My Day

Ethics and Life

2007-12-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

What does a man live by? For a man to survive, he needs food, sleep, air, water etc. These are the needs not only man but all animals or living beings need to survive. But what makes a man a man? Is it brain? Is it knowledge? or Is it Ethics?
In my view, I think man is not born unethical. Ethics is the most important thing that man inherits by nature, but the depending upon the society he grows up, he either loses it or develops it. A mans inner spirit never teaches a man to do bad things. We can easily be ethical if we follow our intuition of good things. If we have a doubt about anything, our spirit can help find out which one is right and which one is wrong.
In every field, ethical persons are always respected. They may not be as rich and successful as unethical persons, but they will have an inner satisfaction that always drives them to do ethical things. If every man can live by ethics, then the world will be a far more better place to live in.

Internet Safety

2007-12-06T09:20:00.001-08:00

Internet is a very good tool for information sharing but it is not just a tool for information sharing. Its like a hole in your house for the rest of the world from where everybody can peek in if you don't cover it properly. Internet is the tool from where you want to know about the world outside of your hosue, but you don't want the rest of the world watch you.There are all kinds of people in the internet, some are good people trying to help others, and some are online predators always looking for good chance to harm others. Identifying these people and allowing the right people through is hard for those who are not aware of these issues. Kids are very vulnurable to online predators. They can have very bad long-term effect if they are allowed to spend a lot of time in internet by themselves. So, we must always be behind their shoulder when they use it and carefully guide them how to navigate safely through it.Recently, privacy has been a very sensitive issue. People can do many things if they know about you, and with your information they can do anything they want putting all the blame on you. This is technically called "Identity Theft". People have been left bankrupt with the help of identity theft. Not to let this happen to us, we must be careful before we disclose our private informaiton in the internet. We must be aware of who we are sharing our information with and not blame this useful tool for everything.

One laptop per child

2007-11-27T06:15:00.000-08:00

I grew up in a “developing” country. I am lucky I grew up in the capital city of my country and my parents were able to put me in a pretty good school where computer education was easily available. There are children in my country who have never seen a computer and may never have heard about it.
Annual income of Nepal is very low. Most of the people earn existential income, that is they earn to live, they don’t have any extra money to spend on technology and other stuffs. Most of them do farming for living and they don’t get a chance to earn money to spend on educational stuff for their children, leave apart personal computers.
Programs like “One Laptop per child” may not sound that revolutionizing in US but it may act as a very big step to make children in countries like Nepal educated with recent technology and help them keep with technology. I am lucky I got to play with computer since my fifth grade, but most of the children in my country are still not fortunate enough to have a computer.
For an average American income $399 is not a large amount to pay for a computer but for an average Nepali person $188 can be his gross annual income. If an average American parent buys his children with that price in that program he will be educating one other child from a developing country. I want every parents here in US to look at the link below and think about buying a computer with this program.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,312877,00.html

Outsourcing: An international Perspective

2007-11-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

Since my childhood, I had a impression that USA is a land of innovation and opportunity. Whenever I saw white tourists in my neighborhood, my eyes had a different view of looking towards them. I had the impression that he must be really rich, as his single unit of money was worth nearly eighty units of my money. I had heard about people getting rich just by guiding tourists around the city. Then I kind of decided to earn my wages in dollars, luckily my education and my dad’s economic condition was good enough to bring me to USA for college education.
I come from a developing country to US to get a “US degree,” which is very renowned all over the world and can sell for a very good price. Whether I am in USA or any part of the world, US college degree works it magic. If I was in my country and earning the same amount of money I am earning right now (even as an intern), I could live a very high standard of living with that money in Nepal . The cost of living is very low in developing countries than it is in USA. But on the other hand, income is ridiculously low for the same degree in the developing countries. This fact is very well known by American companies, so they are buying the cheap labor of developing countries in a wise manner, which Americans call Outsourcing.
Outsourcing is mutual. The wage that US based companies offer people of developing countries is reasonable for both parties. Suppose a US based employee asks a certain wage for doing some kind of job. If the company outsources the job, the overseas employee is very happy to take a fourth of what the US based employee had asked. With that money he can live a very good life there, as it is almost four times the wage he would have got from a company in his country.
Thinking from a different angle, American companies are using all the innovative people of other countries to work for them. Though all the hard work is done by a person of a different country, the credit goes to the American company. So is it leaving a positive or negative effect in the US Economy?
I think outsourcing is only a practice of open international market. We import cheap electronics from China; many clothing stores import their product from different parts of the world. If somebody thinks outsourcing is putting a negative effect on US Economy, they should also think twice before buying any product that is not made in USA.
I think outsourcing doesn’t take away the jobs from US job market, but it provides more free time and resources to US based companies to spend on innovative ideas and new inventions. If the manpower in US companies were stuck in the same old job that could be done by a cheap employee offshore, the technology wouldn’t grow as fast as it is right now. So the people working for American companies offshore are not really invaders, but are helping hands to make America always on the top in the field of technological innovations.

My mp3 player

2007-11-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

I love listening to songs, especially in my car, I want it banging in my ears. I had an ipod, I got it for free by opening a checking acount at a bank. I gave it to my sister on her birthday. Since then I am without a mp3 player. I could live without mp3 player for almost a year, but now it is such a necessity, I had to get one. I didn't want to spend much on an mp3 player so I ordered a mp3 player that looked exactly like an ipod. It took it one month to get to me, it broke the day I got it. I googled my problem, people recommended to upload the firmware, I did, now the mp3 player doesn't even turn on.
I listen to a lot of mp3 songs, I get whatever I want to listen from the internet and honestly I have never paid to get the songs. This time I have been benefited by the weak copyright rules. But at the same time, the Ipod like thing made me suffer. It cost me 40 dollars to get the mp3 player, it doesn't have a brand name and I know it hasn't bought any copyright from Ipod to make it alike. If they had bought the copyright, the player wouldn't be that poorly designed as they had to follow certain specifications.
Analyzing the two things I figured out that the weak copyright enforcement has done more harm to me than benefit. If I had bought all the mp3 songs I listen to I wouldn't have spent 40 dollars in total which I lost in getting a crappy mp3 player.

Google joins hands with Myspace

2007-10-30T10:28:00.001-07:00

As soon as microsoft bought some of the most popular social networking site facebook, the other big competitor Google has joined its hand with myspace. They are launching the new networking "Opensocial" together.
Google lost in the race of getting Facebook with Microsoft. But they went after myspace to join hands not to lag behind in the current era of social networking. Is the present age, age of social networking? Why are big companies like microsoft and Google trying to put their money in these kind of websites. Can the next generation really benefit from these investments?
I am sort of addicted to facebook in the sense that I have to check my facebook profile at least once a day. I have seen people who spend more time on facebook than on their studies. If that is the case then, is social networking really helping to build a healthy society?
Lets see how these big companies will change the way the social networking. Its for sure their investments in this area is a notion of new era in social networking, which is still to be seen by the world. And we also have to see who is going to win in the race.

Is it co-ed?

2007-10-23T06:45:00.002-07:00

Some take Lady Ada Lovelace as the first programmer in compuing world. She was very close with Charles Babbage who is also someitmes referred to as "Fathter of computer Science". Lady Ada Lovelace was close to writing instructions for his incomplete analyitical engine.
People say computer scientists are nerd. When somebody tries to visualize a nerd, we think of a man. An woman seldom comes to our mind, is that because of lack of female computer scientists?
In my computer science classes, the ratio between men and women is ridiculous. Most of the time, my classes don't have female students. Some big classes may have one or two. I never get a feeling that I am in a co-ed school when I am in a computer science class.

Facebook worth 15 billion?

2007-10-23T06:45:00.001-07:00

Social networking is getting very popular these days. Websites for social networking are attracting a lot of advertisements as many people visit these sites and stay in them for a while. Social networking is taken as the present generation hangout spots where people can meet and talk about whats going on in their lives.

Though there are a bunch of social networking sites on the web, some of them are gaining more popularity and their monetory value is raising in an alarming rate. Recently the leading software company, Microsoft bought 1.6 percent of Facebook in 240 millions. Google, a leading search engine company was also aiming to buy a share of facebook but Microsoft was able to give a better offer.

I also spend a portion of my day in facebook. It allows me to see what my friends are upto. I can see what they did over the weekend and can comment on their pictures. I also make myself updated on facebook. Its been like a visual journal and part of my life. Many people take it like that thats why its value is so high.

Your Door and "The Intruders"

2007-10-16T22:04:00.000-07:00

If you open your door for your guests to get in, you open the door for unwanted intruders too, and if you shut the door so that the intruders cannot get in, your guests are locked out. Internet is a like a door to your computer for external data to come in, you want information from internet but not unwanted stuff. Do you think you always have control over what is being accessed from your computer? Or what is getting in it? Do you want a bunch of salespersons shouting in your room, or somebody sneaking in your drawer and taking your blank checkbook and Credit card? The popups and ads are like salespersons shouting in your room and some programs can really take away your checkbook or credit card. The physical presence of the salesperson and the thief might sound more dangerous, but the later can do more damage than the first one. Physical salespersons and thieves might leave evidence but the internet theft might be without evidence. Also they can be so clever that you might have unknowingly agreed to be left looted.
Today data and information is not a stack of papers locked in a shelf but are bits written in hard drives of computer. Today keys aren’t made up of copper but made up of words in your head which is supposed to be known just by you. It is supposed to be more durable and safe. But if somebody has access to the data, it can be modified duplicated and distributed very easily, without the owner knowing about it. If something is physically stolen, at least you know about it, but with today’s technology you don’t know you are being robbed until you have nothing left. Even if we have a subtle hint about what is going on, we don’t go after it because it doesn’t look like a big threat in the beginning.
The crime can be done without leaving evidence and can cause billions of loss. The loss can be more than monetary if it comes to national security. The hardest part to track this kind of crime is to find out who is involved. Because all one can see in the crime scene is data sent by the criminal, and if the criminal gets a subtle hint that he is being tracked, he might fled away and never be tracked again. But the criminal can enter from another route and another form which takes as much effort to find out and investigate.
The book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” talks about the complexity of finding an information hacker and the patience involved in it. The author talks about his careful investigation, non cooperation from other security entities in the country at first, as they didn’t know the gravity of the issue. The author was to investigate the discrepancy of $.75 in accounting results which led to the revelation of a hacker who was getting national security information through the author’s lab. Though the author knew it could be a great problem and worked hard to track down the hacker his appeals were ignored at first thinking it wasn’t a big threat to be tracked down.
So, the point I want to make in this blog is that, though intrusion through wire may not sound as scary as intrusion through your door, its result can be surprisingly shocking. New ways are being discovered to secure your computer from intrusions, but for some reasons, the criminals in these sectors are relatively smart to find a loophole in the security and intrude into your system. The future can be worse as our life is more depending upon digits.

Finding my ancestors

2007-10-09T08:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know my great grandpa's name, neither my dad knows his great granddad's name. The cycle continues on to my children and so on. So our ancestry remains limited to only two generations and I doubt if there had been any bookkeeping on it. It will be almost impossible for me to find out who my ancestors were 500 years ago. People's origin, race etc are becoming very insignificant these days, but on the other hand people are very curious about their origin too.
Its easy for me to say that I am a pure Nepali blood, but I say that just by looking so many years ago. Though my ancestors lived by the mountains, we don't look like the native people living by the mountains, that gives me a hint that I am not a original mountain dwelling person. My ancestors must have come from some other place to settle there. My dad believes that thousands of years ago, our ancestors came to live up in the mountains from Indian territory of this time, but there is no solid proof and a good data to prove it.
These days computer technology is a very good bookkeeping tool for storing ancestry of a person or a family. Many institutions are making good fortune selling other people's ancestry. LDS Church has also a very good reputation in tracking its members and it ancestry with the help of genealogy via computers.
I wish I had something like that in the database to look at and see how other people in the world are connected to me and to find out who my ancestors are.

Me and my Major

2007-10-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

I am an international computer science student at a pretty reputed university. Like most of the big universities, my school also tries to keep me busy with load of projects. If I am taking more than one big programming classes, its a nightmare. As usual, it is happening to me this semester. Sometimes I get so busy that I only have time to have one quick meal per day.
I pay for my own tuition, for that I work as an intern at a local publishing company as a programmer. I am very lucky my work schedule is flexible and I can chose my own hours in a day. Still, sometimes I don't go to my work just because of my projects at school. Being a computer science major is hard for me from all perspectives, financially, physically, mentally and so on. Though it is hard for me I still manage to go to the weight room twice a week. I want to be a computer scientist without being a nerd. I seldom see a computer science student hitting the gym. I sometimes feel that I am not a good CS student by going there.
People depict computer scientists as boring loners who spends most of his time staring at the computer. I simply don't want to be a stereotype computer scientist but now I know how hard is not to be one.

Abstract Abstractions

2007-09-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

In the technology world, abstraction is a very helpful tool. Hiding complicated details with a simple, decorated, easy to use cover makes life easier. We use simple buttons to accomplish many of our tasks which would have taken a whole lot without the technology and its abstraction. We look at some numbers and letters on a screen and gain many useful information from and we make huge decisions with the help of that information.
We believe in whatever the abstraction reports us and assume the details underneath are depicted well by it. But does technology always help us making decisions? What if something wrong happens in between the details and the abstraction? Results could be deadly, The Gimli case is a very good example of it.
"In the famous 1983 flight, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel and glided to an abandoned airbase in Gimli, Man. The plane ran out of fuel due to a mistake that was made when calculating the fuel load." : Source http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2007/04/26/gimli-glider.html?ref=rss.
The calculation was done with FQIS(Fuel Quantity Information System Processor) which is a computer that calculates the fuel load for the plane, and it was not working properly. The FQIS works better than a analog mechanical fuel indicator, but relying totally on its reading almost killed hundreds.

Network for disconnecting people

2007-09-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

Why would you check somebody's status in your mobile rather than calling them and asking how they are doing? I would feel very happy if my friend call me and ask about me rather than being poked in Facebook.
We can browse Facebook in our mobile and myspace just announced that it can be now available in mobile phones also. The news can be found at http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2199455/myspace-launches-free-mobile.
For me it is very unlikely that I browse my friends profile in my small cell phone. I like to use facebook and myspace, they are a good timepass, but they look good when you can browse stuff in your wide monitor notebook. If I don't have a computer and I want to know how my friends are doing I would rather call them than looking at the small screen of my cell phone.
Web in mobile is good. When we are in the middle of nowhere and want to google something, it can serve as a good tool to find information. But browsing facebook or myspace in mobile is a little too much for me.

Religious Computers

2007-09-25T10:26:00.000-07:00

Computers have been helping mankind for around half a century now. We are seeing computers being integral part of human life in many aspects and the use of computers is growing even more. People have misused computers. The misuse of computers ranges from personal misconducts to big destructions against mankind.
Though computers evolved greatly in the world wars and used for wars, these machines now are widely used for holy purpose of educating people with religious knowledge. LDS Church is one of those religious institution that uses computers to educate people all over the world with their beliefs. Information Technology are widely used to spread their words all around the globe.
Chosing mission places for missionaries, training them at MTC(Missionary Training Center), etc are all being done with the help of computer these days. People can consult with each other and solve their personal and religious problem etc with the help of Information technology. So we should also be glad to the religious aspect of our technology and use it more to be more religious.

Watching each other grow up: Technology and me

2007-09-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

I was talking to one of my friends yesterday about the changes we saw in technology. When I first used a computer, my hands were limited just to the keyboard (DOS didn't use mouse) and my eyes were limited to a single-colored characters and whitespace (then blackspace, because the background of the monitor used to be black). I felt so exhilarated when I had a chance to use Windows 3.1 with a GUI and a mouse. Blocks and minesweeper were my favorite computer games until I discovered "Prince of Persia." Later, I was introduced to Windows 95, which was one of the most enchanting thing I had ever seen. I thought I could spend years just exploring it. Introduction to Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP and the Internet were gradual so they weren't as much as a subject of awe to me, although these are the inventions that changed the world.
We are taking everything for granted these days because we get these facilities very easily. We use Internet for everything, it serves us as an Encyclopedia, a blackboard, a bank, a shopping mall, a Post office and almost everything we want it to be. I feel lucky these changes are happening as I am growing up, people who died before the invention of computers and Internet missed something magical. I wonder how they managed to keep in touch with their friends, and I also wonder if they ever had a chance to poke their friends, which I am able to do with the help of "Facebook".

My Struggle

2007-09-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

Dr K. says, "You never run out of thoughts. If you run out of thoughts then you are not thinking enough." This is not exactly what he stated, but this is what I was able to get out from his last lecture. I struggle a lot when I try to write something. Sometimes, I don't think enough, and sometimes I start writing something, and when I read it, I feel stupid about my writing and give up the idea. My native language is not English and I think that also keeps me away from writing.
I envy those people who can talk fluently keeping the subject interesting enough to engage their audience. Some people can talk and some can write, some can write as fluently as they can talk. I know writing is an skill, the more you practice and learn, the better you get. I hope to learn a lot from this class, I expect comments from Dr K. and my classmates also, that will help me get better.

My first blog

2006-07-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

This is my first blog