Reservations - My take

Firstly I haven't been following the reservations issue closely. But this is just my take at how reservations should be implemented for educational institutions.

Rather than having a caste based reservation, I would prefer having a reservation against location or strata of the society. Primarily it is not just backward castes that needs help or reservation. There are lot of people belonging to forward castes who suffer economically and also from lack of exposure. Reservations should be looked in from a different angle so that all the downtrodden sections of the society gets uplifted and thereby we also alleviate the caste based stigma.

The current reservations are kind of overkill for all the forward castes and in this competitive world capabilities of the individual should be given higher priorities than their caste.

Bigger the Better

In my work environment, I am provided with Dell 19 inch Flat panel monitor. The bigger the monitor, the better the visibility and productivity. The other day when BillG told that he has multiple monitors connected to same PC to increase his productivity, I was surprised and quizzing how that improves. There is lot lesser alt-tabs and switching between applications. It is pretty awesome experience.

Busy Vacation

Finally I had the luxury of having a real vacation. Five years in IT Industry without any vacation really sounds ridiculous. Apparently the vacation turned out to be busy one, learning few things that I ought to know and forgetting few things that I wish to do.

It turned up to be much deserved break that I was longing for. Lots of stuff to catch up!

HashMap and memory

While working on a project, we were faced with classical datastructure problem of achieving a balance between space and time cost. HashMap datastructure allows to have a quicker access to data but has the overhead of space. Other linear datastructures has slower access to data with less hit on the space. The following post in the java forum provides a good insight into the space occupied by a HashMap based implementation to store the data.

Otherwise the HashMap can be tweaked with the initial capacity and load factor to suit to need.