My last unmarried day at office :)

Yeah, that sounds like a big thing! The next time I come to office, I shall be a married lady. Will be writing "Married", instead of "Single" in marital status! Will be writing Shweta Vaity instead of Shweta Agrawal! (Hmmm.., probably, I will have to give some more thought to this last thing.) What about just getting up and coming to office in jeans-tshirt, hair all screwed up... People will now expect something more from me probably :( Lots of bangles and a big Mangalsutra with jeans, pretty trendy, yeah!

Socialism... and free market.

A nice article on Slashdot on importance of free market in America..
It has echoes of Ayn Rand of "Atlas Shrugged", Gurcharan Das of "India Unbound".

An excerpt:

Socialism scares me. The direction of America scares me. Patton said ``America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.'' I wonder if now this is no longer true; Americans love losers and cannot tolerate a winner. And it's sad, really, because Americans have the opportunity to become winners. We're just choosing to bring everyone down to the loser level, making sure nobody gets ahead, so that nobody will be left behind.

America has to prevent socialism from paralysing their economy, and India has to cure it!

Those sounds of Ghungru...

I was looking around for kathak classes in Pune for long. Came to know of some, but they were far placed. Yesterday, I put an effort and went to the most famous one - in Deccan. Reached the Poona Coffee house in front of the Deccan Bus-stand. It was rainy. Was quite tired of driving till there after office, and was wondering where it can be near such a place. And... I heard those beautiful sounds. The sounds of ghungru being played in rhythm. Something happened! All the tiredness vanished. I was elated and moving in direction of the sounds. I climbed the stairs and reached the room. Yes! that was the place. I was quite happy, thinking that the effort was worth it...
But, the caretaker there turned me down... saying it was the class for seniors. I have to come again the next day to enquire about the classes. Came down quite dissapointed. Called up the classes in Bund Garden and confirmed that I will be joining them. And, earlier, I was not able to decide this since weeks...

Me in Goa! 

The HitchHiker's Guide to The HitchHiker's Guide

Found it here...

I am still half-way through "The HitchHiker's Guide to Galaxy". After some amount of lost of interest and delays in between, it has again caught my interest and attention. The guide does not probably have a continuously increasing graph of interest, but the intermediate triumphs are worth it.
My favorite quote in the book till now... In fact this was the one which lead me to start reading the guide. (Later discovered that it is the most famous one too...)

On the planet earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

So long and thanks for all the reading. ;)

Linux for human beings

Yes, that's Ubuntu!

Installed it on my home PC last night. The installation was pretty simple and fast. Just one installation CD, and it does install most of the useful packages. The installer is not all that graphical, but still quite straightforward and easy, probably more than the Redhat graphical installer.
I have my PC next to my bed, and I was literally doing the installation half asleep. It was all very smooth, except that I formatted the wrong drive :-P

With linux at core, debian packing, gnome desktop, and open-office, it makes a good desktop solution. It can make shifting from Windows to Linux a bit more comfortable by small but useful offerings like
- installs firefox as the default browser rather than mozilla.
- gives small toolbar icons for "Browser", "Show desktop", and "Adjust sound" similar to Windows
- The default desktop settings make a clean desktop with a good look and feel.
Not that you cannot set all this up easily in other linuxes, but the good thing about ubuntu is that it gives you the desirable things without doing anything extra.

That's what I noticed on first shot, ready to do some experimentation with it and my iPod!

My pink iPod!

My pink iPod! 

How can somebody afford anything than just loving it! :)
It is so cute... I am sure that Apple has got one of the best creative designers in the world! (may be the best after google :), have to say this after using picasa and hello for posting this picture...)

But it is so good. It's cool! It just rocks!

So, let me see, here is a list of my most loved possessions:
- my pink mini iPod!
- my newly bought silver Honda Activa! (though the bank half-owns it yet)
- my nice and loved black Sony headphones
- my red "Easies" bag
- my LG-reliance mobile (just added it, don't love it that much though)

Hey, the thieves out there! don't take the alert!

Why do you hate Windows?

Ok, so once again I face this question. Actually I have never given a
concrete answer to this to anyone. So let me attempt so.

First of all I do not "hate" Windows. Windows is all so pretty and
useful. And, I have all the due respect for the great brilliant
Microsoft guys who made it so :) And, for my father, say, I would ask
him to please stay away from linux, get his work done fast and happily
in Windows.
But for myself am irritated using Windows. And, it is mainly because I
have no use of most of what it offers. And, it does not offer many of
what I need and like.

Why I mainly login to computer
1. to work
2. to mail and browse
3. to listen to songs and maybe watch a movie.
I find linux and windows both pretty good for 2 and 3. (I don't play
computer games, if I did I would prefer Windows).

Now comes "work". And for that I need
1. A good command shell
2. A good editor (which I do not have to change for every language I work in)
3. Compilers and debuggers for the languages I work in.

And, for these I find only workarounds in windows but "the nice
solution" in linux. Lets say I want to do some C programming. Oh, I
will have to bring somehow and install Visual studio!
And, in Linux, gcc will be mostly there, or can be installed in few
minutes without much overhead. I can use my old practiced VI, no need
to learn a new editor! Similarly for perl, for python, anything that I
can think of, windows makes you buy (or pirate) for each and every
small thing you need. On Linux, it is just available!

OK, one thing that I may need is MS powerpoint or MS word. That is the
only thing for which I might go to windows. But I am not ready to
compromise on above fronts for document editing which is not so often
for me. I am ready to use workarounds for that!

And, above all I do not want to be dependent on a thing which I cannot
buy for my personal use, (or say do not want to buy) but only pirate!

Hmm, may be I missed some points, but anyway was not a bad attempt,
and totally my personal opinion and choices. There might be people,
who do not want a command shell, and who are happy learning and
installing a new editor/compiler for every language, and pirating as
long as it goes!

HTML docs and Tables :(

splurr, splurr, splurr
doc, doc, doc
table, table, table...

I have become a document generating machine. Am writing a new document almost every day, and that too in html :((. Escaped from Word, and resorted to use VI.
And, how much the managers love tables! Was forced to search around to find a right CSS format to define a table, and came to know how horrible and frustrating it can be. Even after years of standardization of HTML and CSS stuff, there is no good way to define or say freeze a table format. Added to it the discrepancies between different browsers. There are always some properties that have to be written in the table tag itself, if you want a pleasent (or better said as expected) look in IE as well as firefox :(

I had a very simple requirement 1px solid borders, some cellspacing, cellpadding, align and width.... Did it very badly. Sharing it here only in hope somebody would tell me a better way :).

#tbsolid {
border: solid 1px; }
#tbsolid td{
border: solid 1px; }
#tbsolid th{
border: solid 1px; }

table style="border:solid 1px" id="tbsolid" cellspacing=0 cellpadding=5
align=center width=90%

If it doesn't get better, I may revolt and to dismay of my managers and reviewers, start floating around pdfs written in LaTeX :))

Current mood: Nostalgic

Software Code is Design

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/reeves_design.html

Came accross this interesting article which says that "programming is not about building software, but about designing software". The author compares the software development process with a manufacturing process saying that the programmers are not the manufacture workers. That work is done by the compilers and linkers, and we rightly call it a "build" in a typical software development. The build in a software project, unlike a manufacturing process is pretty inexpensive. Most of the software project is "Design", and the ultimate design is the software code that we write. Testing as well as debugging is a part of design.

The idea is pretty controversial, but I tend to agree with him. What we typically call a "Design" in a software development process always seemed to me unsatisfying, incomplete, and the continuous pester of so called good software engineers to freeze it before coding, very unrealistic. The Software engineering Gurus seem to take pride in making the "Coding" the most unimportant and short part of the whole project.

I guess many have now realized that it is inconvenient and inefficient to make a design independent of a pogramming language. Languages like C++, Java etc support this trend. And, probably that is why we see the software development process moving from waterfall to spiral etc all evidences of slowaly making coding a part of design.

Confused...

Between what is right and what is wrong. There is so fine a line between good and bad. Infact, the line is not there, everything is mixed, and I guess to make a line is as hard a problem as.... SVM in datamining :) (or may be harder!)
Anyways, I think this is common enough, and boring enough as I am not going to say here what is the exact confusion! But it does make me thoughtful, and refrain me from making a judgement about anyone. It is better to think of everyone just as "good" or "don't know", "bad" is a faulty and a cruel judgement.

Some questions

I have some questions revolving around in my mind for long, or say from the time I have started seeing myself as a Computer Engineer...

1. Assume all your degrees and certificates are gone. You have no piece of paper saying anything about you. Also, asssume there are absolutely nothing related to computers anywhere. Now, what can you do for your livelihood?

My options are - open a "dancing school for small kids", take some tutions of maths, physics..., teach in some primary school , work as a receptionist in a hotel, company etc...
What are your choices!

2. How far can you take a new civillization with your brain, knowledge and skills, if you are left alone with them with no aids of the present world?

I guess, for this one, mechanical engineers have an edge :)

Living IIT again...

When I was leaving IIT after 2 memorable years of MTech, one thing pained me more than anything else - that whatever may happen, I might come here again, I might meet the people again, see the department, the hostel again, but I won't be able to live those years again.
And whew!, the fate (or so many people who wanted to go to their homes or places at christmas time, and due to whom I couldn't get my reservation confirmed) gave me that rare chance too! :)
I spent my whole vacations (7 days!) in IIT, and spent them almost as older times!
That getting up late, feeling a little shameful for that, having a bath after much postponement and short naps, going to department, working a little (yeah, a little work of my old project, made it all the more realistic), having some tea from Badlu, going somewhere out with Chetan in evening.. coming back in night after dinner, try to work (this time this is for Chetan, I didn't work that hard), feel sleepy, sometimes have a walk outside, coffee at H8, going back to room, reading a novel (co-incidentally picked up Arthur C. Clarke again as while in IIT ), and sleep wondering how fast the day runs in IIT!
Yes, I lived the IIT again!

Fountains of Paradise

He does it again. I am amazed by Arthur C. Clarke's capability of doing far-fetched imagination. "Fountains of Paradise", an outstanding example of this. No, but I am not talking (only) about the "space elevator" here. I was impressed by the simple yet brilliant "News" system that he mentions just in passsing.

People specify their items of interest (of which he mentions the most interesting ones!)

Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of
Circle, squaring of
Atlantis, re-emergence of
Christ, second coming of
Loch Ness Monster, capture of
World, end of

And, the intelligent news system blink when any news related to any item of interest comes up!
Interesting.

And it's Sybase now!

Yesterday was pretty adventurous! Going to HP in morning, completing the formalities, flying to Pune in afternoon, and joining Sybase at 2'o clock!
It all came out quite well. Although, it did not seem so when I was stuck in the traffic jam on Airport road in morning, feared missing the flight, vented out my anger on the traffic policeman who was stopping the traffic for some minister to pass, and ultimately became the last person to board the air-van towards the plane!
Anyways, all the three DBMS TAs met today, and now one can imagine the fate of yet to join DBMS students :)

Exiting HP

Just returned from the building I am most reluctant to get in - 29C, the HP main office. Somehow, I like the sun-lit plain old offices better than Air-conditioned rooms lit with the white light in software companies, especially if they have low roofs! I have a claustrophobic feeling at such places. Anyways, it was perhaps the last-but-one day when I have to go there, my "Exit Interview" went pretty well.
So this is my last day at my first-ever-full-time-job. (By this I remember, I am yet to write the conventional, "My last day at HP" mail). But I am not feeling anything, except that a lot of things are to be done, before I leave. And that I should make a list now, and start doing them!

My first blog!

And what is all this fuss about! My first love, my first ball, my first kiss... (I am reading too much of Jane Austen), or ...................... "My first blog"! Sounds stupid.
Anyways, I never thought blogging was a very good idea, except if you want to do some tik-tak on the keyboard even in your free time!!
But still, here I am, with "My first blog"!