Making a computer do ‘Anything’…

Moving on from my first blog entry, I have somehow convinced my vastly diverse and unmanaged ways of innovativeness to focus on topics that follow the central theme of My Eternal Quest, “Can a computer really do anything?”
The blog might interest people who consider themselves in the categories of Beginners and Intermediate computational evangelists. Although I am writing in a place where some of the best technology authors of this planet expose there skills, but I do hope that I will find some interested audience.

I am considering subjects that go beyond standard development and programming processes, mostly because I myself am already becoming tired of making Software that ease out the life of a standard sheep like human being with sub standard computational needs such as online air ticket booking systems, online Cineplex ticket booking software, simply because of a very logical reason, that is, ‘there are far too many people on this planet who will happily do all this stuff and I should not probably interfere with there jobs when I can do something that satisfied my senses and desires in a much better way’.
During my 14 years of programming experience I have confronted many people who have no idea of the power they handle daily, when they walk into there office and switch on a machine that they solely recognize for solving there day to day streamlined processes. I try and imagine how many of those people will ever one day recognize the potential and power of a computer.
At this point of writing, I think I should identify the species of machines that I am again and again refereeing to as a computer. When I say ‘a computer’ I specifically mean a desktop machine and not those embedded chip type ones. My vision takes me to a belief that one day I should walk into my home or office and my computer makes me coffee without my asking for it by typically sensing that I need coffee, more like a mother sensing when her child needs some relaxing, I am in near future hoping to work on this growth of personalization and affection that can exist between a man and a machine. Perhaps this is what I thrive on; perhaps this is what I was built to build.
Ahh, speaking of the subject of ‘built to build’; I recent came across a webpage that addressed the matter of writing programs that write programs to write programs. I will perhaps write about this in my later entries. My concern of pointing out the relation between the human nature of ‘built to build’ things and ‘programming to program other programs’, is a well fitting analogy, this closeness in the analogies is what drives my belief further that very soon Man and Machine will unite.
Another interesting subject that can be picked up from here is ‘Uniting Man and Machine’; it is something agencies like NASA etc. must have been working from very long to crack, ‘Connecting the human brain to a silicon chip’. I think I can waste a lot of blog space simply writing about many techniques that have come into being to do this but I guess everything has its time to be done.
For now I think I will start off with my core topic and I think I should generalize it a bit to ease out the discussions for programmers.

It’s like giving your desktop a personality. I am not considering giving a particular name to it as on now but for reference purpose I think I will call my new mate BOB. I think it is also good that I point out that we are not building a Peedy or a Bonzy Buddy kind of application. We are going many steps ahead of what Peedy had to offer by giving it a BRAIN of its own, by brain I am considering a NLP engine and an Expert System.
I think we should move from speech to vision in a schematic way. First I will discuss how to use speech and then how to implement vision. From this we will also move to building a remote robot that will be controlled from my desktop using simple parallel port interfacing techniques.
I will typically be working on platforms of .NET, mainly because it is the only platform that does NOT drive me nuts even after 12 hours of continuous programming as I have found out after trying out everything for around 14 years from ALGOL, FORTRAN to JAVA and further even down to LISP and believe me if you can … Many Many More!.

-Gunish Rai Chawla

Hello World!

Hello World!

Every programmer in the world knows this statement. I Came across it some 13 Years ago when i was just around 9 years old. I saw my first computer, it was a 386 with 5 1/4 floopy bootable, no hard disk memory . From then to this day it has been a hell of a joy ride for me. Computing , Programing, Hardware all these and more make up most part of what ever i do or think or feel today.

In those days, there was no windows available, we only had a squnkily put Black and White Moniter with a dull flickering cursor on it, what was told me to be called MS-DOS. The idea was very exciting and took my imagination by storm. I was told i could do anything with a computer, and i remember i exclaimed in AWE ..... 'Really,... ANYTHING!' the instructor laughed away and said 'yes Gunish, Anything'

From that day to this day, the quest for actually making a computer do anything and everything has never ended. To this day i am on this journey of invariably Programing and Going through painfull stages of learning and reading Long and non interestting Istructions Manuals (Mostly without the help of any teachers, coz the stuff i ventured into was alien to even my instructors) to find answers to my Quest. How can a computer do 'anything'?.

And to this day the Question still holds its values to me. 'Can Really a Computer do Anything?' Well during this journey i do beleive that we can do many things with a computer. But the 'AnyThing' factor still eludes us. Working on Numerous Projects through my life as a Computer Programmer, i have always sought to find excitement in bore and dull subjects of Database Managemet and Billing systems, (the Funny Irony is i still am Building Some Even Today!).

When will this quest end and how far down the line i am, what all have i worked on and what all is it that i am supposed to do before i become OLD enough to stop Programing,

Is What i am going to write about in this Blog of Mine. Hope somebody somewhere identifies with me and Finds some answers to the eternal Question .... "Can a Computer Do Anything!"

-Gunish Rai Chawla