Murphy's laws of Computer Science

Recently my uncle (newly introduced to the world of programming) sent me a link with murphy's laws of computer science.

• Any given program, when running, is obsolete.
• Any given program costs more and takes longer each time it is run.
• If a program is useful, it will have to be changed.
• If a program is useless, it will have to be documented.
• Any given program will expand to fill all the available memory.
• The value of a program is inversely proportional to the weight of its output.
• Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it.
• Every non- trivial program has at least one bug
  Corollary 1 - A sufficient condition for program triviality is that it have no bugs.
  Corollary 2 - At least one bug will be observed after the author leaves the organization.
• Bugs will appear in one part of a working program when another 'unrelated' part is modified.
• The subtlest bugs cause the greatest damage and problems.
  Corollary - A subtle bug will modify storage thereby masquerading as some other problem.
• Lulled into Security Law
  A 'debugged' program that crashes will wipe out source files on storage devices when there is the least available backup.
• A hardware failure will cause system software to crash, and the customer engineer will blame the programmer.
• A system software crash will cause hardware to act strangely and the programmers will blame the customer engineer.
• Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.
• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
• Make it possible for programmers to write programs in English, and you will find that programmers can not write in English.
• The documented interfaces between standard software modules will have undocumented quirks.
• The probability of a hardware failure disappearing is inversely proportional to the distance between the computer and the customer engineer.
• A working program is one that has only unobserved bugs.
• No matter how many resources you have, it is never enough.
• Any cool program always requires more memory than you have.
• When you finally buy enough memory, you will not have enough disk space.
• Disks are always full. It is futile to try to get more disk space. Data expands to fill any void.
• If a program actually fits in memory and has enough disk space, it is guaranteed to crash.
• If such a program has not crashed yet, it is waiting for a critical moment before it crashes.
• No matter how good of a deal you get on computer components, the price will always drop immediately after the purchase.
• All components become obsolete.
• The speed with which components become obsolete is directly proportional to the price of the component.
• Software bugs are impossible to detect by anybody except the end user.
• The maintenance engineer will never have seen a model quite like yours before.
• It is axiomatic that any spares required will have just been discontinued and will be no longer in stock.
• Any VDU, from the cheapest to the most expensive, will protect a twenty cent fuse by blowing first.
• Any manufacturer making his warranties dependent upon the device being earthed will only supply power cabling with two wires.
• If a circuit requires n components, then there will be only n - 1 components in locally-held stocks.
• A failure in a device will never appear until it has passed final inspection.
• Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
• A program generator creates programs that are more buggy than the program generator.
• All Constants are Variables.
  Sent by Risto Matikainen
• Constants aren't
• Variables won't
  The last two laws were sent by Hnathoo
• A part dropped from the workbench will roll to a degree of un-reachability proportional to its importance.
  Sent by Neal Buddenberg
• In a transistor circuit protected by a fuse, the transistor will always blow to protect the fuse.
  Sent by Neal Buddenberg
• The best way to see your boss is to access the internet.
  Or...
  No matter how hard you work, the boss will only appear when you access the internet.
• The hard drive on your computer will only crash when it contains vital information that has not been backed up.
  The last two laws were sent by Charles L. Mays
• Computers don't make errors-What they do they do on purpose.
  Sent by Terry Jaster
• If Murphy's laws are so true then how come I can log onto this site and submi............
  [connection reset - error message 928 ]
  Sent by Paul Breen
• Gumption's Law (?)
  Any problem, no matter how complex, can be found by simple inspection.
  Corollary: A nagging intruder with unsought advice will spot it immediately.
  Sent by Ray Geist who found it handy when he was debugging computer code.
• Each computer code has five bugs, and tis number does not depend on how many bugs have been already found (it is conservative).
  Sent by Andrew
• Profanity is one language all computer users know.
  Sent by Jeff Webb
• The number of bugs always exceeds the number of lines found in a program.
  Sent by Yaron Budowski
• The most ominous words for those using computers: "Daddy, what does 'Now formatting Drive C mean'?"
  Sent by Yael Dragwyla
• When putting something into memory, always remember where you put it.
  Sent by Paul Pigott
• Every non-trivial program contains at least one bug.
• Every non-trivial program can be simplified by at least one line of code.
  The conclusion of the last two laws: Every non trivial program can be simplified to one line of code, and it will contain a bug.
  Sent by Brandon Aiken
• An expert is someone brought in at the last minute to share the blame.
  Sent by Bassey Essien.
• Debugging is at least twice as hard as writing the program in the first place.
  So if your code is as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you're not smart enough to debug it.
  Sent by Brian Kernighan
• Bahaman's Law:
  for any given software, the moment you manage to master it, a new version appears.
  Sent by Bahaman.
  Yakko's addition:
  The new version always manages to change the one feature you need most.
  Sent by Yakko
• Patches - don't.
  Sent by Doru Tasca
• Most computer errors can be attributed to a similar problem - a screw loose behind the keyboard.
• Whenever you need a crucial file from the server, the network will be down.
• Whenever you need a crucial file from your hard drive, your computer will crash.
• E-mailed tasking will always come just before you log off.
• A quarantined virus - will be opened.
• A chain letter - will be sent. To global. A dozen times.
• The chance of a virus infecting your network is directly proportional to the amount of damage it does.
• The chances of getting off work on time is inversely proportional to how much e-mail the boss leaves for until end of the day.
• The faster you need a hardcopy, the more people will be using the only office printer.
• General Fault Errors are the "Check Engine" light of computers. If it can be fixed, chances are it's not by you.
• A patch is a piece of software which replaces old bugs with new bugs.
• The chances of a program doing what it's supposed to do is inversely proportional to the number of lines of code used to write it.
  The last twelve laws were sent by Ryan Sylvester
• The probability of forgetting your password is directly proportional to the frequency of changing it.
• No matter how fantastic your latest and greatest PC is, you will be able to buy it for half the price in 12 months.
  The last two laws were sent by Zain
• The longer it takes to download a program the more likely it won't run.
  Sent by Skwirl
• Failure is not an option, it's included with the software.
  Sent by Paul
• A program is good when it's bug free - which is impossible.
  Sent by Hans van Rijsse
• If you forget to save you're work every 5 minutes, it will break down after you've been at it for an hour.
  Sent by Eric Guilbault
• It's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature.
• The amount of time taken to successfully complete a software project is in direct proportion to the amount of Marketing input.
  Corollary: Marketing should not be located in the same city - much less on the same campus - as Engineering and/or Programming.
• The only thing worse than an end-user without a clue is an end-user who has a clue - usually the wrong one.
• According to most Tech Support people, the most common user error message (regardless of Operating System) is ID 10T.
  End-users' Corollary 1: most application failures occur between the hours of 2 and 4 am on a Sunday night - with a 6 am Monday deadline for the project.
  End-users' Corollary 2: On the graveyard shift, there's no Tech Support to hear you scream!
  The last four laws and corollaries were sent by Jim Kirk
• Bugs mysteriously appear when you say, "Watch this!"
  corollary: If you call another programmer over to see if he knows what's wrong the bug disappears.
  The corollary was sent by S. Bussell.
• The probability of bugs appearing is directly proportional to the number and importance of people watching.
  The last two laws were sent by Bill Smith.
• An employee rank is in inverse proportion to his use of a computer, and in proportion to its performance.
  Sent by Dan Wasson
• The only program that runs perfectly every time, is a virus
  Sent by DaRk_jAcKaL
• If a project is completed on schedule, it wasn't debugged properly.
• Non Crash Operating System aren't.
• The worst bugs in your program will show up only during the final review.
  The last three laws were sent by Kiran
• The people who say that computers are simple to use are the same people who tell you how to build a watch when you ask what time it is.
  Sent by Jack Betz
• Philington's First Law
  If it works, it's production. If it doesn't, it's a test.
• Philington's Second Law
  Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
  The last two laws were sent by Philip Partington
• Format C: fixes all
  Sent by Ron Westby
• Law of Computer Generated Aerodynamics
  Computers suck.
• Law of Recycling
  A computer that has been on the market for 6 weeks is still usable as a boat anchor.
• Law of Anti-security
  The best way past a pesky security feature is a 13-year-old.
• Law of Acceleration
  A computer that has surpassed its user's frustration capacity (FC) will accelerate downwards at 9.8 meters per second squared.
  The last four laws were sent by Timothy Boilard
• Computers let you waste time efficiently
  Sent by Jim F.
• Make a system even a moron can use and a moron will use it.
• Make one that requires training or intelligence and only a moron will use it, but there will be more help desk calls.
  Sent by S. Bussell
• The likelihood of problems occurring is inversely proportional to the amount of time remaining before the deadline.
• You will always discover errors in your work after you have printed/submitted it.
  The last two laws were sent by Niels Hageman
• 90% of a programmer errors come from data from other programmers.
  Sent by Emanuel
• 'Illegal Error' messages only happen when you forget to save your work
  Sent by Abdul Mohsin
• If you make the letters in your Word document bigger and then you print it out, you'll have everything on the first page and only one line on the second.
  Sent by Nadine
• the OEM did not actually manufacture the part you need to replace
  Sent by Bryan Lord
• By the time you learn your new computer you'll need a new one.
  Sent by romanaround
• After a software is released, the first bug found will be by a person who normally does not use that portion of the program but was wondering why he can't do something he normally would not do.
  Sent by Rick G.
• When the Downloading Window says "99%complete", there will be a fluctuation in the voltage and you'll have to start all over again.
  Sent by Sagar Kalantre
• Millions of people believe they are animals, but I have yet to meet one that believe in Windows' stability. Even human stupidity has limits ;-)
  Sent by Sylvain Galibert
• The troubleshooting guide contains the answer to every problem except yours.
  Sent by Jesse Janowiak
• Plugins Law
  Whenever you install a group of plugins one by one just to find out which one can make your software work, you either haven't gotten the right one, or have accidentally skipped the right one or it has become the last one installed.
  Sent by Laudney Ren
• No matter what problem you have with your computer - Its Always Microsoft's fault
  Corollary: If its not their fault - Blame them anyway :-)
  Sent by Andrei Keren
• You will get disconnected from the Internet or experience a computer crash when you are downloading. If you don't experience one within 80% completion, then it will happen at 99%. If you do manage to get the file, then it will turn out to be completely useless and/or invalid.
  Sent by Hyung Jin Lee
• You'll always receive an e-mail from a web site that you never visit before.
• 75% of the bugs laws in this page can be applied to MS Windows (Any version).
  The last two laws were sent by Christian C
• Auto Correct - isn't
• Microsoft excel- doesn't
  the last two laws were sent by Alegna
• If you need to shutdown your PC ASAP, It will restart.
• The quickest way to shutdown a PC is to unplug it.
  Corollary: ACPI shutdown (sometimes faster to get to than the plug) does not always work.
  Corollary: ACPI shutdown will fail most frequently when you run the risk of being caught doing something.
  Corollaries were sent by Stravag
• No matter how big a hard drive you buy, you'll need to double it in a year.
  the last three laws were sent by Pliaskos
• Complete computer breakdown will happen shortly after the maintenance person has left.
  Sent by Jan Wenall
• A virus will be erased when the hard drive crashes, making it useless for antivirus program to fix it.
  Sent by mitch
• The problem always exists between one keyboard and it's respective chair.
  (On submission problem was insomnia... zzzzzz)
  Sent by Cpt_Anderson
• A program that compile on the first run has an error in the algorithm
  Sent by Iavor Dimitrov
• Edward V. Berard Law
  Walking on water and developing software to specification are easy as long as both are frozen.
  Sent by Andre Van Dun
• The smaller the size of your email account, the more junk mail you will get
• The boss will always come to your workspace when you accidentally open an adult link
• The more pop-up screens you have, the more likely the boss will come by
  The last three laws were sent by Mark
• A computer is only as smart as the person using it
• If it ain't broke, Overclock it!
  The last two laws were sent by Michael Horvath
• If you're in a hurry, your computer will crash, a hard drive will become corrupted, or your files will be erased. Any way, you're screwed if you have a deadline.
  Sent by Logan
• Software Reliability:
  Investment in software reliability will increase until it exceeds the probable cost of errors.
  Sent by Bill Pramik
• Computer sadism: When the computer causes physical or mental damage to a person and can't receive such a return favor (due to management rules).
• Computer masochism: When a computer takes all the abuse you think you can give it and continues working as it should.
• The sound of grinding metal or the sight of smoke coming from a case is a warning that you are trying to do too much with too little.
• The survivability of a system is directly proportional to the price of the cooling system applied to it and inversely proportional to the amount of use it sees.
• Antivirus systems only effectively work on a virus after given virus has passed its prime.
• The most frightening of viruses is the virus you do not know is already there.
  The last six laws were sent by Stravag
• The amount of damage that a string of code can do is inversely proportional to the length of the string
  Sent by Kit Balmer
• You only receive instant messaging, when working on a project that's due instantly
  Sent by Keith
• When designing a program to handle all possible dumb errors, nature creates a dumber user
  Sent by Rich Spejcher

GCC Traffic Week of 7th December 2007

This week had a continuation on the discussion regarding improving debug info at various optimization levels and the general consensus was that behaviour that caused code generation differences with and without using -g should be removed. This is a basic promise by GCC to its users and would result in a lot of things breaking in such a situation. It would be interesting to wait and watch on this space since it promises to improve things with debug info as well as try and define compromises with debug info and optimizations (as long as optimizers do not generate code dependent on debug info being turned on are not .) .

Dan Berlin started a huge thread about using git for the version control system and the space / time overheads with checking out a repository , keeping patches and generally using git instead of svn and / or mercurial. There is a huge thread that starts here and goes on to include the friendly neighbourhood folks from the git community in attempting to get git working on the gcc community. I've tried in the past using git with an internal CVS repository and given that I work only with relatively small history I haven't had the kinds of issues that folks are having on the lists.

However the scales are different and it would be interesting to see what is the kind of times I get using Mercurial to play with. Makes sense for a weekend project.

BTW the command line for Mercurial is hg, in some sense the chemical formula for Mercury .:) .

GCC Traffic Week of 30th November

Michael Meissner continued where he left off at the summit regarding Function Specific optimizations. The basic idea is to be able to control the target options initially on the function being compiled and be able to generate different code for the same functions. The idea seems to allow for dynamic dispatch of function versions of very hot functions that could result in better performance on architectures that supported it. The wiki proposal is available here and the mailing list discussion can be found here.

Mark sent out the 4.3 status report and noted that we are still 34 bugs away from a release branch . The full details of the thread can be found here.

The 2 other major topics of discussion this week were regarding improving debug information from GCC and the contentious plugins project with the overall consensus being that plugins are good for quick prototyping and so on but might not be maintainable in the long run given that API stability is not a given with GCC. So, it appears as though productizing a plugin with GCC might not work in the long term given the pace at which things change but might be good enough for a researcher to do a quick prototype. Ofcourse the legal angle is different and it would be interesting to see what the FSF thinks of this project vis-a-vis the GPL. There's more to come surely on this. I didn't quite follow the debug information thread - so no reports on that.

You can find the discussion on debug information here and the discussion on plugins starting here.

GCC proposals.

The last few days I've been figuring out that there's a lot of stuff new that's being proposed in GCC . However reading mailing lists for keeping track of all this is rather painful . So I shall endeavour to publish on my blog regularly the new kinds of topics that are being discussed in the GCC community pretty regularly. Ofcourse there have been many attempts like this including the one on the GCC wiki , though I am sceptical of my own discipline on doing this.

But then ... lets see how we go at this.

The IT guys jargon

Don't know where to stay in Timbucktoo - what's the problem - google it. Don't know this client visiting us - what's the big deal lets google him. There's an ICE in GCC - no problem lets google it in gcc.gnu.org . Its become such a tool in one's life that I now hear my mom using google for all her copy editing work . Oh I don't know what Schrodinger's cat in the box means, let me google for it and figure out if the book has it used in the right context.

The other useful app that Patan pointed out to me was Google Reader and a one stop solution for collecting feeds from all the blogs that I manage to read once in a blue moon. I did try and use the standard gnome applications for it but then opening and closing it everytime proves to be too much of a strain on my ancient workhorse with a couple of builds running in parallel. However one does have google open most of the time in a browser window and a tab having the blogs isn't too much overhead.

But then google has this tendency to figure out that the user in his web experience definitely wants more tools on the web and they've gone around filling that gap rather beautifully. Hmmm the mind boggles.

0x2b || !0x2b

Thank you Manas Alekar for that mathematical formula. A geek would automatically understand this as a consistent source of boredom and the time when too many questions about things which one has no control of puts your mind in an inevitable state of flux.

Dinner with parents and my cousins led to the inevitable Indian questions of settling down, getting married, starting a family etc. etc. The specific requirement for my sis-in-law was the fact that she'd get good food, my niece in the middle of her current nightmare in life (10th grade board exams) could buy herself a ghagra choli and it would allow both her husband (my esteemed bro) to point a finger at me and laugh evilly before welcoming me to the married club ( yaam petra inbam perugavae vaiyyagam) - When informed that such a matrimonial union with some female of the species was definitely not on the cards - everyone started sulking at the very loss of being able to do this again this year.

Does one go looking for relationships ? Now the arranged marriage concept among us tambrahms is rather amazing. Any lallu punju [1] thanks to our booming IT economy prefers to sit in the U.S. and evokes dreams of a fancy life in the U.S. chasing a dollar dream and forgetting that one can get one's clothes pressed for a mere 3 bucks (now what is that in cents ? ) and hand delivered. This evokes dollar dreams among the female of the species and a passport is procured even before they find a guy of their dreams. This works to the extent that families say that they are only looking for guys in the U.S. In some sense this is a whole load of education wasted - The majority of the females who travel to the U.S. only are glorified housewives atleast in the TamBrahm community (ofcourse there are others staying in the U.S. who are married and have wives who are in pretty high posts - So apologies to their sentiments ) . To get there they are among the toppers in their schools , colleges and professional courses and have fought their way up the rat race the way life in India usually is.

If nothing else this is one of the causes for what is hitting India today in terms of its growth story - serious lack of talent. Ofcourse it is important that a family be raised and that the mother is the centre of the family , but just going abroad to show off is just not done without having done anything to justify your education at maybe the state's expense is plain ridiculous.

Coming back to the relationships bit - it comes back to the basic fact that the two should first be friends and share some common interests atleast . Something which is very difficult to judge by just meeting someone online or through an arranged marriage. But then you need green colored money and green colored cards for that ..














References .

[1] (No offences to the Punjabi readers of this blog - especially a certain Sardar with the tendency to fly like a bird)

My top 4 places to visit and reasons.

Well if I had the time these would a few of the places that I'd love to visit and spend time on the list.

1. The top one would be the Iguazu falls on the Iguazu river in Argentina and Brazil. Its amazing and apparently has 275 waterfalls in 2.7 km. Would be a photographer's delight.

2. Ladakh in the North of India . After seeing some shots in the movie Lakshya especially where they do a mountain climbing stunt this is one place that I shall visit sooner rather than later.

3. Darjeeling, Nathula, Gangtok, Kalimpong and the entire North East. For sheer virgin forests, breathtaking beauty (in the literal sense at Nathula) the wonderful Himalayas.
This is another place that has to be visited during my existence on planet earth.

4. Wrykyn (for Mike), Blandings Castle (for the Empress, Ms. Haliday and ) , Ickenham (for the Lord) , Brinkley Court (for Aunt Dahlia) , The Drones Club (Dover Street London), Market Snodsbury Grammar School (for Bertie and Fink-Nottle) , New York and the offices of Cosy Moments (for Psmith) .

The new fangled software application space.

Over the last few days , my interest has been piqued by the variety of new applications that are showing up all over the web. I created my profile at Facebook and the variety of options that it has with the fact that folks can write their own plugins on top of it. I do login to orkut but Facebook really appears slicker, gives more privacy, apparently has an SDK for folks to write their own plugins and so on and so forth.

One of the other interesting releases in the last couple of weeks for me was Android , the Google mobile phone SDK - like most Google products, its slick , neatly packaged and eminently usable. The interesting bit about Android is that its all in Java and hearing all that one does about Java run time implementations is the performance downside to all the other gains of writing apps in a sandboxed environment. I'd however like to try it out on a 200MHz ARM and see the effects it has on performance of basic scrolling etc . I am not sure about what happens with the open handset alliance given that it has so many cooks, but it would be worth watching Google's next move in that space.

The last application that I laid my hands on this morning was Enso , the demo of which can be viewed here. (Thanks to Muthu for pointing it out) . Looks very very slick and neat and worth giving a go with . A demo version is available for trial and it looks rather rather neat. It improves productivity while working on Windows for a Linux user like me since I can type out commands instead of using the mouse to navigate menus and submenus and what not.

The joys of Diwali Weekend.

Diwali the festival of lights here was spent amidst the usual noise of crackers, pestilent kids bursting crackers and also using my car to draw art that would put an MF Hussain to shame. The noise levels and the pollution levels were pretty high in my area thanks to the amazingly high number of kids present there. Diwali is great to celebrate thanks to a long weekend, amazing food - mom being present at home ensured good home cooked food instead of having to resort to food from restaurants and outside.

The only pain however was an amazing argument one today had to endure for nearly 45 minutes with parents of an impudent kid who had decided to use the side of my car as a canvas to his artistic ambitions substituting a nail for a paint brush. The usual arguments of who said my kid this did this were applied succintly by the opposing party to which yours truly brandished eye witnesses who were Maharashtrian by nature. The accused was a pesky 6 year old kid with a naughty glint in his eye who was sleeping initially through all these deliberations. I had to spend time explaining to his parents and his grandmother who seemed to have a deliberate prejudice against non-Maharashtrian tenants - their claim being that being a Maharashtrian and owning a house in the society gave their kid rights to do whatever he wanted . The petulant bit was them going on in chaste Marathi in which case I fought back telling them that they were in India and reminding them that basic decency meant that they would be talking to me in Hindi or English. Ofcourse to this one heard stunning remarks like you are in Maharashtra, better learn Marathi . Also heard was that the society would be asked to change rules so that no tenants could own any vehicles. Pretty stunning start to a Monday morning if you ask me .

The end result - finally the neighbours in the society realized that someone lived in flat 21 and was not going to take crap in any form lying down.

The joys of insomniac hacking.

You know you should be sleeping ,
You know you are not that young anymore ,
When you start nodding off looking at code,
And writing verse that is such a bore.

On such a note my friends
I introduce to my friend insomnia
the poor cousin of amnesia which
all the big ones said lead to being comfortably numb.

Ok enough of this bs ,
Let me actually quit this insomnia business so soon.

Saar bondaa.

It was late at night and a friend M caught me on yahoo messenger. She's sitting in the US having fun making such yummy looking bondas. Now that I had asked for some of them and this is what I got at 2:52 a.m. this morning . Ain't technology wonderful.
Person makes bondas
Broadcasts on yahoo
Requests given for bonda
Yay ! half an hour later its ready to be served. Too bad its in a continent some few thousand miles away .

Programming Languages

Spending the weekend over at my sister's place I got a very interesting question - Hey can you teach me C++ since I need to do some programming for some of my financial derivative work - Now I particularly don't like C++ for the sheer number of concepts and sheer number of options to do the same thing in a C like dialect. Personally as a programmer I prefer the simplicity of C and on occasion have had to use shell , sed, awk to get most of my work done. Thanks to my own love of languages and never shirking from writing custom parsers and custom languages for some of my own projects either they be during my time at the university or during the course of my professional career I figured there had to be a better way than getting her senses damaged by the whole thing with segmentation faults, runtime errors, dynamic casting errors . Much easier with an interpreted language.

So I did some googleing to figure out what kind of libraries she needed and for what . I discovered that open source did have some kind of financial libraries and something available for the kind of stuff that she needed and that it had interfaces in languages simpler than C++.

The pain with programming in C / C++ for non-programmers is the steep learning curve with the whole jargon of CS, memory management - the absolute pain of looking up APIs and trying to make sense of doco that makes sense to other computer science programmers but not to programmers who want to do a bit to get their basic tasks done. Exposing APIs in simpler languages like python, ruby etc tries to improve the footprint of users and allows the users to solve the problems they want to rather than worry about other problems not specific to the problem domain. Also playing with an interpreted language rather than a translation system allows for interactivity and quick testing of functions along with development and reduces the pain of setup and attempting to do things differently.

So I am trying to now set up python so that she can get going with simple programming and free her mind off issues related to low level details. The library I am trying to use is quantlib
and see if we can get the relevant exposure in the corresponding languages. I wonder though if there could be a way of generating stuff or link this up with Excel or openoffice so that she can remain with her favourite tool. Interesting stuff for a weekend eh ...

Kashid Trip Slideshow.

This is a slideshow of photographs taken at Kashid post the trip to do the river rafting.

Left Forward Right back.

Regular readers of this blog would realize that this is quite an odd title . But that's my new mantra today for existence ! Read on.

It was Gandhi Jayanthi and instead of spending time sleeping at home all day doing nothing 11 of us from office decided to do something adventurous beyond fixing compiler bugs, optimization issues, graphics issues, widget and manager worries.

Something adventurous for us was a 380 km drive across Western Maharashtra starting from

Pune -> Mulshi -> Vile -> Sajad -> Sutarvadi -

The drive is exquisite , waters in the dam are full with the copious monsoons this year and the drive through roads nestled by hills of the Sahyadris left one speechless with the beauty and the impunity with which waterfalls sprung from every place. We had a raft to catch and hence I couldn't stop and take photographs there . One should go back over the weekend just to get some cool snaps around sunset especially with those amazing waterfalls just on the road.

The Kundalika River is where we decided to do some such things in life.


So at Sajad it was decided by the powers that be , that we'd end up doing something known as white water rafting on the Kundalika river. This is one of those small rivers fed by dams in the Western Ghats and irrigating the Konkan area. However from where the water is released till the time it reaches downstream there are a number of rapids intermittently created by the flow of the water over such beautiful terran. So it is possible to raft through some of the rapids , there was 1 class 4 rapid that we had to worry about. I was however separated from the rest of the gang as we could fit only 10 people in a boat and went on another boat not so surprisingly filled with more Software Engineers. One of them seemed to be a keen ornithologist and one got to see a Golden Orion and other such exotic birds on the trip downstream .

Rafting seems to be an interesting activity as long as there is enough current to pull you through the rapids. The job of the guide / steer is the most important as he gives orders to the rest of the team - we actually had a crash course in rafting for 20 minutes prior to the actual work and amazingly self preservation has a way with people obeying orders from the guide without any questions asked and practicising with utmost seriousness because of the risks associtated with the sport. I would have usually expected some smart ass to make some wisecracks there but surprisingly the crowd in my boat was rather silent.

The rapids were in increasing order of complexity-it was too bad that I couldn't photograph any of it - there was only space in my hands for a T grip on the paddle and nothing much else. The rowing commands while in a raft seem to actually be pretty simple - Forward , Back, Get Down (Means get into the raft! and not into the water ) and Stop. Pretty efficient state machine if you ask me - however it has interesting combinations like Right Forward and Left Back which means paddlers on the right side of the raft row forward and those on the left row Back. There's a technique to rowing - but its so tiring in still water that one gets really hit with the lack of exercise that epitomizes every software engineer's life.

There was one class 4 rapid John Cary as our guide called it - In all we had the following rapids

• Laughing Buddha - The easiest of the lot, we got our real life training sessions here for implicit obedience to the guide.
  
• Pumphouse - Little more complex - was a series of class 2 rapids , pretty simple in comparison to some of the others but after the serenity of Buddha was an interesting and long drawn affair.
• Morning Headache - It should be renamed to Monday Morning Headache - This was a class 3 rapid that was also managed pretty well. All the while the guide was taking us into the rapids in the best possible way and giving everyone a fair and thorough drenching.
  
• John Cary - A class 4 rapid. The only place where we had to "Get Down" . Get Down in rafting is to get into a defensive position holding a line that runs around the raft and brace for life and hope that you don't get thrown off. This was v. interesting . There were a number of times when one thought that you'd get hit .
  
• Rajdhani Express - Am not sure of the class of this rapid though one thought it would be a class 4 rapid. This was long and drawn , the last one but pretty fast and long like the Rajdhani Express.
  

The rapids got covered in about 30 minutes of the whole trip down though the remaining time was spent in just floating through with the current till we reached a point downstream where people could swim pretty safely. Yours truly was reminded of a certain incident regarding swimming in the Mulshi Dam where there was a rebirth - so i kept my counsel and decided against getting into the water for a long time. The will was finally broken by the sight of friends of mine who'd never swam before in life swimming merrily in the water and I jumped in promptly to disappear under water for a couple of seconds. I surfaced but it felt as though it was time to call for the lawyer, bequeath my car to my parents, wonder about my tax refunds . Just when one wondered if this was it - the end one realized that he could breathe and got in a few scoops of Oxygen instead of water . This was when the fireworks display inside my head started reducing - and I was able to vaguely make out shapes on what we call Planet Earth. Things got even better, the sun was shining merrily, folks were enjoying their lazy swim in the river , the birds were flying , the vultures disappearing when a pair of hands actually pulled me up using the 2 straps of my life jacket. I didn't know that these things were so strong and pretty well maintained and got back up. I also realized that K my cubicle neighbour wanted to get back at me for all her troubles I had previously caused her in life, by pushing me into the water. Give me land and I am good , push me into water and I am worse than a baby.

In any case after this got done one got to participate in a mini regatta for a couple of kms involving 4 boats. After a spirited race where the left side paddlers in my boat decided not to row in sync with the folks on the right side, we caught up with the leaders who incidentally were my office mates in the other boat. We did give them a tough fight, though ingenious last minute matchfixing by yours truly let us reach second to the final destination.

P.S. This doesn't end here, what's not mentioned is a 1 km climb up a hill with sore legs and hands , resolves of more visits to a gym and the badminton court.

Nasik Triambak Shirdi Bombay Shani Shinganapur Panchvati

3 cheers for the roads and the beauty of Western Maharashtra. If anyone would have told me that I could do this in 1 weekend with hardly any effort I wouldn't have believed them . The fact of the matter though is that I've managed to in one fell swoop cover stretches of Western Maharashtra that have been on my wish list for ages now. Its my 9th year in Pune and only now have I managed the trip to Nasik .

Nasik is about 200 km from Pune and boasts of the origin of one of India's mightiest rivers, the Godavari. It derives its name from the Sanskrit word Nasika which means nose. Legend has it that this is close to Panchvati where the nose of Surpanakha the sister of Ravana in the Ramayana had her nose cut by Lakshman . The Godavari or the Ganga Godavari as it is known here flows in a merry stream maintained rather well by the Nasik civic authorities. However I wonder what would happen in Jan or feb when the monsoon rains would have stopped and the dams would no longer remain so full.

The places to visit in Nasik are Panchvati, kala Ram Mandir, Seeta Gupha, Triambak, Godavari Khund. if you are a pilgrimage fanatic then this be the place.

The Seeta Gupha is among the most interesting places to visit. Psychologically this is the place where you realize how much thinner you need to become and the dangers of that last piece of dessert and that one last ice-cream and that one small spoon of sugar in your coffee. Now for the literal story - its a small little cave with idols of Ram, Lakshman and Sita but the approach to it is so small that only one person can enter and that too on their knees or on their haunches. You literally crawl down have your darshan and get back up in a similar undignified position. Thankfully I had a friend to push me down in case one got stuck but then he just had 2 small school going kids who'd have had struggled to pay him the same compliment.


Anyways the story ends with me not having to be pushed out of the cave and making it back safe and sound to write this one.

The Ganesh Festival- Pune's time in the sun.

Its the middle of the Ganesh festival here in Pune and as usual the streets are rocking to Himesh , AR Rehman, Anu Malik and who ever the latest as we say in Hindi "dhinchak dhinchak" music star is . The great Lokmanya Balgangadhar Tilak started this in the late 19th century as a way of national integration , introspection and a way to unite our disparate masses. But now in the name of tradition and culture we are carrying this a bit too far with all the extravagant spending, the extortion in the name of the pandals, loud music from walls of speakers and drunken dancers in the middle of the street even at midnight.

Its fun for some but its definitely not my cup of tea. Ofcourse the pandals by themselves make for fantastic photographs at night but when there are suicides by farmers in the countryside and powercuts and black-outs for nearly 12 hours in the rural areas of Maharashtra it seems quite hypocritical to indulge in such forms of fun.

Having said all that however the amazing energy, the crowds , the sheer joy of watching different plays, acts and themes for the idols of Ganesha is an experience worth having. As usual I suspect I'll be going along with a group of Swedes and explaining the stuff having not done this in ages. Its time to bring on the D50 .

Tosegarh and Thos waterfalls.

[Enter home at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning after a long week's work . ]

Roomie : What's up for tomorrow ?
Me: Nothing much - gotta get back to office and work on some cool optimization. What are you upto ?
Roomie: Me am off to Tosegarh, Sajjangarh and the valley of flowers at 5:30 a.m. Wanna come
Me : What the heck - lets go .

And so began an amazing journey worth 250 photographs all shot on my magnifique Nikon D50 . Tosegarh and Sajjangarh are located off Satara in Western Maharashtra on the beautiful 4 laned NH4. Getting there was easy, we'd hired a Scorpio to drive us all the way around . It was interesting though with the driver providing us anecdotes about gruesome accidents on highways and driving at maniacal speeds on narrow mountain roads that I thanked my stars for reaching back to Pune in piece.

Tosegarh is nestled in the hills behind Satara reachable on an amazingly picturesque drive. The monsoons have left the hills with copious amounts of water which comes down in the form of a huge number of waterfalls which end up forming the river Krishna which flows through Andhra and 2tmcft of which reaches Madras through the Krishna water scheme. He he all you madrasis watch out for water that we bathed in yesterday ;) . Getting around in the waterfall is an amazing experience. The water was icecold and was gushing along at a merry pace . Getting inside the water was like getting a full body massage albeit by cold water with 15000 masseurs. The scenery as most parts of Maharashtra in this time of the year was awesome and made for some amazing photos. It sure as hell beat working on a Saturday and made for a nice break .

Come September

What do we remember September for - Ganesh Chaturthi , Gokulashtami, 9/11 , friend's birthdays , OSIM ?

I would remember September for the Pune Festival associated with the Ganesh Chaturthi. In as much as I hate the noise and the ruckus they create - (after all Ganesha didn't ask for the walls of speakers with Himesh Reshammiya blasting away at the top of his nose (err voice) ) , the grandeur and beauty of some of the pandals make for an amazing walk through the most crowded areas of Pune and excellent photographs.

Its been an interesting week or so. Rediscovered that the College of Engineering has a boat club from where you can get some amazing pictures. I need to cart my camera along the next time I go just to photograph the birds (of the winged variety). Just watching the egrets and the Eagles swoop over the river in an amazingly tranquil environment is rather neat. I have done some work on addressing mode generation for GCC that seems to improve performance a bit . It would be interesting to see the benchmark results that should be out tomorrow.



So September bring it on ....

Mazes, Traffic Jams and Obstacle courses

Travelling or driving in Bangalore is an amazingly arduous task. Wild horses cannot even drag me to stay in Bangalore. The fact that almost every road in central Bangalore is one way and there is absolutely no way you can make any geographic sense about where you want to go . I had to drive a couple of times across Bangalore and needless to say this was a very different experience. You can't make a mistake in terms of direction and not spend another 20 minutes rectifying it because everything is one way and there are no u-turns available . The circle is possibly a favourite of the road planners in Bangalore - since you keep going around in circles thanks to the one-way's as well as in various junctions . Also the typical rule of thumb according to my friends is 7 minutes per km, so if you need to travel 13-14 km its atleast an hour and a half . The most funny sight though on my trip was this flyover from "Double Road" to Richmond Road which has a signal on top - So you climb up the flyover and drive "American style" (of driving on the right side of the road) for around 500 m and then stop on the top of the flyover to get back into Indian style of driving. For the unimaginative imagine this to be a large X with traffic moving diagonally. Woe betide any learner stuck on the incline in first gear and my sympathies for the car stuck behind.

Driving in each of India's cities is a different art - Bombay is fast , has wide roads , better planned , well co-ordinated and generally very disciplined. Delhi is chaotic but the wide roads are a life saver inspite of indisciplined drivers. Hyderabad is the epitome of lawlessness on the road. People go on the wrong side as though its a right of way. Pune is chaotic too but Hyderabad is possibly the worst traffic I have seen since there is absolutely no logic to driving there as well as wide roads and folks having the most powerful vehicles :) . Bangalore is slow , crawly , confusing and is basically a collection of vehicles that like to imitate the snail. Madras is ok , better disciplined than either of Bangalore or Hyderabad with decent enough roads. However at the end of the day if you can drive here you can drive any obstacle course or navigate through any city in the world with far better co-ordination thanks to manual transmissions in most Indian cars.

Bengaloooruu ... Hello World.

In Bangalore this weekend on a whirlwind vacation of sorts. Its good to be in the garden city of Bangalore and as I blog this after a redeye flight to Bangalore, 2 cups of authentic tamilian filter coffee, 1 plate of ven pongal and a trip on the streets one does start feeling the effect of lack of sleep for a week . It has spectacular effects on my eyes, they start turnign totally red, irritated, and then it moves into what I call the migraine zone where every part of your head starts aching with pulsating and shooting pains . Wow ! sounds interesting doesn't it ? Anyways migraine shygraine aside- it looks as though there are a whole bunch of family and friends waiting to be met in Bangalore - a 14 year old nephew and a 4 year old cousin being the more interesting of the lot .

Looking forward for a tyrst with the infamous Bangalore traffic. Morning wasn't too bad but then no one wakes up in this city till 11 , do they ?

Ottawa Sunrise finally

Finally sunrise in Ottawa. A collage of shots from the hotel window showing sunrise on a day that I woke up at 4:30 a.m. and had nothing much to do.. 3 cheers for my D50 and amazing skyline shots ...

Of television serials and a lazy weekend.

Its been an interesting week . One of my friends P became a father on Thursday and it was an unexpected sight to see him holding the baby when we entered the hospital room to greet the new dad . So now 3 cheers to the big daddy. Ofcourse this leads to a new domain of jokes about the new dad (oops should we say kid) on the block which I'll save for another time.

Spent Friday sick in bed with a sinus attack but later in the evening felt better to run through all the episodes of Heroes to How I met your Mother. One's a sitcom while the other is a supernatural thriller.

Ofcourse being a pretty big fan of sitcoms I managed to finish both seasons of How I met your mother in a couple of marathon sessions neither of which can be said is very good to my health . But as cliches go .. .what the hell, you only live once. I somehow relate to Ted in How I met your mother - too much planning and not doing can never do you any good in any relationship . If there's something to be said or done one's possibly better off saying it or doing it as soon as one gets the thought. Sometimes its good to be impulsive or you just miss the bus or the moment as the case might be. The gang in How I met your mother consists of Robin Sparkles Shebarski, Marshall Eriksen, Lily Aldrin, Ted Mosby and ofcourse the irrepressible Barney "suit up" Stinson. Interesting combinaton of characters and they do make quite a good combination. I can't wait for the 3rd season to get under way. I believe we should be able to see it on Star World in India. Atleast that's what Wikipedia suggests...

Ok thats that .. Nice internet break and now its time for 2 and a half men.,

chak de india.

Its been 1 hour and 42 minutes into the 61st year of our Independence and I just got back from watching the new SRK movie Chak De India. While watching it at ESquare in the 1030 p.m. show last night there was an event that quite astounded me. In the movie a small clip of our national anthem was played and everyone in that particular hall stood for the duration of the clip. Bowled me over totally. Maybe it was to do with the Independence Day spirit and all the media hype but whatever it was due to that one moment made me think about the probability of a hall full of people actually standing up for a clip of the national anthem out of a population of a billion.

Of an English Summer...

What an interesting English summer it has been so far. The Indian cricket team pulled off a series win after 21 long years with a bunch of players some of whom would never travel again to play in England. It was very interesting that the man of the match, a certain Mr. Kumble known more for (the absence of huge) leg spin in his bowling, ( but the presence of the top spin and a veritable googly) to receive the award for his batting (the only century by an Indian in the series in the presence of the demi-gods of Indian cricket) .

Its been raining here continuously for the past few weeks and we are quite fortunate to see the sun on a couple of days. Tomorrow is our veritable independence day and yours truly is celebrating in office today listening to patriotic songs and mulling over wearing a dhoti in office. Ofcourse the problem is that wearing a dhoti in office means the risk of indecent exposure (albeit inadvertently) and the fact that the air conditioning would make me feel very cold in my legs. Being from a tropical place which has only 3 seasons (hot hotter and hottest)such impulsive acts are not so good for an old man like me.

Of Time management and what not.

After the trip last week to Canada, the body clock is still misbehaving and pushed me into a wake-up at 9:30 a.m. and sleep at 3:00 a.m. routine which ends up with me reaching office either having over slept or under slept or at an hour later than what I usually try and maintain (well ,at times :)) .

Time management and splitting time between office work and personal projects is an interesting piece but something one has managed to do well over time . Personal projects on some new topic provides one with an escape mechanism from the drudgery of work or a way of getting out of a problem that one can get stuck on for a long long time . Fixing bugs is also a good way of spending free time and ends up giving the author an extra fillip towards spending some more time in sorting out other bugs of his creation :) .


This is a random posting and do ignore it ....

Of a Canadian sojourn

Its been an interesting couple of weeks thanks to a sudden trip to Ottawa for the GCC summit and work related activities. It was a good trip to Ottawa, meeting for the first time, names that are so active on a mailing list and figuring out that everyone looks so different from what you expect them to be . Travelling to North America for an Indian Vegetarian is quite a daunting task since vegetarianism has been stretched to include fish and chicken in certain cuisines. However this time was rather interesting as one met an alumnus from my school and also working on compilers. Now take that for a coincidence. Incidentally he had the same teensy weensy problem that I had which was that of being a vegetarian :) So there was company to try and explore cuisine other than that provided by Subway or Starbucks or Tim Hortons ..

There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .

The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .

Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...

Pure Magic.

Its been one of those really really good days. The day dawned with me waking up late for my trip to Mahableshwar a hill station about 100 km from Pune. After that what followed was pure entertainment and enjoyment. The drive to Mahableshwar, lunch at Mapro , drive through the clouds, good music , visibility = 0, Humidity = 100% , temperature = very low made the day extremely beautiful. Got a number of photos which I shall upload at some point of time pretty soon.

Once we returned from this long long drive I managed to catch the Federer Nadal match from the 3rd set. For the first time in his life, Nadal seemed to believe that he could beat Federer on grass and actually gave the champ a good marathon for his prize money . The other thing was Federer suddenly gave up in the 4th set where Nadal simply ran him to the ground. The 4th set actually had Federrer rattled and shaken like he had never been before. A couple of hawk eye calls left him non-plussed and irritated. The number of unforced errors went up dramatically in that set too. Finally it all came together in Federer's 3rd service game of the 5th set. It was scrappy, it was dramatic and it was entertaining. Watching Fedex play was like watching a beautiful act of synchronization between limbs, the racket and the ball. It was sheer poetry and it left me incredulous about how he managed to return those serves with so much power and panache !

Shakespeare and Wodehouse.

As is evident from the title of this blog I am a great fan of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse. I didn't realize that the bard from Stratford on Avon (Shakespeare for the uninitiated ) also had certain qualities similar . Statements like "That is a custom more observed in the breach than in the obeisance" show his humourous side too .

The particular quote that I was quite impressed with was not one that would tickle your funny bone . I am not sure about how true this is but anyways here goes "God in his infinite wisdom chooses to ignore some of our prayers while we in our ignorance choose to blame him for it. "

This particular piece of prose was conveyed to me by my mom after a particularly interesting day in life when something that I wanted didn't occur. However both of us were pretty curious of the origin of the particular quote , she couldn't remember if it was Hamlet or Macbeth. If there are interested readers who see this , it would be good to know if you have come across this some place on your other literary quests. Quite refreshing and interesting one must say.

Monsoons, rains , near floods and crumbling roads.

Its monsoon time again ! Rains Rains Rains, its grey dark, cold and raining all the time here at Pune. We seem to be breaking all records this year. The last weekend of June was enough to make up the seasons average for the month . The Mutha, Mula, Indrayani , the Pavna and the river on Paud Road are all flowing and are in spate . The net result, roads laid a week before the monsoons started have started disappearing or in the process of developing great big craters .

On a more serious note, its been a long time since I updated my blog . Was busy with helping out in a GCC workshop at IIT Bombay, lots of work at office travelling to Madras and Bombay through out the last month on weekends and one week . Phew its been quite a while .

Spidey , Anti Spidey ... Spiderman 3

Sometime during this week decided enough was enough and managed to catch up with Spiderman 3 . I was warned by Miss. S that this was going to be a bollywood tear jerker and emotional drama, but went with a notion that it couldn't be as bad as some of the soaps that Bollywood churns out with unfailing regularilty. This is the year when all the so-called heroes cry on screen, James Bond did , and now Spidey also followed suit. (Now thats what is called Bonding with the best. ) It was spectacularly long, 3 bad / misunderstood guys (Anti Spidey, Sandman and the other Monster) , patching up with old friend turned enemy and then watching a friend die. Similarly add in a broken relationship with a girlfriend, fights, a lot of meanness , some gyan and then the good old patch-up at the end. All in all I thought Sam Raimi had gotten to watching Karan Johar while he was in Manhattan shooting the latest Bollywood tear jerker and got influenced suitably.

Bombay trips and driving around.

Driving down the expressway between Pune and Bombay is among my favourite pastimes . On yet another trip this time to talk to a few folks about compilers and to meet my sister I decided to try the road via Turbhe to the Airoli bridge. However it looks as though the contagion of digging up tar roads and replacing them with concrete roads before the monsoons seems to have also hit our neighbours in the valley. Pune has a long tradition of doing that . This resulted in a driving time of nearly 2:45 min when I could have completed the drive to Mulund in 2:30 min or even lesser. The expressway from Dehu Road to Kalamboli was done in 50 minutes flat with a top speed of 130ks an hour.( However I have received other threats during my trip which pale in comparison to the actual threat in driving down at such speeds).


Driving in Bombay is a pleasure in comparison to Pune iff you restrict yourself to driving on the express highways and the eastern side, large 8-10 lane highways where you can zip at 80-90 kph, smooth roads, quite a number of flyovers etc etc etc.

Customer don't care and congestion free networks.

Its been an eventful week . Had fun on the first few days of the week thanks to a visit by some friends from Bangalore. Decided to back my car into a tree , the tree didn't move despite continued threats and ended up having to change the door of the boot.

Last evening, however was even more spectacular. My phone stopped working claiming that it had an inactive Sim . I tried a number of things like putting this in a cool Blackberry and in that I got an even more helpful error message which claimed my SIM card was rejected. A call to the customer care of one of India's biggest networks followed. For folks who don't know, I have a mobile connection with India's largest congestion free network and one that has had folks like Sachin Tendulkar and AR Rehman signed up as brand ambassadors. It resulted in egg on their faces with a claim that they deactivated my phone by mistake. I was surprised to say the least, having paid all my bills for the last 5 years since when I have this number but was prepared to forgive a technical glitch. After all its software, there are always bugs. There is also the possibility of a human error where someone could have gotten it wrong and gotten a typo.

Guess what happens this morning, A call from Airtel's customer care again checking for feedback happens while I am in the middle of a nice little session playing with trees and forests in gcc. The conversation goes:
CC> Sir did you have a problem with your phone ? Did you have a problem with outgoing calls or incoming calls ?
Me> Yes I had a problem , neither was working . The phone said something very helpful like SIM rejected or SIM Inactive.
CC> But sir its working now na ? I just got through to you .
Me> Thinking that he'd come 3rd in a quiz competition with just him in the fray - Yes but the problem was you deleted the line.
CC> All problems solved now ?
Me> But it took you 5 hours to connect it back.
CC> Have you paid your bills ?
Me> Yes, I have . the last one was paid yesterday.
CC> No problem sir, I will check and make sure your bills are reflected in the system.
Me> Fine please do that .
Narrators Interruption> In the middle of this the congestion free network decides to stop working and the call gets cut. So Me calls him back.
Me> We were talking
CC> No problem sir , I will get back to you.
Me> but have you realized the problem ?
CC> What is the problem ?
Me> Patiently explains again.
CC> You must not have paid the bills, thats why they disconnected.
Me> Go check it . I have paid it for the past 5 years regularly and the last one was also paid. Get off your high horse.
CC> What are you saying ? Am I speaking nonsense or are you ?
Me> You are speaking nonsense.
CC> Who's talking nonsense ?
Me> Dont' have time for this , bye.

Customer Disservice is what they seem to be about here and nothing much else.

Across the pale parabola of joy ...

Achievement of the decade. Procuring a printed copy of Mike and Psmith, the "pre"quel to all the Psmith books by P G Wodehouse was the highlight of the day . I had read it off Project Gutenberg but the joy of having a printed copy is something else. This is the origin of sentences that have given absolute joy to readers over the years . Having tried to lay my hands on this book out of print unsuccessfully since class 9 when I first lay my hands on a work of art by Wodehouse, it was a significant achievement to obtain this at long long last...

To quote one of these as PB mentioned to me .

Mr. Downing was a bowler with a style of his own. He took two short steps, two long steps, gave a jump, took three more short steps and ended with a combination of a step and a jump, during which the ball emerged from behind his back and started on its slow career to the wicket. The whole business had the dignity of an old-fashioned minuet, subtly blended with the careless vigour of a cakewalk. The ball when delivered, was billed to break from leg, but the programme was subject to alterations.

Indian Summers...

Managed to get to Crossword in the middle of answering an SOS to my sis over what I would term an eventful weekend . It began with a game of cricket on Saturday what folks would call an intra company match to help unearth new talent in our organization to play cricket ... Yours truly was the first person to appear on the ground at 7:30 a.m. which left our captain K rather impressed considering the fact that he's usually had to give me some 30 wake up calls after reaching the ground on a couple of previous occassions.

Inspecting the pitch showed that it was a beauty with the length of the crease so much that some one would be hard pressed to bowl a no ball. I must say I came very close to overstepping but then pulled out of that delivery at the last moment. The moral of the story was that we lost thanks to a typical collapse after a fantastic start . 59 for none after 9 overs became 67 / 4 ... 2 spectacular catches by my particular nemesis P who usually plays a game with a hangover with either a build the previous night with some P0,P1 blocker critical bugs fixed or with sufficient quantities of suspicious liquid jostling in his innards. One of the catches was to get me out , still cannot believe that he managed to take a catch while falling backwards and still managed to pull that one out centimetres above the ground. What hurt me more was losing a bet to one of my friends who still thinks that I can't bat for nuts.


After this we had a few interesting innings from folks who tried running with Ph (Now I have P so I should refer to Ph as Ph. ) involving an interesting sequence where many a time one would find Ph at the same end as the other batsmen... Thanks to our democratic practices we allowed all our players to get a hit but this noble approach enabled us to score just 115 in the allotted 20 overs.

After a short break where we bemoaned global warming and how heated Pune was becoming before we started on the second innings. We had few brief hopes of winning but all that was dashed once the other batsmen batted through. If only we had held on to a couple of catches, 2 tough c&b's off my own bowling and a skier at long on , there was a chance that we might have done something different. However the dudes of the day were Pr and KP (not Kevin Pietersen but another guy who shares a similar outlook to batting) .. Pr was batting well in the 18th over and suddenly went for an ugly reverse hoick which resembled a cross between a pull and a slash .. I was umpiring then and as Pr walked off I couldn't resist questioning the reasoning behind the shot - (we were not too greatly placed ) to which he replied as an excuse that this was the last over. It turned out that he'd been done in by a smart piece of work by the keeper ( a smart alec) and KP who insisted this was the last over despite feeble hints from the square leg umpire. However this makes Pr the dude of the week and pushes him close to the hall of fame which KP currently occupies...

Namesake

Gogol Ganguly - whats in a name you may ask , but if you have a name which goes Nikhil Gogol Ganguly I am sure you'd sit up and question the wisdom of your parents choices. Its from a superbly crafted movie called the Namesake which I managed to see with 3 Swedes and my niece M bringing to an end a mixed weekend . The movie is well made and the performances are really good - Tabu and Irfan Khan stand out and so does the kid who plays the role of Gogol in the movie . Almost everyone questions their name at some point of time and wonders if their parents could have done better - However you live with your name and its not too far before you make the same mistake.

Watching Australia play England before dozing off . I hope England does a Bangladesh today :)

South Africa do an India .

by losing to Bangladesh - So the win against India wasn't a fluke - the match wasn't fixed and all that to all those losers who went around burning the effigies . Greg Chappell's gone but Dravid stays on. Its been a while since I have been delighted by someone losing and I was backing Bangladesh all the way yesterday .

The last few days have seen a lot of noise and chirp about Indian cricket and the way its the system which sucks and our players who are treated as demi-gods when the team wins and then worse than dirt if they lose. Its possibly to do with our psyche and as my mom's grandmom would say with an old Tamil proverb "Veccha Kudumi Saracha Mottai" .which means that either we are all punks with waist long hair or with a completely shaven pate that resembles more the MCG with lights on... Some balance guys or we'll never achieve anything ...

Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

I went to the new Landmark store that's opened here in Pune to see if I could pick up a copy of Mike and Psmith that I had ordered a couple of months back . However discovering that it wasn't available promptly picked up Colin Forbes' 34th and last thriller. Colin Forbes is an author that I have read since class 9 and I usually manage to pick up one of his books either when I am travelling or haven't read anything interesting in a while.

The central character in all his novels is the head of the British Secret Service or the SIS as it is called Tweed. Tweed spends most of his time looking out for the Brits and saving the world and Britain from total destruction . His enemies in the time of the cold war were the Russians and the Eastern Europeans who morphed once into the Al Qaida . However his favourite enemies in recent times were huge conglomerations lead by rogue industrialists. There's a familiar pattern to Mr. Tweed's madness and there is a method too! Hence the weird title in the honor of Mr. Tweed .!

Rest in peace Mr. Forbes - I shall have to go searching for a new Tweed pretty soon !

Marching towards a century

It was the ides of March when I started writing this particular post.I now see that the blog is approaching the century mark . 5 posts to go and I should be hitting a century here not to mention other places where I have hit centuries before . Certainly my high school maths teacher would be hopeful !

I had a brief and wacked out trip to the silicon valley for a bunch of meetings and conferences. Returning to India meant that I was jet-lagged on return rather than during the trip. The return journey got me back through a very fogged out Hong Kong and I spent the time curled in the large airport doing nothing much but hogging and reading.

Post that I managed to force myself to drive the 590 odd km between Pune and Hyderabad to meet an old friend A . Now A is an HR professional and for the first time in life I ended up in a room where a person from a non-HR background was in a minority. Must say that it was a unique experience and not hearing too much HResque was worth the time. I thought that it had become a part of their common speak , but then P , A's wife is another non-HR entity and that saved the day for me. Anyways I am raving and writing crap, so let me stop here for today.

The valley and eclipsecon.

In the valley - ostensibly the mecca for all software developers for some meetings I managed to find time to attend eclipsecon and listen to Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert . The stories he put together regarding why some of his cartoons never made it past editors also made for Dilbertish episodes. IMO there's Dilbertism in any and every organization that exists on Planet Earth and more so increasingly in India given our requirement that everyone becomes a manager . We all seem to contribute to a chain of actions that don't seem to result in anything useful but a set of meetings. As one of my former customers used to say about some of his other customers A & B. If A and B needed to do a project to tie shoe laces , they would need 467 meetings across a year with every tom dick and harry who thought himself or herself (now we have to be equal oppurtunity ! ) to be useful to the cause to talk about a plan, a contingency plan, risks , accuracy of estimates from engineering before 1 day of engineering could be done to tie their shoelaces !

Progress....

Blogging this technically after the weekend and feeling generally bored about Monday mornings . Spent the weekend catching up on some movies which was a good way of spending the whole of Saturday night. Watched Blood Diamond , Crash , Mistress of Spices, Walk the line , Dor and what not . After a long time stayed up till 7 in the morning. However the result of that activity is that I slept through the whole day getting up only for meals and more sleep . Listening to the music of Pachai Kili Muthucharam streaming over the internet on totem on ubuntu . Now thats really progress as far as Linux goes. It used to be a pain to get sound working - you needed to know myriads of options and what not to get it working - alsa - oss and some other black magic . Currently its just a simple install and everything works like magic. Now now like my uncle says that a computer is useless unless it makes food for him , I wouldn't be surprised that very soon we should have a linux powered robot which doubles up as a cook . The day such a product is made - I'll gift it to him.

Comfortably Numb"ed"....

The Sunday was spent in driving down to Bombay for the big Roger Waters - Dark Side of the Moon concert. Wow! it really was worth every picometre covered in the drive . The concert started bang on time and finished on time too. In the middle was all the fun - quadsonic sound, flying pigs, a number of taunts at the war(s) in Iraq and above all fantastic music. It was worth every single second spent there and every single drop of sweat spent in standing in a huge crowd which was bent on crushing every person standing ...

By the time he got to the Dark Side of the Moon the crowd was totally primed and roaring. Shine on you crazy diamond was received with absolute adulation and then once the band finished playing the Dark Side of the moon . they disappeared ...........only to make you feel cheated ... Then they reappeared to play the all time classics - Brick in the wall, Vera , Another Brick in the wall leaving the audience comfortably numbed...

The unexpected vacation draws to a close.

Hardly expected that I wouldn't be hacking into GCC despite sitting in the city of sweat (Madras) but then it turned out into an unexpected vacation . Here on a private visit for some functions in the family it turned out to be a lot of work in terms of running around , meeting relatives getting some decent photographs, visiting a village our so called ancestral village of Vengalathur . It was certainly a hectic trip. Today looks much better as I have to pay my yearly visit to Landmark and hopefully obtain a few books. Ah Monday Morning approaches and with it a flight at 5:30 in the morning back to what is home these days. Long week lined up but then ......

theppamcloseup

DSC_0680
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

The actual theppam close up . This was shot from nearly 50 meters away with a whole bunch of folks standing between me and the theppam. Its the closest shot I could get to the theppam.

The theppams or the floats of Madras

Across the pale parabola of joy

The weekend has been spent in the city of sweat (Madras) and in the middle of all the rituals and festivities I found the time to go and see the Theppam (Float) festival on Saturday in Mylapore (Madras) .

This was organized for the first time in nearly 2 or 3 decades because of the simple reason that there was never enough water in the Mylapore tank for such events. Some stunning photos were as usual the order of the day - Links will be available tomorrow as I upload some of the pics - The advantage of carrying the D50 is that the policemen on duty here mistook me for a Press Photographer and allowed me full access. Some of the panoramic photos make for very nice viewing.

Other than today I need to get back to hacking GCC and finishing a patch that is long long and long overdue ! Its just not working and proves how much of a pain backporting patches can be .

Elections our experiment with Democracy !

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Indeed our experiment with democracy leads to very interesting sights. This morning I was running to catch a train that would hopefully get me to Bombay in time when I ran into a huge traffic jam which enabled me to move nearly 400m in 45 min. Finally getting irritated I got out of the rick to walk the remaining 4 km. to the station lugging a suitcase and the customary uniform of the laptop, the nikon D50 and a smaller bag !

The reason for this was the result of the civic poll that was getting announced this morning near the Pune Municipal corporation . Our leaders were so busy getting elected that they forgot the very purpose for which they were getting elected - serve the people. They served the people well by indulging in squallid vote-grubbing exercises, providing free crap to people and forgetting to remember the fact that folks needed to travel. There was an ambulance stuck behind my rick and there was *nothing* that could be done to free it. There were half a dozen traffic cops who incidentally should get rid of their uniforms and go drown in the Mutha or the Mula which ever is dirtier (Mutha and Mula are the 2 rivers in the city of Pune which I inhabit) . The cops did nothing to free the roads of marauding crowds who had parked bikes and two wheelers on all the footpaths enabling the zillions of onlookers to spill on to the streets causing utter chaos, irritation and a n utter waste of time.


Its a miracle that the public didn't beat them up today. I was ready to jump into the melee if and when it started. What a waste of time , fuel and energy and irritation . Have a couple of interesting pictures which I'll put up once I have my set up going.

Of weekends , south indian movies and games of basketball.

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A movie (Guru), a game of basketball - sleep and good South Indian food is a valid weekend - Somehow have to drag myself out of bed in the morning tomorrow to either go down to Karla / Baja caves or drive down to Panhala to get some decent photographs. In any case I have a trip planned for next week down to Madras via Bombay which gives the chance to get more pictures. A highlight of the coming trip is a chance to visit the old village from where our ancestors are supposed to have migrated to the cities . Its a small village near Madras - maybe around 100 km. and can be visited in a day . Don't expect to be able to take too many photographs there but can atleast attempt.

Noses to the grindstone

Across the pale parabola of joy: "BlogT"

Its been a crazy couple of days at work looking at various things as is usually my ambit :) . Finally finally fixed a major piece of work in GCC . Hopefully now we should have some more improvements in the code generated for a particular piece of GCC that I am hacking on . This coming weekend is a long weekend for all of us ! 26th of January beckons and is good to be off for the whole weekend. However getting even with work is also important considering the amount of backlog that has accumulated over time .

My li'l sister managed to achieve quite a few interesting things like becoming the 10800'th global risk practitioner to be certified by the GARP ( Global Association of Risk Practioners ) . Everyone but her was sure that she'd crack it and as is usually the case with the boss - such things happen .

Nose back to the grindstone eh !

LLVM an interesting project.

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Spent most of my Sunday looking at an open source project and reading up on inter-procedural analysis a bit closer . It's called LLVM and looks rather neat. It gained an ARM port from Apple which fuels my speculation that the iphone is going to have ARM in it and Apple is doing some serious optimization at an interprocedural level using LLVM. But again one never knows really !

I tried getting it to build but it looks as though there are some huge API changes which have broken things just when I decided to take on a weekend project ! Its interesting that one can now think of interprocedural optimizations ... I'd love to lay my hands on that at some point of time.

Some cricket finally.

Across the pale parabola of joy At the place where I work we finally decided that we wanted to play a game of cricket and ended up challenging another company to a friendly game of tennis ball cricket ! Not too bad - we actually managed to get 3 games in the week among ourselves and had to get to a point of choosing a 11 which is a commendable achievement at the place where I work.

The day dawned rather decently and as usual I managed to get to office in time - I was the 5th guy or so in office so it wasn't too bad. We managed to reach the ground to find it totally occupied and jam packed . After a rather interesting wait we managed to throw out a couple of committed cricket teams out of the ground and started our game. Thankfully I didn't have to call the toss having lost all the tosses so far this week and left the responsiblity to A our esteemed captain fresh from a stint at the nets at the Oval. We won the toss and promptly chose the best thing to do on a typically dusty pitch - bat. We batted rather decently, gave a couple of chances and ended up with 112 / 3 in 16 overs - not bad considering our feeling that our batting wasn't up to the mark. We then managed to bowl the opposition out for around 80 runs in 15 overs with yours truly bowling what seems to be a very long 4 over spell on the trot which left me feeling as old as every minute of my existence on planet earth( nearly 14716800 at the end of the year! ). Parts of my body that I didn't know that existed are aching and its with that happy feeling that I am posting this and dozing off to sleep.

Sunset enroute to Bhimashankar.

dsc_0571
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

From the previous post a sunset pic !

Wanderlust.

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After 2 weekends sitting at home taking care of a chest congestion, it was time to break free and run off away to some place. Wandering took me on to the re-done Pune - Nasik road via Chakan. Its 4 lane until Rajguru-nagar after which it turns 2 lane - It reminded me of the Nagar - Shirdi road which is quite picturesque being in the middle of a canopy of trees. It was quite a drive, though only 128 km from Pune I did it one way in 4 hours thanks to a variety of breaks for some stunning photography . The other reason for such wanderlust is utilizing the 1GB SD card in my Nikon D50 DSLR and attempting some photographs.

Bhimashankar is about 128 km from Pune, take the Pune Nasik highway and turn off near Manchar village. You'll get to the Dimbe dam a large dam on the Bhima river from where its around 35 km. That stretch is among the worst in the whole travel otherwise its quite a beautiful drive along wheat fields, paddy fields and some brick kilns here and there. Since I spent more time in driving I ended up in Bhimashankar around 7:30 p.m.- there's a small temple for a jyotirlinga of Lord Shiva. This is supposed to be among 12 swayambhu Shiva temples in India. However because of its religious significance I didn't want to antagonize anyone by taking photographs of the temple by itself.

Left Bhimashankar around 8:20 p.m. and reached home by around 11 p.m. a drive of around 2:30 min. In the process of driving back I managed to make my car fly by going too far to the left trying to avoid a rampaging Indicab and ended up hitting a stone on the front left wheel ! There was a sound , a minute of flight and then an interesting landing. Its left my wheel in a bit of shambles.

The year seems to be the year of long weekends which will only serve to encourage me on more photographic expeditions around Western Maharashtra - some of the places that I want to visit include Raigad - the capital of Shivaji, Kolhapur to see anything of the wide Krishna river and the Panhala fort , Nasik to see Triambak and the origins of the Godavari . All this in the trusty new WagonR with or without company. !

Hello World !

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2007 it is eh ? The day dawns as splendidly as ever with me expunging more and more of fluids which have ended up collecting in my sinuses.

Watched a couple of malayalam flicks over the weekend . Its interesting to note that they are slowly moving towards the Tamil masala flicks also - they are getting there.

Today's another lazy day - Possibly will end up sleeping all day to get rid of my bug !

The year endeth and a new one is born

Across the pale parabola of joy

The year 2006 draws to a close finally. It looks as though I'll be celebrating the new year sitting at home with a rather virulent attack of the flu / sinusitis. Its a miracle that the body can produce so much fluid out of the face especially with a reduced intake of fluids :P .

Other than feeling miserable, taking Woosterish concoctions of Jeeves fame trying to restore my mucous tissues to normalcy there and feeling generally as miserable as only a cold can leave you, there is nothing much to write about .


The other event of the week has been the amazing drubbing of the poms by the Australians down under - 3 days for a single test match and defeating them by an innings after having won the test series by 3-0 .

The biggest event of the day though is the execution of Saddam Hussain in Iraq - It would be interesting to see the kinds of reactions to this .

Ah sundays !

Across the pale parabola of joy

and watching India play well in a test match in South Africa was a refreshing change over the weekend. The English batsmen have learnt how to play Shane Warne, with Ian Bell actually coming down the track to him a couple of things. Makes you wonder sometimes if you are high on something or in a blue funk over the weekend. Then you pinch yourself and the muscles are still stiff from the game of cricket the other day then you realize that you aren't dreaming :) and all this is for real.

You still think that you are dreaming when South Africa are 84 all out in their first innings - now chasing 400 odd by playing hop step and jump to Sreesanth and VRV Singh and even to the odd cricket ball from one Saurabh "Prince of Kolkata" Ganguly. It was good seeing Sreesanth dish back and not take nonsense from Andre Nel who thinks he can sledge his wickets. The beauty was in the celebration which made you laugh so much and must have really helped us get under the South African skin.

Mickey Arthur ( the coach of South Africa) last heard was asking for the curator of a dust bowl from India to help even the odds for the match at Kingsmead. Bring 'em on.

The joys of playing cricket.

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Ah, the back's stiff - the shoulder's hurt, and the body feels stiff . Just proves that whatever you do in a gym and how much ever you climb Hanuman Tekdi - a game of cricket can still be a tough task . The fun factor is so much better - actually got to bowling on a pretty bad pitch and got some decent balls in. Now batting was another story - got bowled off the first ball and then run out in the second match backing up too far.

It was a typical match played in parallel to another match which was being played by the Royal Club of Nepal in honour of all the Nepali employees in the city of Pune and fielders from one match happily walked across the pitch of the other when the bowler was just about to start his runup . Reminded one of the times on the hallowed turfs of RKMVC ( for the uninitiated thats RKM Vivekananda College where one spent many hours of his wild undergraduate days improving his vocabulary in Tamil and playing the game of cricket. !) and the grounds of MRC. Though our MRC ground has turned into a posh apartment complex and robbed us of many days of fun .

Sunset in Vancouver

Sunset in Vancouver
Originally uploaded by ramana.r.

This the photo finally.

Bangalore the city of joys, traffic and pollution

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Any trip to Bangalore a city of many sobriquets gives a vision of the future for Pune. Ostensibly on a private trip I realized how much similar Pune was to Bangalore in the lack of public transport, road infrastructure, traffic congestions .. Log jams well the very definition is in Bangalore. Thank god we are still some way away from being Bangalored !

Other than the trip over the weekend and the last 2 days of last week it was good to talk to a couple of old friends and figure out what they were upto in the grand old profession of being a geek for hire.

James "Bollywood" Bond.

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One fine day - Let the team bond with James Bond was the mission of our new management in the company I work at :). So what do we do , we went for the opening day festivities associated with the new James Bond movie (Casino Royale ) .. We could always afford the tickets earlier, no one really pushed us to go see a movie together earlier !

The movie by itself wasn't all that bad though it was quite Bollywoodish . MIA were Q and MoneyPenny though there was a subtle reference to her in the movie. It wasn't a typical Bond movie though Daniel Craig reminds one of Boris Becker - The usual ingredients were there but missing was a usual noisy Bond exit. Somehow Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery really are the good James Bond's ...

Daniel Craig tries but he still has a way to go .. But then this is the prequel to all the other Bond movies, so maybe he'll be more suave and the complete package next time.

Worth a watch though.

Beryl and Edgy - The revenge of the weenie

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Wobbly windows on your Intel 82865G card... You must be joking was the polite answer at work by the rookie geek at work 4-6 months back when the XGL / Compiz mania hit the geeks at the place I work . The more macho answers ranged from asking me to grow up or drink something stronger than ethanol.

Today I have the cube, wobbly windows AIGLX working on my Desktop with the following.

root@numenor:/home/ramana# lspci | grep Graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

And how long did this take me .
Time for an aptitude dist-upgrade to edgy eft
Time for google to find out install instructions for beryl

Figured that AIGLX was already there in edgy. So bye bye XGL .
aptitude install beryl emerald

$>beryl-manager ... .

And now the cube rotates !

You can see it here

Darn! STill can't get xine to play the movie across the edges of the cube. :(

Giving Thanks !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Thanksgiving approaches and this means freedom from calls with customers on a Friday evening. ! Not that I am going to do much about it. I'd possibly be sitting and watching TV at home or doing some other very interesting task like playing with my computer ! Ah no this year round it means that I get a chance to play with my new D50 that I nearly broke !! On a relatively divergent note I saw a beautiful lens today 80 / 400 zoom got some real good pics with it from within a house. The good part is its worth around 20k first hand and I am getting an old lens for nearly 13K which isn't all that bad.. But to use it I need to get out of office more in the evenings .. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin for Daylight Savings which makes this task even tougher for yours truly ....

Some joys at work !

Across the pale parabola of joy

Spent some time in the last couple of days reviewing some documents in addition to the usual GCC hackery that I do as a day job. However today I discovered a new piece of open source software called Frysk that allows you to monitor and debug multi-processor, multi-threaded applications .

The old head maintainer of GDB has moved over to work on this project and some of the screenshots look real good. If folks want to look at it its available at http://sources.redhat.com/frysk. How effective it will be only time will tell.

Oor Koothu a.k.a Orkut.

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It has been reliably learnt from informed sources that Orkut is derived from the Tamil Phrase (Oor Koothu) which literally means Gossip in the Town . It appears to be the latest craze among Software Engineers in the list of "Most Useful Things to do betwen long builds"... Thank God for slow C++ compilers which tend to get slower with every release :) .. Now we understand why Compile time increases irrespective of whether run time decreases or size of the binary generated decreases. :), the GCC maintainers need more time on orkut.

Last heard activists from Amnesty International were working towards removing such recreational sites and creating a Generational Activistic Zoological site which goes by a strange acronym called GAZZAG.

P.S. Orkut is actually named after its Turkish name of people of people to meet. The TamilNadu govt. suspects that Turkish is also derived from Tamil and hence might make Istanbul the next destination for the Tamil Conference for the improvement of Tamil.

Noise pollution

An excuse is all it takes for people to create noise in Pune. It was the Ganesh festival, before which was Janmashtami and now its Navratri. So the celebration is for the devis but it ends up creating such a huge noise pollution that things are totally screwed up . This week they started playing songs all in the main throughfares of Pune causing huge traffic jams which resulted in me taking a 3 hour drive home on Thursday . Its faster to get to Bombay :).
Finally found the time today to get a large number of photos organized and put up online. Phew its such an exercise of patience. Anyways have to take some more good pics soon :) .

Gandhigiri and the story of sequels.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Morning it is on a lazy Tuesday. Have to get into work but am down again with a bug - not the software one but more the viral kinds. I managed to get to watch Lage Raho Munnabhai with the family on Sunday . This possibly is the first case where I have enjoyed the sequel better than the original. A nearly 3 hour movie and not once did I feel it dragging anywhere ! Really a good job. Arshad Warsi again takes the cake in this with what will be an immortal dialogue - 225 kidnapping kiye 260 logon ki haddiyaan todey lekin ek baar sorry bola aur andar kar diya mujhey.

The beauty of the movie for me was the way in which Gandhiji's ideals have been conveyed to the public in the typical tapori language of the average Joe in Bombay. The situations portrayed are all typical to what a lot of Indians face in their day to day existence, right from the son who loses his father's money in the stock market, to the old pensioner who needs to bribe a corrupt babu for getting a signature to receive a paltry pension from the state.The differentiation between the idol worship that we do for Gandhi by naming more areas, streets and setup statues of Gandhiji in every single park and the ideals of Gandhi are the things to be noted.

Thats possibly the reason that so many of us identify so closely with this movie. I am not convinced that Satyagraha will work always , maybe the process is more deterministic I don't know but it did work some 60 years back when we won our freedom. There are already stories in the newspapers of people starting clubs in Pune to follow Gandhigiri . Dadagiri is what usually works on the mean streets of India but maybe maybe after 58 years since Gandhiji was killed there's a chance that his ideals might again gain more relevance and credo among a generation of Indians which is become increasingly materialistic and thinks of his ideals as being irrelevant .

Best of luck to Mr.Kareer the municipal commissioner of Pune, who's the latest target of Gandhigiri with respect to the abysmal state of roads in Pune. To paraphrase the Times - "In India we drive on the left of the road, In Pune we drive on whats left of the road"

Pot Pourri`

Across the pale parabola of joy

Bombay or Mumbai as it is called today is such a huge melting pot for all Indians. You can find people from all over India over here - the taxi drivers from UP / Bihar , the merchants from Gujarat ,the stock brokers from Maharashtra and the general white collar employee from Tamilnadu. This is the 4th weekend away from home, travelling all the time. 1 weekend in Pune followed by 1 in Chennai-Frankfurt-Vancouver,the next in Vancouver and now in Mumbai to meet the parents despite a fever and the horrendous jet lag. The next weekend will find me again in Mumbai and 2 weeks later I need to be in Madras for a wedding .This is serious travel :) . Interesting eh.

Anyways enough of the rant on travelling ,I must say that I enjoy it while I do it and watch all the different people travelling . The trip back from Vancouver last week was interesting in its own right. Vancouver to Frankfurt had a large number of European and North American folk with a number of people of origin in the orient and yours truly representing one of 2 people from the Indian subcontinent. I was seated in an inner seat with an Italian on one side and a German couple on the other side . Interesting people to travel with. The Italian could not believe that anyone could be such a
strong practising vegetarian that he didn't touch beef or bacon. He was extolling the way strangely in which airline beef was served and going into some graphic detail.

I tried listening patiently but after a point decided New York Nagaram , the latest AR Rehman hit was worth listening to in comparison to a discourse on the essence of being a non vegetarian.

Getting off at Frankfurt to take a connecting flight
lead me in a bus across an Air India air plane. Interested readers would note that I have a healthy disrespect for Air India, but that day I must say that I was quite glad to see something Indian and the sight of Air India actually made me happy for the first time.

Finally after the regular duty of buying duty free chocolates I made my way towards the departure gate for my flight back to Bombay. And look what do I find ... More Indians , more people trying to jump the line and making a total ass of themselves in the line on the plane.

But boy was I glad to see some more fellow Indians despite them behaving the only way we really can .

The reassuring sight of the Times of India before boarding the plane was worth it. If in India I don't give it more than a cursory glance but that day I was so starved of news that I read it cover to cover.

Hmmm music.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Other than the joys of dropping your new D50 the day after buying it and creating a nice big hole in it , stress testing the Nikon really works :) ...Played with the soft-float madness for ARM for sometime . Its really a bunch of crap really especially with 3.3.2 . Someone I knew wanted libc built with soft float and it turned out to be a mess worse than I expected.


Spent last nightwatching Jillendru oru kaathal .Interesting movie and some of the songs are rather good. New york Nagaram finally brings back the Rehman of old and his singing has come up leaps and bounds. Its about a guy singing about his loneliness in New York- please note : it seems to be whatever Bollywood can do Kollywood can too . Finally the hero ends up in New York ..

Hmmm interesting ..

A weekend that was and will be.

Across the pale parabola of joy

A weekend that was amazing and that promises to be interesting .. Last Sunday M and Z managed to make me bike nearly 27 km all around Coquitlam. It was further from where I got to and I surprised myself by being able to bike that far.

Got some good shots on the old analog camera and will develop them some time. The next set of things I did this week is managing to acquire for myself a new Nikon D50 camera . The digital SLR is good , gets good photos and I can connect it to Ubuntu and it treats it like USB mass storage. Nothing I need to do . Transferred the photos and voila !

A weekend in Vancouver ...

Across the pale parabola of joy

Finally the weekend arrives albeit 12 hours later than India. It feels odd to be in a place where you wake up when everyone back home is going to sleep or winding down for the day . Finally got used to the idea that it could be close to dusk and the time could be 6:20 a.m. on your notebook (well my notebook still runs on Indian time) :) . Everything is opposite to back home inclusive of the brakes on the bikes, the right brake is the back one and the left one is the front brake. Well everyone can say we in India are exactly opposite.

The first 2 days were spent in just recovering from jet lag and getting better from there on. The temperature is 25 in the day and 10 at night. Early mornings are so cold that if you are out of the house you can see frost coming out of your mouth ..

Managed to half bike and half walk all the way to a place called Rocky Point in a place called Port Moody . It took me nearly 2 hours and managed to exercise my camera finally and that works ! Long needed exercise with just a long walk and a bit of biking.

P.S. If the weekend starts 12 hours later it ends 12 hours later too ... Now thats a thought to bear :))

9500 metres above the sky..

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting 9500 metres above the sky this is an interesting blog before the battery runs out in my notebook . Having utilized a larger amount of my battery time until now nothing much is left but to be left to the devices provided by Lufthansa for all sorts of entertainment :) . Ended up chatting with my cousin while up here in the sky which is good fun.

Achtung Bitte.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Sitting in Fraport (Frankfurt airport) since sometime in the morning german time and catching up with email is quite interesting. The best part has been the ease with which trusty ol' zirakzigil works with Ubuntu Dapper to get the best access point , but paying so much money is kind of interesting. Anyways its in the credit card and we'll catch it sometime..... The thing that hits you is the change in language and despite the efforts to have announcements in English its funny to make out stuff which is written in Yes Prime Minister, (wok upztairzz , take ze train for zerminal B ) . I can now understand the sentiments of poor travellers who visit our country with its Tamil announcements down south, or Hindi announcements up north and the havoc differences in accents make... Was sorely tempted to buy an ipod but decided against it on grounds of fiscal soundness. :) .

So sitting down getting my laptop charged and will then end up boarding the aircraft in the next few minutes or so.

Out of hibernation...

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite crazy the past few weeks getting everything organized and the first weekend since I got posession of a brand new Wagon R . If you want to see it here it is on the Maruti site . The car is awesome despite Maruti and is a testimony to Suzuki's engineering successes ! Fitted it promptly with a Kenwood stereo and Blaupunkt speakers ... The resultant effect is quite worth every penny spent....

Parents are here and looking forward to a trip to Bombay sometime tomorrow. ! Its been good getting good South Indian breakfast and dinner, something that has been missing for quite some time.

If only....

Across the pale parabola of joy

Well the title of this post is rather strange and it comes after a couple of interesting weeks in life. The highs of France reaching the finals, the lows of Zizou being red carded out in the finals ... The lows of not checking stuff before talking to a client and the highs of generating code that run at 184% the cycle count of an earlier release. The scare of 7 bombs in the city of dreams where your sister resides and being unable to reach her on phone ... Phew its been a roller coaster ride to say the least! Ok - now thats the understatement of my life :) .

Ended the week with a re-run of the classic movie You've got mail and realized the disruptive power of the internet. However though not everyone is a Joe F-o-x and you don't run into a Kathleen Kelly everyday though the mind boggles at such a possibility. What would any one do under such a situation ! What would I do ... And yes it all happens only in movies ! But then some of them are a true indicator of possibilities in real life aren't they !

Rain Rain come soon.

Across the pale parabola of joy


The rains are here now in full swing. The Indian Meterological Department after a month of wrong predictions about the monsoon hitting on time has finally got it right by predicting bright sunny weather when it actually is grey , dark and totally dreary. The rains are here and have started washing away the top of every single decent road in Pune. Its good that yours truly has managed to sell his car and is on the verge of a new car. Well however second and third thoughts are peeking up about the purchase of a car at this point of time. Rumour has it that the PMC has commissioned more contractors to make sure that the work started by the rains is completed by huge telecom operators, contractors and the PMC itself. For those who don't know what the PMC is , its the Pune Municipal Corporation.

Sheer brilliance

Spent yesterday evening watching the Netherlands Ivory Coast match . Boy ! what a match it was. Total attacking football from both sides , though it was punctuated by quite a few ridiculous refereeing decisions during the match . There should have been a penalty given in favour of Ivory Coast, play acting by Bommel and Van de Saar should have not resulted in cards for Kone and Drogba . . Anyways that was that. Inspired by this bit of play yours truly decided to go play some basketball after nearly 4-5 months today . Got totally killed in the process. Metacarpal bones that I didn't know were present got exercised, a poor guy walked right into my 6 feet nearly 90 kilo frame (there I go giving my weight away ! ) and came away worse for the wear. He literally bounced off me , was funny to watch but not for the parties concerned in the incident.

Otherwise nothing noteworthy to note . Yet another weekend slideth in and is half way out .... ...

Goal !!!

Across the pale parabola of joy


Its been quite a weekend . Punctuated with food , sleep and all the sporting events. The World Cup for soccer began on Friday and is one of the things that a lot of people have been looking forward to. The second test match between India and West Indies began in St. Lucia and Virender Sehwag's pyrotechnics made up for the lack of pyrotechnics yet in the World Cup . He made 99 of 75 balls and took 21 runs off a Dwayne Bravo over. Was too sleepy to watch Argentina take on Ivory Coast late last night though it was interesting to watch Beckham bend it and Carlos end it in the England - Paraguay match. Later Sweden couldn't overcome their opening match blues against minnows Trinidad and Tobago. Today was good as one watches Arjen Robben star in a Dutch win Serbia and Montenegro . 3 matches in a day would be too much of an overdose .

Back in the land of the monsoon

Across the pale parabola of joy

Ah, its a relief to be back. One week is all that it takes for the weather to change from hot dry and extremely tiring to cool pleasant and windy . Yes folks the south west monsoon seems to be here, though it isn't raining that much yet here in Pune but the weather is very much better. It did rain in Madras on Saturday night but it was punctuated with a huge power cut that stretched the night.

Work is good, normal small fires doused with no real effort . Have a rough bug still to solve which should take up this week.

Vacation bluezzz

Across the pale parabola of joy

Vacation and as usual I am in the city of the sweat. Attended a couple of weddings , a Tambrahm American Maapillai (son-in-law) engagement and then a week of R&R (rest , recuperation!) and clearing up the house which is getting a much needed coat of paint .

Attending the weddings was a bit of a nightmare with quite a few aged R's trying to get yours truly hitched up . It was easy to escape pointing fingers at my sis S and my cousin C . The high point of the wedding was being able to play with my 4 month old nephew A and his twin sister A , yeah they are both A's and getting my shirts chewed off in the process. The other nice part was meeting up with all cousins some old and well known and the others new and met for the first time. It was quite interesting to meet a 70 year old lady who claimed to be my cousin. We are one huge happy Tambrahm family paraphrasing Tom Hanks in You've got mail .

The other few days were spent in visiting a Tahsildar's office for handling some red tape, clearing off old books and getting rid of as many of my old books as possible and looking at old correspondence with the aged R's . I have actually spent a week with minimum interference on the wide wide internet and not responding to many official emails !Now thats an achievement !!