Spencer Time

Across the pale parabola of joy

Off I go to spencer plaza in the evening , one of the oldest malls in the city ostensibly to look at stuff and meet a couple of friends including R, V's sister with whom I went shopping some time back in Pune . It should be good fun to roam around Madras by the day considering I don't have any calls today and get back to coding later at night . Have a couple of tasks pending for tonight which should be finished.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

Mornings, Coffee and Broadcom chips

Spent a lot of time last night trying to get a few builds going and thinking about all that I was doing in life. All of us, so called geeks as I was so firmly referred to the other day end up in front of the machine at 2 in the morning and at 8 in the morning as I sit down and post this. The balance of life and work does not exist for any of us, and the worst part is that none of us geeks pay attention or bother about it since work gives us an exhiliration that very few of other things gives us.

The sheer kick in getting a piece of code working was what drove me last night to do some cool hackery to get a disassembler up for a trivial piece of hw even though we could have lived with it not happening.

The other motivation for spending so much time online or on the comp atleast for this trip seems to be the amazing piece of hardware which seems to be the cheapo ADSL modem . Its awesomely fast, has a Broadcom chip which is possibly as powerful as the K2 in the desktop we have in the old homestead. Don't worry am not posting this from that, but from zirakzigil which is atleast 4 times more powerful.

The other cool thing is that I am trying to register for LinuxAsia and talk about GCC et al over there. Figuring out the right topic and getting an abstract up and going is a tough task , but I ought to finish it today . The flip side is that I will have to be in Delhi and might miss A's engagement which I had planned on attending. Could always fly down, thats an option. The conference site is here .

Nothing much else happening here, though I have a couple of hours of driving around Madras with R who promised to scare the death out of me in a repeat of the driving skills show that I had put on for R's visit to Pune.

A smile can go a million miles.

The other reason for me to be in Madras today seems to be for my grandpa , he is over 90 and quiet ill bed-ridden after a stroke. For the first time in my 20 odd years, haven't spoken to him or rather heard his voice.It is quite heart-wrenching to see him like this but my day was made today . After we spent half an hour with this cool new physiotherapist who came over and put him up in a plastic chair and cushioned him with atleast 5 pillows he suddenly woke up from his daze and gave me a million dollar smile which seemed to say where did you come from ?

Its been 3 days here and today was the first genuine smile. Makes up for all the remote work that I need to do this week , though I would have loved to have been back in Pune tomorrow.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire were the reason my cousin C and I decided to take a trip to Mayajaal considering that all the bridges inside the city were full with Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha appearing and waving to crowds which were gathered around the slums near the river which was overflowing . Also we could not figure out if any other theatre had this running.

So off we went to Mayajaal and figured out we were 5 minutes late for the 2 p.m show and 2-1/2 hours early for the next show. Ended up spending time bowling and chatting about nothing else. Was good fun , C finally losing by 2 points with 2 continuous strike throughs and me messing up a few. It certainly was good fun.

The movie was good really worth the wait. . Really well made and sticks close to the book. The visualization with the dragons is good, Mad Eye Moody was awesome, Dumbledore good . The plot was good , though sometimes after having read the book you felt , oh well where is this episode. The best scene for me was Malfoy turning into a ferret, though the final duel with Voldemort was also worth the watch .

Anyways go see it and enjoy it.

The Adayaru Flows .....

Flew straight into tropical storm Baaz. Our folk have started naming the storms and cyclones like their American counterparts . It certainly was the most turbulent flight in Kingfisher, though my debut flight. Its been a couple of interesting days. Reached home late on Friday night, after getting a cab to drive me through sheets of water which threatened to engulf us in a stretch between Park Sheraton and the turn off to Greenways Road.

Later reached home to find ankle deep water languishing outside, a little more and we would have had water in the ground floor of the old homestead. But as usual it was good to be home again and talk to everyone at home.

Saturday was spent in the function at home with the vaadiyar filling up the house with a lot of smoke . Evening saw me go out to Trader's inn with A and P . It was good fun and saw me in full form after a long time . Finally met someone with whom I could talk EPL and talk about Chelsea , Man U . Wow ! Trader's was good, good fun after a long time and gorged really on all the food at offer. It was good especially the pizza which was not the traditional pizza hut fare . The pasta excellent, the Danish Blue Cheese awesome . Filled myself with a lot of salad, pasta , a bit of pizza et al .. Was good fun ...

After spending the night at A's place was back home in the morning, more about the Harry Potter viewing in the next post following up .

A Delhi Trip and what not.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Back from the National Capital through the crime capital (Bombay) after attending D's wedding. D is a good old friend of mine who was getting married after a long courtship and doing the convincing act with his parents. Met up with N and A, good old friends and also watched yet another bachelor bite the dust.Driving in Delhi was good fun , good wide roads, the Delhi Metro rocks ... Took it twice travelling from Mami's place in Civil lines to CP in 12 minutes a journey which would comfortably take 30 min. by road.

Also drove back in from Bombay last night was good. Read a good post about Ambi Mamas leading the pack of TAMBRAM relatives .Reminded me of all of Pattis relatives back home .
Available < a href ="http://www.bosey.co.in/2005/05/ambi-mama-is-leading-brahmin-relative.html"> here

Off to the national capital

Finally a break . Flying off to the national capital tomorrow for D's marriage. Looks good ATM and do some timepass meeting up with a couple of friends.

Other than that work this week has been quite a bitch with meetings, documentation ,conversations with monkeys and investigating redundant pieces of code generated.

Deccan Gymkhana and Basketball.

The weekend was good, spent saturday sleeping till late afternoon after which I woke up to go practice some basketball for the great tournament debut. Well, yes folk yesterday there was a great cheer around the greater Deccan area, with a lot of festivities: I had made my basketball debut in the hallowed environs of the great Deccan Gymkhana. We managed to beat our opponents 24-8 or something like that out of which yours truly scored a spectacular 0 . Well , you might ask what was I doing, in between trying to regain my breath from running and jumping and blocking I was attempting to understand this wonderful game of jumping running which leaves you out of breath and makes you realize that the tyre around your waist has graduated from that of a cycle into a 10 ton truck .

The next game is on for later this evening . Need to finish off a few things and then run off to the court. Sounds good eh !

Pune , shopping and Asingam

Pune , shopping and asingam. It was good fun roaming around with a couple of friends , cracking useless sad jokes and generally being useless and non productive for a day . The Asingam refers to a friend who considers herself = to Asin the new tamil hearthrob , who we very promptly equated to Asin(gam) adding a gam to make her Asingam . No complaints about Asin though ;-) before people start suing me for slander.

Spent the weekend playing basket ball (hear hear first time since class 9) and watching a cool vijay movie called Sivakasi. Good fun .

Other than that nothing much else. Monday beckoned and I responded by debugging at home. Later ran out to Barrista to surface online , respond to emails from work (BSNL where art thou ? ) and then grab some coffee.

Chennai btw the least polluted city.

Atleast that ! one might exclaim . Well the roads exist and are in good condition , pollution levels are lower, the girls are looking prettier, the confidence level is rising, 60% of the auto travel in 2 weeks happened with 0 haggling. (its a moot point that the remainder ended up in misery for the rick guy getting the short end of the stick from my rather long and easily excitable mouth. ) but wtf is not raining and wtf is there no water to bathe. !

Yeah folks they forgot that water is an essential resource down there. The water we get is either brackish from the borewell or bad from the corporation. One needs to use the handpump in the old homestead to get a bucket of water to bathe !! and everywhere else the borewell water is so brackish that you can only use it for flushing the loo. !! Well this is a bloody rant at the end of a very long long day ! So whoever be the minimal readers bear with this poor soul.

Lots of good work happening in office. Thankfully will be off to the land of Wodehouse the coming weekend for a week and will get a chance to see Long John Silver and hopefully Big Ben :-)

Nothing much otherwise.

Zirakzigil and an R50E

Across the pale parabola of joy

Wonder about the connection . ? Well thats what I named my cool R50e laptop today. Zirak what you might ask. Well Gondor , Numenor, Lothlorien, Mordor were all taken in office. I also have control over Arnor, Gondor and Numenor , various machines that I have had the right to name.

Zirakzigil is where Gandalf finally killed the Balrog from Lord of the Rings. So Zirakzigil it is. It was the best name in the LOTR that I could find and the most unique one at that .

Laundry Management , Disaster Management and the great government of Maharashtra

Across the pale parabola of joy


Rain Rain go away, come again another day . We want to dry our clothes.

Ha , the great rains. Half the city is flooded, infrastructure down the drain, driving is good fun equivalent to rally driving and the good chief minister was at the receiving end from an irate public over the weekend.

Yesterday was spent in shifting parts of my house in the middle of incessant rains, an idiotic cable operator who managed to overturn my television trying to disconnect me at my old apartment and give me a new connection at my new apartment.

The good thing about the new apartment is that there is a health club next door, a number of eating joints to take care of a poor famished software engineer and the company of a couple of good friends . Other than that watching the rivers flow at a level that leaves them just below the roads in the streams that we call rivers was good and left me thinking.

Heard on mirchi that they closed a couple of bridges near aundh and that all the rivers we know are flowing to the brim . Wah Wah ! More like this and we should be flooded soon. It isn't any better down at the financial hub of India , the corporation apparently took a couple of days because the CM declared a holiday for government instituitions for precisely the corporation to do some work atleast. Looking at this one thinks about the tsunami down south and the amount of time that was spent in getting the place back up and running. Some more thought needs to go in. Disaster management exists only on paper and the moment something unprecedented occurs most of these guys hide behind this.

The roads in Pune have simply disappeared, they have been replaced with craters, currently the main throughfares need to be avoided, the inner roads are ten times better . I lost count of the number of craters that my poor zen went through today at around 689 at which point I was more worried about getting through a traffic jam .

The great Pune craters.

Across the pale parabola of joy

One week you are away, the rain washes away the roads. I must confess that it has been rather a pain trying to figure out where the roads end and the craters begin and vice versa since last night. Every single patch that was applied on the roads has disappeared totally and replaced with a crater or a series of craters. Add to it the misery of not finding petrol at night when you reach after sleeping all the way , priceless...

Death where is thy sting. !

The Pune Madras Shuttle.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Ha, the Pune Madras shuttle service has begun. Came down here ostensibly for a surgery for me mum, but the surgery got postponed due to sugar levels. Any case nothing much lost, sitting and hacking . Got a couple of patches up and sent them for testing anyways. Went out to eat in Giorgios last night with A. We decided to split the cheque and thought about pulling a fast one. Both of us had expired cards. We asked for a pair of scissors, cello tape , cut them up stuck them together and gave it to the waiter telling him that we were going dutch. Expression on face : priceless :-)) ... The most outrageous thing we have ever done. Ofcourse we paid up later . Anyways this has been a nice trip since I did manage to get some work done also .

Pune and 20 degrees of temperature.

Across the pale parabola of joy

Cool outside ,but work keeps ones collar sweaty. So its no different fro m Madras till I go back again next week.

Trying to spend time at work getting things sorted out , some interviews and what not. Read the papers on the GCC summit available here .

Compilers seem to be pretty hot these days. Some of the C++ extensions that are proposed are rather cool and look like a lot of cool work inside GCC . The other interesting paper was Linux running on the cell and the GCC / GDB port for this. The GDB port plans to implement a single session debug solution which is something that I looked at in the past with some heterogenous multicore chips. Hmmm. something that could have been.

Anyways thats the rant about work . There really seems to be no time to look at anything else these days. The next thing to wind up before I run away for 2 weeks is a set of evals.

Remember a quote "Death where is thy sting ......."

Surviving Madras.

Across the pale parabola of joy

The last few hours of my vacation and I blog this from the Barrista on Nungambakkam High Road using a Wireless hotspot. I run Ubuntu on my thinkpad (no windoze yet) and boy does the thing work seamlessly. Setting up the connection was so effortless. All I had to do was to fire up network-admin and choose the corresponding service provider and things just worked. All I needed to do in addition was to buy a prepaid card for 50 bucks and then you have it, my day is done. Coffee , wifi access and Air conditioning all that you need to survive Madras, all available .

Spent some time rummaging through the older Landmark store at Gemini close to this place, the listening posts have all disappeared, dont know why , so ended up not buying any music though I managed to buy my share of music earlier this week at Music World.


Hmm things certainly have changed down here. The MRTS (Mass Rapid Transit System) works finally . People are not fraid to flaunt whatever, the noise levels in Barrista certainly give coffee day in Pune a good run for its money, wireless access points to boot and what not. Its a resurgent Madras and am proud about my acronym today (themadrasi) . If it were only not for the weather this place rocks....

Some other survival tips in Madras
Do haggle with the autorickshaw driver
Don't agree for the first price with the rickshaw feller. (they expect you to bargain, so give them that pleasure . )
Do drink a lot of water. (H2O for all ye chemistry buffs)
Don't drink too much coffee .
Do make sure you have air conditioning everywhere. ( too bad the autos don't yet have airconditioning. )
Do get out early .
Do visit spencer plaza or Barrista on NH road.
Do take a siesta.
Dont take a bus.

Madras, A sweaty break.

Across the pale parabola of joy
Woh, 42 degrees and counting. Walk out of a cold shower and then you start being covered in your own sweat at the end of 5 minutes. Considering my sedentary lifestyle back @ Pune, Madras might just be the place to be to lose weight by just dummy sweating. Spent the day tying up some loose ends, finish my courier seva for a friend and then meet up with a couple of old buddies later in the evening. The other great thing is that I am using a AMD K6 500 with Windoze 98 and can't use my brand new thinkpad since the usb adsl that touchtel provides does not have linux drivers. I have to get to the bottom of this.Maybe I should get online from a cyber cafe and use aptitude :-)... Never underestimate the power of debian / ubuntu.

Movies , movies more movies.

Spending the weekend catching up with movies that were missed , watching them. Saw a few new ones like O Brother Where art thou, finally caught up with Million Dollar Baby and saw Ram Gopal Verma's latest offering D Company. Though not directed by the man himself. it still pales in comparison to his earlier offerings like Satya or Company. The good part is Hooda's quiet no nonsense attitude as D and acting , but the additional story around is a little bit too quiet. One rather funny technique was the emphasis on not having proper dialogues between the protogamists and just putting a prologue and epilogue around each dialogue. At some points it resembled a documentary on the underworld. But otherwise its ok to watch and enjoy if you want a break.

The second movie I ended up seeing was Million Dollar Baby. It deserves all the accolades and all the oscars that it received. Clint Eastwood is awesome as a reluctant old fashioned and reticent trainer trying to help Hillary Swank with becoming a boxing champ and in the process getting over his own inadequadicies as a manager. The story is narrated from the point of view of Morgan Freeman as a has been boxing champ who lost his eyes and ended up as a cleaner in the gym that Clint Eastwood runs.

Now to watch O Brother Where ar't though and all the other movies I have missed.



Across the pale parabola of joy

Of Life, nephews and good ol' relatives.

Across the pale parabola of joy

The weekend arrived in its usual lazy self. Spent Saturday running around conducting exams at the univ, meeting up with a couple of old friends and getting my car checked on its usual Saturday morning date with the mechanic. Ended up in office checking mails looking at code and going out for lunch at McDs . Dinner was with my nephew and niece who left the choice of the place of culinary delight to me. In as much as food was a consideration, a close enough parking location was a bigger consideration and managed to find a nice watering hole at Mayurs on East Street. Saturday evening in Pune , hmmm traffic is worse and driving was made infinitely easier by driving around in my cousins palio rather than my smaller zen. The morning arrived and with it a nephew , niece and a pint sized dynamo from Hyderabad. I have always maintained that nieces are easier to deal with primarily because they don't ask too many intelligent questions and are satisfied with nice things like food. However 10 year old boys are a different story. This pint sized 10 year old was no exception. Apart from proceeding to tear apart every single adult in the family he went on to have some serious fun in life at the expense of every single adult.

Then one discovered the only way to silence him .Put him in the front seat of any car, turn on the AC and drive on the streets of Pune. The bumps and the rather jolly rollicking and the soft purr of the engine act as an amazing lullaby on this young feller and put him off to sleep. So the weekend spent on family duties and playing the genial uncle. !