Siddharth's Blog

Change of address?

2006-01-10T09:55:00.000+05:30

Thinking of moving over to wordpress.com This might be my new blog. Or I might post to both addresses for a while. In any case, my major gripes with wordpress.com are reduced with the newer options they offer. Plus I love the categorization and calendar options that I can't seem to find on Blogger.

Forgot to tell....

2005-07-29T09:39:00.000+05:30

I was rummaging around my cupboard today and found some leftover Ubuntu Hoary CDs that Canonical was so kind to send over in their ShipIt program. It is cool to get the officially pressed LiveCD as well as the install CD. Sure enough, I distributed 8 of them the very day they landed at office. I think there are 5 more that I have right now. Anyone want some?

Latest pics

2005-07-21T15:50:00.000+05:30

This is the first time, I am going to use the blogger image addition feature. Lets see how this goes. (Normally, I prefer to keep my pics hosted at Flickr. If you have not seen their service, you should. Chances are you'll like it :)

Anyways, this first pic is our shiny Hyundai Santro alongside us.

This second one is of my desk at Sonus Networks (my employer). You gotta love the 21" monitors and the Polycom phones :)

PS: The image blogging did not look good with my stylesheet, plus it added a whole lot of other styling, so I decided to use Flickr again after all.

Zoooomed ahead 3 months!

2005-07-19T09:07:00.000+05:30

Since my last post I have: changed my job, got a car, had my parents visit us at Bangalore, gone to a jungle resort for a weekend, spent a lot of time reading 3GPP/IMS and finished reading another book ('Goal' by Eliyahu Goldratt). All would have made good blogs in themselves. But I wish I had more time. There's a whole bunch of things that I am still in the middle of.

Meanwhile, the look of this page has changed yet again. The new design is based on 'Kubrick' (the default wordpress blog theme). Hope you like it :)

Gandhiji, Godse and India

2005-04-14T18:16:00.000+05:30

I guess this will be my first post on politics or anything close to it. But I think of it more as Indian history and the events that are linked to creation of present day India. I'll even go to the extent of putting a disclaimer that whatever I do write here or links that I refer to are my research of reading up on the net. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the same in part or whole and these do not, in any way, refer to my opinion on the matter.... even more so because I'm still to form one (an opinion, I mean). I suspect forming any sort of informed opinion will involve a lot more reading. So this post may get updated over time.

So coming to the subject of the post, I was reading up a blog containing references to the thinking of both of these people: Gandhiji and Godse. And I was reminded of a play Me Nathuram Godse Boltoy. I had first heard of the existence of this script (written by Pradeep Dalvi) when I was a part of the Hindi Drama Club at BITS and it was banned (around the same time I think) by the Maharashtra Govt. (Sometimes I feel trying to stop something from spreading spreads it all the more). The curiousity element in the dramatics fraternity was quite high as to the contents of the play and some of us were very keen to know how it was written. We never managed to get a whole copy of the script though excerpts of its English translation were available in soft copies.

After all these years, the blog that I read today triggered a fresh Google hunt on the script as well as more information on the two people in question itself. So, this is the list of URLs that I found particularly interesting:

Excerpts from the self defense of Godse in court.
This happens to be a verbatim excerpt of the defense as presented in the book "May it please your honour" by Gopal Godse (who is Nathuram Godse's brother and has finished his life imprisonment as a co-conspirator in the plot to assasinate Gandhiji). The text is definitely one of the sharpest one to present their side of the case. Its a moderately long read, but does raise a few questions (which I have often heard from others too) on Gandhiji and his way of life. On the whole, my impression was that the eloquence of the speech does get through, albeit leaving a small 'over-zealous hinduistic' shadow on the Godses. If you stop at reading this page alone (and if you had no bias or opinion on this issue to start with), perhaps you would tend to form an opinion that Godse's action was not totally unwarranted. I know this may sound as blasphemy to several Indians, but read on.

A critique on the play by Y.D.Phadke.
This link actually starts of as a critique of the play in question and enumerates (with examples) how he feels many of the facts depicted dramatically are, in fact, factually incorrect. It somewhat reminded me of the Farenheit 9/11 critques and how a play writ (may have) got carried away in the process of making an impression on his audience to present figments of his imagination instead of the facts. Only, in this case, the author of a play may have an excuse that an audience going to a play should be aware that (unless otherwise stated), they are seeing someone's creativity and not necessarily a documentary. That said, it would not make me feel good if someone told me a story containing real life characters and real life incidents with finer details which, in fact, are not real (!). I'm looking for further corrobaration of Phadke's views on this matter: whether he is right or not.

Anyways, Shri Phadke then proceeds to go further and casts a shadow on the man Nathuram Godse himself and how he lied in court. Presumably, Nathuram Godse did that to save some of the co-conspirators (including his brother). However, the most significant allegation is that Nathuram Godse was planning to kill Gandhiji irrespective of the matter of 55 crores which was widely publicized as his 'turning point' from idea to action. This piece of information and some of the other statements written by Godse make him appear as a Hindu fanatic who had a thing to prove irrespective of what Gandhiji did. At the end of this stage of research, I was asking myself: was Godse a con artist who almost carried it off?

Also, this does not stop some of the questions raised in the first article on Gandhiji himself. Was Gandhiji a clever politician who managed to enthrall audiences, created a mass movement and encouraged blind followers of his 'way of doing things'? Would 'Ahimsa' alone have given India its freedom? I partly believe that the world politics at large (and the change of Govt in Britain) was responsible. Congress's hurry to get independance while these factors lasted also seem to justify that. Also, would the 'Gandhian way' worked miracles in post democratic India and were we deprived of a chance to see that? Ah well, lots of questions in my mind. Will phrase them better after some more reading....

Meanwhile, some more references (and recent articles) are available on Godse and Gandhism. It also hosts the (translated) English excerpts of the play that I mentioned above at this link.

love it.

2005-03-01T17:48:00.000+05:30

After a lot of deliberation, I finally installed Mono on my Ubuntu Hoary desktop at office. Also installed f-spot and tomboy after that. Installation of Mono as well as the apps was simple with the usual synaptic magic. That said, getting the applications to actually work was a bit of a pain since the debian packages did not have dependencies on the right versions of other packages these apps wanted (f-spot croaked a bit without exif and tomboy simply crashed without the latest libgtk-cil).

I like both of these apps. Especially Tomboy which seems to be a great PostIt(tm) equivalent for me on Linux. It looks more polished than the 'sticky notes' applet that comes by default with GNOME and also allows me to search across notes.

Beautiful weekend.

2005-02-23T16:46:00.000+05:30

200 odd pairs of eyes, gazing at a fountain that is synchronized to the tunes coming from a public address system.... waiting to see the fountain react to each rise and fall in the musical note, gasping when it does happen, and applauding when the show culminates in 'Saare jahaan se accha....'. Nice experience. One that you can have at Brindavan Garden (obligatory wikipedia reference) near Mysore. I, Vrushali and Parag Dada (her brother) were there huddled in one corner.... Such was the show that for those 15 minutes that it lasted, we were oblivious of the surroundings.... of the other pairs of eyes.... and of the ache in our legs, typical at the end of a tiring day. I came out grinning at this thought as the show drew to a close.

The day starts with a big banyan tree
The day began early as we made our way out of Bangalore at 6:30 AM. Our first stop, the grand old Banyan tree near Kengeri. The official Karnataka Goverment website says that the tree covers 4 acres of land. I thought that tree is not that huge, but then I am not too good with dimensions, so that is for you to find out on your own. All I can say is that it is pretty. Not the kind you see on the streets of Bangalore.... bigger, greener and.... pretty (for the lack of better words). The caretaker at the spot told us that the trunk of the tree was struck by lightning a little while ago, so there is a small temple at the spot where the trunk used to stand.

Next, the dam
We moved on from the tree to another lesser known tourist destination called Manchanabele Dam. The dam is close (nearly 7 kms) from the Banyan tree and hosts the occasional picnic (as far as I know). It was pretty much deserted on this Sunday. The big reservoir behind the dam allows for some pretty clicking avenues. With a nice breeze blowing and large rocks in the background, it allows one to feel the contrast from the crowded city life even more. We spent a good half an hour there.

Breakfast!
Our favourite haunt on the Bangalore-Mysore highway is the 'Kamat Lokaruchi' restaurant. Situated next to Janapadaloka; you reach this beautiful place after crossing the Ramanagaram town. I couldn't help but notice that the greenery has reduced considerably since my first trip to the restaurant (most likely this was to make space for additional tables and the like). But it still is a good place.... Also, the variety of South Indian cuisine that it serves is priced very nicely. Last time that we went, we saw several ducks in the Janapadaloka premises that were very happy to be in our company. This time around, we reached a little late for the regular breakfast; so the ducks probably had moved to more shaded areas. I had my favourite 'idli wrapped in banana leaf' and 'Ragi dosa'. Yum! This was followed by a short trip to Janapadaloka, which I and Parag Dada enjoyed thoroughly as we got enough 'subjects' to click away.

A small diversion into history
Next, we moved towards the historical town of Srirangapattana (another wikipedia link). This town was the capital of the royal state of Mysore under Tipu Sultan. It houses his picturesque summer palace along with the fort where Tipu breathed his last during the fourth anglo-mysore war. This was a small detour since Parag Dada and Vrushali had not seen the place earlier. Unfortunately, the Ranganathaswamy Temple was closed for the afternoon (it closes from around 1 PM to 4 PM, if I remember correctly). But in any case, we got to see the Colonel Bailey's dungeon and the palace, which in themselves are worth watching.

Onwards to do some bird watching
After Srirangapattana, we made our way to the bird sanctuary at Ranganathittu (yet another wikipedia link). We saw painted storks, open billed storks and the great stone plovers. Spent an awesome hour there. The only regrets were that we did not have more time to walk around and that our boat rower was not keen to extend our time in the lake by even 5-10 minutes more than the stipulated 20 minutes he has to take us out for. A thumbs up recommendation for people wondering if they should go there. The only tricky bit is to go in the 'season' when birds migrate.

From Ranganathittu, it was off to the Krishna Raja Sagar Dam (which hosts the beautiful Brindavan Gardens by its side). That culimated the trip.... and it was a nice climax, as I started with.

More pics of this trip are available here. Many of them are taken by Parag Dada.

Ye dil maange more!

2005-02-15T18:30:00.000+05:30

As you can see (I hope), the template has 'evolved' a little more. The image addition is somewhat at a stand-still, while the CSS becomes better :) Got quite a few good resources to CSS and templates using XHTML and CSS. I can appreciate these better since I have groped around on my own in the past few days. For those who are less patient, these lovely resources which can save you a lot of your time are: CSS intensivstation and alexking Wordpress templates. Watch this space for yet more!

touching.

2005-02-10T10:44:00.000+05:30

Read this blog today morning. I feel there is so much that I do not tend to notice around me, still some more that I notice but just goes by unsaid, and finally so much more that I can do.

A weekend gone.... and a weekend coming!

2005-02-09T16:59:00.000+05:30

Mid-week.... Some weeks (or is it all?) are like a mountain slope: you reach the peak slowly, but the downhill journey just zips by. I never get to know where Thursday and Friday go and I can all but long for Monday and Tuesday to finish!

Last weekend, we saw 'Page 3'.... for those not informed about the Hindi cinema scene, this happens to be one of the recently released flicks which seems to have gained immense critical acclaim. Nice movie. Can't say I thoroughly enjoyed it or recommend it, but its a.... nice watch.

As for my search for good GIMP tutorials, I found some nice ones at GUG and some ideas have come to my mind too. Lets see if I get some time on the coming days for 'grokking the gimp'.

Back!

2005-02-04T16:39:00.000+05:30

Finally, I am back to blogging.... And after a good long break :) New things happening now are that the template for my blog has been changed from TicTac (Blogger provided) to my own template, which is heavily inspired by the gnome site as well as other blogs I saw. The layout is done, the jazz with the images is still pending.... Looking for some good gimping tutorials out there :)

Some other things that 'happened' while I was not blogging:

* Upgraded finally to Ubuntu Hoary after holding on to Warty for 2-3 of months. Upgrade was remarkably painless. And as before, Gnome gets better and better :)

* Took a flickr Pro account and uploaded recent pics!

* Had a lovely, lovely time in Nagpur at Chintu and Swati's wedding.

More coming soon!

Shove the stove

2004-12-28T18:02:00.001+05:30

Had an extremely unpleasant experience with cooking gas agencies in Bangalore today. The leading gas distributors in the area seem to be keen on exploiting the shortage of cooking gas supply as of now. Just this week the distributors began issuing new gas connections after a gap of 3 months....

Whether this gas shortage was temporary or not is not known.... so (understandably) everyone is keen on getting a connection immediately before they miss the bus and have to wait again (or pay for more expensive private gas supplies). The result: the distributors claim that he/she must sell the connection 'with the stove'. There are nice posters in the room which inform the customer that he is in no obligation whatsoever to take a stove from the distributor.... but who cares? You are promoted to a preferential customer the moment you agree to pay double the normal expense (for only a cylinder) and take a stove even if you don't need one (because you already own one!) You get the cylinder, regulator, stove et al within 5 minutes if you take the 'package deal'.

On the other hand, if you are amongst the few people who'd rather not take the stove and want only the cylinder.... one gas distributor frankly and politely asks you to try elsewhere. The other tries to postpone giving the connection itself till he is sure he can not sell the stove with a new connection any more:

Distributor: 'Sir, a technician must inspect your stove before you can get the connection'.
Me: 'I just purchased it last week.... and it has an ISI mark (Govt approved quality) on it.'
Distributor: 'Still sir.... we need to check.'
Me: 'Okay.... can you send a technician with me to verify? I have taken time off from work to do this within your office hours'.
Distributor: 'All technicians are out.... We'll send one tomorrow.'
Me: 'But I won't be at home.... can you call before you come?'
Distributor: 'Yes.... he'll call.'
Me: 'So.... after that, I can get my connection? I've been in the waiting list for a month now....'
Distributor: 'Depends....'
Me: 'Can you give a date by which I'll know?'
Distributor (visibly agitated): 'If you keep asking he'll not come tomorrow. He'll come after that!'

End of story. For once, I did not know what to do.... I took the connection from the polite distributor. I know I did not do the 'right thing'.... but after 3 weeks of waiting for a gas connection and after 3 hours of haggling for the same in office hours, I am more disappointed than ever. Guess I will ponder on the morals some other time.

Anyone want a stove on discount?

Travelogue on our trip to Gangtok (30th Nov - 5th Dec): Part I

2004-12-23T10:29:00.000+05:30

Thank you for choosing Jet Airways : 30th Nov
Our (mine and Vrushali's) journey started on 30th November in Mumbai as we boarded the early morning Jet Airways flight for Kolkata. It was a nice feeling to be done with all the rituals of decking up and meeting tons of people and embark on a really real vacation :) The flight from Mumbai to Kolkata is a reasonably long one (approx 2 hours) and we slept for the most part 'cos we had hardly slept for 4 hours on the previous day.... (before the reader's imagination runs astray: we were packing bags for the return journey!).

'Warm' welcome to Kolkata
We were greeted in Kolkata by a weather of equal warmth that we had left behind in Mumbai. So much so for the hill-station feeling.... Guess we would have to wait for the car ride to Gangtok on the next day for anything better. We reached Kolkata at around 10:30 AM and were due to catch the train from there to New Jalpaiguri in the evening around 05:40 PM so we had a lot of time on our hands. We decided to pay one final family visit to my grand-parents (dad's uncle-aunt) at Kolkata and spent a lovely time there with Vrushali doing some cooking (new bahu, you see) and me watching the cricket match (useless beta which is already known to all family).

Howrah and the supermarket train
For the first time visitors to Kolkata (like me), Kolkata has several railway stations: one at Sealdah and two at Howrah (the old and the new stations: fortunately these are in the same premises and not separate places!). The train we were going to take (Kamrup Express to New Jalpaiguri) leaves from the Howrah old station which is around 15 km from my grandparents home at Kaikhali. So we decided to take a taxi somewhat early (at 3:30 PM) itself. It was a nice decision.... We had our lovely first encounter with the streets of Kolkata on the way to the station. Especially the last stretch near the Howrah bridge was the most cramped part of the whole journey. I was wondering if we'd make better time if we were walking on that road.... but there was no space to walk either, so it was more of a fantasy. Sigh, what a place. Just when it seemed that a 2 hour margin to the train would fall short, the traffic eased and lo and behold we were on the Howrah bridge (or so we thought). Again, I guess it must be only first time vistors like us who would beam and smile from ear to ear to be on the bridge. Our taxi driver's looks certainly seemed to suggest so.... But whatever, we wanted to see the bridge and we saw it, so there.

Fast forward a half an hour wait for the train and we boarded Kamrup express AC III Tier coach, which to our definite surprise was not like other AC coaches in the country. If we missed the in-flight entertainment in the flight, we more than compensated for it en-route to New Jalpaiguri. There were hawkers of all kinds of things: bengali sweets, popcorn, sarees, 'magic' slates, magazines (bengali and hindi.... sorry no english available), plastic toys, locks and travel chains to name a few. And it seemed certain they would travel with us all the way and try to sell things all night. My doubts were confirmed when the ticket checker came and patiently waited for these hawkers to give him some space to walk. It seems getting ticket-less hawkers off the train was not something that was defined in his job role :) Ah well.... never mind, what's coming next?

New Jalpaiguri : 1st Dec
The train did reach punctually (like most of Indian Railways these days) at 07:30 AM to the sleepy little town of New Jalpaiguri. I was reminded of my hometown Hapur in several ways.... Awaiting our arrival at the station was our company for the next 4 days: Dinesh, our taxi driver. He dutifully put a silk robe on our shoulders (this we were to find out is the local way of greeting special guests) and went about explaining our itinerary for the day. I remembered Mangu (my college mate) a lot as we crossed on Sevoke Road.... I vaguely remember his house was somewhere there. Sadly, I forgot to get the phone number he had given me in the US to talk to his parents as we crossed.

Onward to Gangtok
The journey from New Jalpaiguri to Gangtok is positively memorable to say the least. The road is in excellent condition with BRO (Border Roads Organization) responsible for its maintenance. It is also wonderfully scenic with the Teesta river visible from the road from the most part as we climb up the hills. (Most of the memories for this trip are in videos so I cannot post too many photographs here, but maybe I can try to get a few stills from that later). It takes a good 4 hour drive from New Jalpaiguri to reach Gangtok, but we diverged on the way to go to the famous Rumtek monastery (official site, wikipedia) so that we would save time later on.
This was our first experience of buddhist monasteries in the region and it was refreshingly different.... after so many days of noisy crowds around us, Rumtek is very calm and laid back. The temple walls are painted with intricate paintings too. This place is also known as the dharma chakra centre (for more on the monastery use the links above).

Welcome to Nor-Khill: our home for the next 4 days
After the visit to Rumtek, we arrived in the Gangtok city within half an hour's drive. The main reason we had chosen Sikkim for our vacation was that we were informed that most places of interest were within a few hours drive at most.... and we found that was quite true. The Gangtok city is in Sikkim's east disrict and is extremely hilly to say the least. The road to the hotel is almost at a 45 degree inclination... but to our surprise people seemed to walk a lot instead of taking taxis.

The hotel Nor-Khill is next to the city's Pal-Jor stadium and overlooks the valley. It also gives a decent view of the Mount Kanchenjunga, but there are other places which give better access to the Himalayan peaks. The rooms are quite heavily decorated and the hotel garden would delight most (if not all) people. However, this hotel does not fall under the budget category. But it definitely lives upto its price tag with a wonderful room and extremely polite service. Also tariffs are inclusive of all meals (usually). As soon as we landed at Nor-Khill we were greeted (again) by the customary silk cloth and a small glass of red-wine (which Vrushali could not finish ;) Once at the hotel, we began to unwind and decided to take it easy the rest of the day. As it was the winter season, sunset in the valley would be as early as 5:00 PM after which there was little to do anyways.

.... story for the next few days continues in Part II ....

2004-12-17T11:02:00.000+05:30

Marital status: married.
Fast forward another few weeks since my last blog and once again life has moved a lot. On 22nd November, Vrushali and I entered wedlock (interesting term: wed + lock ;) at Ahmedabad. That was followed by a tour of family hubs: Akola and Mumbai for wedding receptions. The whole 10 day festivity period has been definitely memorable and I shall elaborate on that in times to come. Meanwhile, some still glimpses of the same are available here. After a relaxing 7 day trip of Gangtok and Darjeeling, we are now back at our respective offices. Alas, all good vacations come to the same end ;)

2004-10-29T15:48:00.000+05:30

Time is flying once again!
Been a long time since I updated my blog. Suffice to say that its been busy time and time very well spent! :) Enjoyed the last weekend of my stay at the US, roaming around Dallas with Parag Dada and shopping in Amsterdam on the way back. Was happy to be back in time for Vrushali's birthday. Then came the elaborate house hunt.... feeling good about the fact that we have finally found a nice place for rent that we will be occupying after the wedding. Everything is going fast since time is a rare commodity at present.

Ubuntu Linux rocks
Managed to screw up my Fedora box at work by trying to be too much on the bleeding edge using RPM updates. That led me to finally ditch incremental updates and do a clean install of the Linux partition. Thought would try this new distro this time around, especially since loads of folks have been going gaga about it. And I whole heartedly join them.... Ubuntu Just Works (TM). Gnome 2.8.1 with Evo 2 is up and running on my desk with no manual tinkering at all. Synaptic is a pretty neat package manager too. I'll stick to the official mainstream upgrades this time around and wait for the 6-monthly release. It can't be all that tough ;)

2004-10-03T15:17:00.000+05:30

Things to do when you are homesick.
Spend a whole afternoon in the mall looking at things for the home and for family. Return to the apartment, cook, read a book for a little while, browse and watch TV. If you are lucky to find something worth watching for once, make the most of it. That's what I've done so far. Seen several movies on the trot today: Freaky Friday, Honey, 8 Mile, Under the tuscan sun. I found all of them okay in one way or the other. But the pick was 'Under the tuscan sun'.

2004-10-01T22:31:00.000+05:30

Amazing.
Every once in a while, there is a report on Slashdot that is truly news to me and is totally amazing. Never heard anything like that before, never seen anything like that before. The Ig Nobel Awards site reported today falls into that category. Weird, funny and interesting all at the same time. Or maybe.... anything that is weird and funny automatically falls into the third category. I think I might have found a research topic for the next year's nominations ;)

PS: My pick from of links originating from the site: the 5 second rule and the Gorilla in our midst paper.

2004-09-21T03:47:00.000+05:30

Closer to the ultimate desktop experience.
Well, I cribbed about my hard disk issues and about the garnome build failing.... but on Saturday, I still persisted with the same process for almost half a day with the breaks and halts (read: broken dependencies) that are somewhat typical of compiling stuff on Linux. To be fair, the whole process is much more organized this time though since the readme has the answers to most of the compilation failure and workarounds. Finally, the point I was coming to is.... the result is sweet. Gnome 2.8 is up and running in its full glory on my laptop and a visit to art.gnome.org (after a looooong time) has given loads of eye-candy to these eyes that had gone sore with the repeated sky blue screen... Best icon theme seen in recent times: Gartoon. Its a must see for those who liked Noia earlier. Kreski lines is interesting too.... though it does not have enough icons for the Gnome start menu yet. Yay!!

2004-09-18T11:25:00.000+05:30

Here we are now.... entertain us.
Before you wonder: I am not a follower or a fan of Nirvana.... but I like the sound of these words. Its the weekend again and there is not much on my mind. So it looked kind of appropriate too. There is a balloon festival some place quite close to our apartment. In case I get my camcorder delivery (yes, I ordered this one!) before I reach there, we should see some interesting pics (and videos) later. Plus, the Fair Park still intrigues me and I am very keen to see the tallest ferris wheel in North America if we can get the time to do it. So watch out for this space!

Office has been going okay so far.... testing times are here now (quite literally speaking) since the code looks ready for action. Once that is done I am 'good to go' :)

On the Linux front, I wish I could use Gnome 2.8 and switch to Linux full time on my laptop.... This machine seems to have some weird problems that we cannot yet place a finger at. Windows gives blue screens at least 4-5 times a day! (Even by Windows standards I find that amazing!!) I tried a Garnome install thrice today only to find it stalled at different stages. Each time it was some fault that can only happen with a corrupt tarball download (since a clean re-install got me past that same step without any new RPMs or libraries). I gave up on that since I did not have time to look at it in detail. Would have been nice to just leave it for compile and see the system ready to use in the evening. That's the beauty of Garnome.... on a working system and an ideal world :)

On the friends and family front, its really nice to get to talk to so many people here that I rarely could do in India. I'll miss that a lot when I return to India. Mangu and Shashi (my friends from BITS) should be coming over next weekend to Plano. (Jeeku cancelled as per latest news). Looking forward to that especially.... I'll be meeting Mangu after something like 4 years!

2004-09-01T10:29:00.000+05:30

Updates from my side
Its been more than a week since I made a post. Things have been carrying on okay at my end. Not much to write about work as such. Went to Fry's electronics yesterday evening. Had a lovely time surrounded by gadgets on all sides. Getting tempted to acquire a camcorder before I leave from here.

Last weekend
Went to San Antonio and Austin this weekend with my apartment mates and Parag Dada. Was an awesome trip! Some pics are uploaded at my other blog.

2004-08-24T02:17:00.000+05:30

Monday's here
Well, there is not much to say about it since it is not very different from the weekend that went by. Sadly we guys were at home on both days. Part due to work, part due to lack-of-transportation. But on the brighter side, I'm glad to be coding again. And I finally caught up with all the BITSians I wanted to talk to.... almost all. I'm adding to the list so its a running target ;)

Weather craziness continues
It poured, stopped raining, became sunny and dried the ground..... all in the space of one hour that we were inside the restaurant today. Some poor guys had left their convertible to bask in the sun and had to run out in the rain to save it from the elements. In the marketing words, I was thinking: "That would be a happy problem to have." :)

2004-08-20T01:07:00.001+05:30

Things that make you go 'Hmmmm'.
Its started to rain here in Dallas suddenly. Since I arrived, the weather has been sunny and quite warm. Suddenly its raining today. And its raining continously since morning. Lets see how much more of this continues.

2004-08-15T19:34:00.000+05:30

Independance day.
Happy independance day to all!

Day yesterday.
Made beloved Maggi for breakfast. Had a good time at one of Dada's friends' place for lunch. Went to the Irving mall after that. Spent some good amount of time drooling on gadgets. Did a lot of window shopping. Restrained myself from doing some actual purchases now itself. Once I get to know the length of the trip, I might indulge in these later :) Stopped at the Dallas temple after leaving the mall. Grabbed some authentic Gujju dhokla and samosa nearby. Did a little Indian grocery shopping and were back. Spoke to Bua and Mangu yesterday after a long time. Was nice fun. Saw Undercover brother into the night after dinner. All in all, a nice long day.

2004-08-14T05:55:00.000+05:30

Reached USA.
At Dallas right now. Its pretty warm and a li'l cloudy.... Journey was peaceful more or less.

more soon

2004-08-10T19:25:00.000+05:30

My birthday was great, great fun!! Thanks a ton to my friends who made it so special by being there and organizing the surprise treat. And a very big thanks to the guys who called in or mailed in and gave their wishes. But the biggest thanks of all to my fiance who made a cake for me, got some really lovely gifts (note the plural) and made me feel extremely special for all the bhaav I was getting ;)

PS: I now have 2 big Dave Barry books to enjoy! I like that guy's writings. For those who enjoy reading sarcastic humour with a lovely insight into life, you will not be disappointed to try the Miami Herald articles here. Or his blog here.

2004-08-09T13:48:00.000+05:30

Hello world.
Just completed 25 iterations of the loop today.
(For those who did not get what that was about....
Its my 25th b'day today :)

Trip details almost confirmed. I'll be in USA this weekend. So friends and family watching this space, I'll be calling you soon!

2004-08-04T14:47:00.000+05:30

Got some time to go trawling on the net....
Here are today's notable finds:
* Gmail API and a POC application here (relax, I meant 'proof of concept')
* Real player 10 released for Linux here.
* Farenheit 9/11 deceits and Michael Moore's responses.

On other notes, I'm back to using Thunderbird since I finally gave up on importing my t-bird contacts into Evolution and more importantly, because I discovered this. I'm still to complete the procedure, but it sounds great. *Just* the thing I need.

2004-08-03T10:37:00.000+05:30

Documentation generators
Spent some time yesterday reading up doxygen and its usage. Also, in related work, read up a little about Javadoc. Since I might be working on Java code sometime soon, this was nice piece of information. Am quite impressed with doxygen in particular, though the Javadoc commenting style does not look very attractive to me.... (I've used a different coding style all along, so that comes more naturally even now). I think it would be wise to change habits now to use Javadoc style since that can be used (thanks to doxygen) for generating documents from several programming languages including C++. Or maybe I need to look a little deeper....

PS: Just read on a blog site about this cool phone accessory. Wow!

2004-07-30T17:54:00.000+05:30

Jogged 5 kilometers for the first time today. Now, the question is.... what will be my state in the evening?? ;) In any case, I feel good that I could manage it.

Tried Picassa with Hello yesterday finally. It worked like a charm :)

2004-07-29T10:11:00.000+05:30

my pic.

2004-07-28T12:23:00.000+05:30

Back in Bangalore
Reached yesterday night after a hectic and lovely 3 day trip to Ahmedabad. Its nice to be back....

2004-07-23T14:52:00.000+05:30

General ramblings
Things are going okay for the last couple of days. Nothing particularly new or interesting to write about at the moment. So this post is more like a list of ramblings.... come to think of it, everything in my blog is more like a list of ramblings in the life of 'yet-another-software-programmer'. Ocasssionaly I do write about work or software or echo other people's point of views (which I agree with). But for the most part, I like to talk and talk.... and talk about casual stuff.

Picasa
The topic for the day is the now free Google Picassa software. I had been looking at Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 demo for some time recently and I had liked the convinience that it offered. So much so that I had called up at least 2 Adobe retailers in the city to find out what a licenced copy would cost me. Sadly, I never got any proper response and the thing persisted like that because the demo version was okay for the mean time since most of my requirements are to do with organizing the photographs into albums and viewing/searching them.

But now coming to Picasa, the following sums up my opinion:

I was quite impressed on the usability front when I gave it a whirl recently. I distinctly remember getting a Jasc Software demo download for similar purpose, but I found the GUI was simply not good enough. I uninstalled it after the first hour or so that I used it. For me to use a photo organization software, it has to have a good interface. Picasa scores heavily on that front. Its elegant and simple. Sort of like most GNOME apps that I like. Its easy to do most stuff and is presented very neatly. The menus are not heaily nested and 'organized' in that sense.
Another big plus is the fact that I can post images to this blog online from the app. Although I haven't tried my hand at that yet, I'm sure I will soon. Going by what I've heard from my friends it should be a nice no-hitch experience.
I read it serves as a means to transfer photographs between friends using the app. That would be a nice thing too. I'd rather not send huge pics through mail or reduce their size by uploading to a photo album site. I would really love to send images in the actual size to my friends. So I look forward to that too.

The downsides that I found during my trial run were:

there is no zoom option.
there's little image manipulation that one can do from within Picasa. The enhancement and the red eye reduction work well.... but still, it would have been good to have a few manual controls instead of only one-click operations.
the software litters Picasa.ini files all over the hard disk (I would like to know the necessity for those files sometime, maybe I'm missing something here).
there is no option to change a photograph's creation date timestamp. This usually gets in my way of navigating on the timeline. If I take a scanned pic and enhance it in GIMP or some app like that, then when I come back to Picasa I end up having the pic showing up as recent instead of old. Or even if I get pics in mail from a friend, they end up having a wrong timestamp. Adobe allows you to correct this.... I wish Picasa did too. I need to do some RTFM to see if there is any workaround for this issue.
there is no Linux port for this application too. Maybe I can use it with Wine. But I'll have to try that some time at leisure. I dislike booting into Windows for specific apps. If only I could find something equivalent or better on Linux. But that requires some more search.

All in all, Picasa is more than just flashy software. It serves most (if not all) of my photo management requirements and is free to use, so I can definitely recommend it to a friend. Adobe may still have an edge over Picasa at present, but at least the competition has increased for it. I can only hope for better things to come :)

2004-07-21T10:41:00.000+05:30

Personal stuff
Its mid-week and time is flying. Went to Golden Palms resort on Monday evening. Was a nice trip. Felt good to talk to Mama after a long time. The place does look grand. Too bad, I don't have any pics to upload. Looking forward to spend this weekend at Ahmedabad if that trip goes as planned.

Work and misc
* Could not agree more to this post from Callum McKenzie. I've been in a project which used C and where memory allocation/de-allocation was a mess because we were afraid of customers who would 'go to bed thinking gotos are bad' (in the words of my lead). I wish there were more people like this guy.
* Yay! I notice Blogger sports a new look again. I like the keyboard shortcuts and stuff.... though I thought the previous look for composing messages was good too.

2004-07-14T12:06:00.000+05:30

Philosophy.
Never studied it, but have one none the less ;)
To see which thinker would you agree with, you can try this page.
My first 5 results were:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Jeremy Bentham (89%)
3. John Stuart Mill (79%)
4. Aristotle (76%)
5. Epicureans (62%)

Note: The highest score, 100, represents the closest philosophical
match to your reponses. This is not to say that you and the
philosopher are in total agreement. However this is a philosophy
that you may want to study further.

2004-07-09T16:33:00.000+05:30

Almost here.
So many things....
* the long awaited weekend is almost here.
* the passport renewal is almost here.
* the expected refund for the real-estate hunt that went awry is almost here.
* the visit to the travel agent is almost here.
* the completion of my house shifting exercise is almost here.
If only I could remove the 'almost' and get on with it ;)

Memories.
As I collected my stuff from my present residence and moved towards my next, I realize I have a load of stuff which (strictly-speaking) does not make much sense to keep, but which I think I'll be nostalgic about if I let it go. I wonder, does this happen to everyone? :)

2004-07-08T09:45:00.000+05:30

Weekend approaching....
Continuing from where I left off last time:
The real estate hunt proved too much to take. After hours spent in talking to the builder, financers, family, friends and the lawyer we finally hit on a stumbling block that forced me to let go of the same. I'm exhausted.... but still not sure if I should take a break from the whole thing for a little while or to press further and carry on to the next builder, and the next, and the next.... what was that bit about perseverance again? ;)

Had a nice trip to Delhi (apart from the not-so-nice experience in the morning). Spoke to Sandy after a long time. Missed Nirula's burger though.... Maybe next time? ;)

Later in the day:
Got drenched again. But for a change, I don't mind it so much. Point is I got my work done for which I had to venture out.

Upgrade to Thunderbird working very fine for me. Tempted to switch back from Evolution. But I shall wait for Evo 2 before making any decisions.

2004-06-30T13:58:00.000+05:30

Hectic days.
Looks like they are here to stay. Its both good and bad. The good: I am really getting to learn more on my job. Also, I'm managing my time better to get the optimum results out early rather than relax and do it. The bad: I have personal commitments that may take a hit and my real estate hunt is worrying me no end when I can't give it the right time slice of my working day. Its bad to be flooded with work when you need to be out of office early for some other reason.... but that's the way life goes these days. Things are moving along though, and we should be in some shape to freeze matters soon.... so I hope. For the moment, hanging in here. :)

Ah.... My compilation must have finished. Time to close this note. Ciao.

2004-06-29T14:48:00.000+05:30

Back again
Its been a long while since I posted anything out here. Its good to be back :)

Meanwhile, trip to Kamath's wedding was quite good. We did not see much of the wedding though. Am still waiting to see the Chitradurga pics taken by friends' cameras. Its so easy to be trigger-happy with a digital cam :)

More soon.

2004-06-20T15:36:00.000+05:30

Lazy weekend.
Spent whole time at home or at my desk at office reading up on stuff pertaining to managing finances. I don't feel quite rested though.... One thing is certain, it feels good to dream of building our own home. As expected, its the journey from the dreams to making it a reality that is a little exhausting ;)

Happy Father's Day to my Dad and Father-In-Law-to-be :)
And.... congratulations to my little sis (Nupur) who'll be graduating next week!!

2004-06-17T14:24:00.000+05:30

Hmmmm....
From Teheran Times (originally reported by Kuwait Times, whose URL I could not find): a US truck carrying radioactive material stopped en-route to Iraq. I think I should not be surprised if US finally finds evidence supporting its cause for the war against Iraq now ;)

2004-06-16T16:56:00.000+05:30

Random links:
* The Prisoner's Dilemma.
* The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee (by Balzac).

Quote of the day (Read it here):
Success: To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Parting thoughts:
Yay!! The Pistons beat the Lakers in the NBA finals! :)

2004-06-14T14:35:00.000+05:30

Life....

Okies. Its been a nice weekend and its a very hectic Monday to start the week (Its almost time to go home now). My uncle (Rakesh Mama) was here for the weekend and we had a pretty good time with him. I realize at times like these that my life as a bachelor is not what my parents or elders would feel remotely comfortable with. Half the things in my room are in a mess (quickly dumped below the bed to give some area to walk on ;) and the kitchen hardly contains enough stuff to make tea (coffee is not the house, sorry). Its a tough task to find more than 2 cups which are of the same design or size and the windows have enough dust on them to make them look naturally coloured brown..... amazing how these things don't attract your attention on a normal 'non-parent-association' working day since I and my room mate don't usually cook at home anyways and by the time I enter home its dark enough not to notice any weird colours in any part of the room under the tubelight. I'm pretty certain that after seeing my place all elders in my family will thank God that I'm getting married soon.

But I digress, coming back to the weekend.... On Saturday, Mama and both of us (I and Vrushali) walked around a whole lot of Bangalore and were driven around (in an auto-rickshaw) even more than that. The matter of search: real estate. The search was an eye-opener for the most parts since the property rates turned out to be even higher than poor-old-me thought they were. But it was better to find that out now than later. We stopped only for a brief lunch throughout the hops. The high point was the wonderful dinner to end the day....

Sunday morning, I continued to display my love for badminton for the third straight week.... partly to my own surprise ;) One hour and 2 broken shuttles later I and my friends returned home. Then again the trio (Mama, me and Vrushali) were off. Met my aunt and had another good meal with their family. Went to see off Mama at the railway station after that. That concluded a rather nice and tiring weekend.

Evolution

I finally managed to get some time to download newly released testing binaries of Evolution (1.5.9.1) and see first hand what so many people were praising. I join that crowd as far as the neatness of the new GUI is concerned.... Installation was not so much of a breeze as I thought it would be, but since my system at office is not a standard Fedora configuration (its a result of numerous RPM upgrades of RH 9.0) I half-expected things to break anyways.... I had to remove the evolution data created by the older evo and move the older gconf entries out of the way too. Then Evo 2 beta came up nicely. The disappointment was that I lost a few old mails in the inbox of Evo 1.4 and had to configure my account and re-create my mail filters all over again (basically start from scratch). Logged in to IRC to see what I did wrong and learn a few tips in case installation should have been more easy for me anyways. Happened to meet NotZed who showed me how to reclaim my 'Sent' mails from Evo 1.4.... Was very pleased to get that done. Now, I just need to get my addressbook imported again. But that, my friends, is another story :)

2004-06-10T10:15:00.000+05:30

Word processor woes

Topic for the day.... why is MS Word is the de-facto standard?! I've used that software for years now, at college and at work and never thought so much about it as I do these days since I've started using Fedora as my default workstation. Here is what is my evaluation....

The good:
I like the interface. Its good to have keyboard shortcuts for almost all your regular work; and given some patience you can even understand specifics such as how to get your templates and auto-text to function as you want them to. Its a good editor for documents which are less than 100 pages long. On Windows, I did not know of any utility which came close to offering the functionalities I would get in word.... at least a couple of years ago AbiWord and OpenOffice were not in the same league, I felt.

The bad:
For all the convenience to create the document, it offers nothing but major inconvenience to share it once your work is done. There is no default PDF export function available. The word document format is not made available for others to be able to write/edit a document made in Word using any other software. For the same reason, MS Word does not allow you to save your work in any open format which would be handled better by other editors. In other words, a pure and undiluted monopoly. If I need to give a document out to others, I have to hope that they have MS word installed on their system.... and preferably the same version as what I'm using. (I've seen colors get screwed when an Office 2000 doc is opened in Office 97).

The downright ugly:
This link may come as a surprise to some MS users. That the word format stores some information about the document creator was known to me (I think I know how to instruct word to store correct information for the creators), but that it would include text from other open documents was a surprise. I don't know under what conditions this happens, but ignorance is certainly not bliss in this case.

If you are reading this and still not convinced, I think this article on the GNU site may do a better job of explaining it....

2004-06-09T15:47:00.000+05:30

Homage
This real-life story is really painful to read. I wonder how many Indian Army men and their families would have gone through similar ordeals.

2004-06-08T10:01:00.000+05:30

Things you get to see from other blogs

Browsing from PlanetGnome led to some interesting pages on IMDB. These are the top 250 and bottom 100 movies rated by users online.... Suddenly, I feel better about not getting enough TV time on some days.

From slashdot: Here's someone who can tell which parts of america prefer to use the word 'pop' and which like to use the word 'soda' for carbonated drinks. I'd like to see a similar study for Indians who use the words 'cokk', 'phanta' and 'coool drink'.

2004-06-07T11:51:00.000+05:30

Weekend highs

Had a really relaxing experience at a restaurant after a long time. The place in question: Bombay Post on Airport Road (Carlton Center). Cuisine is primarily north indian and not extremely high on spices (which is good for my taste buds). Price tag is on the expensive side with bill touching around 800/- for a couple. Its worth the money for an unhurried (but not overly slow) lunch. Ambience is good too. Do try the Jewel Thief if you like black currant :)

Another weekend, another movie. This time it was Potter time. Checked out Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The book was more gripping I thought, especially because the director had to remove some content to fit the movie within the desired length. But, all in all, decent entertainment.... worth the 45 minutes I spent in queue to get the tickets ;)

And, last but not the least, a big thanks to the blogger folks for their service :)

2004-06-04T09:42:00.000+05:30

Night outs and Pilani....
I guess for almost all BITSians, these 2 things go along together. Okay, I agree, I'm almost an old timer now since its been 4 years from college; but yesterday's night-out reminded me of the 'good old days'. The sore difference was that I missed my wingees. It used to be fun to put laccha even when you thought you were just about to give in and go to bed. The topic never mattered.... maximize the time awake and minimize the genuine output of the activity (in most cases.... "Lets go for chai/maggi at ANC. We'll come back and ghot after that!") I wished it had been my wing and ANC all over again. But then, there was work to be done....

2004-06-02T10:53:00.000+05:30

Found a nice collection of RSS Readers on the web. I'm trying to get straw working on my system, but have some nagging issues with the setup which I'll fix in the next couple of days (hopefully). Work is on the rise hence this activity will have to wait for a li'l while I guess.

2004-06-01T11:25:00.000+05:30

This was yesterday at Bangalore.

When 2 good friends announce the date they're going to tie the knot with each other, its great news. And when it comes as soon as you reach office in the morning, its even better! Congrats Vikas and Shyamalee! :)

2004-05-31T12:59:00.000+05:30

Weekend...
Was good. Saw 'Hum Tum' on Friday (took tickets in black after a long time, in fact so long that I don't remember when I did that last!) Was worth it. Good movie, great company :) Caught another movie ('Yuva') on Saturday. Proper masaala movie according to me. Gals swooning over Abhishek Bachchan all over the place.... Had a nice shower to end the day.... no not at my home, on the road. Its pouring in mid-summer at Bangalore. Lucky me.

Fedora & Gnome 2.6
RPM upgrades are not as smooth as I wish they were. I need to read up more on what the issues are with the same. Am reading an increasing the opinion on the mailing lists that a clean install is the best way to go with Fedora. I think I'll try that next time at home. (Fedora Core 2 ISO download is still not complete, so there is some time for that). For now, however, I'm stuck at office with all my MIME-associations lost after an RPM upgrade to Gnome 2.6. On the brighter side, I got to read the shared-mime-info-spec which is good reading, and which I would not have seen unless I encountered these problems.

Meanwhile, a very heartening post on the mailing list which says I can continue to dual-boot after upgrade to FC2 without _any_ issues if I just take some care. I don't use XP so much these days, but my gaming is almost entirely on XP, and for that I can't remove it totally :)

2004-05-27T16:19:00.000+05:30

This is my first post from BloGTK. It got a decent review here and so I wanted to try it out. My opinion:
* The front-end is good (HIG compliant as far as I can make out).
* Back-end seems to use XML RPC, while blogger is moving towards ATOM. So that may be an issue. Not right now, though.
* There are shortcuts to edit HTML without writing the markup yourself. That's a plus.
* The line feeds are not coming in the preview whenever I press an 'Enter'. If they don't show up in the final blog, then it'll be sad.

Lets see how this goes :)

2004-05-27T11:43:00.000+05:30

Serendipity

Ah.... what a pleasant surprise to start my day. Read on PlanetGnome that blogger has new templates available. Came over to check out the same. Got a new GMail account in the process :) .... AND .... I must say the new templates are a great piece of work! Kudos to the creators!! I'm very impressed with the same.

Blogging (and news aggregators) are really innovative means of having a presence on the net and being in touch with folks you'd like to hear from. Seen several offerings over the last fortnight, out of which I particularly liked: pLog, pyBlosxom and WordPress. I was beginning to feel Blogger is not quite there, but guess what.... I was wrong. The new look of the site is a big plus. I'm here to stay!

2004-04-13T04:01:00.000+05:30

Read lots of interesting articles/references on the web recently.
Mainly gnome related:
* gnome 2.6 reviews (here and here)
* State and future of gnome (here)
* More on future outlook of Gnome (here)
* Mono (go mono!)
* debate on the language choice for the desktop

2004-03-22T09:15:00.000+05:30

Monday morning.... Thoughts for the day:
* How does one thrive in challenges?
* What does it take to rise back from a defeat?
* Do serious activities stop being fun and enjoyable at some stage?
* How much is too much?

2004-03-03T09:46:00.000+05:30

Ah.... my first post. Hope that blogging becomes a regular activity now. Sounds fun :)