Ketan's Musings

A discussion with Nirav reminded me of “The Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which states that:

a monkey typing at random on a typewriter keyboard, will “almost surely” type out the complete works of William Shakespeare

We were discussing the notion of a typical Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in a typical CMMI Level 5 approved company. There are an almost infinite^[1] number of software developers, “almost surely” one of them is going to come up with working software, as against mortals using Continuous Integration on a dollar-a-day, refactoring, to ensure that the software just works, every time, and (hopefully) all the time.

Footnotes

[1] “almost infinite” in this context refers to “a lot”, since a few “million” is much closer to infinity than say a few “hundred”, we consider a few “million” to be “almost (equal to) infinity”

Resources

@see Proof of the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
@see RFC2795 — The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS).

One green bug standing on the bugzilla,
one green bug standing on the bugzilla,
and if one green bug should accidentally fall,
there’d be one green bug on the bugzilla (still to be filed ).

WTF, did I get my math wrong ? Is it one of the rules of software engineering ?

This is what I just discovered:

Does the thing on the right look like a new SWT widget or a Jface control ? Sure does to me.

I’d been invited to take OOCS lectures at the K.K. Wagh College of Engineering. As with all hackers, I immediately took up this invitation, simply because I could enjoy doing it. Moreover, I got an opportunity to learn some real cool technologies, that were really new to me.

The course involves OO, COM, DCOM, CORBA, JAVA/RMI and XML.

About 25 students had signed up for this subject. The attendance figures, with a grand maximum attendance of 9, with some 5 students regularly attending lectures. These figures are sure to paint a different picture It’s been about three weeks that I’ve been doing these lectures.

The results were declared a week ago, and I’ve not taken any lectures since then. Today was an altogether different experience. I learnt that there were just 9 students, who have decided to continue with the subject. The rest of the folks simply choose the easier alternative. While I’ve nothing against these people. The general reason being that — the subject is too vast in its breadth, and one has to read too many books for the course.

I asked the folks who had chosen to continue with OOCS, as to why they choose the difficult alternative.

The answer, surprisingly was that I was: I’ve been doing a good job at the lectures, so far.

Thanks guys, you’ve made my day. The efforts have been worth the staying up at nights.

We at ObjectEdge had the opportunity to interact with Dave Collins. Dave Collins is one of the few remaining SmallTalkers, and author of the bestseller Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces.

This was a 3-day basic Object-Oriented training session for begineers as well as advanced people alike.

This was a very good session that covered from basic OO concepts to Design Patterns to various techniques in persistence. It contained simple but effective exercises to better understand things.

This 3 day course was basically based on Chamond Liu’s book SmallTalk, Objects, Design

Some pictures(click to enlarge)

Amarjeet Garewal introducing Dave Collins.	Dave Collins talking on the Command Pattern	Dave Collins talking on the MVC pattern