Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Now one can write blogs by using mail. Isn't it wonderful? This is my first attempt at using this feature.

Monday, August 28, 2006

Ustad Bismilla Khan Ji died a passed away days ago. Ustadji, single-handedly, took up a folk instrument having its origins in Persia in his hand, and turned it into a classical instrument - such was his genius, such was his devotion to music. The demise of Ustadji has left Shehnai crippled.

Listening to a record of Ustadji, I remembered listening to an interview of Ustad Vilayat Khan a few years ago where he said, "Thumri gaane ke liye allah miya ek alag dil dewe." Ustad Bismillah Khan Ji was the only person had that "dil" when it came to the world of Shehnai. The heart of Shehnai has stopped beating.
We were talking about attitude recently, and a senior of mine, who has just completed his masters from an IIT, expressed his disappointment at the attitude of students in IIT; the students who are the brightest minds in the country, the students who are to be the future of the nation. He would get really frustrated seeing them leave the lights and fans switched on all the time. In his hostel, there was a toilet flush which would keep flowing, if, after use, the knob was not manually turned the other way round, and amazingly, there were very few students who would take the 'pain' of doing this simple thing. My senior put up a notice in the toilet drawing attention to the problem and listed the simple solution. Nothing changed.

In contrast, another senior of mine narrated another tale about the attitude of a four year old child. He was travelling by a train in Germany by which a four year old girl and her father were also travelling. The girl was licking an ice cream cone in her hand when the ice cream fell on the floor. Silently, the girl took out a polythene bag from her father's bundle, picked up the stuff from the floor and put it in the bag. She then took her handkerchief, wiped the floor with it, put the handkerchief in the polythene and replaced the polythene back in her father's bundle. And all this while, her father took no notice of what the little girl was doing and kept looking out of the window.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Isn't it rather strange that an attention seeker like Janis Joplin would sing a song like "Me and my Bobby McGee"? It is even more strange that she sang these few lines in the same song :

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah
But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues
Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, Mm-hmm
Good enough for me and my Bobby Mcgee

And in another song, she sings in a very atrocious voice, which, obviously is to draw to herself the attention she always seeked in her life :
This is a song of great political and social importance

Oh lord, wont you buy me a mercedes benz ?
My friends all drive porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So lord, wont you buy me a mercedes benz ?

Another time, a photographer wanted to shoot her, and she started stripping. The photographer explained to her that he would rather have her with her clothes on, but she stripped anyway, and that photograph is, till date, the most famous photograph of Janis Joplin.

Ironically, a few months before her death, it is said, that someone told her, "We actually liked you."

Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't.
I don't believe in an object oriented world. I guess even Bjarne Stroustruppe didn't. True. Ada is a true object oriented language, and philosophically complete, but did it succeed? I know they coded in Ada for a long time, I admire its philosophical beauty, but it was more or less useless.

Even Bjarne never believed in object orientedness, or did he? Unfortunately we will never know. But rumours do go around that he didn't, and he even gave an interview to the IEEE ridiculing what he himself created - C++.
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml

But again Bjarne Stroustrup denies it in his webpage and he says http://www.research.att.com/~bs/ieee_interview.html is the real interview. I don't know. Maybe even he was under too much pressure from the Software Engineering world to deny ever having given such an interview. Who knows. There are Titans, Zeuses and Neptunes in the Software world who wouldn't let anyone escape with ridiculing what has kept the industry going on for years. Not even the man who started it all.

I did a little bit of experimentation with Java. Its really nice to code in java, I agree : it makes you lazy and produces a program which takes a million years to load and get started up. You never realize how much every function (or whatever is the OO equivalent of it) costs. You just don't understand, and don't bother to find out, because you are spoiled.

They always tell you, don't do too many mallocs : does anyone know why? Most people don't. How many programmers today care to open the source code of malloc (now don't tell me that you don't have the source code : get the glibc code)? I am afraid there won't be many.

Now I know you'll say why don't I ask everyone to go back to the days where everything had to be written in assembly. Well. Assembly is too difficult. And the bloody thing gives nothing. You just spend your time in the nuances and forget what you are actually trying to do.

Some day a revolution will come. We will go back to text mode. I will wait till then.

Thursday, August 10, 2006

I have two mailing lists - one is called 'forward' and I forward only decent mails to this list, the other is called 'forward-safe' and I forward any uncensored explicit mail to this mailing list. The other day, after I forwarded such an explicit mail, a colleague belonging to 'forward-safe' walked up to my desk and said with a sparkle in his eyes, "One day, you'll put 'forward' instead of 'forward-safe', and that is where all the fun will begin." I guess his wish will never come true.

Monday, August 07, 2006

Last week was particularly busy for me; after a week at home, as it is a lot of work had piled up, and if that was not enough, new work arrived to make me feel more 'needed' in the company. It is needless to say that I was going early to office and returning late. I had to spend the Saturday in office, and was planning to spend yesterday (Sunday) in office too, but getting up at seven, I felt drained and felt the crushing need to go back to sleep.
I was actually enjoying the pleasures of procrastination under my blanket when the cellphone started beeping announcing the arrival of a friendship day greeting from a not-so-close friend who was bulk sms-ing to all the contacts in her phone book a message she had received from someone else.
Darn friendship. Dash friendship day. I feel like an Al Capone for some time. "Where is my tommy gun?" Not finding it, I gently take my hands to my head and uproot a bunch of hair from my fast balding scalp. Still dissatisfied, unable to be a capone, I decide to become a raging bull and try to ram the wall down with my head, but the pain that follows soon restores to me my senses. I remember the words of Sri Sri Ravishankara. I take slow deep breaths. I feel myself calming down. I feel one with the universe.
Next, I pick up the phone, dial that friend and wish her "happy friendship day", and follow it with an inaudible "dash you and dash your friendship day."
Thank you Airtel. Hope you do good business on independence day. Or is there a special day before the fifteenth?

Thursday, August 03, 2006

I found out yesterday that putty supports full screen mode. Now I can telnet/ssh to my favourite *nix machines and press alt+enter. Abracadabra. Everything that reminds me that I'm using a windows vanishes. The old world charm of text-only mode returns. I am transported back to the age of chivalry, where knights lanced each other to kiss the hands of ladies who wore corsets and those beautiful dresses. It is so romantic ;)

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

I get brilliant ideas and then they fade from my mind was that I can't read anymore so. Yea but I want to read.
It doesn't take much to tell a Bush joke. And I actually quit doing it. It is like topsoil on fertile ground. You know they are just magnificent jokes. But I told in concert in which I was telling i won't tell you. and the audience just howled. And then I got a really beautiful from a conservative man and he said it hurt the feelings of the people who he was with so badly that they had left the auditorium. So I wrote him and said thanks for turning the light on, you know, that doesn't really help that stuff. He would say, excuse me Gandy, and then I would tell a joke. And then I read "Bush On The Couch" and if you haven't read its really helpful.. no serious.. to find out about his little sister who died when he was something like eight she was 3 and they played a lot together, I guess they were very close. But that secretive family never told him why little by little she was getting weaker and why he should be when they played... then she would be gone for longer and longer time obviously to the hospital but they never told him. So the first he knew... By the way the day after the little girl died the parents went golfing. And i think thats a wall of denial thats all it is. And then they came home and George W was waiting to see his little sister and she wasn't there and they told him "she's dead". so thats enough of a trauma really to set off this whole mentality because he never could look at it never could get any help with it. His mother's hair turned gray and he started to "you did. You're white". And she went into terrible depression and he stayed in there and he tried to cheer her up which could explain also some of his behaviour. So I stopped hating him at that point. I still turn off the TV when I see his face. but I stopped hating him.

Joan Baez
Camp Casey, Crawford, Texas, 21/08/05.
Hyderabad, my beloved city, looked even more beautiful from the air. Like a brooch of gold and white diamonds. The sight was so beautiful that I didn't mind the the fact that I wasn't travelling by the lowest possible fares.