Consulting
Posted: Sep 20, 2008, 14:46Consulting is when four people are assigned to “Meet, Collaborate and Execute a Challenge Efficiently and Effectively” in a month; basically a job that can be mopped up by one person in two days.
The Untold Gandhi...
Posted: Aug 12, 2008, 03:14Smriti Irani (Bahu of Saas bhi kabhi bahu...) is all set to launch a TV serial depicting the untold story of Gandhi. So we will finally get to see:
- A good looking, uncannily fashionable Gandhi
- Evil British officers with devillish looking smiles
- British officers' wives with garish make-up and long bindis
- Gandhi having a car accident and losing his memory... to become Nehru for a while?
- Gandhi's Ba outliving him by several generations out of public demand
Yup, it's an untold story alright...
So much to live for...
Posted: Aug 08, 2008, 04:21- A career, which depends as much on whims of others as on my skills…
* A marriage, in which my wife lives far away from me and I can see her only once a month…
* A fat paycheck, which vanishes the moment the next month arrives…
* Wonderful mornings, which are either gone by the time I wake up or arrive after I’ve reached the perennial morning of my workplace
* A Wonderful city, which is burning itself to cinders over who is Marathi, Bhaiyya, Hindu, Muslim….
* A great country, which is pulling itself into the mud, under the pretext of going back to its roots….
* Children, who will grow under the influence of the malls, cartoon network and video games, for whom freedom means pocket money and going to malls alone, instead of playing in the open spaces and maidans…
So much to live for…
Cleopatra
Posted: Jul 24, 2008, 11:00I was having a discussion with one of my colleagues at work about Egypt and I don’t recollect how but we got into this talk about Cleopatra.
He (my colleague) got into story telling mode and he told me that Cleopatra had married her younger brother to stay in power and she also killed her sister some time later in her life time so as to usurp the kingdom from her.
History and its weird tales !!!!!
The Question of Loyalty
Posted: Jul 23, 2008, 19:12I joined the company I currently work for almost two years ago. When I joined I heard everyone around me talk about ‘bearing up with’ the two years and then switching jobs for a more lucrative offer. Me? No. I wanted to stay, I believed in what the company spoke of as its philosophy. I wanted to stay, be part of the family.
Almost two years now and much has changed. I’m married. I have a family. I want to give them my best as well as save for my children when they arrive. I want something for myself as well -- a job that I will always want to excel in. A challenge that I would be raring to face everyday. There’s so much I want that I wonder if I’m being too demanding. I have so much as well right?
Four hours of traveling in a day, people packed like sardines in the train; every single day. A work schedule that demands more and more all the time, while I feel myself giving less and less. I can see people cheering with me, swearing at me, loving me, hating me, resenting me. It is great contribution if you work your ass off on weekends or for twenty hours a day. But at the same time it’s blasphemy if you ask for compensation for it. You should not be drinking too much coffee, not even when you’re trying to keep yourself awake through the night so that you can meet some of those challenging (read unrealistic) deadlines.
It’s a hard question, the question of loyalty. especially hard when you’re really not sure if you’re being loyal to the company who’s values you believe in, or to those individuals who seem to work overtime to circumvent them.
cat random_ramblings_and_frustrations > randomgod
Posted: Jul 20, 2008, 15:37… better than polluting my tech journal with them.
Watching the kettle compile... err... boil
Posted: Jul 14, 2008, 23:36I've enjoyed ripping code apart and fixing things myself for the past couple of years, in my day job as well as while hacking on ayttm/antidialer. But now there's a new challenge that has been facing me at work for the past few weeks.
For the past weeks I've had to monitor and mentor programmers. Which means that I have to watch 'trained' Computer Engineers struggle with basic programming -- like refactoring code (renaming a variable, for the uninitiated) or even reading and trying to understand the code. Someone with just under 2 years of experience in my project doesn't know how the programs he/she writes is built. Ask him/her what compiler is used and they'll tell you the name of the wrapping build script. We intentionally slow down our code so that the dealers can get the satisfaction of defeating a computer in computations -- we call these speed breakers as coding standards.
We use VSS for SCM... no, that's not the worst. We don't even know how to use it. We create a new folder (a branch for us CVSers) for every new revision and then embark on an hour long 'configuration' activity which includes creating configuration files and copying our code on to another server which ultimately acts as our repository. Heh, when one checks out and checks in code, it is termed as malpractice ;)
In short, we have our own little brain-dead SCM on top of another SCM. Why? Well that's because someone told our boss that VSS corrupts itself after some 2-3 GB of data. So to keep things trim, we delete old versions of code (so much for configuration management eh) to ensure that code doesn't become corrupt. So why don't we use CVS/SVN/Git instead? Well it's because the team of computer engineers would find it difficult to use, as opposed to an hour long, error prone, and absolutely mundane configuration activity. Give me 'cvs commit' anytime.
Also, I've been wondering what would best describe the code that I have been working on for the past few years at work. Here's a try at it:
The code is not really difficult, just a lot of Hell-Oh-World-like snippets written in an illegible 'programming standard' to make it difficult to read (someone called it code security once) and then built together into completely unrelated modules so that adding another component would mean ripping ones arm off.
I think I've digressed...
Outsourcing, Bhaiyya style
Posted: Feb 16, 2008, 15:21The Marathi-Bhaiyya issue from my own metropolitan, middle-class viewpoint looked like a complete farce, a means to polarize Marathi votes away from the Sena and towards the MNS. Today, I had the luck to look at it from the viewpoint of a grassroots worker, a rickshawalla in Mira Road. He was far away from the "they don't learn our culture" talk that Raj Thakarey flaunts and was much closer to the issue that hit him most -- employment. Here's what he had to say (So that the comments don't sound out of context, they were made as a reaction to the State Government appealing to the fleeing workers in Nashik to come back. Also, Mira Road rickshaws follow the pre-paid fare system; no meters):
"Those bhaiyyas, they herd into the city by the dozens, stay like dogs, 7-8 in a room and earn money at our cost. One comes here and then gets 10 other relatives to dirty our state. They sell their pride for chump change, steal our jobs by agreeing to work for half the salary. A Marathi manoos would never sell his pride, he will never work in such conditions. A Marathi manoos, with his family, will never live in conditions that they do. We have our pride as well. We won't simply bear anything for work. I'm not saying we should shoo away all the bhaiyyas, just stop more from coming over."
"Among all the rickshawallas in Mira-Bhayander, most are bhaiyyas, but we make sure none of them pick up fare at our stand. They pollute our business area by taking fare from our stand for less. Wherever we charge for Rs. 20, they willingly take fare for Rs. 10. Commuters then fight with us for the fare, which is just not right".
"But, why are they able to afford taking fare for half the cost?", I asked.
"Because they're like nomads. They don't stick to a single stand like we do, and simply wander all over the place. We have stands, we belong to a place, not like them. Passengers know us. Whenever they forget anything in the rickshaw, we make sure that we return it to them the next time. Thay is why we make sure only our Marathi brothers do business from our stand, not those unreliable bhaiyyas".
So to conclude, North Indians should be shooed out of Maharashtra since they are creating competition for the locals. In other words, Raj Thakeray's Marathi manoos doesn't have the spine to compete with the hard working UPites and Biharis.
Shame on us.
Weekend came... and went
Posted: Nov 18, 2007, 23:34Phew! I thought I could find some time to hack this weekend. Wedding shopping meant that the days came and went like a storm and now it'll be Monday in another 25 minutes now. I think I'll have more time on weekdays rather than weekends now ;)
We're probably going to give animated smileys a shot for ayttm soon. I tinkered around with gifs on gtk for a while on Friday and was able to at least load them. They're still not smooth enough though; WIP. Moreover, we don't really have animated smileys yet.
I'll probably move image loading to a completely different layer so that we can abstract loading of smiley files in various formats (gif, jpg, png, xpm, etc.). Tall plans; hopefully I'll be able to finish something before I go on a longish break in December/January.