Again staying back late today. Not actually doing much in terms of official work, but hacking the configuration to get sound working again. Which, didn't actually work till now.

And got mozilla 1.2.1 with xft support, so ditched the older 1.0.0 xft version. Spent some time in getting all the plugins to work (from mozdev.org). Looks good :-)

Gotta leave now, and sleep for a while.

ack! the data I created on the all night coding marathon had some glaring typos. Like names of non-existent tables! Embarassing :-(

My copies of `Hackers' and 'Snow Crash' arrived today. I had ordered them via fabmart.com in Jan and they finally show up. Man, that made me happy, I'd been wanting to read up Hackers [/. review] for a long time since college; and Snow Crash [/. review] is a very famous SF [Science fiction] novel by Neal Stephenson. (Read it by the next week and then blog my review ;-) ). This book is supposed to be a Cyber Punk novel, much in the tradition of William Gibson's Neuromancer. Snow Crash has got some lovely cover art, and the printing is pretty good too. Look at the cover art at the Amazon page (Where you can also read a sample chapter)

Warming to the topic of SF books I'm looking forward to read stuff by Robert Heinlein (in particular `Stranger in a Strange Land', but the book is too damn expensive in India). There is cool online SF story I read last year (and then also got a dead-tree version), it's called Lobsters. Really liked that one.

Anyway, this [http://idebsikdar.rediffblogs.com] is the blog of a guy I know here. Pretty good and accurate. Deals with up and downs in the life of another software techie guy. One who is also pretty interested in software for its own sake rather than the rewards it brings (like, say, ca$h). Cool :-)

In other news silvermane has been ranting and raving about cricket in wake of the cricket mania gripping the country these days. I'm not too partial to the game myself, sometimes go along with the people in watching it. No fan (or fanatic, as some people are) anyway. Just indifferent. So indifferent that instead of speaking why I don't like it, I'll let silvermane's blog do the talking ;-). One additional point which I would like to make is that to me sports is an intensely personal experience rather than a group activity.

Well,g'night :-)

Hah! Script done! And I managed to catch one error in my code before it shipped out :-|. Would have been embarassing if it got out. Maybe the US guy *is* pretty smart. So now off to verify the changes in my code and then create the patch.

I Hope I can leave by 1 am and then sleep till 12 tomorrow! yay!

On a side note gnome 2.2 packages for Debian woody were released today. Mebbe I'll try them out before going. Gnome 2.2 is supposed to look real good as screenshots at gnome art promise.

Today I also want to take my print-out of SICP [online copy] home so I can grok it over the weekend. SICP, for the uninitiated, is the classic `Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' book written by three MIT professors, Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. It teaches the Scheme programming language, a dialect of LISP (with some other features thrown in).

For knowing more about LISP, and why it is one of the most loved languages, check out Paul Graham's website. All of his articles are good, but take a special look at Revenge of the Nerds and Taste for Makers. I'm still trying to learn Scheme (and hoping to get some grasp of Lisp via that route too); one of the big wins for me would be in the fact that Lisp is the scripting language of Emacs. Then rather than just muddling around copying people's .emacs and distorting them to my needs, I could write stuff to exactly suit my needs, the way it was meant to be :-)

Well this is me signing off now, and a very g'night (or pleasant day, depending on your TZ variable) :-)

Great. The US guy does come up with some interesting issues. And I get to solve them. To write scripts to look at them. Can't really blame him, he is trying to deliver a finished product. But from my pov, it is as ugly as it gets :-( 11:24PM and still here working on that script. He did say maybe I could tomorrow morning and work on it, but I don't want to come to office tomorrow!

I feel jubilant today. The chaos that the last two weeks were finally seem to be (hopefully) over. I get to create a patch of all the fixes I have been making and unleash them on unsuspecting people! MUHAHAHAHAHA! Seriously, I was so stressed out I couldn't even think straight, I wonder how was I carrying on talking to people, eating, riding my bike, living :-/

I asked my manager for tomorrow off as I had been working 15-16 hour for the past couple of days. Luckily he agreed, assuming this patch goes on well tonight. I hope it does. The training till 5 pm and then coming here to work on this issue coz of the deadlines was getting a bit too much. Another week of this and I'll be bringing a Uzi to the office ;-)

I need to start managing my time right. For instance, right now I should just create that patch and then get the hell out of here. But here I am, penning my thoughts for an invisible audience (maybe I have lost my sanity :-) ). Actually I'm waiting for US people to wake up so I can talk to my manager there (yesh, I have two managers, ain't I lucky?). I really hope he doesnt bring up any fresh issues or I'll be dead...

It feels so weird, no, surreal, to actually be a professional software developer. This is what I had been dreaming about all my life, right from school days. This is what I wanted so badly I kept reading my programming books right through the exams, even the final board exams, and then the entrance exams, and then the college exams. Sometimes I shudder when I think how I actually managed to pass most of them (with the few exceptions in college, which I did clear finally). But this? This is not what I wanted! This was not my idea of being a coder. Perhaps I got into this without really knowing what it would entail (just like I got into Electronics & Communication for my bachelors without knowing what would that entail, but that is long sad story for another time). Maybe you want to look at The Software Developer as Movie Icon for a similar idea.

Now I come to realize what someone meant when they said '75% of the computer industry is maintainence of older stuff'. Just never really thought about it. Plus the fact that since most of the ca$h for the industry comes from the business world, so naturally they would drive most of the work too. Hmmmm. Interesting thought.

It all finally comes down to what am I doing about it? Currently not much. But I have noticed that the work I get has been improving over time. Or maybe the fact that I don't actually have time to sit back and think about it has quieted me down.

Anyway, it is getting late and I want to get that %^&* patch done. So have a nice time, where ever you are :-)

There is a blog by a friend of mine, silvermane. Thought Provoking. silvermane is a pretty idealistic person and tends to think about things from a whole lot of perspectives. So I usually listen to what he has to say carefully. [I have to be careful about what I say about him here, he reads this blog ;-)]

enetation seems too slow, so I switched to backblog, which does seem noticably faster...After all this effort if you folks (if there are any...) don't post some comments, grrrr....>:-)

Finally added comments via enetation. So go ahead, let me know what you think! W00t!

finally fixed gnus last night to read and send mail correctly. I've been dreading going through the extremely long gnus manual (300+ pages!) for sometime now, but until I do that I can't get it to work the way I want (and am reduced to ask rudimentary stuff on #emacs channel on IRC). Time is a luxury I do not have....

Training is still on BTW, this is during a short break. I'm feeling a bit woozy due to sleeping late last night and then again getting up early today. Gotta start managing my time... Plus after the training I have some "regular" work to do - create patches, write mails and get the ball rolling. I wonder if I can preserve my sanity through all this :-/

BTW my webpage is at aadityasood.net. Not updated in ages, but that is going to change soon. Give it a visit sometime :-)

I just thought about:

All the opinions expressed here in this blog are entirely my own and in no way express any of my employer. There.

Everything I say here is mine, MINE, MUHAHAHA...

Hiya folks!

I want to write about some important things I've been thinking about...

Currently I'm single and looking for someone, but the someone has to be someone special. Someone I could talk to without getting myself (or them) bored stiff. The kinds of things that matter to me, philosophy, computers, GNU (GPL and all the software Freedom releated issues), ethics,... not many people want to actually talk about. So I'm not sure if my SO (Significant Other) should be totally immune to these things, a big part of my life is these things.

Looking at more mundane things, I want to learn a martial art (most likely karate) to get some concentration (and fitness!). Let me see if I can find a good teacher around Hyderabad. Then I want to learn perl. Get good at riding (since I bought a bike recently, yay!) - my riding's still a bit flaky with me meandering at low speeds (and getting the pillion rider all jittery ;-)).

I'm already late for home, and looks like I'm going to miss dinner again :-( Well it'll have to be some fast food (burgers and stuff) at Baker's Inn again. This is not doing my health any good...

Anyway, g'night :-)

Finally the training gets over! Back to my beloved workstation with my GNOME2 desktop :-) such relief! [BTW MozBlog is working again for making new posts, but not for editing older ones, so this is via MozBlog]

I'm in training room and grappling with Java, EJB and business logic in the new framework. The new framework is based on Java and Beans. Atleast java is a proper language with good tools support, unlike PL/SQL (which is a kludge of control structures on top of SQL). The Jdeveloper IDE is pretty smooth, even if a bit buggy and unstable. Way better than developer IMHO.

I'm in the training room, exporting this session via VNC to this machine and working on my mozilla :-). Heck can also launch the same session of Emacs via gnuclient and read my mail [actually gnus (the Emacs based mail reader I use) is a bit broken right now (I fiddled with it last night) so I have to use mutt to read the mail. Ah, the price of sophistication ;-) And, using MozBlog is segfaulting mozilla, so this is via Blogger. sigh ]

I'm still here, browsing and reading some docs online. Mainly waiting for my friend vaishalee to finish her work, so we can leave together. Sigh. And tomorrow the training starts - 4 days of 9 to 5 agony and boredom. Sigh. Will keep posting from training room on what transpires...

BTW, what I'm interested in knowing is that could I get an Emacs mode to publish my blog through my network proxy? I atleast could not get erc to work with the proxy. Right now I'm using MozBlog (a mozilla plugin) to publish this. Pretty ok, but anything-emacs is better, particularly since these days I almost do everything using emacs, like read mail, planner, schedule, editing, shells and what not :-)

wayVk [featured on Slashdot, every geek's dream site] sounds like a good idea to me, especially since I'm so used to gestures in mozilla (via the Radical Context plugin) that I try to use them in nautilus! But I doubt if it'll work well with Ion, the full screen window manager I use.

This week has been pure hell. working late and hard (the `late' part hurts more). A new release is supposed to go out soon and deadlines are fast approaching. One day stayed back til 5 am (think it was Friday). Today is a sunday and I'm still at it (though at a leisurely pace).

The biggest issue is that the evelopment environment/tools are far inferior to what I'm used (C under GNU/Linux with all the awesome tools). This is more of an ongoing concern rather than a current week-specific issue. Still I'm trying to learn perl so I can automate parsing the debugging logs and gleaning useful tidbits :-)

I finally started using the Emacs Planner Mode for managing my tasks and appointments. And It is awesome! Even if you are never going to use Emacs (a very unfortunate decision IMHO) or the planner mode the planner.el file is worth reading for the essay it has on planning, life and reactive/creative work. Highly recommended!

Well, better get back to work. Will keep ya posted :-) !

I finally didn't go over to azri. The final deciding factor was that the work was Tcl/Websites. If I want to make a jump, I think I'll do it for C/Unix or something like that. Agonized a lot over the decision. My manager helped me to see all the pros and cons (he lost a chance to get rid of me ;-) ). Anyway, let's see what pops up next.