And by the way..

if you haven't really heard it by now.. OpenSolaris.org is up with DTrace sources for download for starters. Buildable solaris source is expected Q2 2005.

Deathmatch.

I just quit from a Half Life 2 deathmatch :) Needless to say I got badly bruised both in the game and ego-wise :D Has been a long time since I have played deathmatches and it was especially harder because I was trying to do it from a laptop using the trackpoint for navigation. The net connection here in the hotel is pretty neat and the latency was too low to blame for my ass being kicked :) Anyways it just brought back fond Quake deathmatch memories :)

PS:Check out the HL2 trailer from the HL2 site.

Canada diary 3

Today morning I was angry at someone. That someone is the person who first proposed the idea of wiping asses with a toilet paper. There is a certain feeling of incompleteness if you can't perform the watery ritual :D Maybe the deep pore cleansing effect of plain H2O is merely psychological but I need it none the less and so you have to find workarounds..no I am not going to discuss my workaround..do what you feel is the best :)

The weekend is almost over now. Did nothing special except going out for lunch and some shopping. Went to a mall and then to Walmart yesterday and bought household goodies like "Nice'n Clean moist wipes" which are hard to find in Bangalore ...well life surely changes once you marry :) Had buffet in a small Sri Lankan restaurant in the downtown today...some usual South Indian stuff ..some great rasam, rice chicken, and tapioca pudding (for Marathi people "sabudanyachi kheer" :) )

Came back from lunch and then installed Picasa and Hello and started organizing some of the photos. Suddenly I had this feeling of photographic insufficiency which made me take the rather rash decision of going out across the road to capture some photos. I thought, "well today is warmer (-17 degrees C :D ) and would probably be the last time here when I am free at 4:30 in the afternoon", and so I put on my warm clothing and stepped out and crossed the road over to some open grounds. Then I realised I did not have too much time at hand if I had to make it back alive and so I went click-click-click as fast as I could. After about 10 photos my hands started freezing and the finger tips ached and felt as if they would burst. I clicked a few more times and then prudently put the camera and my hands in my pockets and headed back. The last three posted pictures are some of the fruits of my little trip to what felt like the north pole :)

Fallen tree with snow.

This is what the Holiday Inn looks like from across the road.

Footprints in the snows of time.

View from hotel room.

A vehicle near the hotel.

This is mostly how I pad up for the weather here :)

Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to Sam Palmisano

Jonathan Schwartz's open letter to Sam Palmisano...Interesting..from my knowledge though I don't think the accusation is all that true for quite a few Rational products..The new Rational products have a Linux x86 release available and since Solaris 10 has Janus, running the new eclipse based products on Solaris should not be an issue I think..Rational Rose RT and Rose work on Solaris with MainWin and PurifyPlus is already supported for Solaris. Clearcase servers too run on Unix machines and I assume most corporate deployments are on Solaris. But ya..there are a lot more products in the Rational portfolio and I really do not know about their Solaris support right away.

Canada Diary-2

So to give some updates on my journey and first few days here..
The journey was fine..so was the jetlag but only till one day after i arrived when I did stayed up late at night and sort of overcorrected on the jetlag. Now I am ok again I guess.

I had to buy 6600 Rs of warm clothing for the weather here (my company did re-imburse me most of the amount so the money is not the issue here..) but the longest that I have come in contact with the weather directly is the 30 second or less walks to and from the car to anywhere I have to go..office, hotel etc..and the time in the car till it heats up..everything else is obviously well heated or else I would never have come here :) But those very small periods of time numb the senses :) One of my colleagues had a nice saying to describe the cold..it goes something like the following..."Bahar khade raho 5 minute, to sikud kar mungphalli ban jaayega :)" What shrinks is your imagination :)

The hotel nice..and since we are staying for 2 weeks we have a complimentary upgrade to a executive suite. This is where I am staying..The best thing is the broadband connection..I have encountered download speeds of about 140KBytes/sec..nice indeed. Yahoo voice chat too is working very well for me.

The encounter with the TV here was interesting too. The hotel has a tie up with Galavu and they offer XTV, Naked News and some Howto adult channel amongst other things. You can order directly using a menu on the TV (which has a setback box) and enjoy the visuals till the next days checkout time :) Hmm, such nice integration with the hotels systems..Name of the movie is not shown on your bill :) Haven't ordered this though since it all comes at a cost of about 14-15$..which is not so appealing especially when there are some free channels which show hot stuff sometimes :D

Canada diary-1

So I reached here last friday evening. The most significant happening by far is that it is fundamentally cold here. The wind chill is making today's temperature feel like -42 fucking degrees.

Some left on the plate.

I have been reading some leftist views recently. Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky is recommended. On a related note The Hindu has this article today comparing the amount of aid and war spending by the US and the UK.

Training Day

Some coincidences in life are worth mentioning for their sheer timing. It so happened that some days back I attended a training on "Creative Problem Solving". The training room had computers for each trainee. So I installed Firefox on it and brought up my usual browser desktop which consists of a gmail tab and a bloglines tab for most of the time and was all set for the training to begin. The initial tidal wave of my expectations soon assumed calmer proportions and post lunch I was just about managing to stay on my seat :) I was wondering about the content of the training and the techniques being taught. Most of them revolved around dividing a bigger problem into smaller sub problems and working from both the problem and the solution end and all the usual crap that all self respecting engineers know. And then it happened. Around 3-3:30 the dilbert RSS feed was updated with this VVS Laxman timed gem . Dilbert's last sentence sums up exactly what I was feeling :)