A programmer's ramblings ...

Inspiron 1464 Mini Review

2010-04-06T14:23:00.001+05:30

Since my laptop, an HP Pavilion DV6000, is on the verge of dying, I
decided to buy a replacement. A Macbook was what I looked at first but
it is too expensive for me. Besides, I work mostly on Windows and
Linux. The next choice was a Thinkpad T400. Mixed reviews of the model
sold in India and the expensive price tag even without the Windows tax
left me searching for alternatives. Then I received a nice deal from
Dell for the new Inspiron model 1464 and I bought it. A fast machine
at a much lower price.

Last week I received my new laptop and here are my initial
impressions. Note that this is by no means a proper review. The focus
is on things that are either essentials or major annoyances on my
previous laptop.

The model is a 14" laptop powered by a Core i5 430M with 3G of RAM and
a 320GB SATA HDD running at 7200 RPM. The build is decent for a
low-end laptop. The design is similar to the newer Vostro models and
also borrws a few things from the Studio line.

The keyboard is decent with fullsize keys and with a rounded bevel on
the keycaps. The travel is just a bit on the shorter side. The tactile
feedback is pretty decent. I think it uses one of those "scissor"
switches. I typed on it for a while and could detect no flex unlike my
previous laptop where there was a lot of flex at the center. While the
keyboard is good, the layout of the keys is where Dell screwed up
badly. Firstly, the right shift key is smaller and not aligned with
the enter key. To hit the right shift key with my right pinky I'll
have to curl my other fingers and this can be painful when done
frequently. The bigger screwup is the arrangement of the function
keys. The function keys are swapped with the hardware control keys!!!
and require an Fn keypress. This is simply ridiculous. The function
keys are also off as there is an additional key to toggle the
touchpad. Sigh.

The touchpad is a nice one with a large surface area and has a matte
texture that adds a nice feel. The touchpad buttons are firm and
provide a good feedback when pressed. The right edge of the touchpad
can be used as a scroll area as well.

The display is 14" across with a native resolution of 1366x768 which
is pretty basic considering other laptops offer much higher
resolutions (eg: the similarly priced Travelmate gives you 1280x800
for a 12" display). The display is bright with upto 15 levels of
brightness adjustments which is quite good. The display is housed on a
bevelled screen with firm hinges that is bridged with the main body
and can tilt upto 120-135 degrees easily. The screen does not wobble
when typing fast.

Performance seems to be quite good but then every laptop that I've
touched since my HP Pavilion seems to run faster :). The machine comes
bundled with 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I managed to get rid of
800MB of stuff from "Program Files". Never understood why these
programs are installed in the first place.

Windows 7 - the taskbar is an improvement. However Aero as an
interface theme simply sucks. Nimbus, Nodoka, Clearlooks are all so
much better. The window manager animations stutter sometimes and it
is not a pretty sight. I guess the cheap GMA 4500 HD video card is the
culprit. But then I won't be needing fancy animations so I'll turn
those things off. Good to see the disk management tool being able to
resize the partition(s) as otherwise it would have taken much longer
to do it with gparted.

Compiling software is a good test for measuring overall performance. A
full debug build of wxWidgets-trunk (make -j4) using GCC was completed
in 11 minutes (approx) with all the cores 100% most of the time and
running on battery. This is pretty good as my quad-core desktop gets
the same thing done in 7 minutes (approx). This will perhaps be the
most resource intensive thing I'll be doing on this machine so I'm
happy with the performance that I got.

The laptop comes with a 6-cell battery which lasted for roughly 2.5
hours under a typical workload with wireless on most of the time and
normal screen brightness. In comparison, the HP Pavilion's 6-cell
battery gave at most 35 minutes. I had replace it with a 10-cell one
last last year and I get about 2-2.5 hours. Something is definitely
wrong with that machine. My experience with HP's support was quite
bad.

There is one area of concern: the fan seems to be on all the time even
when the machine is idle. Need to contact the support people and get
this sorted out. I hope that the experience won't be as bad as it was
the last time I called the customer support.

Ask Mr Make

2009-08-02T19:30:00.001+05:30

Ask Mr Make is a tips and tricks column on build systems with an
emphasis on GNU make. The wealth of information provided by these
articles apply directly to real world problems, something that the
manual does not do. Also, there are fun articles like solving the
Tower of Hanoi problem using make that demonstrate the extent to
which make can be (ab)used. Highly recommended if you are the kind
of person who writes makefiles by hand.

s/screen/tmux

2009-07-16T18:13:00.008+05:30

I've replaced GNU Screen with tmux as my preferred terminal

multiplexer. The main reason is that the defaults are better in tmux

and I don't have to worry about setting up a config file. For

example, with screen, I need a (rather simple) configuration file

to get the status line that I get with tmux by default. I also like

Ctrl-b better than Ctrl-a used by screen as Ctrl-a is a heavily

used key combination (emacs, terminals with emacs-like line editing

etc).

tmux seems to use less memory than screen and for me this is be a big

plus as there is very little RAM left on my VPSs when running the

various fastcgi and squeak processes.

The code for tmux is arguably better than that of screen and it is

under a BSD license. Recently it was imported into the Open BSD

base system. This is what Theo had to say about the software:

The most impressive thing about tmux, in my view, is how
frustrating the code audit was. In 2 hours, I found only one
or two nits that had very minor security consequences. It was
not accepted into the tree based on license alone. It is high
quality code.

Here's an interview with the author of tmux:

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20090712190402

s/GCC/Clang

2009-07-12T12:16:00.003+05:30

I've been using Clang as a drop-in replacement for GCC for compiling C

code and so far it has been pretty good. While I did not see any

drastic increase in performance of the generated code, the compile

times have come down considerably. For example, compiling a fresh tree

of the latest emacs pretest took 1m55s using GCC on my quad-core

box. The same test with Clang took just over a minute. Other things

that I've built using Clang that are working well without any problems

include: GNU Smalltalk, cmus, tmux and a whole bunch of stuff.

Clang is a C/C++ and Objective-C frontend for the LLVM "compiler

infrastructure". As of now, the C and Objective-C frontends have

reached production quality on x86 and x86-64. The C++ frontend is no

way near completion and is not expected to be complete in the near

future.

Apart from the compilation speed one other feature that is in favour

of Clang is the shockingly expressive diagnostics. Along with the

message, the exact code fragment that is causing the problem is also

shown. If the C++ frontend is able to provide this feature and I'm

sure it will as it is a fundamental goal, this feature alone is going

to propel the adoption of Clang. GCC sure does have its place thanks

to the support of other languages like Ada, Fortran, Java, Pascal

etc. However Clang improving at this rate is surely going to supplant

GCC atleast on the primary hardware platforms. The BSDs in particular

are quite keen on replacing GCC as is evident from the funding of the

development of the Portable C compiler. With Clang already compiling

the kernel source and 99% of the userland, FreeBSD is seriously

considering replacing GCC with Clang in the base system. I think it is

just a matter of time.

An excellent intro to Clang can be found here:

Clang features can be found here: http://clang.llvm.org/features.html

Instructions for building Clang can be found in the Clang Getting Started

page. In addition to the instructions given there, I added

--enable-optimized to the configure script when building llvm to avoid

building the debug versions as they tend to take up a lot of disk

space.

Building programs with Clang is easy. It comes with a gcc compatible

driver called "clang" so all you need to do is to make sure

llvm/Release/bin is in PATH and run configure as

CC=clang ./configure

LinuxMint 7 "Gloria"

2009-07-12T02:18:00.002+05:30

It's been six months and time for change. I’ve switched from OpenSuSE

11.1 to Linux Mint 7. Prior to that I was running ArchLinux for a year

and it was a solid distribution with a fantastic package manager. But

after Chip Magazine came out with the 11.1 DVD I wanted to try out

OpenSuSE 11.1. OpenSuSE, overall, has been mostly stable for me and I

loved the artwork. While things like package upgrades were efficient

through the use of binary (x)deltas, the package manager itself drove

me nuts. It was way too slow on my not-so-fast connection. Over the

course of six months, I had to install a few packages from the build

service which prompted me to add a few additional repositories. Now

everytime the package manager was launched it tried to refresh the

package list. While I understand the reasons it simply was

annoying. Sometimes the refreshing would simply hang. So everytime I

had to hit Skip Refresh after launching the package manager and the

whole exercise was irritating.

Another reason was the PulseAudio sound system. This caused the

biggest pain and I din't manage to resolve the problem. Sound input

never worked and the output volume was too low. To add to the misery,

I had a skype meeting and the webcam was not working. While the camera

was picked up the device /dev/video0 had permission issues. I'm sure

these things can be fixed after enough googling but I simply didn't

have the patience for it. I had issues running virtual machines under

KVM.

Finally, my / partition had grown to 80% of its size which is a signal

that enough cruft has accumulated on my system and that usually is

when I switch to another distro :)

I had been watching the progress of Linux Mint and when 7 came out I

decided to switch. Thanks to its Ubuntu base, installation was a

breeze and post-install, I didn't have to hunt for codecs as the

installed mplayer played most of the videos I threw at it. Artwork is

as good as OpenSuSE's and even the menu was very similar. The

"mint-green on dark" theme looks very nice and overall it's a lovely

green desktop.

The package manager (mintInstall) has a list of "featured"

applications for things like Adobe Reader (stay away from it!), Skype,

VLC, Audacity etc. Handy.

Audio is still controlled by PulseAudio but on Mint7 there was a

control panel to control it and I was able to adjust the output to an

audible level. Sound input is still not working. Skype picked up the

webcam and that is a relief.

Overall, I really like the system. Boots fast, plenty of packages

thanks to Ubuntu and Debian underneath, nice green desktop, KVM

virtual machines not complaining. Happy!

9x18

2009-07-11T20:04:00.003+05:30

I was looking for a bigger font for my terminals as 6x13 was starting
to look too small on my display. For terminals, I prefer the crisp and
sharp appearance of bitmap fonts although Envy Code R is not bad at
all. Ctrl-Rightclicking on XTerm gives you a menu where you can select
a large font which turns out to be 9x18.

Originally part of the ucs-fonts package, the font got merged into
core X distribution. This is what the website says about the font:

9x18 is an improved version of 9x15 that has more space above and
below the base characters to increase readability and to allow
overstriking combining characters to work properly.

Indeed, the font is nice and tall (although some may say spindly) with
a good inter-line spacing making it a good choice for terminals. Also
the font has a good coverage of characters. For example, it includes
all mathematical symbols, smiley and even chess pieces (terminal based
FEN viewer anyone?)

-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1 is the
actual XLFD 9x18 is aliased to but on my machines (Ubuntu and
OpenSuSE), the fonts.alias file did not have the entries so I had to add
them manually.

Versions of -misc-fixed family are also available for Windows. My cmd.exe
windows use 6x13 giving me plenty of lines of clear text.

...

2009-07-06T01:59:00.002+05:30

For the last two weeks, I've been down with chicken pox. While the first
10 days were pretty bad things are improving as I'm finally off of curd
rice and raw onions and slowly getting back to eating some tasty food.

This little period of rest is a god-send for me as I was getting worked
up at work and an ever piling reading list adding to the irritation. The
last few days, apart from reading, the tool seeker in me has found some
really cool tools and when you start dreaming of use cases for these
cool toys and tools, the pain and the irritation just vanish. Hopefully,
I shall blog about them here this week as I'll be quarantined for atleast
another week.

LyX, LaTeX and books...

2009-03-17T00:06:00.007+05:30

I'm typesetting a book for a friend. Initially I had to decide between LaTeX and ConTeXt. Although LaTeX had a WYSIWYM editor in LyX I've always liked ConTeXt for its perceived completeness (their documentation always looked better than the rest) but I haven't touched it since 2002 when I last used it for preparing reports for college. However after checking out LyX 1.61 the choice was easy. LyX has come a long way since the early versions that used the XForms toolkit.

As for the document class to use for the book the popular choices seemed to be KOMA-Script and Memoir. I almost selected KOMA-Script when at the last moment decided to take a look the Memoir documentation and I was pleasantly shocked! The documentation for the memoir class is simply brilliant! (and beautifully typeset too!). It is not only a class documentation but also a complete introduction to typesetting. I'd say it is mandatory reading for any novice getting into typsetting. Google for memman.pdf and give it a good reading.

I ended up using LyX with minimal ERT needed to customize the memoir document class.

Here's an article that presents a good overview on designing a book with LyX:

http://www.linux.com/feature/56471

Also a good set of tips was picked up from
http://www.markschenk.com/tensegrity/latexexplanation.html

For preparing bibliographies, JabRef is a nice utiility for managing your BibTeX databases.

I haven't really looked at indexing options but the book is mainly an internal monograph so the index can be omitted.

Hello again!

2009-03-16T19:09:00.005+05:30

Back to blogger after roaming elsewhere for three years. As was mentioned in my last post here, I moved my blog to WordPress but was never happy which ofcourse had to with the then prevailing confusion in my life rather than wordpress itself. I eventually deleted that blog in early 2008 and then moved my blog to my own VPS on linode. After grappling with toolset issues (dokuwiki, blorg, ikiwiki) finally settled on pier which is what the fork of this blog is currently running on at http://scriptek.co.in/seaside/pier .

In the meanwhile this "dead" blog was getting more hits than all the other blogs put together. Also blogger is now a google service which meant that it was auto-associated with my gmail account which happens to be my primary email account. There were also additional conveniences like mail2blogger which suits my workflow than logging in and editing posts inside a HTML editor (which I really hate btw). All these factors made me want to switch back to blogger and continue my original blog. However there was a nasty problem: I forgot the password and the email that was associated with my blogger account was no longer there. So this blog was more or less orphaned but the hits kept coming. Wrote a few times to Google but I guess my requests went to /dev/null.

Finally, today I sat down to methodically try and eliminate all the passwords I've used so far in my life. After an hour of trial (and getting kicked out) I managed to login!!!

So here I am, back to where I first started.

Bye Bye Blogger

2006-09-28T13:33:00.000+05:30

After rambling here for 3 years, I've decided to move my blog to a different home. My reasons: Got bored of the same interface and themes even though I've not posted much. Actually, I was looking forward to Google's blogger beta but as of now, it does not allow you to migrate your blog entirely and I don't want to have multiple blogs. Also, much of what Blogger lacks, what blogger-beta promises/provides, Wordpress already has. So, I've moved to Wordpress. My new blog can be found here . I donno if it is within the blogging ethics to move a blog entirely from one host to another but I want to keep all my posts in one place so I've imported this blog to the new site.

A big thank you to Blogger for the good service provided over the last 3 years.

FICS...

2006-09-11T17:08:00.000+05:30

I've rejoined the Free Internet Chess Server . I plan to play a few games there everyday. My handle is "MrPunch" and my current (provisional) rating is 1902.

Emacs artist mode...

2006-09-11T16:51:00.000+05:30

I was blown away when I saw emacs's artist-mode (M-x artist-mode activates it). Artist mode switches emacs's text buffer to a nice canvas where you can draw ascii art using the mouse!!! Coooooool!

Here is a sample scribble:


 

    ** **   *
    *  **    *      **  *
    ****     *     **  *****  *****
    *****   *    *  **  **  *   *
    * **  *   *  **   *  *   *
  ***  *  ****  ********    *  ********

Note: I was trying to scribble 'kicha'. Guess the CSS has ruined my fine drawing :-(

This weekend...

2006-09-11T14:59:00.000+05:30

Indrani came to Salem this week and stayed with us for the weekend. We drove to Yercaud hills. It was a one and half hour drive from my place. The weather was very pleasant, misty and a little bit of rain. We saw the various vantage points. At the highest point, 1500m above MSL, is the Servarayan cave temple. The temple houses Lord Servarayan and goddess Cauvery and it is said that the cave runs so deep that it touches the river Cauvery. It is believed that the god and the goddess are the protectors of the surrounding hills and hence they take the name from him which the Britishers have anglicized to "Shervaroy hills". We walked on the nearby meadow and it was an interesting experience to see the mist covering and clearing every now and then. From the other side of the meadow, one could clearly see portions of the hill that were shaved off by the bauxite miners. Not a pretty sight. We could'nt go to the waterfall because of bad roads and we were too lazy to walk 10Kms. We missed out on a few places but given the short stay, we managed to cover a lot. On our way back, we even climbed a fire monitoring tower installed near a hair-pin bend where we got a nice view of Salem!

I'm quite bad at photography. Indrani sure had a tough time teaching me framing etc. However, I still ended up taking pictures by simply "pointing and clicking". Here are some pictures.

We got a lot of things sorted out regarding acharya/peixes and the direction that the urdu editor will take. Apart from that, we also chatted for a long time. Little did I know that Indrani can sing well. She sang a few Bangla songs and I also made her sing a few verses from Thiruvasagam. Needless to say, it was fun listening her sing Thiruvasagam.

Overall, it was a great weekend.

Turbo Power!?

2006-09-06T08:43:00.000+05:30

Borland has finally made the Turbo product line available for download. Rushed over to the download site and started to download Turbo C++. The package came in two parts - a prequisite that weighed 230MB and TC++ itself which weighed 390M!. Wonder whatz inside. Turns out .Net 1.1 is required. Hmm. As the download was progressing, began to read the FAQ. When I read that the commandline compiler was not included in the package I lost interest and cancelled the download. I was just curious to try out the compiler. Am not a big fan of IDEs. Emacs is fine for most of my needs.

Relocations....

2006-08-21T12:21:00.000+05:30

Indrani has quit ETV after working there for 7 years!. She'll be moving to Mysore and join the Central Institute of Indian Languages as a research fellow. IG, good luck!.

Monkey has quit HCL and joined Wipro. He has moved back to Hyderabad to take care of his many families ;). Right Durga?

Emacs chess!

2006-08-20T23:19:00.000+05:30

When I first encountered emacs, little did I know that I'll be able to play chess with it. This rocks!.

Some of the features:

A full featured client for ICS

Interfaces with engines like Crafty and GNUChess

Run engine-engine matchups

Run puzzles using the PGN and EPD parsers

Announces moves using festival

Awesome!

lispm font

2006-08-17T08:54:00.000+05:30

Found this via lemonodor . Very nice font. Switched!

Factor...

2006-08-11T19:49:00.000+05:30

Decided today that Factor will the next programming language that I'll learn.

2006-07-16T14:59:00.000+05:30

Today, went to drop my sister at her place. En route, we stopped at a Food World and while my sister was busy shopping, I was sitting inside the car. An interesting incident happened: a little kid dressed like Hanuman, including a long tail that went all the way up to his neck and missing only a mace, was going rounds in the parking area. He kept b(e|u)gging people for money. He came to me and I refused to give him money. Then he said something in a language that I could not understand. I told him that I did not understand. Then he gestured that he was very hungry. So, I gave him a 2 rupee coin (hunger sentiment generally works out pretty well!). When he accepted the money and turned back, I touched his tail (curiosity). It felt like a rubber tube or something like that. I'm sure it must have been heavy for that little kid. Anyways, the kid did not sense it (it was not a real tail) and he left for the next car.

Sometime passed and another car came. With arms streched out, our Hanuman rushed towards the car. Inside, a little kid about the same age as our Hanuman saw our "lord" and started shouting: Hanuman!, hanuman! Our hanuman looked at the kid and asked for money. The kid in turn joined his hands and bowed before our Hanuman. Our hanuman immediately withdrew his stretched arms and walked away. The kid in the car though kept screaming: Hanuman, hanuman!. I'm sure our Hanuman must have felt embarassed. I felt sorry for him. And this happened on the day after Kamaraj's birthday, the man who introduced free education and mid-day meal for the kids in Tamilnadu. Pity...

CMake -> Jam

2006-07-09T16:04:00.000+05:30

Today, I switched the build systems of peixes/acharya and the IMLI libraries to Jam. Previously, I used autotools for the IMLI libs and CMake for peixes. CMake is pretty nice and it has recently been adopted by the KDE and Scribus projects. From a CMake project, project files can be created for KDevelop and Visual Studio. However, I use neither of them. I use Emacs + CEDET + ECB for my coding tasks at home. I use the Mingw toolset on Windoze though I want to be able to build peixes using other toolsets like OpenWatcom and DigitalMars C++ .

Using Jam makes this quite easy. The version I'm using is Freetype's Jam which is a slightly enhanced version of the Perforce one. Then there is Boost's version of Jam which is based on Freetype's Jam but heavily modified to suit large projects.

Some of the advantages of Jam is listed here.

The other nice feature of Jam is the default collection of rules and actions are compiled into the executable itself which makes it very compact without the need for having a dozen files in /usr/share .

I've also switched the IMLI lib to Jam from autotools. Although the autotools does a lot more than just build, it is too heavy for such a simple library. The code is plain ANSI C and does not use any platform specific extensions so there is no need for "configuring" the build. In fact, the size of the configure script is twice as that of all the library code put together.

Next step is to try building with all the available toolsets.

Monkey menace...

2006-07-09T15:35:00.000+05:30

There is a huge monkey that has entered our colony raiding all the houses. It has a particular liking for waste baskets. Yesterday, it attempted "restoring" the items of the recycling bin in the backyard of my house creating a big mess. The day before, it raided a neighbour's house and smashed 6-7 eggs in the process. A few minutes ago, it tried to enter my room through the balcony. Fortunately, I managed to close the door in time. The last thing my computer needs is another monkey sitting in front of it ;) . Because of this stupid monkey, I had to close all doors and windows thereby blocking the nice breeze that was blowing across the house. Damn...

2006-07-09T09:13:00.000+05:30

For the last week or so I've been experiencing severe pain in the wrist of my right hand. Yesterday, saw the doc and he said a ganglion cyst has developed in the wrist. It seems in most cases, these cysts disappear without any special treatment but in case they hang on, they have to be removed (sucked out using a needle). The next check up will be on Friday. Till then I'm on pain killers.

Swami Nithyananda's Mahamantra

2006-07-08T12:00:00.000+05:30

My sister recently underwent a 10 day training program at Dhyanapeetam, Swami Parahamsa Nithyananda's ashram, located at Bidadi near Bangalore. She got me a few books and a CD which introduces a meditation technique called Mahamantra . It is a very simple technique and all you have to do is hum for 20 minutes and do nothing for the next 10 minutes. The humming should be as loud and deep as possible. Also the time period between successive hums should be as minimal as possible. The only prerequisite is that the stomach should be empty when doing this meditation. In the introduction, the swamiji says that this technique was adapted from Tibetan Buddhists and it is practised best early in the morning. Faithfully, I started off at 6am and finished around 6:40am. Although I could not sense any big change in me, I was definitely feeling light (ie, less heavy). I think part of that feeling comes from the fact that today is a Saturday and I do not have much to do ;) .

Hope to continue the meditation daily and post my experiences here.

The Swamiji's official website is here.

Hyderabad trip...

2006-07-07T06:25:00.000+05:30

I was in Hyderabad the whole of last week to finish some things at RFC. Also, Indrani, BGa and Saroo have all quit and thought it would be nice to see them once before they move on to their respective destinations. It turned out to be a very relaxing trip. The daily routine of eating, chatting, watching tv, sleeping and no work would have made even Garfield jealous.

On some days, Sayandeb joined us and told us jokes from his work. The first time I met him, two years ago, he appeared to be a quiet person who prefers to work alone (atleast that is what Nithin told me). But this time, I was completely surprised by the volume... especially at 2am in the morning! . Too many Telugu films perhaps... ;)

dkg garu is another person who amazes me with his uptime. The man would do two shifts back to back, come home and straightaway pick a book or watch a film and continue without any fuss! . Wonder where these people get their stamina from...

Sayan took us to the tomb of a French General, Mon. Raymond (a.k.a Moosa Rahim). Very nice place (very few humans around), at a walkable distance from Indrani's place. Located on top of a mound, it offered a nice view of some parts of the city. When we went there, a strong breeze was blowing across. Fanstastic feeling to stand tall on a rock and face the breeze.

In RFC, met ABC and discussed a few chess related things like opening repertoire etc. He got me the scores of my games against Sasikiran and D.V Prasad from a rating tournament held in Salem long back. I lost a lot of scoresheets of my games when I shifted my residence in 2002. Have to archive the ones that I have and put them online.

In the evenings, did a lot of shopping. Came close to buying a HP Pavilion dv5200TX notebook. But the ICICI deal was temporarily not available for this month. Hopefully, should be available next month. 66,000 spread over nine months looks like a good deal.

All in all, it was a nice trip.Thoroughly enjoyed it. A big thank you to Indrani and dkg garu for putting up with a bugger that is me.

Looooooooong day...

2006-06-11T21:23:00.000+05:30

Got up at 4am thanks to a constant burning sensation in my stomach and food pipe. After half-hour or so of self-healing (Reiki) was feeling much better and decided to cleanup pending issues.

First up was a new cairo build for win32 based on 1.1.6 snapshot. Cairo is used in Acharya (and peixes) for printing and PDF export. However, the prebuilt binaries that come with gtk-win32 installers do not have PDF enabled. Started the build with ./configure --enable-pdf=yes under MSYS only to find that the PDF backend uses freetype2 for handling fonts and fontconfig to locate them. Fortunately, the gtk-win32 installer came bundled with these libs. After setting the appropriate include and library paths, GCC (Mingw) started to grind the sources. There were minor hiccups building the thing but finally managed to get a working dll and import lib built. After that, enabled the postscript and PDF export code in peixes, rebuilt and things were working!

Next, was forcefully dragged to Nandu's first birthday celebrations ( <tamil>aandu niraivu</tamil>) where I met some old friends, aunties and uncles. Had to answer a lot of questions including tough ones like "what the hell are you doing in Salem?". Had a good lunch though.

Next was playing cricket with the colony kids. As usual, lost the first match (first match is always for lord ganesha ;-) ) . Pulled out half way through the second match as the stomach pain started to surface again. Reiki to the rescue. But should consult the doc to find out what the hell is wrong...

Late in the evening, was back to cleanups - this time, repository migration. I really like darcs. It is simple to use, decentralized, plays well with other tools (ssh, curl, email patches etc) and most importantly (the coolness factor), written in Haskell ;). Speed seems to an issue for some people - not for me as my repositories are very small, so most operations are fast.

Back in ETV, I used Subversion to hold the code for Peixes and the IMLI. After coming home, I simply restored the repository from the dump file and continued working. This turned out to be bad thing to do because of the centralized design of subversion. Since I triple boot to Linux, Windoze and PC-BSD, repository management has become a pain. Hence the switch to darcs. I used tailor to migrate the subversion repository to a darcs one. The migration was smooth and I hope nothing was left out! - will know in the coming days...

Then came my weekly doze of code reading. Looked at different implementations of RunArray including Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, SWT and Haiku-OS. It was interesting to compare the implementations. More about that in a later post.

So, at the end of a long day, waiting for a call from a friend without which my Sunday is not complete, after which zzzzzzZZZZZZZ.

Pics from Chennai trip

2006-06-09T09:08:00.000+05:30

Indrani sent me the pictures that she took during the Chennai trip in April. You can find them here

My major...

2006-02-25T22:22:00.000+05:30

As computed by this test:

You scored as Philosophy. You should be a Philosophy major! Like the Philosopher, you are contemplative and you enjoy thinking about the purpose for humanity's existence.

Philosophy

83%

Engineering

75%

Psychology

75%

Linguistics

67%

Theater

67%

Chemistry

67%

Journalism

67%

Sociology

58%

English

58%

Art

58%

Mathematics

58%

Biology

50%

Anthropology

42%

Dance

33%

What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com

N.Wirth's books...

2006-02-21T21:17:00.000+05:30

Finally, found time from my screwed-up schedule to read Nicklaus Wirth's Project Oberon - The Design of an operating system and compiler . Very clear presentation (without any buildups) of the design and implementation of the Oberon system (yes, it presents the actual source code for the OS, Compiler, Windowing system and some applications! ).

I first saw the Oberon (V2) system in action around 1995 running on top of MS-DOS. It came with a full suite of tools including the OS (with system wide GC!), compiler, document editor, image editing tools etc. and it came in a 1MB zip file! . I was so thrilled that I tinkered with it for a few months (never liked the KEYWORDS in CAPS syntax though). However the fact that it is a closed system drove me away from the language. The language report impressed me a lot as it was very consise. Only Scheme's R^RS reports were comparable.

Coming back to the book, The chapter on the text system is my favourite. It was a pleasure to read as it nicely documents a peice table implementation. Thinking of using that as a base for the planned peixes rewrite.

If you are a beginner/intermediate programmer and trying to make it to the next level, the following books are highly recommended:

Data structures + Algorithms = Programs

Algorithms and Data Structures

Programming in Oberon

Project Oberon - The Design of an operating system and compiler

The last three are available for download here .

2006-01-27T21:27:00.000+05:30

During the ETVians chess meet, met A.Balachandrudu (aka ABC) who used to be a regular tournament player. Played a few games with him today. Spreading the board and moving the pieces around after a long time - nice feeling it was.

We played three games. The first game I lost after having blundered a pawn from a promising position from Queen's Gambit Accepted.

The second and third were interesting Sicilians which I managed to win after some rabid attacking play from both parties.

We have decided to play whenever we could find time and am looking forward to the next meeting.

Reiser4 design document

2005-09-14T19:55:00.000+05:30

The reiser4 design document can be found here .
Provides a good overview of the Reiser4 filesystem. A must read for anybody interested in filesystems.

Hans Reiser interview

2005-09-14T19:37:00.000+05:30

Via OSNews.com:

A great interview of Hans Reiser can be found here .

Looking forward to Reiserfs4.

Peixes on win32

2005-09-14T13:52:00.000+05:30

Peixes is a multilingual text editor that I'm currently working on. It is built upon the IMLI library. The UI is done using the FLTK toolkit. Since my company uses a mix of Linux, Win32 and Mac OS X, portability is a key requirement for peixes.

For the win32 port, I decided to use the MingW's port of the GCC compiler. I use KDevelop and Emacs under Linux. Under Windows, I narrowed my choice to Dev-C++ and Code::Blocks .

Both are good IDEs that come with a decent project manager, a class browser, intellisense for C/C++ and an integrated visual debugger. The other good thing is they support multiple compiler toolsets including GCC, DigitalMars, OpenWatcom and Borland's free command line compiler.

Code::Blocks can also import Dev-Cpp's project files. Code::Blocks supports project workspaces which can be of great help when working on multiple related projects. However I settled for Dev-Cpp because it is somewhat faster and snappier on my old PIII + 128M of RAM and Code::Blocks was sluggish and used more resources.

Dev-Cpp is written in Delphi and is Win32 only at the moment. Code::Blocks uses wxWidgets and aims to be cross-platform.

All that said, automatic code indenting is poor in both the IDEs when you compare with Emacs's. Code::Blocks's is atleast ok but Dev-Cpp's is pretty basic. I chose Dev-Cpp purely because of its responsiveness. Is worse better ?

A major plus for Dev-Cpp is its DevPak package manager. A DevPak is basically a tarball containing headers, libraries, templates etc that can be installed into the toolset. Installation is painless and fully automatic. DevPaks for popular libraries are already available. Following Dejan Lekic's instructions, I was able to build a DevPak for the latest FLTK-1.1.x sources in 10 minutes !

Would be an interesting exercise to do a side-by-side comparison of KDevelop, Code::Blocks and Dev-Cpp.

Compiling peixes itself was straightforward as it does not use anything system specific (except for Printing where it uses lpr and friends).

Since there is no filesystem standard under Win32, the application and the library needs to be fully relocatable and should not assume anything related to installation path. Therefore IMLI library required some minor modifications such as using the registry for storing path to data files etc.

The next step was to bundle everything using an installer. This time my choices were Inno Setup and NSIS. I chose NSIS because of its better compression ('LZMA /solid ' is really a heavy hitter) and simpler scripting.

Tools - I love them !

btw, Peixes is under GPL and will be hosted along with IMLI. The plan is to release version 1.0 of peixes for Linux and Win32 by mid october.

super cool!

2005-08-21T23:31:00.000+05:30

Some awesome pavement drawings can be found here . A sample:

2005-08-16T14:46:00.000+05:30

Last week, Venumadhav quit ETV and has joined GECIS as a consultant. Best wishes Venu!

I'm working on a text editor for indian languages. It is built on top of the IMLI library. Thanks to the availability of good libraries like FLTK, Cairo, libxml2, the editor's code is fairly straightforward. Currently working on an undo/redo facility. Looks like this Al Stevens article is the place to start.

Good to see blogger supporting images in posts.

...

2005-07-25T21:27:00.000+05:30

Me, Durga and Venu spent this Sun'day' at Indrani's house. We were supposed to get her internet connection working on Linux. We ate, talked, watched TV before actually getting down to work.

Looks like it will take another weekend. We (me & durga) plan to use it as an excuse to get out of RFC ;) .

Lisp is not dead !

2005-06-26T09:07:00.000+05:30

Via Dirk Gerrits:

Google is funding NINE lisp based projects in their summer of code. Thats more than Subversion, NetBSD, Wine, SAMBA and Inkscape.

Lisp is alive and kicking :)

Emacs Code Browser

2005-04-24T14:42:00.000+05:30

Recently, I switched to KDevelop as my primary IDE. Yesterday, I loaded the source code of mlt++ and boom! - it crashed. I was about to switch to SourceNavigator but then I remembered something. Back when I was a "proud" emacs user, I used to use ECB, the emacs code browser. Out of curiosity, I checked out the latest copy from CVS and loaded all of mlt++ code. To my surprise, it parsed the entire code base! . The version of emacs that was installed in my system is slightly old (21.3.x) and I read that a number of improvements were made since then. Besides, I never liked the lesstif based interface. So checked out a copy of the latest sources and built a spanking new version with gtk2. Here is a screenshot of a session.

At the core of ECB is the semantic framework (provided by CEDET) which provides support for parsing code. Intellisense (aka autocomplete) basically works but it has a lot of rough edges.

ECB comes with a number of different window layouts. Another big plus is it works just as well in terminals. Not many IDEs can do that.

There is one problem with ECB though: its key bindings. To go to the method display window from the editor window you have to type C-c . g m - a total of 5 keystrokes! - this is a punishment considering the fact that the Control key is badly placed on most keyboards.

A longterm gripe with emacs is it's font selection mechanism. XLFD should go away, period.

I like thin 'bar' cursors rather than the stocky block cursors, Adding this line in ~/.emacs solved the problem.

(setq default-frame-alist '((cursor-type . (bar . 1))))

Will post more details as I continue to explore ECB and friends.

GCC-4.0

2005-04-23T01:10:00.000+05:30

After 6 hours of downloading (thanks to my poor dialup connection and the large frontends for Ada and Java), finally built GCC-4.0.1 on my machine.
As a first test, tried the compiler on the FLTK sources. The build was a breeze and was over within 10 seconds. As advertized, with -O0, the compiler simply blitzed through the sources.

In the next few days, I plan to build GNUstep (to check Objective-C), MLT, MLT++ and ShotCut. I'm particularly interested in the ELF symbol visibility options and size of the resulting binaries.

Raghu to join StarNews

2005-04-20T16:40:00.000+05:30

Came to know that Raghu has got a job in StarNews as a Sr. System Admin. For the past few months, worked with him on MLT/Pyro installation and testing.

Wonder who's next...

my nerd score ...

2005-04-13T19:27:00.000+05:30

Found this from G.Balaji's blog . Here is my score:

Factor - 0.73 released.

2005-03-23T15:52:00.000+05:30

Highlight of the release is the PowerPC compiler and assembler.

IMLI tree checked in

2005-03-21T20:40:00.000+05:30

Finally, managed to check in the source tree of the IMLI project. Took almost an hour to upload the files to sf.net over a sloooow dialup connection.

Opera 8.0 beta3 released

2005-03-18T20:36:00.000+05:30

Adds native SVG support. Some sample SVG files can be found here .

Kasparov to retire

2005-03-11T14:44:00.000+05:30

Former World Chess Champion and arguably the strongest chess player of all time, Garry Kasparov has announced his retirement from competitive chess. His career comes to an end on a high note with a victory at Linares today.

Alex Stepanov's papers online...

2005-03-08T09:50:00.000+05:30

Here . My particular favourite is the abstraction penalty benchmark.

Hedgehog

2005-03-08T06:31:00.000+05:30

Yet another Lisp dialect+implementation.

From the website:

Hedgehog is a very concise implementation of a Lisp-like language for low-end and embedded devices. It consists of a compiler and a byte code interpreter. The byte code interpreter is written in standard conforming C, is efficient and easily portable, and can be compiled to a very small executable of only some 20 kilobytes in the smallest configuration for the Intel x86 architecture.

The Hedgehog Lisp dialect has proper support for local and lambda functions, lexical scoping, variable argument functions, garbage collection, exceptions, macros, and over a hundred predefined functions or special forms. The built-in types are lists, symbols, strings, 32-bit integers, AVL-trees, and tuples up to 16 elements wide. Proper 32-bit wide integers are necessary for various bit-level operations in embedded systems.

A paper and a set of slides describing the implementation is also available.

Stepanov's advice for "Young Programmers"

2005-02-21T17:36:00.000+05:30

Durga forwarded me this . In the post, Alex Stepanov is mentioned as Principle Scientist, Adobe Systems. In case you did'nt come across the name, he was the principal designer of STL and generic programming in C++ (and Ada).

Fonts for code editing

2005-02-21T03:49:00.000+05:30

Today, woke up with a swollen left eye. Came to office in the afternoon. After finishing the pending code cleanups, decided to cleanup the mess that is my home directory. Found a few font files lying there. I downloaded them sometime back when I was looking for some nice programmer friendly fonts. By programmer friendly I mean fonts that are easy to read, pleasant so that you can stare at it for long hours, clearly distinguish characters like 0,O,1,l,I and also pack many lines in one screen. So I decided to give these fonts a try:

Anonymous - this is my current choice.

14pt
9pt

ProFont

Proggy fonts - the ttf fonts are terrible. However, the bitmap versions work fine.

Terminus - I really like these fonts. Since these are bitmap fonts, I'll have to specify the full XLFD string which is a real pain. This is the only reason stopping me from using these fonts. The README says that the fonts work on Linux and BSD consoles too but I could not get them to work (consolechars failed to load the font file).
16pt

Monaco - I think I copied this from a Mac. If the font is freely available, I'll switch ;)
9pt

I'll start hunting for more fonts after Bihar elections. In the meanwhile, if you have any pointers to good fonts please leave a comment.

BTW, the screenshots were taken using Shutterbug - a fine screengrabber that comes with the FOX toolkit.

Vishnusahasranamam...

2005-02-19T19:23:00.000+05:30

This is a fine piece of work. For a person who does not know Sanskrit this is a great help. Since a word by word translation is provided, I can actually read it in Tamil and make sense out of it!

Factor-0.72 released

2005-02-19T18:53:00.000+05:30

From the changelog:

Tuples.

Improved Windows port, thanks to Mackenzie Straight.

Improved web framework, thanks to Chris Double.

Beginnings of GUI toolkit -- try running examples/gadget-test.factor.

Automatically-resizing hashtables.

Doubly-linked mutable lists, thanks to Mackenzie Straight.

SDL-ttf binding for anti-aliased text rendering.

SQLite database binding, thanks to Chris Double.

Improved jEdit plugin.

Optimizations, bug fixes, cleanups.

Since 0.71, an x86 assembler is also available. I plan to write some Factor code after Bihar elections. CL is another language that I want to learn. Hmmm... elections... I hate them.

Jaggu dada to Chennai...

2005-02-18T21:08:00.000+05:30

Was surprised to learn that Jagan is actually heading to Chennai and not Mumbai. He has joined HCL and will be working on storage.

Bloggomania is catching on in my team. Now everybody has one. Only Raju (our enthusiastic office attendent who is like a living google when it comes to day-to-day info) is left I guess. Will talk to him tomorrow :)

Goodluck Jaggu dada

2005-02-17T22:42:00.000+05:30

Today is Jagan's last working day in ETV. He'll be moving to Reliance.
Good luck and best wishes to him.

Terrible day ...

2005-02-17T22:08:00.000+05:30

Terrible day so far. Up and down to the PCRs,
fighting with a crashing Viz|RT and the list goes on...
Durga's was even bad. He had to give a presentation to the
NCs and the location was changed three times!

BGa weds Saroo...

2005-02-15T23:00:00.000+05:30

On the 13th, BGa married Saroo. We all (our team) went to the reception. BGa was looking great and Saroo was looking like an armoured vehicle. 'll have to admit it - getting back to work after a good dinner was very difficult indeed.

durga->age_++;

2005-02-12T21:43:00.000+05:30

Arisimootai, Happy Birthday!

Designing and Writing Generic Facilities: A C++ Challenge

2005-02-01T09:38:00.000+05:30

Sample chapter from Herb Sutter and Alexandrescu's book "Exceptional C++ Style".

programming with GNUstep - demo

2005-01-29T15:03:00.000+05:30

Check this out for Nicolas Roard's flash demo.

Thinking Forth online!

2005-01-24T21:54:00.000+05:30

Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth book is online. Even though it is for Forth, it is well worth the read.

Factor - 0.70

2004-12-21T11:08:00.000+05:30

0.70 released.

Free E-Book on Agile/XP Development

2004-12-16T13:13:00.000+05:30

From an article on Slashdot. The book is available for download here.

For someone who has never done XP (like me), it makes a good reading. The code examples are in Java but can be easily adapted to related languages like Object Pascal (which is what I use at work) and Objective-C .

As for C++, not too sure whether anyone can do XP in C++. Yet to see a free/open source refactoring browser for C++.

Back to work...

2004-12-15T10:25:00.000+05:30

After a break of 41 days, I'm finally back to work. Nice to be back among friends and colleagues. Hope to write some *good* code in the coming months.

Factor ported to Win32

2004-12-12T10:36:00.000+05:30

From Slava Pestov's blog.

The Win32 port will be bundled with the next release it seems. He is also working on a new compiler that does optimizations from an intermediate representation. It would be interesting to run some micro benchmarks and compare with other scripting languages.

On an unrelated note, I tend to agree with his take on design patterns. For most dynamic languages, these design patterns simply boils down to using features like closures, multiple dispatch (if available), continuations etc.

SmartEiffel-2.1 beta3 released.

2004-12-10T20:18:00.000+05:30

$(Subject).

Available here.

Plenty of improvements in this release. Improvements in the compiler, lots of improvements in the library including a set of classes for networking.

On a related note, EWG is a SWIG like wrapper generator for eiffel. Currently it provides complete bindings for GTK2, OpenGL and a few other libraries.

Casting SPELs in Lisp - The Comic Book!

2004-12-06T19:02:00.000+05:30

Checkout this for a very nice and refreshing tutorial on lisp programming. The diagrams are super cool !

The 6 Myths of creativity

2004-12-05T19:55:00.000+05:30

An interesting article on creativity.

Factor

2004-12-04T14:37:00.000+05:30

Factor is a programming language designed and implemented by Slava Pestov (of jEdit fame). Some key features include:

Postfix syntax
Dynamic typing and scoping
Syntactic support for lists, arrays and dictionaries (key<->value pairs)

Full support for continuations (as in Scheme)

Large math library

Integrated web server that uses continuations to handle requests.

and host of other features ...

The language resembles Forth a lot but also has features from Lisp. The latest version (0.69) also sports an optional JIT compiler for x86.

It sure looks interesting.

Peter Klausler's tales of bit-twisting terror

2004-11-22T13:01:00.000+05:30

Came across this and this via Zach Beane's site. Excellent articles that make your head spin.

His supposedly fast algorithm for computing the day of week for a particular date is here .

Solaris 10 ...

2004-11-22T11:46:00.000+05:30

Looks like Solaris 10 is available for download. I want to checkout dtrace in particular. Am sure Jagan will be jumping around in joy...

...

2004-11-19T22:35:00.000+05:30

BGa (my boss) and Saroo (my teammate) got engaged recently. Congratulations and best wishes to them. A few words about them is in order:

BGa is a one man army in my book. He single handedly designed/built ETV's systems and networking department. More about his technical achievements in a later post. He is a great source of inspiration for me. I've been working with him for the last 18 months and its been a great experience. Learnt a lot from him simply by sitting next to him and watch him work. Besides being a terrific programmer, he is also a great manager. Took the bullet(s) and shielded our team on many occasions. It is a previlage, working with him.

Saroo is quite a chirpy person (she is nicknamed squirrel for a reason). Works very hard and for long hours (her uptime records are probably bettered only by Jagan I think). Has good sense of humour and a very good team person. She started her career in ETV as a copy editor then switched to system administration before settling(?) in the graphics department. Nice person to have on the team.

Hope their marriage date does'nt clash with the upcoming stupid elections in Bihar.

Kanchi seer, mutt ...

2004-11-19T22:25:00.000+05:30

From what I've read in local magazines and seen on TV, looks like the Sankaracharya of Kanchi Mutt is in big trouble.

I still remember the good old days when I used to stand in the queue at 5:00am to catch a glimpse of the Paramacharya. After he passed away, we stopped going to the Mutt. Too bad the mutt is in news for all the wrong reasons. The image sure has taken a severe beating.

skribe 1.2b released

2004-11-19T20:02:00.000+05:30

$(Title) .

Major changes include ConTeXt backend and plenty of bug fixes.

Skribe home

ConTeXt - a LaTeX like macro package for TeX.

memcached

2004-11-14T23:50:00.000+05:30

memcached - A distributed in-memory caching system.

From the website:

memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

Danga Interactive developed memcached to enhance the speed of LiveJournal.com, a site which was already doing 20 million+ dynamic page views per day for 1 million users with a bunch of webservers and a bunch of database servers. memcached dropped the database load to almost nothing, yielding faster page load times for users, better resource utilization, and faster access to the databases on a memcache miss.

Looks interesting...

Skribe

2004-11-14T21:56:00.000+05:30

Skribe is a library of procedures in the Scheme language for marking up text from which outputs in various formats like HTML, PS and PDF can be generated.

Currently I'm using it to generate my website. Skribe can also be used to produce manuals and has good support for formatting source code. Examples of projects using Skribe for documentation:

Bigloo scheme compiler.

STKlos scheme interpreter.

And ofcourse, skribe itself.

Also checkout the STKlos site for an example of a website generated using Skribe.

So why Skribe instead of XHTML or some XML markup to seperate content from presentation ?

Beneath skribe is a full blown programming language (Scheme)

No need to get tangled in stylesheet programming

The only gripe (for non-lispers) is Lots of irritating silly parenthesis :) .

More photos ...

2004-11-12T20:09:00.000+05:30

Here are some more photos of my teammates and boss.
If your browser supports viewing flash and you are not behind a slow connection then you can see a slideshow here .

Fast compilers.

2004-11-10T15:42:00.000+05:30

As I write this, g++ is grinding my hard disk trying to compile a simple application using the FOX toolkit. I'm a big fan of fast compilers (who is'nt ?). At work I use Delphi/Kylix which are very fast. When I write gtk+ apps I prefer the Tiny C Compiler to
compile and run the code during development (the final binary ofcourse will be produced by gcc). This compiler is arguably the fastest I've tried. Recently version 0.9.22 has been released.

From the website:

(Nov 8, 2004) TCC version 0.9.22 is out (Changelog). Linux kernel compilation is 30% faster (10 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4).

Your own customised linux kernel in just 10 seconds !!! . Fantastic.

Another brutally fast compiler is the SmartEiffel Eiffel compiler. For a compiler that has to compile a fairly large language, do whole program optimizations and where the library is maintained only in source form, the compile times are excellent. Combined with tcc, SmartEiffel reduces build times considerably.

Other fast compilers that I occasionally dabble with:

Free Pascal - A delphi compatible compiler that works on a wide variety of hardware and software platforms. Actively maintained.

Digital Mars C++ - arguably the fastest C++ compiler around. Unfortunately win32 only.

My team at ETV...

2004-11-09T12:17:00.000+05:30

dscf0118
Originally uploaded by vkk.

A few key members missing though ...

Almost a year ...

2004-11-09T07:06:00.000+05:30

Its been almost a year since I last updated this blog. Hope to "up" the posting rate in the coming month(s).

Right now, I'm on medical leave and dabbling in GNUstep and FOX GUI Toolkit .

Interesting that FOX is modelled after AppKit and supports the Target:Action paradigm. But has some warts mainly due to the use of C++ as the implementation language. Datatargets are a nice addition.

Still Alive

2003-11-20T11:15:00.000+05:30

Was busy the whole of October.

Nice to link up with a couple of "lost" schoolmates - Vicky and Rajesh.

Thx prasanna for hooking me onto the Ryze network. It seems useful indeed.

C++BuilderX

2003-09-17T17:25:00.000+05:30

Borland has released a new C++ development environment that claims to be multi-platform and support multiple compiler toolsets. The nice thing about C++BuilderX is that it has form designers that generate code for wxWindows. From the information gathered from the wx mailing list, looks like Borland will put some effort into wxWindows. Interesting times ahead!

The minimum memory requirement is 256M !!! . Is it written in Java ? - The demo is cool anyway.

Check it out

2003-09-15T16:00:00.000+05:30

Wasted some time fighting with M$ Acce$$ on date insertion. The problem was finally solved thanks to perl::DBI's excellent tracing facility.

Learning OpenGL is kinda fun. Today, I compiled and ran my second OpenGL program - (the solar system program from the "redbook")

Yet another weekend goes by ...

2003-09-14T18:40:00.000+05:30

As expected, India A defeated India B in the Challenger trophy. It was nice of Sachin to present the MoM to Sriram. Disappointed by the performance of McLaren though. Raikkonen still has an outside chance for the title. Had a nice siesta - thanks to the OpenGL "redbook" .

2003-09-12T21:44:00.000+05:30

The day began with a bang!. As usual, I was sleeping in the bus on my way to the office when one of the rear tyres burst. Thank god it was not the front tyre. A few anxious moments nevertheless.

The day ended with a bang too! . The same tyre burst again when I was returning from the office. We did'nt panic this time though ...

2003-09-12T10:07:00.000+05:30

Ah!. Finally, I've joined the blogging bandwagon.

Terrible day it was. Had to work on a web application using perl+apache+M$ Acce$$. The horrible thing was that the machine I had to work with did'nt have a proper text editor. So I had a choice between notepad, wordpad and the good old edit.com . But wordpad and notepad did'nt show line numbers and saving as plain text in wordpad is a pain. So I settled for edit. For an emacs user, this is a severe punishment.