Category: Live Journal Entries

Hectic!!

Returned from Pattaya on Tuesday and will be again leaving for Bangalore on Monday. Have to schedule unimaginable number of things in the intervening days but I guess I will manage well :)

From Monday myself and Swati will be in Bangalore to attend foss.in/2005. This time I am not giving a talk and looking forward to it!

Will meet a lot of old friends and listen to at least some talks for once. The event itself has come a long way from IT com 2000 and so have we, it feels great to have been a part, how so ever small, of this event since past 6 years. Along the way we have gathered close friends, lots of knowledge, also a small sense of self significance and humility.

Another thing different this time would be that Aasim will not be travelling with us – He, like the event, has also grown. Heck! it feels like yesterday that we celebrated his 3rd Birthday at IT com 2000 and now he has his own set of responsibilities. He is brave about it but he loved to be the only kid around the venue, we will miss him too… but somethings have to be done.

Amongst all this there indeed is one commitment which is suffering – my aim to put a 1000 pictures at NagpurBirds before 31st December. Oh well! I may still be able to do it if I have time.

Cops, murder and a warrant – Anticlimax

What a drag!

Well I guess after got it right, most of the alarmed reactions to my previous were averted. For the uninformed – once upon a time I was a forensic expert and have conducted postmortem exam on 1000+ corpses. Most of those cases are still dragging on and even after 10 years I am still occasionally called to give evidence in court as an Expert witness, in case you are not aware, expert witnesses are the most privileged folks in a court after the Hon’ble Judge and can mostly talk at free will and give the lawyers of both sides a bad time if you know how to 😉

My usual stand these days is to ignore the summons since most of the times the other doctor who was the co-signatory goes to the court and does the needful, in case that does not happen a bailable warrant is issued in my name and the police sub-inspector comes home and ensures that the paperwork is completed – very very rarely a judge may get pissed off and issue a non-bailable warrant in which case the concern police inspector comes about an hour before the actual hearing and completes the formalities for the arrest, of course some benevolent source from the police station informs you well in advance that you are going to be arrested so you are ready – this has never happened with me till now and hence I was surprised!!

However, it turned out that even in this case the warrant was a bailable one and I did not get a free ride to the court and in the court I had to wait for 4 hours till they traced the public prosecutor at his home and the judge threatened him that he will release the witness (me) unconditionally.

So that was that.

Cops, murder and a warrant!

Heh! just returned and found apparently there is a non-bailable warrant out for me.

Hmmm… the non-bailable part of it is pretty unusual, will have to sort that out tomorrow. Sigh! its been 10 years and they still are processing things…

Luxuries I can afford not to have!

I don’t know if this is a good sign, a sign of inertia, a sign of snobbishness or for that matter means anything at all! The following three things, once upon a time long long ago, were considered luxuries by me as I could not afford them but now they are luxuries I can afford not to have

#1 Visiting cards
#2 Cell Phone
#3 A notebook computer

Believe me the sky does not fall if you are not carrying any / all of the above – BTW I really liked “Asterix and the Falling Sky”

Whew! what a week!!

Keelback(?)

As if Diwali followed by Eid was not enough it was Aasim’s 8th birthday on 5th Nov and just like previous years the entire class was invited. The decoration theme was Winnie the Pooh and before I was called in to control the crowd I did manage to get some pictures.

The party was fun and Aasim did manage to WOW some of the new girls with his room and soft toys!! I like the way he is growing up around girls – he firmly believes that one should have 3 to 4 girlfriends, the logic being – if you have only one then you get teased but with 4 everyone just keeps shut…. apparently he has told this to his teacher.

Despite sleeping past midnight all of us did manage to get up early enough for our Sunday morning bird watch/walk – We went to Satpuda Botanical garden walked for just 668 meters and saw 54 bird species. The distance data could be captured thanks to my latest toy.

The highlight of the walk however was not a bird but this Buff-striped Keelback snake – These snakes are harmless and you almost never see them in a threatening posture. It was only after I picked it up that I realised that it was defending itself against the attacks of a Long-tailed shrike.

The evening again was dinner at some friends with the loveliest of mutton korma…

Waahhh!! I want one more weekend!!!

I am a Space-invader

Exactly 25 days since I last posted a meme…. all those games still ROCK!

What Video Game Character Are You? I am a Space-invader.I am a Space-invader.

I will happily recruit the help of friends to aid me in getting what I want. I have no tolerance for people getting in my way, and I am completely relentless until any threats or opposition are removed. I try to be down-to-earth, but something always seems to get in the way. What Video Game Character Are You?

Home Alone!

Swati and Aasim have hopped over to Delhi for the weekend and I am home alone – this is a rare happening, We mostly travel together for business or pleasure but this time I could not join them due to a lot of things… I do have a lot of things planned out for the weekend like post processing pictures, checking out some of the new birding spots and a date with the foster-mother of one of Aasim’s friend (yeah, Swati fixed that one for me!)

I did manage to drag myself to the gym in the morning and my trainer ensured that I exercised but rest of the things are already threatening to sink into the quagmire of lethargy and inertia. I have an option of fooling myself and saying that there is a lot of work at the office but that would require morphing into a real conman 😉

In fact apart from debugging other peoples code the only task at hand is reviewing the new PHP frameworks which have been springing up lately and looks like the epidemic is spreading faster than bird-flu, BTW I feel the panic over bird-flu is totally unwarranted!

I, personally, am more of a library oriented programmer rather than favoring a framework. Still, I found that Symfony framework for PHP5 to be quite elegant specially given the fact that they have some pretty complete documentation. I very much liked the idea of having configuration as YAML files which are compiled into PHP and cached for subsequent requests, that said I still don’t see myself building a web-app which can handle 10,000,000 hits a day using that framework – in fact any generic framework has too much bloat to handle real high traffic.

Hmmm…. looks like the post has turned out to be more geeky than I intended

Disclaimer: My experience of building a web-app which can handle 10 million+ hits a day is restricted to exactly ONE and thats was almost entirely done using procedural programming. So none of the above might be true….

I will format all your hard drives

Computer Teacher: What is notepad?
Aasim: Notepad is a text editor
Computer Teacher: No, notepad is a software for creating text files and simple documents! Now tell me how do you start notepad?
Aasim: By clicking the shortcut on the desktop.
Computer Teacher: Is this what has been taught to you?

Cut to after few more transactions of the above type

Aasim: I will format all your hard drives!!!

Thankfully only a few teachers in his school are like that – His class teacher gave Swati the best compliment a mother can expect to hear “We have enough hunks and punks in the class but your son is a charmer!”

Nakedness is in the eye of the beholder

The mask

“I hope you don’t think I’d ever do anything like that, I mean, just step out of the drier, if anyone were seeing me. It was just viewing.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?” asked Baley.

“Not at all the same thing. You’re viewing me right now. You can’t touch me, can you, or smell me, or anything like that. You could if you were seeing me. Right now, I’m two hundred miles away from you at least. So how can it be the same thing?”

Baley grew interested. “But I see you with my eyes.”

“No, you don’t see me. You see my image. You’re viewing me.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“All the difference there is.”

For many of you the above passage would be familiar, it is from the novel “The Naked Sun” by Issac Asimov where the hero has just initiated a Sci-Fi equivalent of a web-cam messaging with a beautiful murder suspect.

Are these ethics still science fiction?

Oops!

Repeat after me “Favor composition over inheritance.”