office stupidity

I've been getting worked up about a policy my office has:
I sit on the 4th floor. Whenever there is a mail/courier for me which requires my signature (which is, almost all mail, since my cell service provider is paranoid that I might not get my bill (heaven forbid!), so they *have* to courier it ofcourse. Ditto for every other service I subscribe for) I get a call from the 3rd floor security "Sir, please come and collect your courier" (yes, "Sir", colonial hangover I guess).

And then I have to go down one floor for the freaking package. Sign for it and come back up. Kills my mojo like anything. I mean, I could understand it if they couldn't get it inside the building without my signature (sort of anyway, that sucks too). But they're already getting it to the 3rd floor! One more floor can't hurt!

I talked to the guy delivering the stuff to me, and it seems they have only one register to all incoming/outgoing couriers. Sigh, this big an ERP company, with EDI and e-this and e-that and I have to sign a 15 bucks register, which is a single resource for 6 floors. Talk about bottlenecks.

Time to get off my soapbox...:-)

laptop :/

After reading my Saturday post, my dad called me up. PRetty concerned about my state of mind, and the lack of a laptop in my life ;)

So he persuaded me to get a laptop. He's paying.

I ordered this Dell Inspiron 8500. More than 1 lakh.

Which just goes to show that writing down your feelings does help ;)

sleepover=>hacking!

Slept over in the office. Too drowsy I guess. And couldn't get mucho done either.

Hmmm. That calls for some quick hacking ;-)

detachment?

Is it possible for one to grow totally detached from the work they do? I seem to have. It just doesn't matter anymore what I do. Almost like an automaton.

There seem to be just two goals now: get a laptop and get out of here. The latter is being held over due to the former. I've more or less forgotten about anything else. I just keep working dumbly for the laptop and watch my bank balance grow. Heck, I feel the anticipation for getting a computing machine is greater then the machine itself is going to be. As Spock said "Having is not so pleasing after all as wanting. it may sound illogical but it is often true"
Hope I'll be able to find some(where/one) else to work for...

The one thing I find missing in my life is discipline. I just can't get myself to do stuff when it should be done. Rather I burn late nights late into the schedule and somehow finish it all. Though things have improved a lot in last one year. Still a long way to go though.

The problem seems to be that I almost got everything out of life very easy. Class 10th board exams? Didn't really register on my radar. Class 12th board exams? Barely bothered and consequently barely passed. Engineering Exams? Spent some time here and there and managed to get an 8th rank. Engineering? spent no real time on my core subjects and still got a 74% aggregate. Job placements? Mebbe I did work hard on my C/Unix. But I guess that's about it.

Seems to be a downward spiral of self-destruction. My ability to put in hard work has been dropping steadily.

The whole purpose of this self-agonizing self-pity analysis is to try to break the loop. Get some order back in life. I know there are no shortcuts, one just has to sit down and do it.

Starting now :)
Wish me luck....

Drunk!

Had dinner with a friend and then we went out for some beers. And headed back to office. Irresponsible I know...

So I'm technically a bit on the woozy side.

Plus V has gone out of town to her folks for a few days; I feel lonely.

Not mucho else...

Firebird

I had to configure a freshly installed Win2k machine for a friend. So I go over and install Mozilla 1.4 and Emacs for Windows. All nicely done and configured, with all the cool extensions from mozdev also put in.

Then on a whim I just installed the firebird nightly for windows. And promptly fell out of my chair. The damn thing looks good, renders really well and is fast! Not to mention all the cool extensions available at texturizer.net/.

That was it! Played with it for a while on the windows machine. Came back to my debian box. Had to get the whole mozilla source code from CVS. Did that. And built Firebird with gtk2 and xft support. I must say it is an excellent browser, and beats the pants off my compiled mozilla 1.4.

about:buildconfig shows:

Build platform
target
i686-pc-linux-gnu

Build tools
Compiler 	Version 	Compiler flags
gcc 	gcc version 3.3 (Debian) 	-Wall -W -Wno-unused 
        -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -pedantic -Wno-long-long 
        -pthread -pipe

c++ 	gcc version 3.3 (Debian) 	-fno-rtti -fno-exceptions 
        -Wall -Wconversion -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Woverloaded-virtual 
       -Wsynth -Wno-ctor-dtor-privacy -pedantic -Wno-long-long 
       -fshort-wchar -pthread -pipe -I/usr/X11R6/include

Configure arguments
--enable-crypto --disable-tests --disable-debug --disable-mailnews 
--disable-composer --disable-ldap --enable-strip --enable-strip-libs 
'--enable-optimize=-O2 -march=pentium4 -pipe' 
--enable-extensions=default,-inspector,-irc,-venkman,-content-packs,-help 
--enable-plaintext-editor-only --without-system-nspr 
--without-system-jpeg --without-system-zlib --without-system-png 
--disable-freetype2 --enable-xft --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2

I guess by version 1.0 it would be to mozilla what mozilla is to IE :-)

lizard 1.4 has come!

Mozilla 1.4 was released recently. Finally stable :) I had been running 1.4b for a while now.

Got the source and built it.

about:buildconfig shows:
--enable-default-toolkit=gtk2 --enable-optimize --disable-mailnews
 --enable-xft --prefix=/usr/local --enable-freetype --enable-crypto
 --disable-composer --disable-debug --enable-strip 

So I got gtk2+xft. Which rocks :-)

dell laptops

Or how about this Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop? Good config and great prices. Coming to almost Rs 50k.

Hmmmm, I think I'll go for dell :-)

tcpa

Ouch! The IBM US ThinkPad model I had my eye on has TCPA chip built in...(see IBM security). Man, this sucks big time!

Apparently Linux kernel will still work well, but TCPA sounds like a bad idea in conjugation with Palladium (for future windows versions). And future GNU/Linux versions might not be very runnable as this combo can effectively cirumvent the GPL . Read the TCPA/Palladium FAQ.

Wondering what to do now....

coding...

Managed to meet the deadline just by a fraction. Then a strange thing happened. I got glowing praise from the senior member for the code. Wow! It felt good, to be appreciated in one thing I (presumably) do well.

There is another deadline floating around the place, that of Unit Testing. Until the US dude gets back to me with the UT document he is supposed to write can't do much about it.

Other then that, decided to buy an IBM Thinkpad. This one. Specifications: P4-M 1.8GHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD, 13.3 XGA(1024x768) TFT LCD, 16MB ATI Radeon , 24x-10x CD-ROM, Modem(CDC), Ethernet(LOM), 6 cell battery

Paying close to Rs. 70k for it. Comments?

Or this one from IBM US? Might be able to get it from US somehow...

Hopefully my hacking days will come back again...