8 To 8

The magic continues

2010-06-09T16:03:00.001+05:30

Of the entire ruckus going around with the iPhone4 launch and all the “new” and “magical” features that it brings to the people I feel that something is amiss and perhaps no one is taking a note.

Let’s talk about the all the “magical” features and see how well do other devices match up. With the Android Froyo in the field there have been comparisons between the features of iPhone and Android.

Recently I saw a blog titled “New” to iOS 4 is Old for Android. Of the features they have mentioned here lets tackle them one including WinMo as well

Multi-tasking - Goes back to the very first Android phone, the G1 (circa 2008)
- Windows mobile had it since ancient times.
Threaded Email - Same as above, G1 had it 2 years ago.
- There are programs available that do it. No one restricts you to whims of some “Jobs” on WinMo.
Folders, Video Sharing & tap to focus has existed on previous versions of Android for a while now
- Forever.
Tethering - This has been around on Android for a while as well. But Sprint is more gung-ho about it with their EVO 4G
- Do I even need to talk about this one?

From what I feel a certain Mr. Jobs is all about showmanship and ability to get people excited with small upgrades making money for his company and cheating the asses off the fans.

Take the plain old “Copy Paste” for example. He said no one needed it. Then in some version down the line the turtleneck was up the stage presenting the absolutely magical way of sharing the data between apps running on the same system welcome “Copy Paste”.

It’s the same story with almost all the features you find on the iPhone today.

Lets see how new are the various features on iPhone and WinMo.

	iPhone	WinMo
Native Apps	Medieval	Ancient
Multitasking	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Copy Paste	Modern	Ancient
Video recording	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Video conferencing	Fresh off the line (Restricted)	Ancient
Folder for apps	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Home Screen	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Noise Suppression	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Mail	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Voice Control	Fresh off the line	Ancient
MMS	Modern	Ancient
Soft Keyboard (customizable)	Unborn	Ancient
Search	Medieval	Ancient
Voice Memos	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Calendar	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Weather	Old	Ancient
Notes	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Tethering	Fresh off the line	Ancient
Encryption	Fresh off the line	Ancient

Source for Features http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/more-features.html

Wow, it seems that WinMo had all the features that have been described “Magical” by the singular authority on all things apple (you never know when and what will change) since ancient times. Only thing that held WinMo from being the leader is that MS gave up on beautifying the OS and there never was a fast device which carried WinMo even though hardware was there. This is one mistake that cannot be overseen but still letting Mr. Jobs take all the credit for revolutionizing the phone industry is most certainly an overstatement. He did what he does best – Presentations and Copy Paste (earlier from Xerox and now from other Phones).

Need for rationality…

2010-05-23T11:34:00.001+05:30

There are times when you are asked to maybe go over a few things and give your comments on them, or maybe try and find some bugs or design flaws. This usually is a common practice in IT world where software engineers often enlist their peers for validating and verifying the design and the code they write.

Most of the time this process is nothing more than a quick scan of the code/Design to see if there are any design flaws as these are the ones that cause immense pain in the ass if left unchecked. Implementation details on the other hand are mostly trivial and easy to fix.

The details pertaining to the communication between modules or the way they go about storing the data which might be of some use to any other module are very important and should be addressed before even a single line of code is written. And the details regarding alignments of various UI elements though very apparent are the easiest things to fix.

But I have seen people fighting over the best way to align a textbox to a radio button and not care about the data that is going to be passed on to an asynchronous function.

The event handlers in question take something akin to void* from C/C++ world and then use runtime queries to determine the properties it has and then take some actions. The best part is all these could have asked for a specific type of object and then done the same actions with compile time bindings. That’s the beauty of languages like JS/AS/Python, you don’t need to know what is the data type of any given variable. You can query the variable for the property you think it should have and the variable will tell you if it has that property. So far so good, but the developers who use these languages forget that this is a feature of the language and like all good things it has a price to pay for.

For starters anytime you use this kind of run time data binding and property search its going to be freakily expensive. Computing cost apart, this type of code will be a nightmare for the next guy who comes in to maintain/develop the code/product. Anywhere you go it’s a discovery process all over again. He cannot be sure of the content of the variable unless he/she has gone through all the possible execution paths to get to that variable and even then it’s a bitch to keep track of all those pathways and the various properties they might infect.

Compare this type of code with Compile time binding and anyone looking at any isolated piece of code can tell what exactly is going on in the localized view that he/she has. They know the data coming in and the format and type and they know what is going out. The guessing game has been replaced with a much cleaner and well defined set of rules.

Back to the original topic, I recently was a witness to a lengthy discussion about how to align a textbox to the label part of a radio button and believe me the guy who was fighting for the implementation details of some UI element was the very same guy who didn’t give a rats ass for the sanity of data being passed around in asynchronous function calls where each and every function had to go through the same data discovery stage as nothing was clearly defined.

Imagine the person fighting for how should the text box placement go and not caring about the way all important data flows through the system. I choose to believe that the guy who does this has no interest in the product as a whole but is concerned with how it looks to that in when the demo time comes up he can have a pretty thing to showcase. I’m not saying that software should not be pretty but first and foremost it should be functional.

But then I look around in this world of mine and see that everything pretty (functional or not) usually get what they want. Take Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan or any other bombshell out there. No one care whether or not they have acting talents but just because they are pretty they can do pretty much everything and get away with it. The irony is it’s not limited to just glamour world, in out tech world a insanely could have been great product is crapped just because it was not pretty (Looks at windows Mobile) and a stupid crippled product goes ahead and becomes one of the bestselling things ever just because it was pretty (iPhone/Pad).

Sigh…

When the body says no…

2010-03-22T23:34:00.001+05:30

There comes a time in everybody’s life when the person want to go on, for the reward that’s on the far end of the road is worth it but the body simply says “Not happening”.

What do you do then? Do you keep going or do you stop and rest and then continue the journey.

The answer is to let the current take you to the Promised Land. Agreed that the current alone will not be able to make the same time but the effort you save doing so will allow you to savor the end result.

I’m talking about rafting and the end result is the thrill you get while on a rapid, rocking in all the directions and not knowing when the water that’s supporting the raft is going to disappear allowing the raft to free fall till it hits the trough.

So what’s it going to be…

The Dream

2009-12-21T14:55:00.003+05:30

All of a sudden you find yourself contemplating what is going on.

You have a good thing going and all of a sudden you start having doubts about it, you get ideas and not the ones with the good ending. On one level you don’t want anything changed but then an increasingly bigger part of you wants the thing to cease to exist.

I don’t know if this is true for all the subjects or it’s just me but I do feel there is something more to the world than it meets the eye. There used to be a time when all you could want was to make things the way they are right now but now that the thing are in place you begin to wonder.

Was this what you wanted? Has the dream been altered en-route subtly that you have been caught off guard? Were the changes so subtle that you didn’t notice them while you were working toward the dream but now that you thing you have achieved it the bigger picture looks nothing like the dream?

These are just some of the questions that I could think of, maybe there are more questions and possibly even more answers than I can possible begin to fathom.

But what do I know! My friends say I lag socially by almost 2-3 years and maybe that’s true, but to think of it...

Too much!

2009-12-21T14:55:00.001+05:30

When is it right to consider the news items you get in RSS feeds too much?

What do you think is the right frequency to check those feeds?

When is it a right time to get off the bandwagon and join the real life?

How much of the general discussion that goes-on on Slashdot or techmeme is relevant anyway?

Well there is no straightforward answer to that. It’s more than what it should be when any of the following happens.

You dread opening the reader of your choice if you have been away from the aforementioned reader for more than a day.
- Reason: you basically are afraid of the huge amount of unread item count that you are afraid that you are gonna miss out on some important nugget of information that you want going through all the junk that’s posted there.
You repeatedly recheck for any new feed content every five minutes and there is none.
- You should stop doing that. Simple. Stop it.
Whenever you feel a disconnect between the facts that you know and the fact other people are talking about is probably a good time to get to the real world.
- And by other people I mean normal folk who do not work in computer related business.

One thing that you have been looking for!

2009-12-21T14:54:00.003+05:30

If someone asks you what’s the one thing that has greatest influence on your life? Would the answer be Parents or some teacher who had a big influence or some friend who you always look up to or something you always wanted to find but were just unable until you found it?

If I have learned anything about the way life behaves it would have to be this. The one thing would be the very thing whose existence you have been denying your entire life because it made you feel that you might lose control over yourself in case you found it. You do not actively search for it because deep down you believe that it’s too good to be true. It’s the one thing that always has a higher priority, however small the margin may be.

For some people it’s a teacher or their parents or some friend or some colleague but for some people it’s completely different.

I’m not going to delve on what it is/has been/will be for me but just think about it and maybe it makes sense.

There was a time when platform was for trains

2009-07-31T04:16:00.001+05:30

Where do we start and most importantly where the hell do we end?

Roll back to the year 1984 and there was a revolutionary advertisement. Anyone remember what it was? No points for getting it right (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8). It was an ad from Apple against Big Brother as is described in 1984 by George Orwelll. It’s core message was to break free be independent be different and promote thought.

We will fast forward to 2009 when the restrictions from Apple ~~Computers~~ Inc. force all kind of people to question what the fuck is going on in this world and why in the hell’s name all the anti-trust regulators so hell bent on Microsoft and Intel are turning a blind eye to the current mess.

Let’s take two platforms and compare them

	Microsoft	Apple
Default Browser	IE	Safari
Available browsers	IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera	Firefox, Safari, Opera
Default media player	Windows Media Player	ITunes
Available Media players	Can’t count	Can’t count
Slapped with an anti-trust case for browser	Yes	No
Slapped with an anti-trust case for Media player	Yes	No
Current state	MS offers Windows versions without Browser and Media player	Apple enjoys no problems whatsoever

What I fail to understand is why is Apple getting away while Microsoft is getting screwed like anything.

The both bundle their own browsers and Media players. They both have a lot of choices in both departments but only MS is made to pay the fine. EU are you listening?

Where is the anti-trust case on Apple?

With the advent of iPhone Apple seems to have gone a step further. At least on a mac you could install whatever application you wanted but on an iPhone you have been restricted to a fixed set of applications to choose from.

Some very good apps are not allowed in the AppStore because Apple thinks that they duplicate the functionality provided by iPhone’s stock applications and they might cause confusion in the user community. What!!! Apple is now questioning my ability to differentiate between Safari and Opera? You made a good phone, be happy and gloat all you want and nobody is going to say anything to you. But then you want to restrict me from using the phone the way I want is going a bit too far. It’s like Ford telling me the roads I can drive my car on and in case I want to take my car (did I forget to mention that I purchased the goddamn phone) to a dusty road then the car is remotely turned off by Ford to protect your car from getting dirty. What if I wanted to do that Ford, come on.

Apple allows some 100+ variants of iFart in the AppStore but doesn’t allow one browser. Reasons given are that it will confuse users and it can be used to view adult content. Come on Apple, your default browser, Safari was it can also be used to view objectionable content and I don’t see a ban against Safari yet! Sure you can refuse to distribute the application which violates your rules but why the hell are you playing god. If I want I should be able to view pornography on my phone as I see fit, law allows me to do so. Who allowed you to be the moral police and restrict me to whatever you deem fit.

One of the reasons given by Apple on why isn’t multitasking allowed on iPhone is that multiple applications will drain battery life away. So now the duration for which my phone has to be active is going to be decided by apple too. Brilliant! Come on and admit it that you could not handle multiple applications like almost all other mobiles (even Symbian S60 and S40) do and you packaged it into a statement which makes the users think that you have the best of the intentions. Slick job Jobs!

I wonder, the WinMo phones from a generation ago had paltry 200 or so MHz processors and much less RAM but they allowed multitasking. This was when iPhone wasn’t even a dream! Come iPhone and you have 600+ MHz processor, powerful graphics and bigger screen and yet you don’t have multitasking. Am I the only one missing something here? You have better hardware and the OS is kind of a bully. It allows only the application that came preinstalled to be run in parallel (iPod on iPhone I’m looking at you). Anything else and they don’t deserve to run unless the user is using them actively, what a shame.

On a footnote I’m dying to see a lawsuit against apple.

There’s just one thing i asked for…

2009-06-14T18:55:00.001+05:30

Sometimes expecting anyone to behave in a certain manner no matter how many times you have told them to do so is a bit too much and apparently it doesn’t go down nicely.

So there you are and you have told a certain somebody that you don’t like a certain aspect of how that certain somebody lives their life and that certain somebody agrees to the fact. In the future the conditions that lead up to the action you don’t like are avoided but inevitably there comes a moment when the action which you hate and have already expressed a hatred for is repeated.

You confront the person saying you don’t like this and it should have been done differently and they shoot back at you saying that this time the affected person is not you (did I forget to mention that you developed a hatred because you were subjected to that action many a times and that made you realize it’s not you who was the only affected but this was a general attitude problem). You say that it’s not being subjected to the action you hated; it’s the action itself that make you want to puke. Sure the action is sometimes unavoidable; sometimes situation get out of hand and there is nothing you can do to help it. In those times you would think you are obliged to inform the person affected that the action has to be taken and you are sorry. But you know better, you have been the target of the action many a times without any information that’s its going down.

When you confront the person about the hatred, this stops happening and you feel good. But you overlook the reason of it not happening; the steps leading up to the action are now being avoided. It’s like avoiding internet to protect you from spyware and viruses rather than keep a vigil and avoid malicious sites. Sometime later when everything is fine and dandy out of the blue you see the action being carried out without a slightest second thought. You ask why and the answer you get stuns you. “It’s not you who is going to be affected by this, so please stop asking about the justification of the action” WTF. You try explaining you never hated being the affected person rather you hated the action itself. No effect! You try asking for an explanation and all you get is silence and silence. Instead of an answer or reason you get blamed back that you have never curbed some of your actions that were objected against. You know you have curbed them but… never mind.

And sometimes silence is not enough.

Don’t want to tread the path.

2009-06-05T00:05:00.003+05:30

Sometimes you wonder what you are doing with your life.

You work, play, party, roam around and do lots of stuff. But at the end of the day when you head back to the place you call home it feels kind of sad. Its not like “Gonna go home, yay!!!” but more like “Gotta go home, WTF”.

The place kind of sucks compared to all the liveliness of outside world.
Agreed the place you call home has all the amenities you could ever want and it has a cozy bed and a big ass TV but still something doesn't feel right.

You go to “Home” and tread across the hallway on the same path over and over again; taking care not to disturb the dust that has settled over the area you don’t walk over. The chair or the unused table serving as a stand for the unread papers you just pick up every day because you are too lazy to get up in the morning and tell the paper-boy to stop delivering the news paper. The only use of paper is when you get some food items (ordered or carry out) and you are too lazy to wash the dishes. Just pick up some paper, use that as the table cum disposable plate when you are done just throw the whole thing away.

Even though the “Home” you live in has more than one room you don't really remember what to do with or why is the other room present. The primary use of the kitchen is to serve as a place to store the fridge (which of course you cannot put in your bedroom as it generates heat ;) ). And the only time you ever wander into the kitchen is when you need some cold water.

All the appliances you own are present within reaching distances of the bed or at least in the same room so that you can be sure you don't have to leave the room at any time, because the only time you want to go out of the room is when you are going out of “Home”.

Sometimes when you can’t sleep you get up and pick you phone up and thumb through all you contact wondering who you could call up at this hour and have a conversation and not be frowned upon. But the moment the scroll bar of the contact list touches the end you sigh and light up a cigarette and puff your life/time away.

But along comes someone who cares about the place you call “home” and suddenly things start looking bright. You try to go home early because you know that it won’t be just the four walls of the room but someone to talk to as well at the place you call “Home”. There would be food on the table that used to be creaking under the pile of unread and untouched newspapers. Although you would be subjected to torture by being made to watch all kinds of soap operas but you still are a lot happier now.

The only thing sad is the transformation is not permanent and soon it will the loneliness and “confined to the bed times” again.

There was a sentimental fool.

2009-06-05T00:05:00.001+05:30

Some people give in to relationships so much so that they don’t realize the boundaries and the limits. They go so far that they stop realizing what is right and what needs to be done to make things right. They allow people to run over themselves when they are in the early part of relationship and when they have been romped over and over again they realize they have been reduced to a pulp and they don’t like being pulp and then they start looking for someone they can lay the blame on to. In this process they realize that the only person they came in contact through the entire period was the person who was marching right over their heads the entire time. So naturally the blame goes to the person who wasn’t even told that they were wrong in the first place.

The question that begs to be asked is who the culprit is in this scenario.

Is it the person who allowed the rampage or the person doing it? Many people would like to think otherwise. But then it’s a personal choice.

The Month of changes... ;)

2008-11-28T09:59:00.001+05:30

It’s been a long month and for sure this month has seen a lot of changes in me as to what I think and the way I think. Not saying that I absolutely adore the changes but I have to say that I might put up a fight before going down.

All the credit for my current situation goes to Mark and Mayank. Whether this turns out good or bad is yet to be seen but at the moment I can certainly say that one difference between me today and me a month ago is that I can see something more clearly and now I have a bit more idea of how this world works. Yay!!! Never stop collecting information; you never know when you might need it or where it might actually be a lifesaver.

On the other front thanks again to Mayank I think I’m going be in a better shape ;)

Finally found someone to match my thought process

2008-09-15T04:11:00.001+05:30

Sunday was a day meant for sleeping and sleeping only... but no some of us had a (or rather two) films to catch. First up was "Wall.E" at 10:30 in the morning... yeah you read it right. we got up at 10 to go to the movies...

It actually was a “reado” (reading analogy of typo) by us. The website said 10:30 and we didn’t look any further. It actually was AM (those people should use military timings) no one would ever confuse 2030 with anything as 1030. Anyway “Wall.E” was a big disappointment, honestly I expected better from Pixar.

But cut to the next movie “The Wednesday” and I seriously admire the creator. This is exactly the way things should be. We catch the terrorists only to release them later when some AssHole (pardon the language) captures 189 people and demands their release (remember Kandahar and flight IC-814).

What did we learn from the whole goddamn drama… nothing I guess! We just moved on, what a pity!

We caught “Maulana Masood Azhar”, “Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar” and “Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh” and for what? Kept them in prison for lot of time and feeding them all this time on the tax paid by us (WTF, I want to kill all the politicians for this act only), then released them when the terrorists held passengers of IC 814 hostage. So in essence we released those three terrorists for protecting 189 hostages and a plane. Did no one realize that those three terrorists out in the open might kill few thousands and damage property worth more than an airplane?

Let’s weigh the pros and cons in the current version

Pros
- Passengers safe
- Plane safe
Cons
- Three known terrorists at large
  - Will kill more than the 189 people in all probability
  - Will destroy property worth more than one “Airbus 300” in the aforementioned act
- Loss of Spine for India

Maybe no one was able to prove that the aforementioned three people really were terrorists before the hijack but after the hijack was there any need for the proof?

The version I would have liked better:

Take all three to Kandahar and approach the plane
Execute them then and there
Storm the plane

Max losses

The passengers
The plane

Max benefits

Passengers
Plane
No threat from at least those three terrorists and the hijackers.
Strong message to the would-be hijackers.

But this is me, and I think different. But then I ask this simple question, why do we keep people in jail when they have been proven guilty? Why provide them with food and medical supplies when there are people in the country who can’t get enough to survive? Why build jails worth crores, each cell costing multiple millions to build and maintain when a bullet costs 50 odd bucks and cremation another 1000 bucks? Why even cremate them, kill them, chop them and feed to them to the dwindling lion population; after all they (lions) deserve more then what they usually get?

Naseeruddin Shah’s character does exactly this. Kill them off. Government will never do it; they lack the spine and the mental makeup that requires this. Kudos to “Neeraj Pandey” for making this movie. Thanks.

Adding Icons to the Menus

2008-09-06T06:15:00.001+05:30

This has been the worst struggle I've ever had to do with getting MFC to do what I want.

I had to add Icons to a Context menu and so far I have done it successfully for Vista. For XP its another ball-game altogether.

Of promising to give more than you have

2008-09-02T13:02:00.001+05:30

For years that i have been programming i have taken pride in the fact that I check for all the newly allocated pointer against NULL and don't use it otherwise.

No imagine the following scenario

You ask for a huge amount of memory and system returns you a pointer.
You check it against NULL and are happy that its not NULL so you go ahead and try to use it.
Out of the blue you get a Segmentation Fault error and boom... you app is dead ;(

Lets investigate as to what happened

There is a feature in Linux kernel called "Over Commit"
When you ask for memory it just returns you a pointer which actually is not yet allocated.
System assigns you pages as and when you use it (WTF)
So just in case when you decided it was time for you to use the memory you allocated and check the return value for NULL (just to be sure) the system might run out of all memory.

The result

Your app just "crashed and burned". Why? because although you checked for a NULL return from the allocating routines but you didn't use it and check for a "segmentation fault" following the access to the memory. a BIG WTF.

One solution I can think of is to follow this procedure

Set up signal handler for "SIGSEGV"
Allocate memory
Set up a flag that you are going to use the newly allocated memory (the flag has to be thread specific of use a synchronization object for this thus making it thread safe)
In the Signal handler for "SIGSEGV" see if signal was raised due to the memory access of the newly allocated memory.
If yes set up another flag marking the memory bad and don't use it anywhere.
Else use the memory and be merry.

Conclusion

A simple and efficient check against NULL now replaced with all the above crap.

My stand

I don't know who and why would think up this feature, let alone make it a system wide policy. if this would have been a process level settings wherein the developer would have to explicitly tell the compiler to enable "Over Commit" then i could have let that fancy dev do whatever he/she wanted, but making this default setting on every Linux box... WOW, no other words.

Yes i know there may be some advantages to this, but the risk far outweighs the advantages. Let the crazy ones make this choices of doing all the juggling for allocating valid memory, I just want the NULL back.

I found this on gnu.org

Memory overcommit is a Linux kernel feature that lets applications allocate more memory than is actually available. The idea behind this feature is that some applications allocate large amounts of memory "just in case", but never actually use it. Thus, memory overcommit allows you to run more applications than actually fit in your memory, provided the applications don't actually use the memory they've allocated. If they do, then the kernel terminates the application.

Wow, I got terminated because I asked for memory and then used the memory i got back. am I missing something here?

2008-08-12T22:45:00.002+05:30

Just an update...

Went on a trip to Leh... although could not complete it.
Bike ride from Manali to leh is truly an experience (it has been described so much already on so many different places that I'm not even gonna start ;) )

Bought a lot of Kitchen utils and finally a TV set... woha..

The Download Day...

2008-05-29T22:41:00.001+05:30

This sure is an interesting way to create some hype and get people to download FireFox the day it releases and increase the presence...

Of Bike Servicing

2008-05-19T00:24:00.001+05:30

It can be a pain to love your bike and not finding good enough service center for the bike.

Right now I have a Bajaj Pulsar 150 UG3 and believe me; here in Noida or back in Bangalore I am yet to find a Bajaj Service Center that meets the expectations.

It’s been almost a year since I shifted to Noida and since then I have been going to the same dealer (Suman Autos, Sector 2 Noida, near Nirula’s). After every service I see some things that were all right before and have gone bad since. These include simple things such as Indicator lights to complex parts as complete display system.

Before they take the bike in for servicing they ask you about all the problems you know of. They make a list of all the problems and then the guy receiving the bike takes a test ride and points out all the additional faults that you might have overlooked. So far so good.

Then they give you an estimate of the servicing costs and tentative delivery time. Brilliant.

But then the things start to get worse (at least for me). More often than not I have got the bike in almost the same condition, save for the parts that needed replacement. In one of the incidences I had had a skid and the front shock absorber forks were bent. The guy at the service station told me that they would need replacement and I agreed to it. At the end of the day the Forks got replaced but there was a slight alignment error and that error has still to be corrected. But then I have gotten used to the error and have stopped bothering them.

During the last to last servicing they somehow managed to make my digital display malfunction. The RPM needle was offset by about 250 RPMs. Although they replace the display unit free of cost (I had to haggle with the head about the lax attitude and the incompetency) but not everyone might be so lucky.

I have now decided to check Castrol Bike zone (have heard a lot of good things about them) and if possible ditch the Bajaj authorized service centers once and for all for good.

Trips are phun! ;)

2008-05-04T00:03:00.000+05:30

Oh, its been over 6 monts since my last post as well! ;)
I must say life has been good. attended a wedding, gonna attend another one, went on three trips all within one month.
We went to Rishikesh at the end of April. Being cut off the world for some time felt real good. It causes you to stop and think about the thing called life. It is so busy now a days people hardly get time to think about what they want from life.
for people living in the fast lane here isa warning "Try and see the Roadside, you might never see it again".
The next trip was to Sat Tal. This was the worst trip I could have asked for! The journey was marred by the lack of leg room in the bus and then after a gruelling journey the pedal boats just don't cut it.
I spent the entire camp Sleeping or chatting away. my legs were exausted from the onwards trip and I had the return trip to look forward to.
one thing I learnt from the trip was "Do not mess with someone who has problems getting a joke at the moment and may cost you your job".

The third trip was by far the the best. Bike ride for about 520+ km (lots of it in the mountains). We went to Dharmsala and McLoydganj. Three people, two bikes and mountains and night time driving. What more can you ask for? The people are good up there and they do have the essence of life ;)

Oh yeah, I changed my phone too. Now have a Windows environment on my phone as well! yeah!

Me, ME and ME

2007-10-14T09:11:00.001+05:30

A month and 10 days, night around 5+ outs, lots of Paranthas at the Parantha point and a fresh morning later I’m back again.

Since the last most not much has changed. Well, the work is still there and a lot needs to be done. The QEs seem to have gotten minds of their own and then it’s back to square one of going over the code.

Sometimes I wonder if I did the correct thing by changing myself during the transition from College to Corporate. I used to have ready to take anyone on kind of attitude and now it’s down to let me continue my work and I don’t ask for anything kind of attitude. Is it really right? More often than not I find the need to go back to the old me and then I stop my ass from crossing over. When the things don’t feel right I just think I am used to being the old me so much that even though this being better for the world I’m not finding it good for me, I stop. But now I think I’m going back to my old self. Well what the heck, I tried being good, didn’t work out for me. Let’s try me being the same old me for some time now and then let’s see which one fares better in the current world!

Time does fly away...

2007-09-04T14:54:00.001+05:30

Well last time I had the time to actually slow down after seeing the PCR van but this time around I really didn’t have any choices. It was night time and as such the visibility was very low, and there they were, waiting with the laser rangefinder having set up a speed trap just around the corner. They were good! They positioned themselves in such a way that they could keep an eye on the people coming from the other side but we could not! But luckily for me I was driving alongside a Safari. Also since it was night they would have a hard time focusing the rangefinder on a bike moving 100+. Bike being a bike has very low signature and thus you need to be trying to find the bike otherwise all you would get is NOISE.

Anyway in the time between the last post and this one I have treated myself to 4 movies Ratatouille, Hey Baby, Transformers and Rush Hour 3. Of the four Rush Hour and Transformers came highly recommended and I indeed liked them. As for Hey Baby I thought I was a good attempt but just an attempt, it didn’t carry far and I ended up sulking the entire time. Worst of all was the movie was a treat from my side. WTF! Ratatouille was a good movie and I’ll recommend it to anyone who likes animated movies.

With all that’s happening in my life (actually nothing); my life is still as boring as it could get; at least that’s what my friends say. I have been hearing a lot of crap from almost everyone about my lack of social life and time for myself. Man even my parents asked if everything was alright at the office and why was a working such late hours! I mean, come on, why does the world care what I do with my time and where do I spend it. Its my wish more than anyone else’s as to how and where I want to spend my time.

Last to last week I was busy as hell (during the daytime only) in lot of activities and the week did fly away. Only this week it’s been free and kind of relaxed.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the old me I knew. I used to be in a habit to read lot of books! I used to purchase at least a book (non-fiction and mostly scientific) and every month and read, trying to make out things I didn’t know and sharpening what I knew. I did all this because I liked to do it, Read. Now that I don’t have that much time I seem to have given up the habit. I think it’s high time I again started the reading streak of mine and get some books. I’ll be getting my old books anytime next week (well that again depends on my friend who is very much like me in matters of following schedule). So it might even stretch to maybe 2-3 weeks. Let’s wait and watch and see what happens, Do I get my books on time or do I have a friend who is the same as me ;).

I guess that’ll be all for now until I decide I’ve some free time again.

And yes I almost forgot, I saw a Bentley the other day and Man... I don’t have words for it!

HP 7

2007-07-26T10:22:00.001+05:30

Let’s face it; I’m back to my old ways again, irregular and un-punctual. But this is not due to the fact that I actually don’t get time but due to the fact that I’m not able to put the time I get to writing these blogs. Anyway these have been hectic times. With my dad and mum coming over I don’t get a single minute to do anything else other than sit with them (that’s when I’m at home).
This has not very good results for me. I don’t do all the things I used to do or watch all the movies I could have had enjoyed in the last week. But all in all this has been a good week. I have finally settled in my new place and things seem to be getting on track. Engineering specifications have been submitted and work is supposed to start soon enough. Let’s see!
It’s been a long time, very long time indeed (given the fact that I can now write all I want to at home also). But me being me can’t really help it.
Almost a month gone and what have I got to show for all the time. Well all I have are some pages I made for the design and some KM I added to my bike’s KM reading gauge. As I write this I know I need to sleep and badly but before that I must warn anyone planning to go to a movie called “Partner” please reconsider and sleep instead. It’s a seriously pathetic attempt at copying “Hitch”.
Till date today was the only day I remember that I was late to office. But I can’t really help it, can I? I took me some 15 minutes to reach Noida from “Green Park” and another 15+ minutes to get to my office. Shit! This is so bad. But I must say that DND flyway is a delight to drive on (except for the toll taxes). Easily went 100+ but had to slow down after seeing a Police PCR van patrolling the area. Apparently there was a mishap and two cars had scraped each other.
Who really cares what happened, all I wanted was to go fast and I did, as soon as I was out of sight of the PCR vans I was doing 90+ again. Alas I ran out of space and was at the toll gates, beyond those gates lies city roads and you can’t possibly do 90 on them, can you?
P.S.
In the mean time I have finished reading HP-7 – Deathly Hallows!

The week has passed and I'm not there

2007-07-09T10:12:00.001+05:30

Last week was dedicated to the movies I took home to watch and revise ;).

This weekend was dedicated to Mummy and papa. They have come over and I’m getting a hell lot of lectures on how and why to manage myself and the home. Anyway this has been a nice weekend and I also took papa to Greater Noida (on the bike at around 91 KMPH) some 30 KM away. We had a talk with the developers out there and I sure can tell you that it’s goddamn expensive.

Las week I say about 2 seasons of friends and some 6+ movies (all thanks to some K Arora). He is a good man. He stocks almost all kinds of movies in large quantities and thus presents a brilliant opportunity for anyone who wants to see a movie for the first time of just revise for that matter.

Tomorrow I’ll gain have to go to office and that never seemed a better place. Yahoo! Redemption! Stuck in home for 2 days and that too without the freedom to go anywhere and do anything (come on who in the world likes that).

Hope to have a great week ahead.

The weekend cometh!

2007-07-02T09:01:00.001+05:30

Friday

Today was another Friday and that means another weekend over the horizon! Things now are much better given the fact that I am going to vacate the guest house tomorrow, that means kissing goodbye to all the facilities like AC, Room Service and not having to make the bed or clean the room and tidy up the stuff and the likes. But I’ll be shifting to the house that I have rented and it’s not too far from where I stay currently and it is in a sector I am familiar with and it’s nearby to the office.

With the advent of the weekend lot of things change and thus in the process people hardly do any work. It’s a time for making plans and planning to execute them. I for one don’t have any plans worth mentioning for the weekend. All I have planned is the purchase of household items like mattress and stuff so that I am able to live in the newly rented flat. The best thing I have planned is to go to CP tomorrow evening and go to Caventer’s and have the usual. It’s been what, some 6+ years since I went there. From what I have heard the prices have double, but let’s just hope that the quality has not degraded and from what I hear it seems very improbable. Good for me!

Anyway today I saw that my company supports Vista and I have almost made up my mind that I’m going to get Vista installed on the laptop at least. The laptop has a graphic card and One GB of RAM, I am pretty confident that it can run vista smoothly enough. I’ve been waiting a long time to get my hands on Vista and thus try and get myself familiar with some of the new technologies introduced with it, WPF and XAML for example.

I have the VS 2008 Beta 1 (Orcas) downloaded and I don’t think I’ll have any restrictions as far as the learning is concerned. It’s going to be good times ahead. Lot of learning and catching up to do! My last job landed me in soup and I was practically cut off from the rest of the Windows based programming world for the whole time. I bet it’s all going to change. Just a matter of time and patience…

As for the plans of the next week I think that’s when I’ll be getting the assignments I am supposed to get sooner or later and that’s when things a going to get ugly (I mean in a better way). Me getting my hands dirty and diving into a developing product with tight time schedules, WOW this is going to be fun!

One more thing, all the downloading I have done in the past week alone has crossed 15 GB mark, quite an achievement. I have already reduced the amount of free space on my systems drive from 140 GB when I got it to 111 GB. Way to go!

Saturday

Well the day is coming to end and I’m sitting there in the guest contemplating my impending departure to the flat. I got the keys today and went to the flat to have a look around. There were no problems in the flat except for the fact that the top shelves are full with junk. Some are from the previous occupant and majority of the landlord. Well since we don’t really need any apace so it really isn’t a problem for me but I’ve no idea what papa is going to say about that. Well I guess I’ll just have to make do and make him understand.

By the way last night I had gone to the IIT and stayed there only. We didn’t sleep the whole night and stayed up talking and watching “Friends” and sipping coffee. Well the plan of getting to the market and getting all the things need for the house went kaput. But we managed to order ourselves a mattress and pillows. They will be delivered tomorrow and by that time bro will bring all the other necessities.

The only problem with the entire plan is me leaving the comfort of the guest house and going into the flat. I’ll have to setup everything and I never wanted to of have any experience in doing that. It’s a good thing that mummy is coming over next week and I’ll not have that big a problem and I’ll have someone to guide me and help me set up the household.

Next week is going to be a busy time and I’ll have to manage the time more than I have ever done in my entire life.

Anyway today is still Saturday and I have almost 20 hours till I vacate the guest house and I’m going to enjoy every bit of that. No slacking on the enjoyment!

Sunday

It’s almost 2030 hours and I am in my apartment. Well I just moved in and the apartment is a big mess. Theirs is no water as of now and to top it all there is no drinking water too. Got to go and find some vendor for the water bottles and get a connection. Next thing on the list would be to get myself a cooler. The Delhi heat is simply too much to take in and I could really use an AC right now, but for now I’ll make do with a cooler.

The day was not as hectic as we had thought it would be. The only hiccup was that the delivery man for the mattress could not find the house and went as looked at the wrong house and found that locked. So instead of 30 minutes he took almost an hour and fifteen minutes to deliver the mattress to our home. Anyway finally the mattress is here and looks like I can have a good night’s sleep now. The day involved me making a trip to Delhi and back and not having anything substantial to eat. I guess none of them are new to me and I think I can handle them both with ease.

Tomorrow being Monday I’ll have to go to office and I’m planning to claim all the reimbursements also. This would help me tide over this month of one way flow (financially speaking). With the claims processed I’ll have some money and hopefully will be able to enjoy.

Starting tomorrow I’m planning to download at least two to three episodes of “Friends” or some other series to keep me entertained at home. Now that I’m no longer staying at the guest house it’s a big problem (Ah!) as there is no TV in here.

Waiting for tomorrow and hope everything goes according to plan (for once in my life!).

Shell Replacement!

2007-06-29T08:53:00.001+05:30

Another day gone and all I have done is… actually I did a lot today. I managed to restart my system almost three to four times, isn’t that great. I restarted the system twice in hope of patching up the “uxtheme.dll” to allow myself to be able to install and use third party themes. I did that successfully but en the eng I ended up installing “Vista Inspirat”.

Inspirat is actually quite cool. It provides me with all the visual effects I could possibly ask for and without the slow performance as “Windows Blinds” and other shell replacement things do and to top it all it’s free and doesn’t cause any problems except for ruining the Alt+Tab window. But it might be because I had “Windows Alt+Tab replacement installed before Inspirat pack and seems like it continued in the Inspirat and is not compatible. Anyway it’s not a big deal to have a slightly crippled Alt+Tab application, I could live with that.

It has made my Taskbar translucent and even has a Mac like “Dock”. But I don’t think I’m going to use the dock anytime soon. Simply put I love the task bar too much to put it away. Task bar to the rescue again, use “Win”+Tab and happy switching…

I had planned on getting myself an extra monitor but unfortunately I forgot to look for the monitor. Anyway that can be done any day.

In the meeting with the boss today we went over the feature enhancements we are supposed to do in the next release and from the look of it, it doesn’t seem like lot of work to me. Some import export business, some configuration changes and some UI elements being redesigned. The problem would be to maintain the interoperability between versions of Office and we will have to look for a way to do it.

Apart from the normal work I usually do (nothing as of now) I also tried on the competitor’s product and I must say that in spite of the other guy offering more variety (basically twice, each type further split into two sub parts and possible one or two more features) it’s a real put off because although it is supposed to be an add-in it doesn’t function like one. It maintains its own files and doesn’t use the container provided and used by the host. If that’s not lame I don’t know what is.

On the home front it’s only two more days to go (including today) till I leave the comfort of the A/C room provided by the company for my own rented apartment. I and Goli are going to stay in the flat. The flat isn’t too far from the office and I don’t really like it. I used to love it in Bangalore when every day I had to drive 8-10 KM to get to office (did I mention that I used to go against the traffic, so I didn’t have to face the jams and traffic problems, both ways!). Here I won’t get the time of place to drive out. But I think on Saturdays and Sundays I’ll venture out and will try not to lose out on the mileage I had accumulated over time in Bangalore (30+ KM per day, given the fact that my office run was barely 18 KM per day).

That’s all for now and I’m going to sleep now. Good night!

The day of upgrades (Software!)

2007-06-28T12:59:00.001+05:30

Wow, what a day! Today I got Office 2007 on my systems (Yippee). Anyway as always I wasted no time configuring the whole thing. Today was a brilliant day for my systems. I got Visual Studio 2003, a Source tracker and configuration management client also. The only thing missing was the lack of VS 2005. I can live with that!

By the way I finally got the Vehicle Entry Pass (VEF) and now I won’t need to get a temporary pass issued every day. I also got the Mobile Connection from Airtel activated.

I must say that the visual interface is really smooth and addictive. I seriously don’t feel like going back to the plain old “Menu” based outdated interfaces. Though some people might say that it takes up lot of real state on the screen but at the same time it eliminated the need of this pesky toolbars and the need to constantly hide/unhide them and reconfigure them to get that perfect customized look. This “Ribbon” interface is smooth, sexy and fluid and I really love it. More so it presents you a clear picture of what options are available at a glance instead of going down the list of long menu in order to find the menu item being searched for.

Other than this small thing I discovered the roof today and it seriously is better than the Third floor that I used to go to. It also houses the rooms for employees in case they are staying overnight or to sleep in during the day time.

I also sent out photographs of my desktop and laptop across to my old company and by got Vammu was impressed.

Anyway tomorrow I’m going to search for another monitor to put in my computer and configure it with dual monitors. That’s going to be some sight… let’s just hope I am able to find an unused monitor.

Documentation and Improvements in life.

2007-06-27T11:12:00.001+05:30

Sometimes the only thing left to do in the world is read and read and read some more. That’s exactly what happened today. I read through some 4+ documents of SCORM detailing how and why LMS works.

As of now I am kind of through with the concepts and hope I will be able to carry out the tasks to which I get assigned (as if I ever had a doubt). All this reading was just for a small part of the business, rest of it still what I love most. COM add-in most probably, it could also be something else but whatever it is it’s based on windows and Office. I don’t think I’m eve going to have any problems with Windows based programming anytime soon. As of now I might not be well aware of XAML and WPF based programming but once I get hold of Visual Studio’s next version and some tutorials and Vista I’ll be on my way.

Coming back to today I finally got the confirmation of Bank Account’s activation and Airtel’s connection. It would be activated tomorrow and finally I’ll be free from Hutch’s roaming charges. Though I still don’t know what am I going to do with the Hutch connection?

Other than the small improvements in the life’s progress the biggest one was that I got the papers of the agreement about the house and I’m going to get the bills tomorrow for the brokerage charges. Hopefully I’ll get that reimbursed and recover that money. Anyway I have to get the Air-fare and courier charges reimbursed and I think I’m going to do all at the same time.

With life going on as usual and as far as I can see I don’t see any potential problems or hiccups right now. Going to shift in the new home next month and with Goli being my flat-mate thing are looking up. At least I’ll have someone I can talk to at length about anything under the sun, I’ll have a long time friend with me. Life is looking up.

I'm finally going to "C"

2007-06-26T09:21:00.001+05:30

Well I thought it was all over for me when there was a probability of me getting pushed into the Cold World of ColdFusion. Today my PM asked me whether I’m ready to take on some work and I said I would want to work in C/C++ and as luck would have it I got into the only project with C/C++ in the whole team. It is an Office add-in and hope I’ll get to work with what I’ve always wanted.

The team on this project is quite small, only 6 members and there’s going to be a lot of slogging to do (yahoo…). What better could have happened?

I’m sure that lot of people would have wanted out of this kind of project and work but not me. I don’t have anything else and all I have ever wanted to do was get to the core and code. I hope this would be great experience and I would get to shape at least one product which people would be use. WOW!

Another important thing, I finally got my Desktop and my ID card. Now I won’t have to worry about asking the guard on duty every time I want to go out or come back from canteen.

Getting around Delhi...

2007-06-25T09:16:00.003+05:30

Well the weekend has passed and here I am, sitting in the guest house. During this weekend I’ve been to my local guardian’s house, been to the IIT and been to almost all over Delhi and lot of places in Noida. Last day has been real hectic with me going all over and at the same time trying to find myself a house. I’ve finally succeeded in the quest of the house and hopefully by tomorrow night I’ll have the agreement ready.

The best part of the quest was the landlord we got. They are an elderly couple and ex army man. So it means we won’t have to deal with the normal “blah-blah” of the normal landlords.

Anyways tomorrow I’ll be getting the ID card so I’ll be able to get a post paid mobile connection and finally I’ll be connected to the world. As of now all the connectivity I have is limited to getting and making “missed” calls. How funny is that? Having a post paid connection and not being able to make any calls just because you are in roaming. Ha ha.

With the Monday dawning its again back to work and I still have no idea what am I supposed to be doing.

The weekend started with me calling up my brother and finding out that he got the bike all right and is in IIT. He came over by around 1230. We left him in the mall and went house hunting (by we I mean me and Goli). Anyway after all the hustle and bustle of finding the home I dropped Goli and as we didn’t have another helmet my bro had to go till IIT in a cab. Yesterday was my first time on the DND flyway and I did my first mistake there. Got into the car lane and then had to track back till the bike entry point. But once on the flyway it was no stops. Went till 104 and would have gone a bit further if it was not for the ford in front of me and some other cars. The trip to IIT from there was rather uneventful as I had to find out my way amidst all the newly constructed flyovers.

Today I had my yet another first tryst with the “Dhaula Kuan” circle. It sure has changed and in a brilliant way. Gone are the days of long traffic jams and delays. Not its free flowing traffic. Way to go!

My room mate is still absconding and I have a feeling that he wont be back till tomorrow morning so it’s a good night for me… well I don’t have to go out every time I want to, I can be in the room all the time and be ok with it.

The world suddenly feels so cold!

2007-06-25T09:16:00.001+05:30

I was supposed to be introduced and given an overview of the work going on in the team today. The anticipation was long and I resisted the urge even to go for short walk around the building lest my PM comes in with the news to go and meet the people.

The time wasn’t there till almost lunch time. He came by and introduced me to my neighbor. We started about the product as it exists today and the basic overview and how everything fits around and what the product actually is.

Later today I was introduced to another product (rather another component). As luck would have it it’s a web based components (as is the previous one) and currently the person introducing me to the component asked me to get familiar with “ColdFusion”. Now this ColdFusion is a server side scripted and tagged language. It’s got good enough database connectivity. But all in all it still is a scripted language and the syntax as I know it is archaic and unique to it.

Suddenly the world seems cold and fused tighter!!!

Anyways the time after office was good. I downloaded DAP and will download Visual Studio express editions for C# and Web Development and I will continue my .NET quest and will try to learn WPF and other technologies which have come out. My stint in Wipro left me high and dry on these fronts and I will not let any other work come in the way of my development.

I also had my dinner in the office itself and I must say its really good.

Its almost 11:30 PM and I’m still waiting for a call from bro about the delivery of the bike. Hope he gets it. Its really been a long time now.

Another day of mindless surfing and feed reading!

2007-06-21T22:34:00.001+05:30

Got up quite early to the knocking from the Guest house's attendant who had brought in the "Bed Tea"! This guest house sure is spoiling me (as if I don't like it)!

The breakfast was consisted of "Aloo Parantha and Aloo ki Sabji" and vegetable sandwich. I dug in and left for the office.

Today also like yesterday I didn’t have any work so spent the whole day surfing, restoring my bookmarks and feeds and most of the time reading them. One good thing in here is you are directly connected to the Internet so there is no need to supply User ID and password to each instance of every application who wishes to connect to the web. This allows the IE to refresh the web feeds and keep them ready as and when they get updated (well 10 minutes to be precise). I don’t have to open up IE and then explicitly go and refresh the contents of the feeds every time I want to read them.

After I reached office I connected to the net and alas, no new mails! This is the worst that could have happened. So I set out for the quest of getting myself some mails. My ex team mates did their job and by lunch time I had a good collection of about 50+ mails that had been exchanged triggered by a mail origination of the “Parser Team’s” newest member’s corrupt file.

Now its lunch time and none of my new team mates are looking like they want to eat! Everyone is busy so I quietly slip away and treat myself to a hearty lunch.

Afternoon is again the same old story of surfing the net, reading the feeds and mailing. Only this time it’s on a much less scale and less intense.

Today my PM told me that I would be getting my team allocated tomorrow. I just hope that I get some work or at least some documents to study along with the code so that I can busy myself. This sedentary lifestyle (brainwork wise) is killing me. Also when I get into some team it would allow me to mix in the team and get acquainted with more people.

As of now it’s almost 9 PM and I’m back in my room and my roommate is still absconding!

Well too much for a single day.

Hey hey hey! guess it wasn't enough... we have wireless network in the Guest house.... brilliant. right now I tried it out in the lobby and it works. I'm going to try it out in the room.. if it works it has made my day.

The Joining Saga (It wasn’t but still, for namesake!)

2007-06-21T09:20:00.001+05:30

Late yesterday night I arrived at the guest house where I was booked by my new Company and was provided with a decent room. Although the room as it stands now is on a twin sharing basis, they have promised that I’ll get a single room in two to three days time. I think by that time I would have already found a room for myself. As of now I’m looking for an apartment and a shift from the life I have been living till now. I plan to go for a full fledged room instead of paying guest accommodations. Negotiations are on and hope to find a decent flat by next week.

I have some 12 more days during which I can enjoy the comfort of the guest house (it’s got AC, fridge and room service to boot). But as all good things come to an end I’ll have to move on… let’s hope the transition isn’t painful… ;)

Today was good! I got a full featured laptop and a cubicle which is at least twice my previous one. I’ll be getting the systems tomorrow so today was basically no work. One of the best aspects is nothing on the web is blocked and the speed is simply mind blowing. I downloaded the IE 7 from Microsoft site at over 1 MBPS. Now that’s something, right? Anyway My PM is the same guy who was my first interviewer and the mere sight of him sent me on a roller-coaster ride. He seems to be brilliant and a nice person so I don’t think there’s ever going to be problems.

One of the best things about the joining process was its simplicity. With my last employer we had to fill up a plethora of forms and it took almost whole day. Here it didn’t even take two hours and that too unguided. The only guidance we received was from the bank PR who came to us telling us details about the Account we had opened up and the “Escalation Matrix”. As if someone ever uses that. Anyway I must say that the overall simplicity and the efficiency are sweeping me off my feet and I’m ready to land face first ‘because I know I don't have a granite floor to face.

More so the team members seem quite friendly (though I haven’t had the time to meet all of them but in the introduction round the all seemed very friendly and the team member from the opposite cubicle also says the same thing). I still don’t know what I’m going to be working on but frankly who cares… I know that whatever work comes my way is going to be good and challenging. No second opinions about that!

The first day on the job and I get a laptop! And to top it all the laptop is amazing, with Core 2 Duo and 1 GB of ram and ATI Radeon mobility inside I think it is much more than I could have ever asked for.

To top all of the happenings of today, my room-mate is still missing… he should be here by now but I don’t know… maybe he went to his friend’s home.

Enough of the current place and job, going back to my old team I discovered that there is still no change in the way it works and all I can now hope is for the ways to change and that the “Creator” finally realizes the things that he has been doing wrongly and change himself. Although it sounds highly implausible but still one must never give up hope… wait, what am I saying? I gave up almost all hope that the “Mordor” and its occupant will ever change (for good that is). Let’s see what happens and cross the fingers.

Anyway I’m going to sleep now and hope that I can be more regular in blogs, now that I have a laptop so I’d not be restrained to write whatever I wanted to in office… now I can come home and write all I want to in peace and with lot of time at hand.

This goodbye is not forever…

2007-06-19T00:41:00.000+05:30

As the song goes I have said goodbye to the IT capital for an IT job for another. Well the compensation aspect is a big factor but I know for sure that I’ll be put to better use here than I was in my previous job (well if you call that a job at all…)

The flight was good! It had to be, it was Kingfisher after all!

The day was long and no sooner than I landed in Delhi I got a taste of world’s favorite beverage (40% content).

The Best week of my life (till now)!

2007-05-29T17:10:00.001+05:30

The week of the interview was bad. I got the rejection and had no place else to go. Only thing that could make it worse was the requirement specs that I needed to write without knowing virtually anything. And what do you know, I got that also.
Sometimes you think what else can go wrong now! So optimistic! I got everything going against me.

But the week that followed was a lot easier to start. I had passed the ball back in the Co-coordinator’s court. Then there was some juggling but it was relatively easy.

Come Thursday and I got a call for HR interview and the day I was supposed to go attend was Friday. What more could one ask for? I went on and came to know that my rejection was because of my “easy-going” attitude. I need to fix that! Anyway the interview went well and I was told that results will be communicated to me by Monday. Well, as is usual for me I got the results on Thursday, the day I resigned and the day when the Parser Team got wiped out. Good for them (myself being one of them).

Since then many of our teammates are considering “Parser Team” to be the way out (in case the need one). I don’t know about the people but I know that it felt good. Knowing that I’d be free from this trap and I’d be working for a change.
Yeah I know how foolish it sounds, but that’s the truth. For the last 11 moths I have been in Wipro all I have done could have easily been done in a month and now I am supposed to do a “Knowledge Transfer”.

The first question that comes to my mind is what am I supposed do in these KT sessions? I groped around and found that I am supposed to tell my successor all I have learnt about the system so that he can continue without problems. Well if I had learned about the system or created anything new I would have told him, but as of now I don’t know shit about the system (actually I don’t think anyone knows)! All I did was to translate one linked list (tree actually) into anther kind and that’s what my successor will be expected to do. There is only one teeny weenie change. I used to dump the statements in file and he would have do make an in memory representation of the data. The later sounds easy.

Anyway I told him all I know, and he seems happy with it and is experimenting. Actually I know very less because all I know is because when I needed the information I dug or it and then use it. As it stands there is a lot of information inside and I don’t know anything abut it just because I never needed to know. But who cares! Those days are past and I can look forward to a better life away from the South and in Noida.

Looking forward to the day my PM relieves me.

Oh No... so long already

2007-05-21T11:44:00.000+05:30

Me being what I am (simply lazy) didn’t post a single post for so many days… can’t really help it!

Anyway the time in between was good enough. Not much work and easy going week! Sometimes I wonder what the hell am I getting paid for? I do no useful work.
That doesn’t mean I can’t do anything useful but as of now I don’t have anything to do. Once in a while something comes up and goes away. It’s like sitting at the platform and waiting for the right train to show up; only to realize (much later) what you are waiting for flies from the airport.

It’s the same old routine for me. Get up in the morning and go to office and come back and watch TV and sleep so that I’m able to get up tomorrow. I just hope something better comes up and today might be the day when it happens. Although I’m not sure I got through but it might, I’d give it a 50-50 chance.

As for the week and the week before that nothing much happened except for one false party alarm that took me some 15 KM from my office in 10 minutes only to find that it as a private team party instead of the general open to all. That felt so bad!

Anyway, the plus point of the false alarm was I got out of office and into sprawling lawns and enjoyed the sandwiches I purchased to ease out my sagging morale.

This week unlike rest of the weeks we forgot to go for a dinner and sufficed for that by ordering a hearty meal for ourselves (me and my room mates) and sleeping the whole day.

The day of the power cut was the worst one and I was forced to resort to go for a drive on my bike. We took the road less traveled (by me) and ended up some 20 KM away from home at around 9 in the night. The road was good but so was the traffic and sadly enough I couldn’t push the bike to its limits. I still went above my personal best of somewhere around 70 KMPH (in the night time) to around 95+. It would have been got to go past 100 but alas! Damn those truckers.

The week after

2007-05-05T18:06:00.000+05:30

It’s been almost a week now and I’m back to the blog… finally!

The week has been rather uneventful. I spent most of the time chatting and surfing my time away. As for the work there has not been any pressure. Seems like the people top side have some problems coming to terms with the complexity they have induced in the project.

They have been thinking of changing the language the project has been implemented in for almost the whole of last year (hey that’s what I know of… actually it’s been longer than that).
Now that everyone has become so at home with the forgiving nature of python and the benefits that come along with it, switching to ‘C’ will be a very tough proposition. Especially when you think of the amount of work that will be needed to be put in so that even a simple stage of the whole mammoth starts to take shape.

Actually that’s gonna be much harder than anyone has ever thought, especially when the mammoth doesn’t have any layering or any orthogonality and almost every line of code affects almost every other line’s outcome.

Let’s just assume that the whole process starts and begins taking shape… what then. With Python they can rely on the “exception handling” for all the non-initialized variables and changing everything at run time and getting away with almost anything. With ‘C’ however I can only wonder what’s gonna be the case.
Just some points

No built in support for dictionaries or advanced data structures
No exception handling support
Compiled program and no interpretation.

Other than the project…
Well thing have been rather boring this week except for the holiday we got for the 1st of May (remember “Labor’s Day” that’s us). The white collar labor force!

Recap

2007-04-23T12:39:00.000+05:30

What do I say… almost 6 months of silence on my part really doesn’t make for great impression?

In the mean time lot of things have gone wrong and write in the lifeless life I have been leading. I haven’t moved from where I was staying, neither have I hopped jobs or projects but one thing I have done is get myself a Bike.

I got the Pulsar in December and since then I have taken it for a spin for almost 3700 KM. That means I have been averaging around 27+ KM per day. To think of it my daily trip to office is around 18 km! Now don’t ask me where did the extra distance come from but I have been here and I have been there.
As far as the bike is concerned I have had no problems with is except for one Front-Fork oil seal leakage (I wouldn’t blame Bajaj for the problem, I jumped a breaker at around 90, lucky me). One of my friends tried reaching 100 and as soon as he got there he got airborne. Bike landed on its ass and rest is history.

In the mean time I haven’t done anything worth mentioning (out of office stuff that is). But wait I did go up to 118. Bike maxed out (sob). Got zealous of the new 200 DTSi that came out… (Seems I purchased my 150 too early). But hey, at least I got all the cosmetic enhancements, the LED illuminated LCD console and the LED Backlight and Wolf Eyed headlamps.

Bajaj could have put more effort on the fuel gauge. The reading are erratic and sometimes even with 10+ liters of gas in there the indicator will show somewhere in the reserve region. But I think it’s a problem with digital fuel gauges, even Karizma has this problem.

Other than the two minor hiccups I have a pretty smooth run with the 150. The engine is responsive. The seating position is sporty, slightly leaning to the front and making you feel the wind in face (unless of course you don’t wear a helmet, which I always wear).

So much for the Out-Of-Office activities, now lets o inside and have a look at what have I been doing in here.

The typical day start at around 0930 hrs with a broken lift (well for most days the lift on the left side usually is down or breaks down during ascent). The coffee starts the day inside the office and sometime the milk isn’t as hot as I would like it to be.
Then its work as usual and we take a breather around 1030 (as if we were working our asses off).

For the last two months I’ve been working for the conversion of EDG’s output to GCC’s. And from what I have learned and actually seen I must comment the EDG fellows for a brilliant piece of work. Unlike the GCC’s spaghetti implementation of data structures to hold the AST (parse tree of the C code) the EDG’s AST seems to be a breeze and that too powerful. It’s simple, elegant and clean whereas with GCC … (don’t even get me started on that, maybe I don’t fully understand and appreciate the beauty of GCC but still).

Before the last two months (late February, March and early April), I had a tough time with the work. Seemed like every goddamn thing was going wrong and I was in a wrong place. Now thing are at least looking up!

The project is being converted into C (though I am not happy with the language of choice, it should have been C++ at the very least) but what can I do. Me a rookie and supposedly inexperienced and immature should not be allowed to speak my mind out.
I don’t despise my ideas being sidetracked when someone can prove that there is something wrong with them. But getting sidetracked just because someone up there doesn’t know the matter or is unable to understand the stuff or simply is uncomfortable with the new technology is ridiculous. I hate that and I hate …
Sometimes I think what I did wrong. I paid the college people to allow me to write some good code so that I could become a good resource and now (It makes me laugh to think of the incompetence of the management) I get paid to write shitty (yes, that the only way to put this down) code. Till last week I was writing code that was churning out garbage just because someone who designed the project was unable to understand or appreciate the benefit of keeping to his boundaries. Just for corollary why in this world would a routine for adding two number need to know the processes involved in reading the numbers (from user or file for that matter), all the routine’s maker should be concerned is getting two numbers and returning the sum.

Once they started to feel the pinch of not having layered system they have finally decided (must thank someone for that) to implement layering. But they are thinking of doing it in C (to think of it they are migrating from Python).
Now the point that concerns me is how the people who have been using Python for doing everything will migrate to C. Python with all the advanced constructs and a runtime environment surely offers the programmer a richer and simpler way of getting work done and now C. its like a journey back to the stone ages (except that you know there are far better tools available). The least they could have done is switch to C++ and probably exploited some benefits and functionalities offered.
This not only would have made the work easier but also intuitive and easily attainable and upgradeable. As for me I would have suggested C#.

Only time will tell what comes to the minds of those sitting high up but lets hope for the best (second best at least, [please]).

I forgot, meanwhile we had gone for an outing (adventure type). Here are some photos from that one.

Radio - My Destiny

2006-10-12T09:54:00.000+05:30

Sometimes you don’t have anything to do but to sit in the office and wonder what is it that you don’t have that could have made you happy, and suddenly you realize that it’s the songs that are missing.
After all you can’t simply go on listening to radio the whole day, cay you?
So battling all odds of the firewalls rules of restricting the community sites and music and illegal download sites I set out to find me some good songs so that will cheer me up on any day! Which songs would qualify for this job? Linkin Park, Eminem and the likes! Yeah, they would be perfect.
So I set out to find some sites where I could find them. About seventy percent of the time the firewall was successful and about 25 percent of the time I was a bit late (the files had been removed from the download sites, these things don’t liger for long you know!), but the small window of five percent was more than enough for me to get what I wanted.
At the end of the day I was able to find myself some six albums of Eminem and I’m yet to find some albums of “Linkin Park”.
But the irony is after all the effort yesterday I don’t have a pair of earphones/headphones today to enjoy the music I downloaded yesterday. So for now it’s back to square one listening to radio and the plain old “Radio City” and the good one “Radio Indigo”.

The Code Search and GAWK

2006-10-06T17:23:00.000+05:30

The latest word on the wire is the release of yet another Google product (not to mention it searches) called Google Code Search.

Basically this a search engine specifically to search in the code snippets (full programs also for that matter). “Search public source code” goes the tagline. This may be of very great interest to the software industry as someone has said that 50 percent of the code we use today is the result “Ctrl+C” and “Ctrl+V” and then some modifications are done.

Anyway the code search will be definite boost for the open source community and the students alike. It will help students finish their project on time and allow the Open Source people to stop themselves from endlessly making copies of the same app.

Anyway today was a rather uneventful day. Spent the whole day downloading the material for Windows Exchange Server and IDE for Python (I’m a snake charmer now!).Seems that I am going to be an expert in the field of “GAWK”! I have the manual for GAWK and an implementation of GAWK for windows.

Someone should say something…

2006-10-03T16:44:00.000+05:30

Everyday one can see the media shouting about one thing or the other; sometime it’s about
the latest scoop they have or it’s the new policy that has come out to protect the so called underprivileged and the underrepresented.

Never in my life have I seen any politician (his cast doesn’t matter) coming out against
these topics in open. All they do is sit back and let the Ass-holes (sorry for the expression) run the show.

Recently I started reading “Falling Over Backwards” by “Arun Shourie”. I must say that do
this day I was largely ignorant about the ways and means the “Mandal” commission had employed to reach the magical figure of 27.5% reservations and the way the Constitution was twisted by adding or removing (as the times required!) a single word, maybe a line or sometimes a whole section or paragraph. I had never known of the numerous cases wherein the courts had given a verdict so as to strike down a proposal or an action authorized by a Government (most of the times State Govt. and sometimes the Central Govt.) but the political parties joined together to change the law itself so that the new law was more
supportive to the previous decision.

The best part is that it didn’t stop there only. They (read Politicians) even went all out to
make sure that the law they passed to support the actions they had authorized before the law existed was put into such a place in constitution where it could not be touched or be commented upon by the Supreme Court.

The current scenario is such that a person who has more muscle power, more money and more
political power is enjoying the benefits of Reservation! Why? The question is completely useless if anyone knows what India stands for. Normally in a democratic country there as one law for all (few exceptions of religious issues like marriage and such) and everyone has to abide by that law. But in India the law changes by the minute as the politicians’ desire. When India gained independence the lawmakers did the terrible mistake of copying the constitution instead or framing a new constitution from scratch. India was a new country with its own set of problems to be addressed. As is with any patchwork the constitution had many loopholes waiting to be exploited by someone who knew how to work the system.

The very important thing the constitution makers forgot was the power to modify the constitution was entirely with the legislature. The same people who get elected and get to have a say in the assembly. They had made judiciary to see that that law that was made by the legislature was properly implemented. But the left a serious flaw there. The legislature got the whole and sole rights to the constitutional amendments and thus no one could stop it if it wanted to make any stand or belief a law.

Of course the framers could not have simply taken away the right to modify the constitution but what they could have done was that every amendment that was going to materialize had to be authorized by the judiciary. But alas! They didn’t do it and nobody after them required it (except for the general public).

And we thought we were living in a free country. Where is the freedom? The basic question that
remains to be answered is that the politics today has become hereditary. The father dies and the son takes over. In case there is no son then some of the kith and kin will take over. Take congress for example, Rahul Gandhi may be very good leader and it may happen that over the course of time he actually does some good to nation. But that doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t have to go through all the hardships his father or the founder of Congress went
through. The dynasty system was thought to have been abolished in India with the
fall of “Moughal” empire. During the colonial rule the governing officials did not come out of a single dynasty. But after the British left after partitioning India, we have relapsed back into the old system which we loved so much. The plain old Dynasty system!

The Printer and the Problems

2006-09-29T16:35:00.000+05:30

One more day has passed today and I’m sitting here in the borrowed cubicle on a borrowed PC and listening to radio on MY CELLPHONE. The day was almost eventless except for 3 pages of printout where the printer started to act up and demand special paper.

I don’t know if this was the fault of “Adobe Acrobat Reader®” or the Printer Driver or “HP LaserJet 8100 series PCL6” but the document I was trying to print got stuck and would not get printed.

The printer demanded that special size paper be inserted from the manual loading tray to start the printing. Thankfully a few key strokes later (actually buttons on the printer console) I managed to force the printer to print on the A4 (standard) sheets.

After I got the printout I’m still wondering why that printer was shouting for paper of different size when the job could be done on the paper already present in the tray.

Today I have to go to my supervisor to try and get myself a PC, and I just hope that they give me a new PC with at least minimalist configuration (P4 2.4 GHz+ with at least 512 RAM). Actually I would love to have a PC with 1 G or RAM and Dual Core Processors (HT will also do fine ;)).

So much for the Office part! I actually forgot that I have a three day weekend (remember Gandhi) and most probably Wednesday will also be a Holiday (yippee!). Why? Because some fools in Karnataka have called for a “Bandh” and thus no public transport (yeah Baby!), that means almost all the companies will be down on their knees while they wait for the Bandh to finish.

But alas, in lieu of the Wednesday off I’ll have to come to work on Saturday! Sucks man! There are times when a man is tired (Psychologically, if not physically or mentally), Saturday makes a person feel tired and makes him want to sleep and do things he normally doesn’t do. It’s a natural response to the Week gone by, when a guy sits down and contemplates what he did in the week and tries to find out better ways to pass time and Better excuses for all the misdeeds ;).

Will be back on Tuesday

Allocations – no comments!

2006-09-28T17:58:00.000+05:30

This comes in the wake of fresh allocations…
Not a surprise there, again as it turns out the people are not happy with the way they have been handled. Unlike me who is perfectly happy with what I got I know of some people who deserved a lot better and got so less.

Sometimes the world is not so gracious; I know of a time when I was not happy with the stuff I was allocated to, that was about a month back, but back then I didn’t have any say and I could not blame the people who allocated me to the department. But when I consider the present time I sure do feel that the staffing and allocation department should have been more thoughtful while allocating the Human Resources.

There have been a few exceptions to this (including myself ;)). But that can’t make people overlook the fact that they need to revise the allocation scheme. Once they have examined people for more than one month and had their people monitoring and trying to gauge the potential of the people to be allocated to various groups, they should have tried using the feedback from the supervisors and the results from the test.

Looking back on my allocation I feel that in the beginning I was not entirely happy with what I got allocated but once I got to the root of the job I was supposed to do I felt that this could be the ultimate redemption for me.

More on the allocations and their fallouts tomorrow.

8 to 8

2006-09-26T18:32:00.000+05:30

Well something left unsaid contribute to the world in unsaid ways…. And more often than not the contributions result in more chaos than there originally was.

I’m not saying that the converse also holds, when you say something you should not have said the tension builds up not inside you but in somebody else and that my friend can sure lead to an increase in the entropy of the system on the whole!

This my friends is a place where each weekday I’ll put in what I learnt from that day and what I should have done. Although I must say that I can’t disclose any info regarding my whereabouts or what do I do but almost everybody with some mind should be able to guess.. 