Adventures of an High Elf Sorcerer

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