Saturday, May 29, 2004

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

Friday, May 21, 2004

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 ...

Tuesday, May 18, 2004

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'!

Friday, May 14, 2004

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 :-( ?

Monday, May 10, 2004

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

Thursday, May 06, 2004

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 :)

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

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