On a local Maxima :( :) ?

I don't know but somethings in life now don't bring the same happiness they used to carry before. Have I become hungry for more or has the experience of experiencing all these things an ad infinitum times led to all this?

Recently I finished my VII Sem end terms. The exams saw a vitriolic outburst criticising the teachers, not for not teaching us well (that has always been the case) but for not teaching at all.

If the Sem's end was not much of an occasion to celebrate, a full month's holiday (December) was also not enough for a cock-a-hoop. My inner self trying really hard to make me believe I had achieved enough and need to enjoy, but thinking of the CAT exam after 2 days the idea was rejected as a cockamamie.


After spending so many insomniac nights preparing for the end terms, sleep has not remained the way it used to be....so sweet...and enjoyable.
Now its always accompanied by a lot of dreams. I dont know if its a kind of illness or mere mental fatigue.After just waking up I feel as if under the effect of psychedelic drugs.

Sudden spasmodic interests in a whole lot of eclectic fields seems to be more adventurous, melodramic and satisfying than just enjoying the solitude or playing. I want to be a jack of all trades and a master of some.

I have become a kind of a paranoid. I imagine myself as a person running on a highway with thousand others and afraid of slowing down for the fear of being overrun. The story "Slow and Steady wins the race" seems ridiculous. The rabbit in the story sleeps for some time and the tortoise takes the advantage of that to go ahead and win. But nowadays no one likes to sleep or take rest. I don't know what the human race has come to and where does it intend to go. A person on my class is never seen doing anything else than writing some scary code or reading some esoteric research papers like newspapers. The word content doesn't exist in his dictionary.

Nowadays no matter what I achieve I always feel like on a LOCAL MAXIMA with a lot of steep hill climbing still remaining to reach the maximum.
The Mount Everest (the global maxima) is still invisible.

From the last so many vacations I have been reducing the time I spend with my family and I am not an exception (not even in the home bunking list of top 10 or 20).
The present century sons have become the proverbial "PARAYA DHAN" (DHAN taken away by the companies), leaving the homes even before the age the daughters marry!
Every time I go home, the joy in my mother's eyes suggests how long has she waited to just see me. And by the time I leave her gloomy eyes suggest that she's crying from within...she knows that now she won't be able to see her son for 'don't know how many' months. I just feel disgusted with myself and feel like crying myself out. But is there a solution?

NetApp Interview Questions

This year Netapp came to MNIT on August 19. In the seminar itself they made it clear that they need students only for QA (Quality Assurance).

They had a written round in the morning , announced the results at 3.00 PM where they shortlisted 12 students.

All the 12 students were called for the interviews at 3.30 PM.
After the first interview they again shortlisted 6 students and called them for the interview the next day. The scapegoats were not aware that they were to face not 1, not 2 but...3 grueling interviews!!!

So here I present all the questions that were asked to me in the 4 interviews that I faced.

I interview (Aug 19)

1. What do you know about NetApp? Do you know anyone there?

2. I can see that you have made a Robot (after seeing my resume). Can you explain me what kind of a robot was it? Explain me in full detail everything that you did giving details of the basics.

As I was explaining...there were counter questions.
He asked me if I had a photograph of the robot. :P On saying 'no' he asked : then what proof do you have to prove that you made the robot.
me : Sir I have the Certificate of the competition in which I participated...on saying this the smile on his face was killing...he didnt see the certificates.

3. If you were interested in making robots then why didnt you take mechanical engineering?
me : I have the plans to make robots with some artificial intelligence capabilities...for that I will have to program the robots either in LISP/Prolog.


4. You have to impress me in 2 minutes. Start.

5. What is your area of interest.
me : computer networking.

6. Then he asked what a bridge is?
7. Can you give me the example of any presentation layer protocol?
8. Explain the concept of subnetting by taking an example of a Class A IP address.
9. Tell me something about your family.
10. What are your strengths?

11. Write a C++ program for multiple inheritance.
After I made the program he asked me if it is possible to declare a base class constructor in the derived classes?
What will happen if I make a member function in the derived class with the same name as that of the Base class member?

12. If you had the option of choosing between the developer profile and QA, what is it that you will really go for?
me : i will choose to be a developer but with NetApp to work as a beginner in QA I have no problems.

13. Tell me your daily routine.

Ok...I am done with you...Do you want to ask me any questions?

II Interview (Aug 20)

1. You have worked on LDAP...explain me how LDAP works.
I explained everything. In between there were counter questions like what is SSL, DES,SHA,etc...

2. OK. Now suppose that you have made an LDAP module. How will you perform negative testing on it?
My answer : port open in firewall or not, number of simultaneous connections, hardware support, network bandwidth,...
He said explain me from the perspective of the Client-Server architecture.
I explained something about the injection attacks, the security of the encryption algorithms used, need for strong passwords, dictionary and brute force attacks, PAM modules etc...

3. What makes a strong password?

4. Then he asked me to write a C/C++ program for the following:
You are given a file that has the entries like:

SNO : student name : marks

What you have to do is to read the file and write the names and marks of the students into another file in descending order. But make sure that you take care of all the boundary conditions and the program should be completely fool proof i.e. for eg. if the student name field is empty then you should take appropriate actions.

I did my best to make a fool proof program with all the checks.
But then the irony.........he told me that at NetApp you will be a part of the testing team. So now what you have to do is find as many errors as possible in this program.

I started thinking from the perspective of the operating system, i was able to find some of the conditions where my program went into infinite loops, some conditions for the memory bleeding, etc.

5. Explain me how a NAS works.
I told him that I had installed a NAS in the college to mount the home directories of all the mail users, then he asked:
What is the difference between a SAN and a NAS?
me : NAS works on TCP/UDP while SAN on iSCSI...

6. What is firmware?
7. What are device drivers? Why do we need them? Why the application program or the new hardware that you attach cannot talk to the kernel directly?
What is the difference between device drivers and firmware?

9.You have worked on Unix...so explain me the whole Unix architecture.
10. What are the file permissions in Unix? How can you change them?

11. What do mean by white-box testing? Give me an example to explain.
What are the types of white box testing?Give examples for all.

12. Why do you want to join NetApp?

III Interview (Aug 20)

1. How are you? How are the interviews going on? How has been the experience until now?

2. You have 25 horses. There are 5 similar tracks and only 1 horse can run on a track at a time.
You have to find the fastest 3 horses out of these...But you have no time or distance measuring instrument. You know only the starting and finishing lines.
Write an optimised algorithm that minimises the number of runs.

And here it comes again...After I gave him a working algorithm, he asked me : as a part of the testing team how will you test this algorithm for the possible bugs that might crop up.

-->I gave him around 8-9 exhaustive test cases like for eg. my code would fail in the case if more than 2 horses reach the finishing line together or if all the horses do not start at the same time the results would not be correct that's why when we implement thrking.is algorithm we need to have clock synchronisation and precision of the nanosecond range.

3. Rate yourself on networking.
me: 8/10

4. Ok then explain me the routing algorithms that you know.
-->I explained him the Link State and Distance Vector algorithms.

5. What is RIP?
6. What are the problems associated with RIP?
7. What are the internal and external gateway protocols?

IV Interview (Aug 20)

This was a pure HR interview.
She asked me the following questions:

1.Tell me your educational background from the time you came into this college, what all you did and learned.

2. Did you do anything after coming into the college that made you famous?

3. What all did you do to improve the conditions in your college?

4. Are you a team player or do you like to work alone?

5. Do you know what exactly your job will be at NetApp?

6. Will you be able to perform well for this kind of a job?

Moral of the Story (for me) : It was useless to spend on the folder, it was never really opened up! :P

I was really upset to have a hair cut for the placements, the only thing that could have soothed me was getting placed in NetApp :)

Cool Facts About Snakes

Today lets have a look at some of the cool facts about snakes : one of the most interesting creatures to be found on earth.

- King Cobras make nests : Generally snakes show little or no parental care. But a pair of King Cobra will cooperate to find a suitable nesting spot. Nests are built usually in the month of April. Despite having no limbs, the female remarkably constructs her nest of dead leaves by scooping them up with her large body.

- Snakes are cold blooded with the exception of the Leatherback Sea Turtle, which can elevate its body temperature well above that of its surroundings.

- Snakes smell via their tongues : Snakes smell by using its forked tongue to collect airborne particles then passing them to the Jacobson's Organ, a special organ in the mouth for examination. The fork in the tongue gives the snake a sort of directional sense of smell.


- Snake venom is a combination of many different proteins and enzymes.

- Snake Venom as an anti venom : An anti-venom serum is actually a small quantity of the venom itself which when injected into an animal or human affects only slightly triggering an allergic reaction to it. The allergic reaction will allow anti bodies to be formed and thus immunity to the venom is developed.

- Size : While the anaconda can grow up to 38 feet in length, the brahminy blind snake is just 2 inches long, making it the smallest snake.

- Pit vipers : The pit vipers have 2 pits on either side of their mouth. These are not the nostrils as we all might expect but are a special gift to them. They are the infra red sensors which can sense a temperature difference of about 0.2 degree celsius. This helps these snakes to catch their prey.

- Teeth : Snakes have more than 200 teeth, which they do not use to chew, since they point backwards, but bite and grip their prey securely.

- There are about 2,600 different kinds of snakes. Of these, only about 400 are poisonous. Still the rest 2,200 innocuous species get killed by people just because of ignorance about the snakes.

A WORD OF CAUTION!

Many snake species are slithering unnoticed towards extinction. There are many a reasons for this but the ignorance about the snakes being the biggest one.

The snake charmers who catch the snakes and bring them out of their habitat are also a reason.

Many a snakes are being killed for their skins and and the beautiful snakes might become a thing of the past lest these practices are put in check.

Gates's Law

Wirth's Law :

Software is getting slower more rapidly than the hardware is becoming faster.

Gates's Law

It is a humorous and ironic observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months thereby negating all the benefits of Moore's Law. This could occur for a variety of reasons: "featuritis", "code cruft", programmer laziness, or a management turnover whose design philosophy does not coincide with the previous manager.

Gates's Law is born of the frustration that many users feel due to the apparent tendency of commercial software to become slower with each successive incremental version, such that buying new hardware upgrades sounds like a reasonable idea.

Though the law's name refers to Bill Gates, Gates did not formulate or express it. Rather, the name refers to a perceived tendency of Microsoft products to slow down with each new feature or patch.

Cricket And IPL

The gentleman’s game has had a makeover. So move over Test cricket and One-Day cricket as the Indian Premier League (IPL) T20 tournament is here to stay.

The BCCI-backed IPL claims it will give serious competition to the saas bahu soaps on television as a "sizeable number of women" have shown "tremendous interest" in the shorter format of the game.

With a new format, Bollywood actors promoting it and business tycoons financing the teams – the game has just got bigger.

Lets have a look at what experts think about it.

Charu Sharma (Chief Executive of Bangalore Royal Challengers) believes that there is nothing wrong with movie stars being involved with the IPL.

"What’s the harm? You talk about film stars being involved with sports, the cricket T20 in particular. They are practically involved everywhere, whether it is politics or human rights causes or television. So, what’s the problem here? Let us not be cynical, let us be a little mature.”

However, Vinod Mehta (Editor-in-chief : Outlook) had some reservations about the latest revolution that has taken the entire cricketing world by storm.

“I don’t want to sound like a kill-joy but IPL is to cricket what page three is to journalism. It is a bit of harmless diversion and a bit of tamasha. And if somebody makes money on this, then good luck to them. But in page-three journalism we have to be careful that it should not become page-one journalism. Similarly, if IPL, which has the potential to undermine Test cricket and One-Day cricket, becomes the sole concern of the BCCI then we are going into very tricky waters.”

It was just a part of what these experts think. Now lets have a look at stats :

-According to a new survey there has been 70 per cent increase in TRP ratings of cricket after India's World Cup win in the Twenty20 format.

-BCCI had netted a total revenue of $1.749 billion (Rs 7,000 Crore) from the IPL even before the first ball.

- 80% of the people that after the IPL it would be really very difficult to watch the test matches.

IPL is changing the rules of the game. Its adopting the way the soccer gurus have long before chosen to follow. Franchises exist in soccer since a long time and they have been able to keep the Fans on their heels, hungry for more even after getting so much of it, never getting satiated.

But IPL though similar to footie in many aspects is a lot more different. Its changing the game in a revolutionary manner. Its taking cricket away from where it started ie test cricket.

But what I think is if cricket has to live it needs a lot more IPL's.

No one in this busy worls has the time to sit and watch a boring test cricket match for 8 hrs a day. (Comapare with soccer matches of 1.5 to 2 hrs). People come to watch games for excitement and a changeover which T20 promises to provide. Everything has to move on. Change is the law of nature and to live in a changed world you yourself need to change which is what IPL and T20 cricket is doing.

IPL is about creating new value. As long as every one involved in the IPL get something back, the IPL will succeed. The players, the Cricket Boards, the Corporates that own the franchises, the advertisers, the TV companies and the paying public; all will have to get something back from IPL.

The extent to which cricket will change post IPL will only depend on its success and how BCCI handles its success.

------------ Write in C (1980's)------------

(sung to The Beatles "Let it Be")

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C." As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers"
"Write in C." Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, write in C.
LISP is dead and buried,
Write in C. I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
for science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C. If you've just spent nearly 30 hours
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C. Write in C, write in C,
Write In C, yeah, write in C.
Only wimps use BASIC.
Write in C. Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, oh, write in C.
Pascal won't quite cut it.
Write in C. Guitar Solo Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
Don't even mention COBOL.
Write in C. And when the screen is fuzzy,
And the edior is bugging me.
I'm sick of ones and zeroes.
Write in C. A thousand people people swear that T.P.
Seven is the one for me.
I hate the word PROCEDURE,
Write in C. Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
PL1 is 80's,
Write in C. Write in C, write in C,
Write in C, yeah, write in C.
The government loves ADA,
Write in C.

When will I stop making Silly Mistakes?

Today, I thought of vomiting my feelings out about Silly Mistakes.
Silly or careless mistakes (whatever you may call them) have always assumed a special position in my life. Now its almost as if they have become my friends, a part and parcel of my life...haunting me all out.
Many a times the toll of these mistakes is light but sometimes heavy...but always better if you can avoid them.
I often think whether the mistakes are careless or am I ?

In the X Board exams I applied the formula for the volume of a sphere as
4/3 pi r*r ...LoL...lost 5 marks for this and got 95 . OK...doesnt matter much.
I would have sacrificed hundreds of marks to these mistakes...and dont know how many more would I...

So this time I tried to find out the cause behind these mistakes discerning something from one of the latest happenings.

Yesterday, we were shown Computer Graphics II Mid Term papers. I was quite confident of getting 10 on 10. Neeta Nain ma'am checked the first 2 questions and I got full marks in there...then came the 3rd one. In the 3rd question we were given 8 coordinates of a polygon and were asked to give the pixels that will be filled in by the polygon filling algorithm.

Now lets take the life into the reverse gear to see how I proceeded to solve this question in the examination:
=================================================
I marked all the points given on my answer sheet with the utmost attention. Then as I was joining them one by one a deja vu struck me which soon converted to a nostalgic feeling - hey i used to do the same thing in the newspapers.

Finally I got quite a decent looking polygon. I applied the filling algo and wrote down all the pixels that would be filled; confident of getting it all correct
=================================================
Now the denouement and the climax. I got this question completely wrong... :P
How ? Why? Where? did I make the mistake ! How could I screw up this simple question ?

Answer:
I had joined the points in a random order forgetting that they had to be joined only in the order they were given in the question paper. Hence I got a completely different polygon and completely different answers. And the reaction of the teacher...U can imagine :P

ANALYSIS :

Lets analyse here a bit and think what could be the possible reason behind commiting this trivial mistake.
Remember the deja vu feeling....immersed in a feeling of nostalgia, I cherished thinking about those sweet days of my childhood...that was the point where I lost my concentration and I commited another Silly Mistake !
Had I remained focussed and stoic, I could have possibly avoided it.

Uptil now the consequences of these mistakes were light weight but WHAT IF
while working for a multi national firm I screw something up in a financial deal.
I could possibly lose my job.

Thus at this juncture of my life it has actually become imperative that I stop making these Silly / Trivial / Careless mistakes and I believe better concentration and focus are the way out...the challenge lies ahead.

COME ON Silly Mistakes !

Are Stock Markets A Barometer for Ecomony ?

A stock market, or equity market, is a private or public market for the trading of company stock and derivatives of company stock at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.


The stock market is one of the most important sources for companies to raise money. This allows businesses to be publicly traded, or raise additional capital for expansion by selling shares of ownership of the company in a public market. The liquidity that an exchange provides affords investors the ability to quickly and easily sell securities. This is an attractive feature of investing in stocks, compared to other less liquid investments such as real estate.


The index is a diversified portfolio. It includes oil companies, banks, software companies, etc and is not sector specific.
It includes listings from every facet of the economy.
The stock market has sometimes been a remarkably good forecaster of the economy. For example, in the early 1990s, stock prices rose sharply, in anticipation of a doubling of profit in 1994 and another doubling of profit in 1995. From late 1994 onwards, stock prices did badly. This was in anticipation of big declines in profit: -38%, -22% and -50% from 1996-97 to 1998-99. Similarly, in 2002-03 and 2003-04, profits grew sharply, and the stock market captured this in prices ahead of events.

The price of shares and other assets is an important part of the dynamics of economic activity, and can influence or be an indicator of social mood. An economy where the stock market is on the rise is considered to be an up coming economy. In fact, the stock market is often considered the primary indicator of a country's economic strength and development. Rising share prices, for instance, tend to be associated with increased business investment and vice versa. Share prices also affect the wealth of households and their consumption.


But from experience we know that investors may temporarily pull financial prices away from their long term trend level. Over-reactions may occur—so that excessive optimism (euphoria) may drive prices unduly high or excessive pessimism may drive prices unduly low.

So the question arises: Can the stock market be considered as a reliable barometer of a country's economy?
Lets move forward by taking a few examples.

ZIMBABWE:
Zimbabwe is in the middle of an economic disintegration, with GDP declining for the seventh consecutive year, half what it was in 2000. Ever since President Mugabe's disastrous land-reform campaign (an entire article in itself), the country's farming, tourism, and gold sectors have collapsed. Unemployment is said to be near 80%. And to add to the misery inflation has sky-rocketed to unbelievable 100000% !

Yet something odd is happening.

The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (the ZSE) is the best performing stock exchange in the world, the key Zimbabwe Industrials Index is up some 595% since the beginning of the year and 12,000% over twelve months.


BHUTAN:
The small Royal Bhutan Stock Exchange (RBSE) currently trades only 13 companies. Does the growth of Bhutan depends only upon these 13 companies?


INDIA:
There are nearly seven lakh companies in India, of which only 6,000 or so are listed on our exchanges.
Though nearly 9,000 scrips are listed on our exchanges, more than half are not quoted or traded.
Another 25 per cent were quoted only a couple of times last year. The shares of just the top 10 companies commanded nearly 45 per cent of the trade turnover last year.

Contrast this with the NYSE, where no single scrip normally enjoys more than one per cent of the turnover.

Though market players and exchanges brag about India having the largest number of listed scrips (like having the largest cattle population in the world), only about a hundred are active.

More than 70 per cent of trading, even in these hundred or so scrips, is not for delivering these shares. It is for squaring-off purposes. In other words, the participants do not even see these scrips, and a true "scripless trading" is in place.

A substantial portion of the transaction is for gains or losses at the margin and it is the day-traders (who square-off within the day) who are active in the market. Hence, the stock market is no barometer, either for India's corporates or its economy.

The stock market is known as being one of the most volatile markets with ups and downs much difficult to comprehend than highs and lows in corporate profits. Swings in stock markets are known to be driven more by the speculative psychology of investors than actual economic analysis.

While stock market capitalization in India has increased by four times in the decade of 91’-92’ to 2001-02, capital formation in the country had barely increased over that decade. As a result, investment has also not risen commensurately which again suggests that the financial markets dance to a tune of their own. Upward swings in the stock market in early 90’s were mainly caused by a rise in Foreign Institutional Investment which only led to increase in the country’s foreign exchange reserves.

Although Stocks can mobilize savings into investment and can cause the growth of the company and increase its market share, it is not always a barometer of the economy in its true sense.

But often it is manipulated to give an untrue picture. The aim is to boost the stock prices of certain corporations through stock market manipulations. Unscrupulous profiteers jack up stock prices to earn huge profits leading to losses for the small investors.

Ethics And Education

Today I am writing something on Ethics and Education (as we have been given an assignment in our Technical Comm. class :P). Here are some of my views:

Ethics are concerned with what is right or wrong, good or bad,responsible or irresponsible, obligatory or permissible, praiseworthy or blameworthy. It is associated with guilt, shame, indignation,empathy and compassion.
Ethics are norms for conduct that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Ethics are about making choices that may not always feel good or seem like they benefit you but are the "right" choices to make. Ethics is something one has to feel for himself.

Ethics are the premise on which the whole social and corporate structure is functioning. The absence of ethics in our daily life can seriously hamper the progress of any nation. But what is being observed lately is that the ethical practices are blithely floundering. Here comes the need to incorporate the ethical education into our education system.
School education is something that we remember throughout our life. Thus if the seed of good ethics has to be sown we should catch the students young.
It is much easier to influence the DNA of a child in the right direction when he just starts to develop his thoughts.

It is very important to include ethical education as a compulsory part of the primary education. It should be given a high priority. Students will grasp the importance of ethics only when educators take it on an even plane with science and mathematics. If some fixed guidelines are not provided the students will end up making their own set of ethical codes.

Ethical guidelines will help students figure out for themselves what actions they should take when faced with ethical issues. Leaving it to the individual judgment is highly risky. Such an individual is more vulnerable to get misguided at any point of time.
Ethics education should incorporate not just teaching the code of professional or social conduct, but rather a process whereby individuals become more consciously involved in making ethical decisions.
One of the main goals of ethics education should be to encourage students to recognize social responsibilities within their profession and as citizens. Ethical education should be implemented to consistently reinforce the desired behaviors and to skillfully reduce the undesired ones.

Recent corporate accounting scandals have brought ethics back into the limelight. The sight of CEOs and CFOs parading into courtrooms has raised public awareness and concern about ethical behavior in management and accounting.
If India has to maintain its reputation of an ethical nation and lest another Satyam strikes hard at our roots we should implement a revolutionary ethical education system without wasting any more time!

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab

There have been a lot of discussions and debate regarding whether Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist caught alive in the midst of the Mumbai terror attacks on the November 26th, 2008 should be provided with an advocate to defend him or not.

I absolutely dont understand what is there to be defended? Should we defend him for the cold blooded murder of so many innocent people or for the killing of ATS chief Hemant Karkare  or because he has shown a lot of courage, not worrying about his life and dedicating himself completely to the Jihadist manifesto...and the list of the crimes is endlesss...

On one point I seem to agree with Bal Thackery that he should be hanged in the Mumbai streets mercilessly...or better Mr. Bal Thackery I would suggest just leave him for the people because he is the culprit of the citizens of India not just Mumbai. That would be a fitting tribute to all those people who were murdered in cold blood and also a lesson to the terrorists.

I was taken completely aback after reading some of the blogs: 

-> Yes. He should be defended. It is the hallmark of civilization and a practice in existence in India from time immemorial. No one is guilty until proved so is the basic principle which governs jurisprudence. As we are a civilised society, we must extend this.

Wow dude excellent ! You are the fitting candidate to defend this savage. 

In this land of the mahatma all types of criminals have human rights.This is called gandhigiri. If you leave Ajmal you will be hailed Gandhi's true follower.There 's a nobel peace prize waiting too.

-> If we dont give him a legal trial the terrorist organisations would become very angry and would next time strike India more brutally...we should look to pacify them and talk to them to achieve a friendly solution...

Disgusting cowards! Thats all I have to say.  

Shameless Kasab eats roti and chana masala and demands for non-veg daily. He wishes to meet Bipasha Basu too. Just see the courage. lol...

As far as defending him is concerned what his advocate gonna argue? What evidence he gonna show ?

He has been caught on live cameras and he has also accepted his crime.
That would  just be a wastage of time.

Do you remember what happened in the case of Mohammed Azar when his trial extended for 3 years? 

Do we want the same to happen again?

 What I think is Indian Constitution and the laws should be made dynamic rather than  rigid and inflexible. They should be commensurate to the fast changing or rather mushrooming crimes. 

If a person who poses such grave threat to the national security has to be defended in our country just because the laws require it to be so...then its a big shame for our country.  

Leap Seconds

What are they and why do we have them?

Leap seconds were introduced in 1971 to reconcile astronomical time, which is based on the rotation of the Earth, and physical time, which can be measured with amazing accuracy using atomic clocks.

Tidal friction within the Earth, caused by the gravitational pull of both the Moon and the Sun, continuously slow down the daily rotation of our planet. The modern-day definition of the unit of time, one second, approximates the length of the day divided by 60×60×24 as it was in 1820. Since then, the length of a day has increased by roughly 2.5 ms, and continues to increase in the order of 1.7 ms per century.

With the invention of atomic clocks in the mid 1950s, a means of measuring time became available that is far more stable and accurate than the rotation of our planet about its own axis. This led to two alternative definitions of time:

• International Atomic Time (TAI), a time scale that was started in 1958 and as been defined uninterrupted by an international network of atomic clocks since then;
• Universal Time 1 (UT1), an astronomical definition of time based on the position of the Sun in the sky, a modern and refined definition of astronomical time, replacing what used to be called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

TAI and UT1 were approximately equal at the introduction of TAI in 1958. But UT1 fluctuates all the time and is slowing down increasingly in the long term. As a result, TAI is now more than 32 seconds ahead of UT1.

With two different definitions of time available, the question arose, how exactly the civilian time zones according to which we set our clocks should be defined. In 1971, a committee of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union), which is in charge of setting up international rules for the operation of radio time signals, proposed a third definition of time, as a practical compromise:

• Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), a time scale defined such that
  • the difference between UTC and TAI is always an integral number of seconds;
  • the difference between UTC and UT1 is never larger than 0.9 seconds.

UTC is a time scale defined by atomic clocks, just like TAI, but these atomic clocks are adjusted by inserting or deleting an additional leap second whenever UTC and UT1 drift apart by more than half a second.

From 1972 on, UTC quickly replaced GMT as the international reference time for setting clocks, because it was easily available from time-signal radio stations. UTC had the advantage of being generated by atomic clocks, which are far cheaper and easier to operate than the precision telescopes used earlier, without changing the relationship to the traditional astronomical definition of time by more than a second, an amount negligible for all but a few specialist applications (such as pointing telescopes). Today, most civilian time zones are defined in relation to UTC, from which they typically differ by an integral number of hours (sometimes half hours). As a result, civilian time zones have leap seconds simultaneously with UTC. If a leap second is announced, it is inserted as the 61st second (23:59:60 UTC) of the last “minute” of the month June or December.

Leap seconds have to be inserted on average every 1–2 years during this century. However, due to an unusual temporary acceleration of the Earth, no leap second was needed during the 7-year gap between the end of 1998 and the end of 2005.

Uptil now a total of 24 leap seconds have been introduced. Out of these 9 have been added on the June 30th and 15 of them on December 31st. Recently, 1 Leap Second was inserted at the end of the year 2008 on the 31st December. The UTC Clock ran like this:

 31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 59 SECONDS

  31 DEC 2008 23 HOURS 59 MINUTES 60 SECONDS  

  01 JAN 2009 00 HOURS 00 MINUTES 00 SECONDS