Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

That the more time you spend earning a living, the less time you get to live!

This is another killer combination :) Ever since shifting to a new campus and giving up my old machine, I was desperate to have a working linux on my machine. One attempt at installing it ended up in the bootsector of the harddrive getting corrupted and me losing valuable time which I had to make up by doing overtime. Earlier I thought that it was Linux and Lilo that screwed up the hard-drive, and I got a few ugly looks. But a few other machines have also faced problems, so I'm out of the woods now. Anyway, coming back to the point, I found something called coLinux on our internal community portal. Its something like VMWare, but its open source and works much better. So I installed and configured it. Then I downloaded a debian root image (it needs a root image to work with and I need debian) and presto, I have a working linux running parallel to my windows. The default boot gives a console prompt and it has a another windows command prompt associated with it. I have a phobia of a c

Here is me in a snap on the KDE website. This one is during the inauguration ceremony of LB 2004. http://ktown.kde.org/~wheeler/images/linux-bangalore-2004/dsc01027.jpg

This was the second time I had been to the Euphoria concert, this first time being in Mood-I in IITB. It was more about hearing live music than anything else. I would have gone even if it had been some other decent band. The thing about live music is, even a mediocre piece sounds good. I'm beginning to belive that the widespread availability of digital music is really killing these live shows. And music is losing, because the recorded versions are not the real thing. The show started a good hour and a half late. But the quality of music was very good. As I said, there is something about live music that makes me like it much more than the same music played on a music player or radio. Not to mention the atmosphere that is present during a live concert of a famous band as Euphoria. They played their trademark numbers and a couple of rock numbers too and had the crowd singing and dancing to their tunes throughout. Unfortunately, their concert was cut short by the police a 11pm, just wh

Plans are brewing up. Something big lies ahead of us. X-ite is doing really well and we have come pretty far from where we started. But all things have a saturation point. Perhaps X-ite has hit it. Perhaps there is a lot that can still be done with it. But as we keep exploring the unknown seas of perl script goodies and the hazardous rock cliff shores of Xt, we are beginning to see shorelines all around us. It seems like a time to move to newer seas. But what we have in mind is almost as big as a Captain Cook voyage as compared to what we have been doing so far. Its a humongous task to say the least. One step at a time. The first task is going to be to agree upon a good design.

After a loong time I got my hands dirty with some ugly looking C code. Managed to add in a new feature in x3270 in pretty quick time! Feels good, really good.

The next thing that I remember is Homyar shaking me awake the next morning. I was feeling much better and all the exhaustion seemed to gone away. Good thing too, because I was scheduled to give my talk in three hours. The talk before ours was on Gambas (Gambas is mostly basic). Gambas is supposed to be a clone of VB. I dont know how good it really is, but the speaker managed to create a movie player and its RPM package for Suse in three minutes flat. And yes, everythign worked absolutely fine. After that was my talk. There were about 10 people in the hall to listen to us. Out of them, one old fellow kept insisting that working on Mainframes is a horrowing experience and that we had really done a tremendous job in making life easier for other mainframe programs. I can't believe that Abhay and I actually argued with that fellow in favour of mainframes for a while. We met Rajesh (from Infosys) out there. He was one of the audience. All our efforts bearing fruit in Infosys have been la

We reached on Tue at 11 pm. Unforunately we had missed the Infosys visit and the interaction with all the hackers elite. When we reached the hotel, Abhay had not yet reached. He was scheduled to check in on Wednesday morning. On the list of people who I knew was Guntapalli Karunakar. I decided to pay him a visit at around 11:30 in the night. I knew that there was no way he would be sleeping. He hangs around on IRC till late night usually. Karunakar was working on his presentation when we barged in on him. He was put up with a fellow called Gopal who works in Wipro, Hyderabad. Over three days I have come to greatly respect this fellow. That was pretty much it for Tuesday. Wednesday started with Abhay knocking on our door when we were getting ready. The person he was supposed to share his room with was having his bath. When I opened the door, he said 'Hi'. I replied with a 'Hi', but I had no idea who I was talking to. I had never seen Abhay in my life before. He introduce

The more I use thunderbird, the more I like it. It may not have the functionality the mutt provides or the advanced filtering capabilities of KMail, but it has just enough. Just enough for me that is. So far, I have been able to find every feature I needed right where I looked. That is what I call an intuitive interface. Finally after a long time, the Silicon Mountains repairman showed up and got my connection working again, which means I can now access the net using my laptop (I could have done it in Windows, but who is going to go through so much of extra trouble to connect to the net, especially when the desktop is running fine). So here I am, typing this post in Thunderbird, replying to other mails, with my legs stretched out on the bed. Its such a comfortable feeling. Now back to that documentation Manas has imposed upon me.

Just tried out the thunderbird mail client today at office. Its awesome. Some really cool features include reading RSS feeds as posts. I guess this is going to be my default for some time to come.

Dont have much time. Ironically, there is a shortage of bandwidth here. But to make it short, I'm having a real ball of a time :D

When it came, it was more a sense of relief than anything else. Infosys finally entered a final of a football tournament. We had been beaten in the semi-finals on the last 5 occasions. But today, finally, the jinx has been broken. The game went to sudden death penalties and Infosys beat Persistent 8-7.

I have been wondering why all this while we have been trusting historians. How can I be so sure that the events reported by history have actually happened. Contrast this with science. In science, things are stateless with respect to time. There is no 'event' which has 'happened'. Its all just there in front of you whenever you want it. You can test it whenever you want. Of course, one can argue whether you can trust your senses in the first place, but lets not get into that. Lets assume that the whole world is what you percieve with your senses. But even then history is just something that is fed into your brain so as to give you a basis on which you can justify your existence. The worst part is that you are taught to change your view of looking at the world and your way of interpreting information from your senses in way that is consistent with the so called history. For example, history has taught me that Hitler was cruel and he massacred a lot of Jews. How can I be s

I was actually having fun at the embassy when I went for my visa stamping. The security check seemed so cool and it even beeped when I passed through the detector. It was something in my wallet. Then they asked for the documents, which I produced, all in order. Except that one was missing ... my passport. I experienced a kind of adrenalin rush that I have never experienced before. Then I calmed down and tried to remember where the hell it could have been! Finally I went out again, back to the car, opened my bag and there it was! Once again through the security checks and everything. The actual interview was very trivial. After a couple of questions the lady said something that I tried to interpret as a question but failed miserably. A second later it registered that the interview was over and I had been issued a visa. If there is anyone out here who has forgotten his/her passport while going for a getting a visa, please mail me. It will make me feel much better.

Please join me in welcoming to the club of people who have lots of time and nothing to do and hence think that spending time writing blogs is a pretty neat idea, a friend of mine - Manas Alekar (http://manasalekar.blogspot.com). Maybe he will blog regularly from now on and go on to become a prominent member of the club. Or maybe he will just stop like many other clever people who realise the truth do. What truth? That there is no blog! Then you will see that it is not your blog that people should be talking to ... but you. Urgghh ... that was a bad one.

The only thing I wish right now is that people respond to my mails! (Sigh).

I got to know just before the match today that Infy had qualified for the semi-finals just by winning one game in the super-six, thanks to the outstanding performance in leagues. I actually had fever when I started the game. But once the game starts, you forget all these things. Geometric started well and put pressure on our defence in the early minutes. But Infy scored off a counter attack against the run of play with Peeyush finding the back of the net. Geometric came out attacking in the second half. We managed to hold on and midway through the second half I scored from a good five metres outside the penalty box. That pretty much sealed the game. I'm beginning to feel the pinch now, and I hope tomorrow morning I wake up fit enough for the match against PSPL.

An 'eye opener' Let's say that you are teaching a class. Let's say that you are teaching Unix. You have drawn a neat sketch of the inode-wise layout of the disk and you are explaining the concept of the hierarchical filesystem and directories and inodes and hard and soft links with the help of your neat diagram. Suddenly you discover that one of the students is not getting the whole picture ... because he can't see ... *because he is blind*. At that moment I didn't really feel the impact because I was too engrossed in the subject, too engrossed in teaching. But the whole thing really hit me hard on the bus ride home. A thousand questions were raised, not many answered. First, about teaching - in such a situation, do you teach for the lowest denominator or the higher one. Doing anything is going to unfair to the other category. But in this case, the whole problem is magnified to a huge extent. I obviously cannot rely so much on gr

It's not often that music can bring a smile to your face ... just like that, out of the blue. Hats off to Indian Ocean for 'Kandisa'.

I think I gave myself the proof that my dumbness is unparalleled. There are two independent queues in our canteen for getting food coupons. After waiting in the first queue, for some reason, I decided to spend another fifteen minutes in the second one. I realised my stupid mistake when I reached the counter and the lady asked me what I wanted. I said 'nothing' and proceeded to the food counter, leaving the lady wondering what the hell had just happened. It going to be difficult to beat this act of stupidity!

It was a pretty scrappy game by Infy. We tried out a lot of combinations in this game, since the result was inconsequential. After being up 1-0 in the first half (I scored!!! :)), we went down 2-1 early in the second half. We went back to our regular combination then, and finished the game winning 3-2, with Mukund scoring both of them. Mukund had this big itch of playing forward sometime. Hopefully he was provided with the scratch and he should be back to his rightful position next game onward - the reliable sweeper back. Actually I hope everyone goes to their regular positions. But most of all, I hope Abhishek and Rajeev recover soon. We might just miss them in the next round.

What a birthday present! A Dell Inspiron 1150, 512 MB RAM, 30 GB Hard drive, Wireless Lan Card, Combo Drive, 15 inch screen. Not to mention a wireless router along with that!

There are some things in life that we take for granted. One of them is the keyboard. And when it stops working, it frustrates the hell out of you. The keys on my keyboard progressively stopped working today. So I decided to open it up. You see, electrical gadgets start working when they are opened up and repackaged. So after opening it, I looked around inside for any obvious flaw. When I saw none, I decided to put it back together (the original intent was to drop it from a height of 15 cms or so after putting it back together, but I didn't need to get to that step). Now, the keyboard has some soft pads on the keys that look like contact lenses. While assembling the keyboard, I found that three of these pads had vanished. Well, its sort of expected, with the third law of thermodynamics messing with our lives. No process is perfectly reversible. So right now, three of my keys are sunk in and are not working. I shuffled the missing ones for the least used ones. One of them happens to

I'm amazed by the way we keep pulling rabbits out of hats. Our regular team has been reduced to less than quarter of its strength. But everytime, we find come up with something new, something better. If the other day, it was a well coordinated series of ruthless attacks on the opponents, this time is was the way we built up our game and our moves. The defense as usual, was rock solid. But with Abhishek and Rajiv also bowing out to injuries sustained in the last game, there was the question of filling up a huge void in midfield ... and that too central midfield. I'm very proud to say that Dheeraj and I coordinated well between us and did a very fine job indeed. It was a new experience for me. I've tried to play in the center midfield position a few times, but without much success. Now, I have something to look back upon in content. The goals came from Samrath who was brought in with about 15 minutes left as a striker. He scored with his first touch of the tournament. He foll

Scatter approach to convolution is communism. Gather approach to convolution is capitalism. Go figure :) (Yes, I'm attending Udayan's seminars)

This is more like a commentary for the Infy - Patni football match : The game starts. Patni has the ball initially. Their first move comes inside the Infosys penalty area. After a bit of hussling, a shot from a Patni player deflects off Eric's leg into the goal. Patni:1, Infosys:0 after 2 mins. Then Infosys started getting its act together a bit. After about 10 mins, we were playing in the Patni half most of the time. A shot from Rajiv hit the crossbar. It rebounded back to Dheeraj who was alone in the box with the keeper to beat. Since the ball came at an awkward height, he headed it and it went straight to the keeper. Then a cross from the right by me found Peeyush. With just the keeper to beat, he shot it wide. The goal continued to elude us. Another run by me down the wing had caught their defence napping. Again, I failed to put the ball at one of the striker's feet and it was cleared for a corner. At half time, we knew that the only thing that was

Well, when you want to do things that look smart, you must make sure that they are done smartly. Coz when people realise that what you have done is smart from the outside, and not so smart from the inside, you end up making a fool of yourself. Such is the case with the Infosys billion dollar day watch. For the uninitiated, Infosys distributed a T shirt and a watch (along with a hefty cash bonus) to all its employees on the day Infosys crossed the billion dollar turnover mark. The watch is pretty good, looks good too. But then, these people tried to do something really smart which unfortunately came under my scrutiny and now, my criticism. The watch was custom made by Titan for Infosys employees with "Infosys" engraved on it on it on the front and back. Now, on the back, I found something engraved in binary. So I decided to read it. Turns out, the binary reads "001010100 01001001 001010100 001000001 01001110 0101001 01101110 01100110 01101111

Final result 0-0. A very discipled performance by Zensar to take it to a draw; a big cock-up by Infy. I don't think I should be saying anything more right now.

I'm nowhere close to my full fitness. Thats alright at other times, but not alright when you have to play an important football match tomorrow. And especially not alright when half the regulars of the football team are missing. Lets see ... Sam M is in USA, Prakash Thadani is in Japan, Sandeep wont be there (don't know where he is going), Munjay is in Europe (as always), Raji has left the company and now Kapil is threatening to go to US over the weekend as well :( All these nitwits had to leave right in the last week, just when the tournament begins :S

Yesterday Manas and I got down to discussing some DSP. And I realised that I had forgotten almost everything! The difference between DFT and DTFT, spectrum leakage, periodicity of the DFT and its causes. I had everything at the tip of my fingures a year ago ... and now it's all gone. I am left with vague memories of all these concepts. The underlying reasoning and logic just completely eludes me as of now. And it's just so damn frustrating. Urggghhhhhhhhhh ....

Today was the first day of the inter-IT football tournament. The opening match was Infosys vs Kanbay. Having seen Kanbay's game before, we knew how we had to play and what exactly we had to do to win. The good part is that everybody stuck to their task and stuck to the plan. The plan was really simple. Choke up Kanbay's supply options. One way to do that was to mark Sam Chauvhan. Having tried that many times before and failed, having seen others try that before and having seen them fail, that option was just disregarded. The other way to do it was to prevent him from making his trademark passes and supplies by choking off the rest of them. And we did that pretty well. The first goal for Infy came via Peeyush who capitalised on a great through ball by Rajeev. The second was a penalty which I converted. I was a bit nervous when Sam C himself decided to keep for the penalty. Nervous because he has seen me taking penalties quite a few penalties before and he knows my style. The thi

The Sunday morning football game is something I never miss. And I didn't miss it this time round even though it was pouring. Unfortunately the others decided to miss it. The only idiots to turn up on the ground were the two Sams, Ranjit and your's truly. So we came, we had tea at a tapri in Sakalnagar and we left. So much for the much awaited Sunday game.

Had been to a place called Shisha Cafe in ABC farms. Great ambiance with great food and pretty good taste of music as well. And if you want a 'hukka', you get to sit on a very comfortable diwan. One of us wanted the hukka, so we had dinner on the diwan, and I settled into a nice cozy corner. This phenomenon happens frequently with me and has been described before as 'The Settling of Aditya' by some friends. I had a shot at the hukka ... but I didn't see what was so great about it. I sucked on a pipe, something went in through the mouth (though I didn't realise it) and I blew out smoke through the nose (that I realised). So in effect, you suck on something and smoke comes out of your nose - those are the only sensations you are aware of. If that sounds very exciting, hukka is for you. Just be sure that you dont try one in any village. Authentic hukkas have tobacco. The one I tried was just flavoured (?) smoke. Other than the hukka, the food was really good. I had

Sam Mehta's shower is one of the most wonderful gizmos I've come across. Well, how I ended up under Sam's shower is a long story and it's got to do with addiction to football and food. Anyway, when you look at it for the first time, it looks like something built out of spare hardware left over from some plumbing job in the seventees. To put it simply, its a shower combined with a water heater and perhaps the most efficient way of heating water for a bath. Only water that you use for the bath gets heated, so there is no wastage of electricity. Invariable in all modern geyzers and boilers, you heat up more water than you use. And unless you have spent a fortune in insulation of the boiler and the piping, the rest of the heated water becomes cold and power is wasted. Hats off to Sam ... or rather his shower.

Well, for the record, I liked the movie. Now the difficult question is, why did I like it? Its not a great horror movie, neither is it much of a thriller. The basic story of the movie seems a bit weird too. But you have to hand it to Shymalan, he knows how to tell a story. He really does. In a scary movie, you always go about anticipating what will happen next, you always try to predict, to prepare yourself better for the time when it actually comes. But out here, Shymalan beats you fair and square. What you expect never happens and more importantly, you never expect that what happens. A typical Shymalan movie otherwise, with great cinematography, good dialog delivery and excellent use of sound. As usual, there is a message in the film. Whether or not you agree to it is upto you. If you have an eye and liking for implicit details, book your ticket now.

I felt it was just a matter of time before the Indians found their form. Actually, it doesn't really look like they have found their form yet, but they certainly have found their tempo and their spirit. The urge to win seemed to be missing for quite some time, but yesterday it was there. Right from the time when Saurav Ganguly came out to bat the Indians looked like they were going for the kill. And when Rahul Dravid scored 25th run by running his 25th single, it was certain that the pitch was not good for batting. I missed the opening spell of Nehra and Pathan, but from what I heard after the match, it looks like the pace bowlers are back in business. Vaughan and Giles did put up a fight, but they were not really going to be able to lift the tempo when the required rate crept up on that pitch. And thats where they faultered. A good victory for India after a long wait!

Sigh! Another semifinal, another loss for the Infosys football team. Its the fifth loss in a row in the semifinals, I think. We have always come up against really strong teams consisting of renowned club players. But it has always been a close fight. Three of the five matches have gone into penalties, one into sudden death and we have been beaten in regular time just once. I think what is lacking is the finishing. Our strikers need more practice ... as simple as that.

I've been working quite a bit on x3270 recently. Adding in some enhancements, helping its deployment in Infosys. And the efforts have started to pay off, literally. We are looking at savings of a thousand US dollars per license. Personally, I'm at the threshold of another milestone. I'll be sending my enhancements to Paul Mattes, the current maintainer of x3270 ver soon. Lets see whether the changes make it into the next release. That, as hackers would know, is the ultimate reward for your work!

Whoever designed this SQL language is a nut. That was the opening statement of "Close encounters of the Fourth kind" and I still stick by it. It was about a year that I wrote that story, and my opinion has still not changed. After a year I had to actually read and understand an SQL query. I was unhappy that I had to read tripple nested queries of 10 lines then. Now I have queries that span 2 printed pages each. Yuck! How on earth is any human supposed to make sense of it? And how the hell did that author manage to write it? Probably must have had a fight with his/her girfriend/boyfriend/spouse. And to think I have to bear with one whole week of this. I shall overcome someday!

When you go for a movie that is based on your all-time favorite book, you obviously expect a lot from it; and 'I, Robot', the movie doesn't disappoint. Special effects are no longer a benchmark to measure English movies. What is good about the movie is that it maintains the spirit of the book intact. Asimov fans will like this movie. Contrary to what the trailors suggest, the 3 laws of robot have not been compromised at all. Also, a lot of issues raised by Asimov have been touched upon in the short span of 2 hours. Also prominent in the movie are a few hints taken from 'The Bicentenial Man'. Even though Donovan and Powell don't feature here, there isn't a shortage of humour. Just one point that I don't agree with ... Dr. Susan Calvin should *not* have been shown to be pretty at all! All in all, I rate this movie very highly.

This is perhaps the best example of a community effort - power of the people. This almost makes me believe in socialism. A mammoth work created by the cumulative effort of perhaps thousands of people across the globe, transcending all barriers of region, language, religion and all such others that we tend to raise between us and our neigbours. For the English version, check out http://en.wikipedia.org This project started on January 2, 2001. It basically uses a system based on wikis (a wiki is web page that can be edited using your web browser by whoever has rights to do so and the name 'wiki' is derived from the Hawaiian word 'wiki-wiki', meaning 'quick') to create an encyclopedia. The inspiration behind this idea was Richard M Stallman . This is an encyclopedia that you can modify if you want to (unless you have been blacklisted for vandalism). By now it must be the largest repository of knowledge in the world ... and it is still growing a

Hi, This is a test from via e-mail. Since you can see this, it works. Now this makes blogging really simple.

All right, I promise to be more regular with this now, especially now that I can ;) There have been quite a few developments lately. One of them is my website. Check out http://aditya.adotout.net . Its not very jazzy though, primarily due to my lack of expertise to make it jazzy. And also because I want to be able to see it through lynx/links. I've been working a bit on x3270 which is a mainframe terminal emulator client. Planning to deploy and promote it in Infy. Its been a lot a fun and has been irritating at times. GUI programming has alays been irritating for me. Other than that, I was confirmed as an employee of Infosys pretty recently. Which basically means that I completed one year out here. We had a small private celebration at Rujuta's place where I ate Tandoor chicken from Blue Nile to my heart's content and we watched 'Schiendler's List'. Perhaps not an apt choice for the occasion, but I had never seen it before and I loved it!

I dont know how long I'm allowed to go before my blogger account expires. Hence this post :P