Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Sultans of Swing !

Who would that be now ? The latest kid on that list would be Irfan Pathan who seems to end up getting a wicket with his first over . Or would it be Richard Hadlee ... or would it be Kapil Dev India's only all rounder for ages now. Would it be Sir Alec Bedser ? Or the great Pakistani bowler Wasim Akhram , someone that a lot of Indians grudgingly admire. I still remember that one over in Sachins test that he bowled to Rahul Dravid. 5 balls to which the Wall had no answer going this way and that ending up with the last ball breaching the wall and clipping the top of the off stump.

Ok why such a post ? As you can guess I got bored of looking at bugs for the day and spent some time listening to Dire Straits rendition of the song with the same title. The good thing will be to set up my router tomorrow if and when Iqara delivers it and finishing work on my loop bug ! I seem to be bug squashing only loop bugs or bugs that end me in being in loops !

Sunday, April 16, 2006

The weekend away .

The news is that I finally got my broadband and cable modem connection @ home from Iqara on Saturday. Now in the motions of securing my Desktop as well as setting up stuff on it. Moved up the desktop from unstable Breezy to Dapper . Now I truly run ubuntu. Its fast , decent and good fun . The speeds were so good that since I had to go to Shirdi overnight and return on Sunday afternoon, I set up a download of the entire Dapper package repository. Timing this gave me a time of nearly 100MB an hour , the whole set of packages got downloaded in 5 hours. Now thats super cool !

The other event in life was travelling to Shirdi and Shani Shringanapur overnight to get some piety into life . The village of Shani Shringanapur is amazing. Till this day and age , no house in that village has a door or windows. Well not even toilets and bathrooms have doors and windows. Its supposed to be a "swayambhu" as far as the idol goes and is supposed to be good to visit if you are having a rough time on account of Mr. Shaniswara !

Saturday, April 15, 2006

The new year that was.

Apparently today was a major major day. It was Tamil New Years day , Vishu (The mallu new year day) , Bihu (Assamese New Year) and Dr Ambedkars bday . With the result that there was enough food at home to make sure I worked from home. Well there was vada and paayaasam ( kheer for all ye Northies!) , then rice sambaar, rasam and curds . Not to forget the papad also made.

However the traffic was even more terrible, thought that with the firang masters enjoying Easter Weekend it would be cool on the roads but on the contrary got stuck in a traffic gridlock that ran for nearly 2-1/2 kms. This was a stretch that I usually zip around at 60-80 kph , today I did this in nearly 40 minutes. Terrrible. And why was this ? There was a procession. Whats this city going to ?

Now they have floodlit golf in the Pune golf course. What they forget is the fact that we have powercuts for 3 hours everyday while ppl can enjoy golf !

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Ground hog day

The day before the Tamil New Year. Never realized it so much until today when I spent time in cleaning up some bugs in a super expensive super testing suite provided by some folk out of Europe in the 4.1.1 port that I am doing for a wireless soft modem DSP . Also managed to grind out one more bug out of the earlier 3.4.5 version that we have running now. :) .. So can breathe easy tomorrow and start looking at slightly more interesting stuff like why dhrystones are slow !

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

A method to madness

Life is quite excellent these days. At the end of the day driving is such a pain that one enjoys working from home. When you do that you enjoy the heat in Pune where temperatures are now touching 40 degrees. I pity the English team thats playing cricket now in India and specially in the dusty bowls of Bihar and UP. In such a situation what can one do but relax in a pool in the evenings after the heat goes down. Its awesome in the pool to cool down after a long days work . The only reason to reach office is to sit under the AC to cool down ! Add 3 hours of power cuts daily at home its such a pain to get anything done sitting at home ! When will this great state get some sense and decide to build some power plants !

Saturday, April 08, 2006

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

What a waste !

Tough long day today . Got back home early enough , but can't sleep now . Traffic in Pune is getting really terrible with the amount of vehicles. Took me an hour and a half to get from the airport to home . I estimated it to be half the time. My clients should not hear this or they wouldn't trust the estimates I made with my Software Projects;) . In any case when we reached home , the lights were off. Its amusing to see that people in Pune can play Golf at night when the rest of the city sweats and faints under the heat . There isn't enough electricity for Small and Medium Enterprises to do work , they need to idle for atleast 3 hours a day , but the blasted golfers need to play golf between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. when there is peak demand for electricity . What a waste and what misplaced priorities as a nation. No wonder Maharashtra is going the Bihar way !

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Wake up Kumbhakarna

Ah , Here we are again..New day , new slate ! Time to wake up and blog again. Life has so moved on ... .Summer's here and the heat is oppressive. ! Did 3 trips to bbay since my last one. Was good driving on the eway at 140 - 150 yesterday. Did the drive back from bbay to pune in 2hours flat ! Now that was some heck of a drive . Now figured out 3 routes out of bbay to drive back. One the traditional , chembur -> mankhurd -> panvel route , the second eastern express way -> airoli -> panvel and the final to take the airoli->belapur -> panvel route which is a much better road and skips kharghar.

Spending more time hacking gcc, got a few bugs which are interesting... I hope the new age cells unite and make up for all the existing pains in this world. ! This will be clearer in the next few days !