Jetbrains of intellij IDEA fame has launched a new magazine which features some really great articles on language oriented programming and structural search and replace. I mentioned this in a previous entry

JetBrains Magazine. Check it out. How I wish we have similar IDE's for all languages...

On Cribs

Ton is a colleague at my work place and he is the acknowledged "King Of Cribbing" in our development centre. Many aspiring freshers actively seek out his advice to get started on the basics.. and he is always willing to oblige :).

Ton recently finished 1 year here and decided that it is time to turn over a new leaf and stop cribbing for a period of time. Next time we met, I quizzed about what happened and he confessed that they were the worst 40 minutes of his life... !!

I went out yday evening and finally bought a comp for my home use. This little thing took 6 months of deep thought and planning. If you are in hyd around hi-tech city area, there a huge computer market in Aditya Plaza at Ameerpet. The rates are good and they dont rip you off like these 'hi-tech computer shops'.

Been reading a good book "Psychology of Computer Programming" which discusses programming as a team activity rather than as a group of isolated acts of individuals. This book is awesome considering that this book was written back in 1971 and the points made are relevant even today. Just shows how little we care to learn even about known problems.

An interesting quote :) -

". . . the lack of software skill was never the problem. Lack of managerial skill was always the problem; lack of software skill was merely a convenient excuse for those managers who lacked esteem"

Oh well, I would say some companies lack both :-p

Continuing on the jobless theme, there seem to be many online sites which allow you to work for clients all over the world. Check one popular one at rent a coder.

The Yaksha's question and its equivalent today

In the famous 'Yaksha Prasna' in the Mahabharata, the Yaksha asks Dharmaputra to answer a few questions and stipulates that if he does not give proper answers, he would be killed the same way as his other Pandava brothers were killed.

The last question he asks is "What is the most astonishing thing in this world"?
The answer was something along the lines of "People see people dying all around them all the time but they dont realize that they are going to die themselves sooner or later."

So whats the answer to that question in todays context?
I think it is "We see people losing their jobs all around us, but we dont think we are going to lose our jobs anytime soon" :)

There is a nice article about keeping your job at the pp website . Though it assumes an american audience, it holds for all programmers and is well worth a read.

Saw Harry Potter at IMAX over the weekend. Good timepass movie.

For programmers working on java, IDEA is *the* IDE to use for all development. Most of the other projects like eclipse, visual studio .net 2005 are still trying to catch up with the features that this cool IDE provides (www.jetbrains.com).
 
There is an interview with the CEO of jetbrains at www.codegeneration.net where there is a discussion about "language oriented programming". Makes for a  very interesting read. And given their track record of doing things which seem impossible till they are done, I wont be surprised if they strike something big.

 

 

I have been going through my mail archives and I came across this in a mail which I wrote to my classmates.

"'Money is not everything da' according to OP who is perhaps the first millionaire amongst us"

The surprising thing was OP was a fairly worldly person and I found it pretty odd that he should say such a thing. In fact, after a few months he quit his plum job and moved on for further studies... So this set me thinking - is there any truth in what he has said? How serious was he in making such a statement?

After years of experience, I now realize that what he said is true - Money is not everything, we need power, fame and position too :-). I realized the basic tenet is that a human being is never happy in absolute terms; he feels good only when has more in relation to others according to some (however arbitrary) criteria - money, power, grades, knowledge, position, looks....

Hmmm.. wonder if evolution is such a big thing after all.

I have intentionally changed the names(initials) here to protect the privacy of individuals concerned :)

Wanted to learn and write a tutorial on windbg. But you know what, someone beat me to it :(. http://www.codeproject.com/debug/windbg_part1.asp provides a nice introduction.

Why learn a new debugger? you may ask. Well here are some reasons:

1. Cool value
   
2. Scare your peers when they come to your office (assuming they dont know :) )
   
3. You can say, this can be done easily in windbg when you dont know what to do.
   
4. It has the wt (call graphs of each call) command
   
5. Execute arbitrary commands on break point and continue
   
6. Good logging features
   

Wiki is an awesome piece of collaborative software which enables anyone with just a browser to contribute and maintain shared information/knowledge. In the past my teams have used it to maintain project level information like faq's, process information relating to build, checkins, codereads, release, new hire pages, install docs and what not.

Usually I find that wiki's are much better than having a set of word documents checked into some project or database for the simple reason that the latter makes it harder to access, make modifications and check them back in. Many issues come up like read/write access to the shared repository, necessity of having some office clone installed on the machine you are currently working on etc. And to round it up, most wikis have cool features like full text search, title search, ability to view history and restore a page etc.. which makes them far more flexible than the usual alternatives.

Once we started using the wiki, the rtfm equivalents on my team have been "Did you read the wiki?", "Can you put that on the wiki?" "why is not on the wiki?" etc.. :)

Want to try it out? Try out the wiki sandbox .

You can find a lot of implementations to choose from here

If you are in a software company think about why your team is not using a wiki !!

Was a ridiculous hectic week at work which explains no blog activity :). Next week will hopefully be better.

Catching up with my reading as my build gets done and here are my picks:

1. Interview with Chomsky - it is a must read . Has references to Animal Farm and to educated people like you and me.
   
2. Another interesting article about free speech unless it is critical
   

Makes one wonder if iraqis are the only ones who have opressive regimes

Who is Tinku ?

We moved recently to a new place to reduce the insane commute times to office. And we landed up at what we thought was a nice apartment complex.

As we settled down and got introduced to neighbours and all, who do I see but this 12 year old kid by the name Tinku calling me 'Uncle'. I took an immediate dislike to him, though I not sure why.

Now he barges into our home whenever he feels like it, shouting 'Uncle' in a shrill voice to tell me about some new thing that he has learnt. I think the fact that my mother gives him something or the other to eat whenever he comes is encouraging him even more.

Now coming to the interesting part - he is hardly the size of my computer table but he already knows the difference between DDR Ram and SD Ram, has his own computer, knows a couple of scripting languages - python and ruby and constantly embarasses me with questions about them.

I decide that he is too young for stuff like this and tell his mother that this is the age to play and it is likely that he will have all kinds of problems in his later years if he does not stop all this immediately.

Instead of taking it in the right spirit, she told me that I should learn more if I can't answer his questions instead of asking him to stop learning. "And I thought you were from IIT" was her last statement as I left in a huff!

Will this next door menace be the creator of the next Sasser Worm? Very possible, unless something is done about it :)

On an entirely unrelated note, I now have a copy of "Python Cookbook".

Changed the look and feel to something better :)

In addition I have linked to a few other blogs too:

Vishal - was a colleague at Trilogy where we both used to work. He is now heading to IIM A. CAT enthusiasts will find his blog very useful - the way he planned, his concerns, strategy for the test, the gds and the interviews :). If you ask him now - "How do u prepare for cat?" I am sure he will reply "No big deal da. Just mug and go and u will get !" But blogs dont lie, do they ;) ?

Not Srinivas - He was my college junior and a colleague at my current company. In addition he is a CE from ISC.

The rest are assorted techies ...

So finally elections are over and so we are set to see a new set of jokers in government now. There have been some interesting articles in the news about the credentials of the top players:

http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/apr/13rajeev.htm
http://www.rediff.com/election/2004/mar/23espec1.htm
http://atlanta.indymedia.org/newswire/display/27642/index.php

Should I feel sad that we have such ppl coming into govt in India? Not at all! As is evident from the first article, jokers are just about everywhere. I am quoting something which I found very amusing just in case the first link becomes outdated:

""" I used to think Wodehouse was kidding, until I encountered (thankfully, in print, not in real life) Prince Philip, the husband of the British queen. This worthy came to India, visited Jallianwallah Bagh, and declared that the whole thing was overblown: not too many actually died there. On being asked how he arrived at this insightful observation, he confessed that General Dyer's son had told him. Dyer was the British general who had ordered the massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh! A truly objective man, his son must be.

In another incident, the ever-tactful Philip, on being shown some shoddy electrical work, suggested that it must have been done by (British) Indians. Talk of being sensitive. """

I will leave the wise reader to form his own opinions of the british 'monarchy'!

Fiddling around with some tools and found an interesting tool called apimon.exe. It helps you to see the calls made into various dlls during execution, their counts and the time taken. In addition it allows you to trace all calls into a file which can be tooled for various things..

Oh Cool, I thought, since i was looking at some code which uses a 3rd party dll and thought it will be a easy way to see all the top level calls into that dll (apimon allows u to monitor a subset of dlls used by your process).

I installed it from
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/reskit/tools/existing/apimon-o.asp and thought I was done. However, when I tried to use it it I got errors like "Unable to load dll into process" irrespective of the process I tried to instrument.

Now what ? "google to the rescue" :-). Turns out the above install does not contain apidll.dll which apimon requires !!! So I googled again for the same and finally found it. All in all searching was fairly irritating - took quite some time.

If the error message had some more information life would have been simpler, but then who cares about a poor end user like me :-( ?

I am so tired of all this rhetoric about iraqi's enjoying their "newly found freedom" and how George Bush liberated them.

With the atrocities and the graphical depictions of torture in iraq on the world headlines today, I guess the question to ask everyone would be "Do you want to be liberated today?"

I have been reading Chomsky lately and find his thoughts very interesting and incisive:

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html
http://www.zmag.org/chomskyarticles.htm

There are so many 'self improvement' best seller books around these days. I wonder if I should write one as well. What should it be ? I think it is best to start from the cover page:

----

A truly remarkable story about a group of dogs which go in search of the proverbial "Bones Village" and in the process learn about the true meaning of leadership and teamwork.

Reviews:

If you have time to read just one book this year, this is the one !!
-- The PQR Post

Pathbreaking !
-- The XYZ times

Touches the core of your being. Has influenced millions !
-- Author of "Leadership among rats"

----

Hmm... not bad huh :)

Tired of trying to open non project files in VS. Found a cool tool which allows you to open an arbitrary file in an already open instance of Visual Studio.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/ide/helpfiles/vsedit.aspx

Checking out the features