Mind.random()

Over the past few weeks a lot of things are happening in my life and i feel really guilty of not jotting them down in here. Its amazing how naturally things evolve and looking back you think everything happened so fast.

I was talking to my wife a couple of days back on how all things in my life fell in place naturally, like the neatly arranged dominos, and how much God is great that we can never have the faintest idea of what he thinks and what he has in store for us.

Myself and Rajesh always had the inner fire to do something big and our focus has always been a new “idea” – something which dazzles. And we were pretty sure that no idea falls from the roof. We have to be into a lot of ideas to have a new perspective to see ours. We always felt that it is always not about the money. And, I, for one reason felt that contributing to open source is “the idea” to have something meaningful in your life.

This blog is not about how things went on well and how we achieved the “idea” but how bad things could go and we still have our “dream of the youth” alive and active.

I left for Singapore and a couple of months later Rajesh got laid off from Merrill. Recession hit badly all over and the only thing i could think of is to pray that i retain my job. Simply because i dont want to depend on my parents when my kid is born. Rajesh got his engagement cancelled and was at home for 9 months. If i were him, with my family, i am not sure how my reaction would be. It could either be a “face what may come” or “hibernate for winter”.  Looking back at myself and my reaction to various “things” that happened in my life, I am sure i would have given the situation a cold shoulder. But then there is this new addition to the situation called family. Nevertheless, Rajesh’s situation really scared me a lot. He was unable to find a job despite being one hell of a developer. The calls are simply not coming his way, leave alone interviews.

Singapore is a good place to live but still this is not my home. I wanted to go back and i was unable to. That was when i told to myself that none of things that happened in my life is entirely shaped by me. And i am not going to whine anymore. I decided to take up technical reading more seriously and got the national library membership. Singapore’s NLB has a very limited collection of technical books and that motivated me even more. I resolved that i am going to finish off the entire IT section (except of course, those scary looking System 3 manuals)

I read the truly random books and some recommended ones. Among the many interesting books which gives that wonderful satisfaction at the last page, I had to meekly admit that once in a while, i had to return some books half way to pick another. One amongst the beautiful ones is “Dreaming in code” – the journey of Chandler and its team. It gave a lot of insight into how everybody starts small and everybody makes mistakes. But then, they all had a bigger dream and they were focussed. The grit and the patience of Mitch Kapor all through the project was beautiful. I am yet to see a truly impressive tool like Chandler. Even today, I composed a mail (outlook) to our corporate technical group appreciating their efforts on a recent technical event. I then mentioned in the mail that we should be meeting tomorrow to see what we can do next. Only then i realised i actually needed a meeting request. So, i copied all the contents, composed a new meeting request and pasted the contents and then started typing in the whole “To” list. In Chandler, it is just ONE FREAKING CLICK !!! Your mail is converted to a meeting request.

The “better programmer” link and “Dreaming in code” made me want to learn Python. Meanwhile, Rajesh started doing projects of his own. He fell in love with Rails and became a fan of Ruby. The speed of Python and the quantity of code needed to be written to do something useful was amazing. List comprehensions and slicing had me dumbstuck. After reading “Learning in Python“, I wanted to write something USEFUL. Rajesh got through Tech Mahindra as a contractor and moved to Pune. He didnt have internet access in office. And that was the birth of Fetch2Me – the name fondly given by my wonderfully best friend “Mirth Machine” Gaurav. Fetch2Me was a simple screen scraping application and it had a simple raison d’etre. Use your corporate id and send the url as the subject to fetch2me AT gmail DOT com and it will fetch the page. If the subject could not be resolved to a valid url, respond with the google results of the search string. But then, all my friends wanted more out of the project. I am not saying that this is all I had in mind from the start but I am considering this as a start – to be useful. Stay tuned.

The blog says it all.

http://www.code-purity.com/free_developers_that_is_a/

I am sure open source enthusiasts will get reminded of  the infamous Open Letter to Hobbyists  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Came to know about this just now. Brilliant way test your website in different browsers. (I remember the days when i used to boot to windows to test my website in IE).

http://browsershots.org

Let me cut down the story and give you the shortcut

Control + Shift + Delete pops up a window prompting for the time range to clear history.

For more interesting Firefox shorcuts

I compiled few interesting problem solving stories for a training today in my office.
Thought you might be interested. I am sure every story will be helpful.

Programmer Stories.ppt

Immediate sources for the stories :
The Holy Bible
The Pragmatic Programmer – Andrew Hunt & David Thomas
How To Think Like a Programmer: Problem-solving for the Bewildered – Paul Vicker
The Mythical Man Month  – Frederick Brooks Jr.

Last night, I was watching the movie “Street Fighter – The Legend of Chun Li”. Though the storyline is about a girl who takes revenge for the abduction and murder of her father, there was subtle yet strong message in the movie. Master Gen, who trains Chun Li in Wushu, was actually a former accomplice of the villain. He mends his ways and tries to make good of his former evil actions. At one point in the movie during the training, he drew the “Yin and Yang” with his legs on sand. How meaningful and thoughful.

I slept over with this thought. After reading the rest of this text, I am sure many would say to themselves “Hey, I’ve been through this” or “I have done this” or even “I was this”. Over a period of time we have all seen the good and the bad side of life and people. Our fight has always been more to prove that other people were wrong than to satisfy our measly ego. In simple words, we are fighting for those people who show their summer side after proving them wrong.

Toggling between the mean Booking supervisor in one station and sweetest and caring Booking Supervisor in another station in Railways, between the exploiting Senior booking clerk who forced me to work his shifts and another Senior Clerk who helped me buy the first branded shirt for my first birthday alone and between the supervisor who made me have lunch everyday at 4 and the supervisor who bothered to bring me lunch everytime he returned from his home in Trichy, between the molesting whores and Khalasis when I slept on the platform and seniors who offered to share their homes for me to stay, between the Police Senior Reporter who bailed me out of the greatest personal problem in my life and the chief reporter who purposefully prevented me from attending classes at 7 in business school saying “I wouldn’t allow you to use this office as your launchpad”, between the Inspector who treated me like $hit just because I was 20 and the DSP who treated me like his son bringing me tea on late nights, between the considerate SP who cared to ask why I refused to take a work and a chief reporter who got me transferred to Sivagangai for the same reason, between the girlfriend who ditched me for my own friend and the girl who attempted suicide for me (I am lucky to have married her) … the list goes on an on… and things arent any better today.

Yesterday, I saw an Indian who shivered and offered his seat for a man who carried a “few days old” infant. The man was standing with the kid for at least 10 seconds in the middle of the train and nobody else bothered. Previously, I used to have the general thought that everybody gets when they travel across seas.. “why am I not good looking?” or “why don’t I belong to that race?”. Those thoughts were long gone and yesterday I felt really proud that I am an Indian. If it were India, the same scene would have been funny. The whole train/bus would have stood. Of course, I don’t deny the existence of those “confused Desis”.

The downside of the past and the way “Yin and Yang” is balanced is painful but I have something to carry for the rest of my life. Somebody quoted, “If a book is able to give you one single point to ponder, then it has served its purpose”. Taking the nature of my job into consideration, I am done reading more than half of the book and have a lot of things to think over. A month ago, I was reading the book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, a Professor from Carnegie Mellon, diagnosed as having terminal Pancreatic cancer, having three children – two of them infants. He wrote some valuable notes for his children. The read was emotional. The downside is that he was dying and is trying hard to instill memories of him on his children. The upside – he knows when he is going to die.

Just realised today that PowerISO (http://www.poweriso.com/download.htm)  is available for Linux and its free too.  I have a weird feeling of liberation nowadays though i have been using Linux for more than two years now.

The manual goes like this

PowerISO   Copyright(C) 2004-2008 PowerISO Computing, Inc
Type poweriso -? for help

Usage:    poweriso <command> [parameters] [-switches]

<Commands>

list <image file> <directory>    List files and directories in image file.
Example:  List all files and directories in root direcory of /home/sam/test.iso .
Command:  poweriso list /home/sam/test.iso / -r

extract <image file> <dir/file name>   Extract files/directories from image file.
Example:  Extract all files and directories in root direcory of /home/sam/test.iso
to /home/sam/test recursively.
Command:  poweriso extract /home/sam/test.iso / -od /home/sam/test

convert <image file>    Convert image file to other format.
Example:  Convert /home/sam/test.daa to standard iso file
Command:  poweriso convert /home/sam/test.daa -o /home/sam/test.iso -ot iso

Do take note of the “/” before -od and -r. It throws a weird “Unrecognized parameter:”

Microsoft is becoming a house of ironies in more ways than one.   Sick support of ODF on Office 2007 SP2 has been old news. Now the latest news hanging around is that their search is going to be Hadoop/Hbase based.  I am sure you are already thinking “Isnt Hadoop, an Apache project?”. Yes it is. So much for the anti-open source shouts from them.

MS Search = ( ( ((Hadoop)Lucene)Java) + ASF) && (! .Net) && (!Dignity)

That’s their business formula, I guess. I wish i could curse now !!!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10235400-16.html

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/09/201210