The term "Freedom Of Expression" is among the most misunderstood terms - especially so after the advent of Social Media. The problem is that people don't know where to draw the line for freedom of expression. This is true for a couple of other freedoms as well. Let's have a look at the most common example - Religion & God. The presence or absence of God cannot be proved or disproved conclusively, at least at this point of time. However, it is reasonable to say that we can prove or disprove what God has not done for sure. For example, you can say for sure that a particular disease is not because you didn't pray to God but rather because of a certain bacteria. However, there are so many things unexplained phenomena in this universe that have not yet been explained fully by science. It is, therefore, important to retain an open mind. Could it be done by God? Possible. Should we accept that as the answer and complacent...

Swami Gulagulaananda wondered: " Can we recreate evolution and the world programmatically? " Classes and Objects form the core of object oriented programming. A class is basically like the floor plan of a building, and an object is the instantiated version, a physical manifestation if you may, of the class - viz, an actual house. What's interesting is that with one class, you can have as many object instances as you want - one house floor plan, but multiple houses that have the same house floor plan. Now that we are clear with classes and objects, let's take a look at modifying the properties of objects. Two houses can look alike and have the same characteristics - that is, doors and windows in the same positions, etc. but can have different properties, such as paint colours - one might be red and another blue. Similarly, if you look at people, though we have the same general structure, we have different properties like skin tone, height, weight, eye colour etc....

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " The course of the law is the longest course in the world " Important Note -  This is just a thought experiment - I DO NOT endorse nor encourage anybody to take law into their hands and go around dispensing theirown brands of justice.  Not a single day goes by when we don't see the words 'scam' or 'rape' or pseudo-secular behaviour in the news. Everybody talks about how corruption is bringing ruin to the country. Some others talk about this as the reason for Indian brain-drain and talk about how the Satya Nadellas are leaving for the US because of transparency and openness. Fine, the need of  the hour is a political overhaul, they said, and at the risk of sounding like Rahul Gandhi, let's bring the youth into politics, they said... There was great rejoicing when AAP came to power in Delhi and people waved brooms, promising to sweep away the filth of corruption from within the system. We will punish the corrupt, they...