The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami

The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami News and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts.

Bloglines blog.

I am fed up of using email for forwarding links to the good articles that I step on when going through my bloglines subscriptions. So I have started a link/clip blog on bloglines for publishing links with just a click. Have linked to it from the sidebar [Some Interesting Recent Reads].

SUV safety

Before you think of buying a SUV read this and google SUV safety if you are not convinced enough. I stumbled upon this from some blog but don't remember which..pretty funny how companies still manage to sell them. Probably SUVs should also come with a statutory warning!

Laptop upgrade.

Bragging time again :) I now have a very good laptop at my disposal. Its Thinkpad T41p which the team acquired some 2-3 months back. I tried out the "braces for impact" technology immediately by banging and shaking it :) The options property sheet for this feature has a "Real-time Status" pane that shows a graphic laptop which shakes when you physically shake/bang the machine and a status message is updated to tell you if the hard disk is ON or stopped. In addition this thing also has 1G RAM and a 60 GB HD, battery life of 4 hrs and a combo drive.

Da Vinci Code

I finished reading The Da Vinci Code this morning. Nice piece of fiction which builds on some facts. Comparable in its raciness to a Robert Ludlum novel. Raises a lot of controversy about the actual roots of Christianity and those that have been projected by the church. Why am I writing this though..everybody probably knows about it by now :) Those who haven't read it should.

Darcs

Lambda the Ultimate reports on Darcs. It is yet another de-centralized (has the advantages similar to Bitkeeper's where one can develop disconnected since each tree is equivalent to a repository) version control system. One thing to note is that it is written in Haskell and is based on the "thoery of patches" from quantum mechanics. I tried to go through the theory and my brain dumped core big time :D.

Toddlerpedes

The blog of wierd things reports on toddlerpedes. Check out this comment on it too :)

On KISS

Read a talk by Adam Bosworth and a follow-up by Sriram Krishnan.

Better news aggregator..

In line with the previous post some days ago I felt that I needed a better news reader than what the bloglines web interface provides. So in desperation I decided that a bloglines backend for gnus might be the right answer so that I get all the standard news reader functionalities like scoring, reading news offline etc for free. I did some elisp hacking and came up this. Unfortunately nobody has responded to my queries :( Maybe the idea is too stupid and there is some other way to get the desired functionality with gnus which i do not know :((

You know you are reading too much on bloglines when..

one fine day your manager comes up to your desk and says

"saara internet padh kar ho gaya kya"

and keeps on repeating this everytime he sees you browsing after that. Information overload is so much real :)

Back..

from a 10 day Diwali vacation in Nagpur with no Diwali homework :) (back in school we used to get homework to be done during the holidays and I used to procrastinate it till the last day :)) Every time I go to Nagpur I can't help but rave about the roads there. It has about 5 times better roads than Bangalore and about 10 times less traffic. If you want to experience some driving pleasure this is the city to be. It hasn't been so rosy all along. There was time when the roads were an absolute nightmare but the last 4-5 years have really seen a lot of development..nice wide and smooth roads, good footpaths with trash bins at regular intervals, 2-3 flyovers over some busy roads, flower beds on some road sides..Recently PSPL has opened an office in Nagpur and it has succeeded in getting atleast 3 of my seniors to the city(they are about 80 odd strong there now). One left IBM ISL, one Sasken I think and one IBM IRL. Apart from that Nagpur now has a Westside, Pyramid, Big Bazaar and also a Cafe Coffee Day :) Real estate prices aren't low but are still reasonable..Megha's sister bought a duplex with 3 bedrooms for about 15-16 lacs. Probably a good time invest in some land there in anticipation of some more IT companies opening up.

To B.E. or not to B.E.... part 1

To B.E. or not to B.E.... part 1

"No this is not the deprivation of the non-vegetarian stuck in a Saravana Bhavan for life. No this is infinitely worse. Anything remotely comparable is the plight of the Thakur in Sholay who lost his wife and both arms."

LOL :))

Standord Day 39 onwards..

Start here and keep on reading till you hit Stanford: Day 41. It is entertaining :)

Eminem's new video/political statement

The Mono man has linked to the new video and lyrics for the latest Eminem song. I guess Kerry must be really very happy. The most hilarious statement in the lyrics is

"to disarm this weapon of mass destruction that we call our president"

The video is also great.

Lost and found

Sometimes you discover that some of the books you have lost are actually being put to good use :D I mean I have searched for this book for a long time and I was planning to do so again when I go to Nagpur for Diwali and here it is...I don't remember donating it on my own..My guess is some btech guy borrowed it from me and then when he found out it was too late to return it he gave it to the library and also attributed the good deed to me.

This mallu is funny :)

This guy Sidin writes really funny stuff.This story about why south indian guys are so female starved and this one about some south indian naming cruelties are extremely funny :) Thanks to Megha for supplying the links.

Can you still sprint??

Well I thought I could. And also expected that I would be able to do it well. Context was the IBM sports meet on saturday. I went there and participated in the 100 mtr sprint. I practiced getting out of the blocks and building up speed but I did not practice going the whole way and managing to stay on my feet to complete it on that dirty uneven track :D Halfway through the sprint I was trying to get all my weight forward and accelarate. Unfortunately the ground beneath got a bit uneven and I misbalanced a bit and fell forward. Had a soft landing but by that time everybody else surged ahead :(( Anyways I got up and sprinted again and completed the race ahead of one person and for a full 20 minutes after the race I was catching my breathe and my legs are still aching :). Physical fitness is at an all time low for me I guess..sob sob

Some people are making their mark!

I read this news item some days ago. Pavan also sent this link on our batch mailing list today. Find the mention of Mr. Ankur Panchabudhe who is going great guns in Veritas.

Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog: Colon cleansing

I never knew some people are so obsessive about cleanliness :) Anyways the whole thing is unnecessary and potentially dangerous as the article states.

Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog: Colon cleansing

I am not OK, you are not OK.

Prajakt has this story about how according to the fools at ISKCON, Hindu children are better than western children. Another story talks about Kali Yuga. They should also post some behind the scenes kind of a story telling how they come up with such enormously hilarious content :) Amit there is some popular demand for you posting a Gayab like review about these articles :)

Mining and carpentry

Apparently Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti can also make useful furniture. Megha pointed me to the following image

Whidbey team system.

Some good samaritan in my office downloaded the Whidbey beta1 with Team System. It is a whopping 3.5 GB :o...Harshal you might want to take a look at the FxCop thing that was on your list if you have the bandwidth, both from a free time perspective and from an actual network bandwidth perspective :) (I am not sure if this is available in the VS 2005 express editions.) They also have something called PREfast which does static analysis for C/C++ leaks, null references etc.

SwitchProxy

I have been using SwitchProxy for some time. Nice extension to use if you are in a large organization where you can use multiple proxies which can be up and down and which perform well or bad unpredictably :)

BitKeeper niceties

I went through BitKeeper (BK) documentation a couple of days back. BK has a concept of multiple repositories which is pretty useful. It is the ClearCase UCM concept of development and integration streams carried a step further. With UCM you have a separate dev stream where you can work with as many intermediate versions as you like, but the whole thing falls apart when you are disconnected from the server. So if you create a view on a laptop and want to work from home, you can, but you can't checkin intermediate versions, can't compare with previous ones etc. Yes there is a ClearCase webclient which one can use over the net so you don't really need to be on the LAN or VPN but then that is not what is the cheapest and most productive option. What one really wants is all source control functionality on your desktop/laptop. BK provides it and I guess this is a feature that gives them the edge over their competitors when they sell to companies who have mobile employees.

ISKCON Mumbai, Hare Krishna Land

ISKCON Mumbai, Hare Krishna Land:

"5. Love marriages are nothing but marriages based on lust. The fact is that most love marriages end in a divorce. While most arranged marriages are successful, the alternative to love marriages."

Prajakt sent this link on YM. The above point "for my information" is just one of the several gems :) Another one I liked is:

If you want to keep your righteousness values, avoid Bollywood movies. Until around the late 70's, Bollywood movies were ok, but now they have simply become stupid, silly, and demonic.

And while we are discussing demonic content, if you are already a victim of immorality and the likes then I would recommend Sex and the City and The Mind of the Married Man. Both have a lot of "shock value" :) and I find them entertaining. Your views might differ irrespective of your demonization index :)

And while we are discussing content I should admit that since my parents' last visit (in May-June) me and Megha do try to follow a particular (non-demonic) Marathi serial "Hya Gojirvanya Gharat" on ETV Marathi :p (airs at 8:30pm on weekdays)

The Good

The flickr photo things seems to have bombed somehow...also Nikhil pointed out that this might be offensive to Mitra now that he is getting married and all..so let this post die.

ClearCase UCM: WHAT IS

I went through the Source Control HOWTO some days ago. Almost all the chapters till now have information targetted at beginners. However, the fourth discusses some behind the scenes issues too, about how versions are retrieved from deltas etc. Overall a good guide that freshers should read (I remember my early days in firstRain and shudder :))

Well things did improve after the early days and we got around to using CVS and here at IBM Rational I have been using (no points for guessing) ClearCase.

We are using the UCM(Unified Change Management) partially (Partially because UCM can also integrate with ClearQuest so that there is a relation between the bugs/tasks and your code changes which we are not using for some strange reason)

If you join a team which works with UCM you can have a pretty clueless first few days because UCM abstracts out a lot of the source control activities. I am still not sure about some :). The following is how I understand CC by equating the different CC terms to basic SCM operations (mostly in terms of what I know from CVS usage).

1. Project: A project in UCM translates to a branch in CVS. So when you start with a new project you create the main trunk with some set of files and then as the project evolves you add/delete/modify files on the trunk.
2. Streams: Again streams map to branches. There are two kinds of streams Integration and Development. Every project has a single integration stream where all the developers integrate their work. An integration stream is a branch of the trunk. A project can have multiple development streams. Many developers can have many development streams. A development stream is a branch from the project's integration stream. One develops everything on the development stream. So in CVS terms it is like having at least one separate branch per developer per project. Thus you are free to checkin as many intermediate versions of your work as you like without affecting others.
3. Activities: CC has the checkout-edit-checkin model as opposed to the edit-merge-commit model of CVS. This brings us to "Activities". When you checkout you can associate the checkout to an "activity". An activity has a name and you can associate multiple checkouts of the same file or multiple checkouts of a set of files with an activity. Later you can view an activity and examine the change set associated. e.g. To fix a bug you create an activity called "Fix bugno" and associate it with all the files that you checkout for it. This is the equivalent of putting up a patch manually on a bug. Instead of the bug and you doing the job you let the source control system to do the tracking. Plus this has the advantage that you can view differences between multiple versions of the same file during the course of the activity.
4. Deliver and rebase: Occasionally you want to merge your changes back to the integration stream or merge the latest from the integration stream to your development stream. These actions are called "deliver" and "rebase" repectively. This is just like normal merging from one branch to the other in CVS but devoid of the pain of labeling each time before doing the merge. Clearcase does the job of creating an activity and maintaining the change set for the merge and also remembers the points from which you have merged changes on both branches. One can also selectively merge changes by delivering only those activities that you want (provided there is no dependency between the activities)
5. Views: A view in CC is your local CVS tree or working area or sandbox. Views can be snapshot or dynamic. Snapshot views are like a CVS tree which you need to update explicitly to get the latest changes. A dynamic view resides on the server and any changes that go into it are visible to you immediately. CC recommends using a dynamic view for the integration stream and a snapshot view for the development stream. Some people actually like dynamic views a lot and use it for development too. My personal opinion differs and I think it is not a good idea. CC implements a file system for achieving dynamic views and in effect on windows it mounts a folder from the server. This causes the builds to be slow..maybe it can be speeded up with some tuning parameters for the MVFS file system that CC uses but I haven't tried that..but regardless, I think it is not such a great idea. It increases your dependence on the network and you can't work offline.
   
6. Baselines: Baselines are like tags or labels in CVS.(I suspect they are something more too but for the scope of this discussion this idea suffices)
   
7. Policies: In UCM one can specify project policies. One example which the manual gives is enforcement of the policy that a developer should rebase to the latest baseline fro m the integration stream and thus do most of the merging work in his development view. This saves you from the scenario where the developer is locking up the integration view files for complex merging. If the user tries to violate a policy clearcase shouts. In CVS one has to merge in the local tree by default if the local version is out of date. But then there are other policies that one can enforce too like allowing/disallowing delivery across projects etc.
8. Parallel development: After some time you reach a point where you want to fork off on a release branch. In CVS one would create a branch. In CC you create a new project and "seed" it from some baseline of the project from where you find it best to fork. So now you can develop parallelly on the release project and the project from where you forked (mostly the main project). You can then later choose to merge changes from your release branch on to the trunk project by "delivering a baseline" across projects. For the other way round you can rebase the release projects integration view from the required baseline on the trunk but this is a very unlikely scenario. The point that I am trying to make here is that just as deliver and rebase applies for integration and development streams it can also be used for integration streams across projects. As already described a project maps to a branch and so do the streams so the basic operation of merging applies to both.

Port blocking..

Harshal: Ya, that is what the sysad guy tells me. For valid business reasons I can get it opened..but I really don't have one :)

The PubSub client.

I checked out the PubSub sidebar yesterday. They are also offering some free libraries under the BSD license. However, that damn thing does not work from behind a firewall. Looks like it talks XMPP with the PubSub server on port 5222 :( If they start supporting WS-Eventing over http then I would be able to access the service from the office.

Film Review..

Amit's articulate 2 paise about the movie Gayab :)

firstRain wake up..

Venetica is going to be acquired by IBM. Venetica offers content aggregation products/solutions. Among other problems they also offer to solve the "empty portal syndrome". I guess firstRain also offers something similar :)

Latest hindi commentary gems..

The Olympics has brought back some well known voices and also a lot of unintended entertainment :) The guy I was entertained by the most was probably Jasdev Singh, who is a recepient of the Padma Shri according to this article. Padma Shri be damned, here are the gems:

1) The long jump is on and me and Megha are watching keenly since Anju Bobby George was participating. A certain Yelena * from Kazhakistan is warming up for her jump...commentator describes it thus..

Yelena..(pause)..Kajakistan ki ..(pause)..apane muscles ko.....(looong pause)....heelaate hue...

This in that oh so familiar voice of his was just too hilarious :)

2) This one is from a hockey match between India and some team X

aur ye X ke khiladi ball ko aage le jaate hue..lekin ye unke saamne Dileep Tirkey...deewar ki tarah...(pause)..sach much bohot hi majboot deewar hai Bharat ki, Dileep Tirkey..

I really recommend you to watch a recording sometime on DD sports if you get a chance so that you can hear it verbatim :)

Little did I know...

that one of my first few p0rn viewings (some time before my 10th std) called Henry & June had Uma Thurman in it. I liked her in Kill Bill quite a lot. Never mind this review, all I was interested in back then was the "scenes" :) and my (and all fellow juvenile delinquents who shared the cost of renting the movie :), I think a VCR used to cost about 60 Rs, an old english movie would cost 7, new one 10, XX would cost 20 and XXX about 30 :) and the cost would be shared amongst 6-8 of us) perception back then was that the movie was real hot!

An atheletes final hurdle

This sums up an atheletes story for a place on the podium.
PS: I now subscribe to The Hindu and it was not easy. The paper bill guy and paper delivery guy aren't the same and either the bill guy is a lossy channel or the delivery guy is highly resistant to change. Two months back I told the bill guy that I wanted to switch from TOI to Hindu. No effect. Then the next time he came I refused to give him the bill. Then suddently the next day onwards I get both the TOI and Hindu. About a week or two from then bill guy comes again, gets a mouthful from me and only then sanity returns :)

Kuro5hin takes a look at Olympic doping..

The Olympic Drug Problem.

Renal constipation..

Harshal has pointed to this doping story Its summary is "Look ma, no pee :)"

How wired is your home?

Grady Booch on his home network setup

Sexy Sexy Sexy mujhe log bole..

This recent story about the case against Uma Bharti in the Idgah Maidan flag hoisting controversy has the following words:

Bharti, then dubbed sexy sanyasin for her ochre robes

..I mean why?? And even if somebody justifies the mention then how on this fucking earth can somebody be so sex starved :))

Disclaimers for Harshal.

Do not read between the <br>s :) I am not thinking at all...If I were capable of "thinking" about it I would be doing a Phd which I am not :)) I am just summarising information gathered from different sources.

Yes, you are right that MS uses such products internally..lots of people do, mostly OS vendors HP/M$ (I am not sure about IBM which is an irony :)) do so for verifying protocols and third party stuff like device drivers. However, they are not as omnipresent as memory profiling, performance analysis tools etc (read as tool usage has taken off in the application development space as much) I mean I wish we had had a tool like this to catch the crazy deadlock between java threads due to some convoluted synchronization code in vS just like we had purify for settling the leaks in the native code.

Connection: smatch -- based on --> stanford checker -- worked on by --> Dawson Engler and others -- founded --> Coverity.

As far as the reason for posting about this lately is concerned, one of my colleagues is doing a Phd around the same topic (he works part-time, I envy him..but he also has a lot of money so he can afford to :) ). He sent me some links to it and I also attended a talk recently on the subject.

You are also urged to try out Rose RealTime. There is a link for an eval download on the right hand side. The product is mainly used for writing software which can be modeled as a set of nested state machines and is heavily used for developing applications for embedded real time systems. It lets you concentrate on the business logic while taking away the state machine coding from you. You code whatever goes on when states change etc. It is based on the philosphy of "Model driven development". One can debug on the model level itself e.g you can put breakpoints on the states rather than on lines of code.

Answers for Amit.

There can only be two aspects when one "masks" some rules.
1) You are intentionally keeping known bugs in the system (both in cases when you know that you don't stand to gain from the fixes and when you want to push stuff under the carpet :) )
2) The tool you are using gives a large number of false positives and hence you end up masking the rule.

The second one is a problem that good tools have/will solved and the first depends on your judgement and integrity :)

Anyways consider that you have a certain constraints in the system where-in some valid code forms a of a pattern that is considered as a bad practice (also called an anti-pattern) under the programming framework (e.g. J2EE, J2SE etc). Such bad practices need not be given as input by the programmer. All such rules can be pre shipped by the tool vendor and maybe extended (if needed) by one of the project members and reused by all.

Unified Sporting Theory.

Instead of holding hazaar different events after building hazaar infrastructure, there should be a single infrastructure to judge the competitors in track and field, swimming and weightlifting. The unified infra should be a lab where people submit blood/urine (whatever they use for dope testing) samples under different event heads and the efficacy of the doping method used will be rated and medals awarded accordingly. Also the Olympics should be renamed "I dope better than you" games.

Static Analysis tools for the uninitiated - 2

Amit: Yes it should be similar to PC-Lint. I haven't used/evaluated any of these two but they are both good examples.

Static analysis tools can understand rules which can be added by the user provided they fall into certain types. More formally they should be some kind of logic formulae. e.g If method X() is called, method Y() should be called at least once after method X() has been called. This would probably (I am bad at logic and maths :)) be a rule that can be expressed in temporal logic. The analysis tool takes in such rules, checks your code for violations of these rules and then reports these as bugs.

Model checking is another technique used for verification. Microsoft uses a tool called SLAM for device driver verification. Protocol designers also use model checking. In model checking the user has to provide an abstract model of the program against which the program is verified. Generally this can take a lot of "ramping up time" if you need to specify the model since it writing a model means that a person has full understanding of the program.

Regarding the comments: I have ditched the haloscan comments now and use blogger comments, but anonymous comments are allowed. In the sign-in page you have a link which allows you to post comments anonymously.

Static Analysis tools for the uninitiated.

We have all used tools like purify for automated leak detection, out of bounds memory access, free memory reads etc (essentially certain types of code patterns which are considered as bugs). These tools are great productivity enhancers and cost savers since we can and fix more bugs before the product reaches the customer.

However, there are a lot of other bugs like deadlocks, race conditions, resource leaks like unfreed sockets, database connections etc which are hard to find and generally can be hit at customer deployments which are costly both for the customer and the software vendor. Such bugs can also be auto-detected using static analysis and dynamic analysis to some extent. There are two hard problems though:
1) The algorithms do not scale well for large code bases, and
2) The number of "false positives" tends to be very high in static analysis.

However several people have now worked on these problems and have come up with usable tools. e.g Coverity. It will be that you run a tool like this from your IDE once you want your code to be checked and viola you get quality bugs reported in a small time.

Hitchens on Mother Teresa's Beatification.

Less than Miraculous. In this article Hitchens talks about the highly unprofessional attitude of the media which reported about the "miracle" needed to be assiciated with Mother Teresa for her to be beatified. He says at the end:

"But our media, so crudely materialistic in so many ways, is also anti-materialistic at just the wrong moments."

I would disagree to this..the media reported what popular belief wanted. Not many people want to buy newspapers that question the religious establishments that one believes it.

So much for separating content from presentation..

I changed my blog template and it is not painless. All the changes that you have made in your earlier template are lost. So I had to redo the blogroll integration from bloglines. I was also faced with redoing the haloscan comment integration but now blogger provides comments so I skipped that one. Why don't I get to choose/edit a css separately from the blog content template? Blogger people must have surely thought about this..what am I missing?

Christopher Hitchens on Mother Teresa and Michael Moore

I was going through the archives of jivha (unfortunately jivha has been (end-of-life)eol'ed) and found some material on Mother Teresa. And as I crawled from there on I came upon some articles by Christopher Hitchens. He offers some very compelling information about things that the Mother did the wrong way and did it in the name of religion. The whole world according to him accepts it unquestioningly that she did indeed help a lot of people and did it well and selflessly. Very few journalists have actually examined her work and its effectiveness from close quarters. He even alleges that the funds that were gathered in the name of the poor and destitue were mostly siphoned off for building convents in around 120 countries when they could have been used for building better hospitals, schools etc.

I went through the following articles. Most of them are long (and at times repetitive) and going through all of them will take you some time but it makes some interesting reading.

There are about 4 articles at Atanu Dey on Mother Teresa.

Hitchens has written a book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. This is a review of the book.

Hitchens has also criticised the Oscar winning documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 for presenting a misleading picture. Micheal Moore offers some "factual back-up" which I have not yet gone through exhaustively but some of the points there like "FAHRENHEIT 9/11: Nearly seven minutes passed with nobody doing anything." have been questioned by Hitchens as being one edge of an opportunist's double edged sword (Had Bush indulged in frantic activity he would have been accused of acting in haste etc etc..)

All in all interesting reads..especially on one of those days that you get tired of work and want a break :)

GROKLAW

This GROKLAW story is hilarious MS apparently announced that somebody was gonna use their software since their software was cheaper and more secure :)) ROTFL.

Cookies

Not browser ones but real, light, and tasty choco-chips cookies. Ya I made them yesterday with a little help from Megha. Garnishing with dark chocolate peices/powder adds to the taste.

Art, Art, Art.

I guess I am in the art business...just have a long way to go to be in a position to create things of beauty :D

The Art Of Unix Programming, Master of Fine Arts in Software, Hackers and Painters. All these links talk in varying degrees of explicitness about software as an art rather than a branch of engineering.

As I May Think...: Enterprise vs. Consumer Systems

As I May Think...: Enterprise vs. Consumer Systems. Some wise words.

Lemon tarts

The boundaries of my baking skills kingdom have been expanded. Lifting a receipe from a book (LG microwave receipes or something) I tried my hand/luck at lemon tarts. The receipe used was different from the one given in the link. However, in essence a lemon tart is made of 2 modules :)

One is the base and the other the filling. The base is flour-based and the lemon thingy is in the filling or topping. The topping needs to be pulpy or jam like. Lemon and sugar give the taste and the texture is dervied using flour, corn startch/egg. Although mine could have tasted better (Megha did not dislike it nor did she have an overwhelming urge to gobble loads of it and termed it as "interesting") it does make a tasty dessert.

I guess replacing the lemon juice with orange juice should give orange tarts..that's what I plan to try next.

Roti Maker

2-3 weeks back there was a window of time when we did not have a gas cylinder at home for cooking due to some shortage at the gas company. Wasn't such a big problem since we could cook stuff in the microwave oven but making rotis was a big problem. So we decided to buy a roti maker.

So the roti maker has two plates between which you keep the dough and press and once a bit hot you turn the roti and let it puff. Sounded pretty neat to us. However, practice wasn't so perfect. The damn thing did not have a user manual and it seems there is a special technique for kneading the dough. In the absence of a manual we argued and reached a conclusion that we should make the dough wetter than normal. However even that did not work. The problem is as follows:

Both the pressing plates have a non-stick teflon coating. Since it is an electric roti maker both the plates are hot. So when you put the dough in surface of the dough loses all moisture and becomes slippery and when you press the plates the dough just slips out rather than flattening out into a nice roti that the gadget promises to churn out.

Trouble is I can't FGI :((

The maker Jaipan has this stupid flash site.

And while we are at rotis I might as well declare with immense pride that I too have mastered the art of rolling nice round ones :)

ReleaseComObject and peace of mind

don't go hand in hand :) This is a good article about the whole thing. The problem we faced unfortunately falls under case 3 in the advice provided in the linked article.

outlookindia.com | showtime

outlookindia.com | showtime

Ajit sent me this link today :) Its the review of the new Salman Khan film(?) Garv. Feature to be noted is that Punit Issar is the director :))

The worth of Gmail invites..

One has to admit that if your wife/girlfriend is also a s/w engr then a gmail invite is one of the coolest gifts you can give to her :) and it comes free to :p

Some days ago Megha pointed out all this craziness to me..I never knew.

Harshal: No interesting private mails from UNinteresting people this time around :)

United States Patent: 6,727,830

This story is about patent 6,727,830 and it proves that the US patent office is full of nincompoops.

Gmail invites

Three lucky people today. Megha, Nikhil and Harshal. Thankfully I did not have a problem choosing since I had exactly 3 invites :)
In the meanwhile some managers thought I was working pretty hard and gave me a "Thank You Award" :D. I hope it has slightly more substance to it than "Employee of the month" at fR :))

The jetty on the beach.

View from the lakshadweep beach resort where we stayed.

Me in authentic scuba diving gear in an authentic sea.

Mr & Mrs Haldar on their wedding with funky headgear :)

Mr & Mrs Haldar on this yrs holi :)

Blogroll

Latest in here is the blogroll courtesy bloglines.

My flash drive seems to be pretty much up there..

Ars Technica: USB 2.0 Hi-Speed drive review - Page 10 - (6/2003) gives the comparison of the flash drives in the market. My Sandisk cruzer mini fares pretty well in the review. It aint the best one as far as read-write speeds are concerned but has good average perf for both.

Google cooks blogging.

Google Blog has this appetizing read posted on it recently. The oregano reminds me of the oregano chicken that Amlan and Mitil (mostly Mitil :)) had successfully made at their place a few weeks back. The preparation is very simple. Just marinate some boneless chicken or chicken breast in some lime juice and oregano mixture for a long long time. Then cook it in a microwave..fat free..no need to add any oil etc. Tastes excellent.

These pictures are being brought to you courtesy photo blogging
The greatest innovation here being unlimited photo hosting :) Kidding..Hello is nice and makes posting photos on a blog very easy since it does the work of uploading the photo to blogger on its own..however does not work behind firewalls :( so eliminates the option of using office resources for personal gain :D

This piece of fundu english was seen at Chennai's Marina(?) beach which is also the place where the last photo was taken..

The sleepy man and the sea

More gmail niceties

1) One click replies..
Traditional way: read mail..click reply button..wait for a new page..then type..
Gmail way: read mail..click in the bottom input box..javascript/css magic..to/from/subject etc fields automagically on page and you can just start typing..

2) Threading..Something which is pretty useful for following a conversation..a thread of mails can accessed on a single page..you can expand and collapse individual mails...neat for a start.

3) Messages can be grouped together using labels. One can add more than one labels to a message which is neater than moving a message to a folder and only one folder.

Curiously though the stardard "marking" a message is referred to as "starring" a message.

I got a couple of requests for invites and so i scanned some gmail help. It says that invites ll be called for periodically and the opportunity shall be conveyed by a mail in my inbox. So there is still hope in your lives if getting a blogger account is too cumbersome a task for you.

Whats in, whats out...

1)
OUT:
Using Megha's digicam with a 128 Mb memory stick as a data transfer device between home and office.

IN:
Using a new 256 Mb SanDisk flash drive for data transfer. It was gifted by Megha's sis Snehal and her husband Sudarshan who arrived 2 days back from the US of A bringing goodies unlimited with them :)..ya chocolates, nuts and some Lime Margarita ready-to-drink alcoholic stuff too.

Will try and see if carrying a 3-4 yr old IBM Thinkpad (whopping 10GB of HDD and 484 or so MHz processor :), decent RAM though 512 Mb) from home to office and back, just to synchronize working files can also be put in the OUT list..currently looks like transferring whole source trees is slightly slow due to the USB-ness of the drive.

2)
OUT:
neerajbhope@rediffmail.com
IN:
neerajbhope@gmail.com

Even though these accessibility problems hold, credit shall be given for atleast thinking and coming up with some changes to the interfaces for web-based email. e.g. selecting messages was till now limited to clicking on little checkboxes one by one or using a "Select all" checkbox. Here I saw a select all, read, unread, starred, unstarred, none. I liked this one.

BTW the new blogger interface is also good. e.g.Posts editing and previewing can be toggled with just ctrl-shift-p which is very convenient. Both gmail and blogger are making efforts on the interface front which is nice.

3)
OUT:
Wearing 60-70 Rs slippers to office and other places of stature :)
IN:
Wearing slightly expensive 1000 buck-sish Red Tape leather chappal/floater kinds.

4)
OUT:
Grammar upgrading for various SQLs.
IN:
Writing actions for the updated grammars :((

5)
OUT:
Sanity.
IN:
Insanity. Cause I have to track down changes made by some crazy assholes to "add features" and "fix defects" to the earlier SQL parsers..which sounds not insane..but is because they did not change the grammar files but edited generated files :(( and have brought considerable grief to my soul.
Imagine thousands of lines of parser code emitted by the likes of javacc and nincompoops editing them and maintaining these changes by hand merging it every time :(( How did they sleep at the end of the day they stepped on this sinful path???????

Slashdot | Google Files for IPO

Slashdot | Google Files for IPO. But that is not the interesting thing over here. The page has one familiar name :) and a familiar idea. Hmm now is there an IP issue lurking somewhere here??

Remembering Van Wilder

A few days ago I watched the movie "Masti" with my colleagues. This review is misleading. It gives it an average rating. This one however is way up there with the likes of this movie , Yes Van Wilder . Its got double entendre of the quality that made me laugh only in my 6th-7th standard !! And it has Tara Sharma and her fantastically squeeky voice.

If you have already watched Masti or if Van Wilder memories are back haunting you, read this and lighten up :)

Music sales down...what else do they expect..

CNN.com - Music slump: 'Worst may be over'� - Apr 7, 2004 This is linked today from Slashdot. According to the article music sales have fallen 7.6% in 2003, a record fall. I am not surprised.

The music industry is dumb. I am not the first one to say this and blog about it, but crib I shall. I completely agree with this.
I agree because:

On 29th March (yes, it was Megha's birthday gift) I bought Norah Jones's new Feels like home CD marketed in India by EMI, and yes anti copy technolgy is provided for free :) This was my first experience with anti copy technology and inspite of the bad things i had heard about it, I went ahead and bought it expecting a certain degree of inconvenience.

My expectations weren't low enough and now I feel cheated. I expected it to not play (with normal music players like winamp etc) on a computer where it can be possibly ripped. They provide a player with the CD using which you can play the CD even on a computer and so I thought it was ok. However, I expected it to play on my dvd/mp3 player and another portable sony cd player. The cover of the CD warns "Might not play in some car stereos". I thought ok..i do not have a car stereo :) ..

I come home put it in the CD players and they fail to recognize the CD :(( I put it on the computer and play it using the player on the CD. It plays music which i felt was low on quality..it seems they introduce some errors in the content which can be removed only by their player and the format in itself is some windows media player format. The whole thing just sucks big time. If this was not enough, the fucking player takes 100% CPU :((

Dumb idiots..after making me go through this if EMI expects me to buy even one more CD from them then it is just wishful thinking.

Easy CD extractor people have decoded the little secret though and offer ripping from anti copy CDs as a feature :) I used it with great pleasure.

EOF

I am currently working with a javacc grammar for oracle sql and pl/sql. It is a huge 8712 line grammar file. The original author has summed up his feelings at the end of the file thus:

/********************************* End of SQL (Not Life Though) *********************************/

:)

Analysing that file is like penance, and unfortunately i have to do it daily :(

Fwds

I am sick of them. All the fwds enumerating Pakistani courtesy extended to those Indians who went over for the matches. Makes me puke...how stupid can ppl be to forward one of those. If you have done so please visit a public toilet everyday for the next 30 days and stay in there for atleast 24 hrs a day. Oxygen masks are not allowed.

Megha's dad left for Daman today morning. Has generously left the Black & White whisky bottle behind with large peg in it. Nice scotch it is. Megha's mother is also leaving today evening for Nagpur so I shall be free to roam again in the house with just my underpants on :)

Two days back we ordered a lot of furniture for the house. Despite our protest Megha's parents insisted on gifting us a double bed and a diwan. Some ppl are surprised to know that we did not have a bed till now...So we went on a rather innocuous visit to the furniture market here 2 days back to order the same. However by the time we returned home we ended up ordering a sofaset (3 seater, 2 chairs, center table), a bookshelf and a hanging chair; all cane. Will be getting them on the 1st.

Megha's birthday is close..29th..I am backing myself to not forget :) Have added an entry in the phone scheduler to be absolutely sure!!

Tale of a stolen bike

Boo hoo hoo...the bike i loved so much..my Yamaha RX-135 was stolen last saturday by some asshole. It was locked and inside the compound and yet.... :((

I have insurance and hence some consolation. The story is as follows..

On Friday night I came home and parked it in the compound. The house owners who live on the ground floor, had left for their native village the same day. Uncle was going to be back at night and then go. I went to lock the gate at about 11 but did not do so since i did not see Uncle's bike and thought that he would be coming in late. Woke up in the morning half hearing gentle worried words from Megha conveying the missing bike :(( What followed is even more interesting.

As all normal citizens would do me and megha started for a Police Station on megha's bike..seems like the bastard(s)? had deflated her bike and so we got only abt a kilometer far and were stranded in since there were no shops open at that time in the morning...so dragged the vehicle for some distance and then banged on a motor garage..a guy emerged fortunately and we left the bike there and proceeded in a rickshaw to the police station. There we were advised to get the papers of the bike xeroxed and come after 15-20 mins since the concerned policeman was not present. So it was done; only to be informed that I should go to some other police station. So it was said and again so it was done.

New police station all seemed fine. We wrote an application for filing the complaint following which we were to wait so that some constable would accompany us to the crime scene. So we waited and waited and waited and.....and were bored...wanted to rest my butt on something...so went up to the compound of the police station and did so on the wall...So both of us were sitting there like good law abiding citizens until some frustrated constable thought ill of it and whisked us away from there...so we again went inside and sat on the chairs.

After some time there was some frantic activity and before we knew what was happening the inspector of the station walked in. Everybody stood up when he did so..except for us :) Quite frankly I did not see the need for it...

Then everybody settled down and we were still waiting..sitting on the chairs and what followed that did disturb me. I was sitting and suddenly hear a policeman talking to me saying "This is too much sir..this is too bad.." I look around trying to grasp what had offended him. He looked at my legs..hmmm...I was sitting cross legged in my shorts and shaking my legs..(not any other body part just the legs :) ) and somehow this was not acceptable to him. I shrugged conveying a coredump. Another policeman joined in "You must show respect in a police station, otherwise we will file a case and lock you in". I again smiled at him since this also failed to parse..."No seriously" he followed it up and it soon sunk in that all this was not in any sort of light vein.

What complete bullshit? I was sitting there harming no one, bearing out the delay, a worried man whose bike has been stolen and those bastards have the audacity to threaten me just because I was shaking my leg?? I did not view a confrontation as the best thing to do and so I straightened up my legs and sat in disbelief.

I thought some more and came to the conclusion that these people have no dignity, no real pride/respect whatsoever that they derive from their work. They fool themselves by demanding a physical show of respect from people who are soft targets. The entire work culture is 180 degrees from what I am used to as a s/w engr. I have never been told to "stand up" or sit properly with seniors around...(I am sure Bob Wyman can give many examples of supposed "disrespect" :)) )

The entire concept of "respect" is ill defined for those poor chaps. For me respect is what one gains through what one has done. If they get my bike I ll surely have some respect for them for a job well done but not shaking my leg is not my idea of it. And it feels sick when you choose to sit there and obey dickheads.

Another coincidence

Wel,l came in contact with one more Chinese fella..Guess what is his name..it is made up a former highly rated colleague's and his wife's :) yes the guys name is XiangMin Wang!
Past couple of weeks..maybe more..i have stopped keeping track :( have been very hectic. Learning how to write parsers and when things dont work out how to hack my way through :)

Recent infrastructural investments for the house include a computer, computer table and chair, a TV trolley and henceforth i shall also be eating on a dining table!! Around 12000 bucks for the furniture and 27K for the computer. Decent price for a comp..AMD 2.4GHz, ASUS motherboard, 256 RAM, 80 GB 7200 rpm HDD, 17" monitor, CD writer, wireless keyboard and mouse. I already have a DVD player so did not go for a combo drive..also the player can be connected to the comp to act as one if needed..

We had a colorful Holi this time around. This colorful bit was after 2-3 yrs i think. We got together at Manjiri's place. The newly wed Haldars were also there.

Megha's mom arrived today morning (and I had a bad verbal fight with the rickshaw wala, there are only the bastard variety here) and will be here till 25th or so this month. Hoping to eat dishes me and megha cant make..ll probably also take some lessons.

Some friends are searching. with pictures taken by me on our trip to Kerala which most people like to call a honeymoon :D

*Rain

One of my managers needed three attempts to remember the name of my last employer correctly. First two attempts being "RainDance" and "NextRain" :)

*Yu

After "xyu" at firstRain, I have just come in contact with a "hyu" here :) h == Hong-Lee.

Death to hungarian notation

Surely
hungarian notation ought to be banned from the face of the earth..aaaaarggghh. It is so ugly it beats Paula Jones's hair:)
It is a bad thing because it is hard to consistently maintain its use in a code base touched by several people. It is especially bad when code generating tools use it and the code incorporating the generated code does not :(( I recently came accross a piece of code which uses variable names like "dqToken, sqToken" to mean double/single quoted tokens, and then went on to some generated code which was using hungarian notation. My nonhungariannotationed brain's reaction to it was to find some context dependent meaning for the prefixes in some of the variables ulProd, oulProd. And aargh...i realised after going through some more of that generated code that it was hungarian notation.

MAD

I recently bought a collection of 25-MADs from Fabmall. These ppl are really cruel :) One of the mags had a MAD look at dedications one finds in music album covers/booklets. Michael Jackson's is something like this "I dedicate this album to children because children are our future, our soft, tender, sexy future" :)) One wonders whatever happened to all that good music he used to make..he now only makes news..for the wrong reasons.

I dont know if the referrer of the last linked story wants to be identified :) but thanks to him!!

Oblivio > Road > Bookmark

Some people have strange and fundamental stories to tell. Maybe having a porn star girlfriend is somebody's fantasy, but a girlfriend turning out to be a porn star is slightly a non-fantasy :) Well that can hurt........and right in the groins at that :D

Hmmm..remember the security violations long time back? As a punishment the security policy makes the errant kid participate in a security audit :) So here i am at 7:30 am in the office having just participated in one..snooping around on my colleagues, checking their desks and all to see if they have left any confidential stuff unlocked. Anyways this thing is off my back. Wasnt totally my fault you know..I had no keys to the drawers on my desk..how on earth was i supposed to lock anything :) I created some hungama about it some days back when i got the "mandatory invitation" (what a euphemism :) ) to participate in the audit. Copied my manager, the department who supply the keys and the security ppl and informed all that I still did not have the f*?king keys and i wont be signing any violations till i get them...and what..preto..I get a replacement for the drawer with they keys...also asked them to work more efficiently and give keys to any new joinee as soon as he joins...at the time i signed the non-compliance sheet i had no idea abt the implications..i though i would sign and they ll give me back my documents..never new i would be here today. People say i aint seen nothing yet and hungama is the only way things get done here :)

Code tasty code..

Slurrrp slurrp!!! (Meaningful) Coding days are back again :) Finally after a long wait my colleague has completed what he had to before i started integration of the part that i m working on.

The emporers clothes.

A few days back Nikhil was here in Bangalore. Heard an
interesting Mitra anecdote from him. A few days earlier ppl had
encountered Mitra in an unusually oversized shirt. So people
asked Mitra abt the reason...the answer as told by Nikhil was
something like the following: "accha bohot bada hai kya..mera
nahi hoga..wo dhobi ko diye the kapde..usne wapas laye..usmein
ye shirt tha..to pahana"

We bow to thee O Mitra.

Probably Nikhil or Mitra himself could give us a very correct version
of the conversation in the comments.

FYI I have learnt how to make banana split at home! And no, this
has no connection to the banana split in a certain Sidney
Sheldon novel :))

This allah is also interesting.

D-Day

Hmm so I am back a married man.
And whats more got work straight away after coming back on the 12th. However now I have struck the wall and can't progress. Lack of documentation for one of the tools I am using..So ll just blog instead..it has been a long time coming :)

Some pics. Wedding day, when we both signed the legal papers..that was the meat of the ceremony thankfully :) and reception..countless touching feet of elders this day :(( Had abt 1200 ppl that day :(( The customary "Do u recognize me?", "ya ya". "ok now tell me who I am?", "oops :p dont recognize u that well" was also a regular feature that day :)

Ya so we got married and not much changed and much did :). I guess a big thing to change was the legality of the whole thing :p

The wedding ceremony was a cute one. Nothing religious, only legalities. The registrar had been called to Megha's place and we had a nice pandal there. Both of us were made to sit down with the registrar and then we signed some legal papers. Then both of us were given legal vows. "Me <full name>, <counterpart's full name>, yanana kaydeshir pati/patni mhanun sweekar karto." This had to be repeated 3 times by both and each time was accompanied by a lot of noise from all the junta around us..it was fun. Then we exchanged rings and garlands and mangalsutra and a chain. I had forgotten to get my ring but my mom hadn't and so I was saved some embarassment :p.

This was followed by a round of touching the feet of any and everybody and then lunch. Then we went to my place. We were welcomed by all the bacchaa party with a shower of flowers and petals from the first floor just as we stepped into the veranda at my place..then there was some music and dancing in the afternoon. In the evening there was a "satyanarayan" pooja at my place. If one goes by the rituals then this is a mandatory one before the couple and indulge in earthly sins :p We both had to sit for about 2 hrs to complete the pooja. The brahmin was as usual loose and flexible with the pooja and thankfully sprinted through under his breathe with the "satyanarayan katha" which has to be read to the victims :)

At night there was dinner at my place for Megha's and my relatives and friends. The menu at my place included bhakri, baigan bharta and red-chilli thecha. The funny thing was that some ppl mistook the thecha for gajar halwa and started off their dinner with a big mouthful of it :)

Well all this pooja and all and I find out at night that we had to sleep in separate rooms :((