2007 year in review.

So 2007 goes away and 2008 comes in - the last post for the year . Its been a hectic year with this 58th blog post for the year (the maximum in the last 4 years of blogging !) , lots of trips to all parts of India- I've lost count but seem to have averaged atleast 1 trip to Bombay every month for sure - Finally managed to see Goa - drove my WagonR all over Western Maharashtra and to Hyderabad . The highlights ofcourse were the trips to Coorg and to Ottawa to attend the GCC summit.

Its been a very satisfying year at work . We internally worked on upgrading our private port of GCC to 4.3 trunk and contributing atleast bug reports to the open source community seems to have helped in improving the final performance of our compiler. Its now is very close to cycle counts from 3.4 and is infinitely better in terms of code size ! . Pretty neat achievement for our team at work .

Playing cricket for possibly the last time in India during the new year. There's an inter IT tournament coming up and we'll be participating and I hope to be playing for sometime. Come the new year and there are lots of changes pending in life . So lets see how it goes.

Go Goa !

Go Goa , or viva la Goa as you might put it in French ! Having heard a lot about how Goa is different from any other place in India , I'd decided that I would jump on the next opportunity to visit Goa which is exactly what I did on what was a hectic 3 day trip to Goa . The beaches are quite phenomenal with truly white and clean sand , no dirt, friendly people and very good water. We stayed at a place called Majorda and had a private beach to ourselves which was cool though we did visit Bagha and Calingute later at  night to see the public beaches. Goa parties like it is no one's business and 24 hours a day. When we were leaving Bagha to return to our hotel at 1 in the morning folks were still streaming in and all decked up to have a party . Just walking around and soaking the atmosphere was quite an experience in itself.

Driving to and from Goa was a novel experience given the fact that you had single lane'd roads for highway lined with trees, breathtaking ghats on either side of the road. But wait , what's the catch - buses and trucks and the odd Santro motoring along with what seemed to be single minded determination to run us off the road . Add to this motley crew a driver who thought himself to be the Indian version of Juan Pablo Montoya, a Toyota Qualis substituting the F1 car and the dirt track from Nippani to Sawantwadi in place of Imola and a whole car full of enthusiastic folks , you had the right ingredients for a heady time.

Merry Christmas and the new year arrives.

So Ho ho ho and all that, 2007 has been an eventful year more so than 2006 and 2008 promises to be even more interesting. Looking forward to the new year by celebrating it with Bobs and gang at Not Just Jazz by the bay . In addition there is a quick 2 day trip to Goa on the cards - lets see - depending on how much work one finishes today I'll be able to steal some time to visit Goa finally. Having never visited Goa and hearing everyone go on about it and how beautiful it is to visit especially during new year's - I've gone ahead and agreed to join V and gang on a road trip to Goa. ! Now thats gonna be interesting given that there's going to be a huge gang of us going over to Goa and all of us being a really diverse lot . Fun times ahead till the new year.

India Darshan and tortoises.

The conference in Kanpur was super cool for a variety of reasons including the talks that one got to hear from virtually the gurus of Computer and Compiler science :) . The other reason why Kanpur was cool was because of the weather. It is freezing cold in Kanpur , the sun rises at 6:45 in the morning and sets by 4:45 in the evening. By 5:30 its pitch dark and afterwards roaming outside in the cold weather is quite an act of bravery for a person not used to such cold dry climes. The wind is chill and hits you as though there are knives about in the air.

The train journeys to and from Kanpur were very interesting both of them were epitomes of why the Indian Railways will always remain very effective and punctual here and in the South of India but never in the North of India. The jury is still out on the East of India but looking at when trains from the North - East and the East arrive in Madras or even in Pune (atleast 8 hours late !) . Trivandrum - Guwahati 12 hours late. In any case while going forth self had a first a.c. ticket for a train known as Pushpak Express which was before time at all stations till the Rani of Jhansi started delaying it on its path to Kanpur with the result that it reached an hour late. Travelling in first class with a director of the railways (with whom I had rather interesting conversation regarding how good or bad the railways really were ) was an educational and comfortable experience with the attendants pretty much fawning on us. The return journey was by a train called the Awadh Express that comes all the way from Gorakhpur and comes to Bombay after almost going almost as far north as Delhi (it crawls through Agra so you might as well say thats close to Delhi) . So to come essentially south west as the crow flies , I was on a train that was going all the way around India by first going North , then west, then North West and finally south , south west and south east . This was also quite educational because this is when I learnt the virtue of patience and accepting a situation where one can never have enough.

So the travel continues...

Just about finishing work to leave for Kanpur to attend a compiler's conference at IIT Kanpur - its going to be cold and also a lonesome train journey after a long long time. Also getting a first class ticket thanks to there being no other direct way of getting there by air is going to prove to be some fun. Work's been hectic trying to figure out a way to sort out a GCC bug with the loop optimizers in making it generate better code for machines with zero overhead loop instructions.

So with all this it sure is going to prove to be a welcome break to smell the roses as they say !

Sawai Gandharva at long last.

After nearly 8 long years in the city of Pune finally found the time, energy to push myself to go listen to a concert in the Sawai Gandharva music festival. It was Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia playing the flute to a packed audience of nearly 15000 in a ground. People were somehow packed into the ground , sitting and standing and in odd positions . I heard the entire concert standing in an area where we were packed like the proverbial sardines in a tin can.

The master started with a raga in the hindustani mould (I forget its name other than the fact that it started with a J) , reached a crescendo with Vachaspati which is a raaga from Carnatic music featuring a jugalbandhi with the tabla which was awesome to hear. The final raga that he started playing as I left to pick my niece ( who decided to run for the Pune district at Ahmednagar) from the bus stop. was Pahadi. Having heard this in the past and knowing what magic it leaves with the listener I was quite loathe to leave the place but then duty called...

This really is one of the few things that I haven't enjoyed in Pune and finally even that has been completed.

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.