Lost and found

Like everyday, I came home from office. Before I could relax, I rememembered that I had to call a friend and so reached for my mobile at its usual place. But it was not to be found there. I searched the whole room but without any success. I tried calling my number from other mobiles, and every time it answered as unreachable or out of range. Guessing that it might have slipped out of my pocket when I reached home, I searched the road in front of our house as well as the garden. I couldn't find it there too. I had called from my mobile while leaving the office, so I had lost it on the way home. After the dinner, me and Devaki travelled back and forth to office searching for the mobile on the way. We didn't find it there either. Meanwhile I contacted, BSNL customer care and learnt that I have to visit their customer service center to block the old SIM and get new SIM with the same number. The nearest CSC had closed and it was not until the next morning that I could block and get new SIM.

Next day, I went to nearest BSNL CSC and within 10 minutes, I was out with new SIM connected with my number. Now, we had to buy a new mobile and also gather all the contacts that I had lost with my lost mobile. But it was not to happen that way.

Day after, my mother got a call saying that my mobile is with Mr. Jahangir Beg, who works as watchman at Mr. Rathi's bangalow on Boat Club road. Mr. Rathi happened to be the owner of Sudarshan Chemicals. Me and my father reached the venue and got my mobile. The events in between as narrated by Mr. Beg were thus. While crossing Council Hall chawk, the mobile had slipped out of my pocket. Mr. Yadav, who works as the driver for Mr. Rathi saw it falling and picked up the loose pieces of it. He assembled them and found that it didn't have the battery. Next day, he went back to Council Hall chawk and searched for the batter and found it. He assembled everything and read through my contact list. He got my mother's mobile number and called her. Since he was to be on the road again, he gave the mobile to the watchman and asked us to collect it from him.

The honesty shown by them and the efforts they took to find the owner of the mobile are rare these day. Hats off to them.

Postgres Open 2012, Chicago

It all started with me and Amit submitting our proposals for talks for Postgres Open on the last day, perhaps last minute of submission. We sent one proposal each for the talk and one combined proposal for tutorial. While doing that we had PGCon experience in mind. The Postgres-XC team submitted two proposals for talks and one for tutorial to PGCon. Against our hopes, the tutorial got accepted and not the talks. For Postgres Open we hoped that at least the tutorial would get accepted. But to our surprise , both the talks got accepted. Crossing hurdles like last minute budgetary approvals, US (many stars around that word) VISA, we finally booked tickets for our trip on the eleventh hour. There was Postgres-XC core team meeting to be held in Dubai from 11th to 13th September. Postgres Open was being held from 17th to 19th September, following the meeting in Dubai. Since the formalities for US trip were completed at the last hour, I had no option but to have these trips as Pune - Mumbai - Dubai - Mumbai - Chicago - Mumbai - Pune way. That was bound to be very hectic, and we were preparing mentally and physically. The Dubai trip went smooth. On the way to Chicago, the three hour halt at Abu-dhabi airport was horrible. The lobby hosting gates 28 to 41 is too small and lacks enough facilities. There was a long queue to enter the gate 28 for boarding Chicago flight. The gate didn't have enough seating capacity and many of the passengers were standing and waiting post-security check. (Advice: If you have a halt at Abu Dhabi don't rush to gates 28-41.) Barring this uncomfortable situation, rest of the journey went well. Abu-dhabi to Chicago segment was comfortable irrespective of the 15 hour duration.

The conference was to be held at Westin Michigan Avenue Chicago. The hotel is placed in excellent location in downtown Chicago, few minutes away on foot from the Michigan lake shore with two beaches nearby and Navy Pier. It has a couple of eateries around it, noticeably "The Cheesecake Factory", "Ghirardelli" outlets and a break-fast outlet, of which I have forgot the name .Tom, Robert, Gabrielle, Bruce, Amit, Vibhor and me participated from EnterpriseDB. The conference started with an excellent key-note by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. In his key-note he emphasized that the next generation databases ought to be Post-SQL databases (not NoSQL) where prefix "Post" implied the databases after the SQL era. He explained the desired characteristics of such a database and mentioned that PostgreSQL is a candidate to be such a database.

There were three tracks and my presentation was scheduled in the first slot after the key-note on the first date. The response was overwhelming; the room was full and there were people standing at the back. There were quite a few questions during the presentation, but I managed to finish it within time. The questions covered broader areas like fault tolerance, HA, HA using replicated tables etc. People appreciated the scalability shown by Postgres-XC and also the fact that it's API compliant with PostgreSQL, implying that applications can migrate with very little changes to Postgres-XC from PostgreSQL. The presence at the talk showed that more and more users are getting interested in Postgres-XC. Hopefully, we will see such overwhelming adoption as well.

I attended few presentations and few private meetings. The topics covered HA, 9.2 features and enhancements, logging and backup, migration to PostgreSQL, experiences with PostgreSQL, scalability  etc. The quality and content of the talks was generally good. The audience was from varied background although a lot of them came from StateFarm. Heroku and 2ndQuadrant threw parties on the evening of 18th and 19th respectively. I liked the conference badge. It was a small booklet with schedule in it and a map of the venue of evening parties. One could just open the booklet to find the schedule and decide which talk to attend without much hassle. Generally, I do not like to wear conference badges, but this time, I wore it all the time, even outside the conference venue because of the map it contained.

Me presenting about Postgres-XC

Attendees at the start of the presentation

Amit, reading the schedule from his badge

Conference badge with my name on it

Hancock tower from the shores of the Michigan lake 

On last day, I was feeling tired, I didn't do much sigh-seeing. I had a trip to Navy Pier and the walked and visited places along the Michigan lake shore. I spent an hour at the beach, listening to the sound of waves, an amazing experience, possibly the best hour that I spent in Chicago.

Help

I was sitting on a chair. My nine-months old daughter came crowling towards the chair. Clearly, she had intentions to sit in my lap. At the foot of the chair, she tried to hold a lower plank of the chair and tried to stand up. Her toes slipped, and knees didn't hold, and she slided down half-way. She tried again, this time again slipping aside. Now, seeing the low prospects, she started crying and gave me a hopeful look. I could stretch my hands and pick her up, but then she would stop trying. I wanted her to try to the best, and rightfully claim my lap. I kept cheering her to climb. Possibly she didn't understand that I am cheering her and that I am helping her by not picking her up. I saw disappointment in her eyes as she moved away towards a toy.

Is that what you do to me, Lord?

Exams and ethics

After reading this post by Shailesh, I reflected a bit on my past immoral actions of copying and yes, did find a few.

I was in primary school, and mostly that was my first exam in life. We were given question papers and answer books too (what a joy, school providing us nice papers to write on, instead of usual notebooks). They told we are supposed to write answers on the paper provided and submit it back to the teacher. I happily wrote answers to all questions and turned back to chat with the guy sitting behind me. He too, had finished. We chatted a bit here and there, may be we talked about the questions in the papers and what we wrote, and suddenly teacher shouted at us, and blamed we copied. I was hearing that first time, without knowing what copying is. She was talking to us as if we were deadly sinners. We tried to plead and other teachers testified our character. Somehow we were let free without any punishment. There I knew what 'copying' is.

Years passed and I learned good and bad and how people cog and copy in exams, though I never tried it. Once during a drawing exam, we were solving the geometric constructions. I was starting my last construction which was simpler than the other once. Other student saw my sheet and observed that I had successfully fit circles in corners of a polygon (a skillful construction), which she was not able to. I vaguely remember that, that was a compulsory question. She asked me if I can draw that for her. Somehow I agreed, and asked her in turn to complete my last construction which was much more simple. We completed our papers and went happily. I haven't seen her after the results were out till now.

This was one of the annual exams. Some papers were over and one day before starting paper the guy sitting behind me came and said, if I can show him answers to certain questions during the paper? He was a student from night school. He told me, he couldn't study for that paper at all, and will pass if I can show him the answers to certain questions, which were easy to see from behind and copy. Thus he can secure passing marks. For no other paper he had asked me such a thing, neither he threatened me to do so. I can see in his eyes some sort of shame. I agreed. He copied without letting anyone else doubt. He didn't ask for any such favour for rest of the papers either. During results, he came smiling to me and said he has passed and has secured passing marks in that particular subject.

Now, I was in an esteemed institute, where some professors allowed to refer to books during exams. One instructor, told us that we can't even discuss the assignments with other students and should solve them on our own. In one of the assignments, there was a difficult problem. I had thought of some method to solve it using some X concept. During dinner, over the table I told my method, to a friend who asked me for help. The complete solution was not ready yet. And we solved it independent of each other using same X. Few more guys got the idea from this second guy. The person correcting these assignments found our solutions too complicated and refered them to the instructor. The instructor saw the esoteric (from his perspective) solutions and doubted if we had copied each others ideas. He suspected that second guy is the originator and rest of us have copied him. The instructor called me and asked 'from whom did you copy your answer?'. Seeing the 'hole' in the question I replied, 'I haven't copied from anyone.' He persistently asked same thing and I maintained my answer. He enquired others too, and one of the last guys told name of second guy. Those two were punished and got lesser grades than they were worthy off.

First incident surely was something unintentional, and I never felt guilty about it. I never regretted the third incident either, or whenever I started feeling guilty about it, I remembered the smiling face of the guy and could overcome the guilt. For second my feelings are confused. If I would not have helped the girl, she would not have failed, so it was certainly unnecessary to copy for her. I just helped her get some more marks which she was not worthy off. For last incident, I am only content that I replied the instructor bare truth according to the wording he used, but felt very sorry for others who were punished.