Good Trip, New Place

The vacations are over. It had been a long time since I last went for an outing. These have been pretty good vacations in that respect.

Its seriously amazing to see the what all people can do for religion here. 12 km uphill and another 12 km back, >24hrs continuous, no sleep and people > 60 yrs doing all this stuff that even young trekkers will think once before stepping into. Anyways, it was lot of fun with beautiful landscapes to view enroute and full satisfaction of getting mata's darshan.

To complete the change, I joined the new office today. Its pretty interesting working in a place like this, with employees number in single digit. Its a completely different experience and I feel that life is going to change a lot in next few months.

Time for Change

Its time for another career move. I remember more than an year ago when I was looking for a change, I had this huge discussion with a HR manager who thought that I do not really like to stick with a company for long. At that time, looking for a 3rd change in 2 years, I really couldn't blame her for thinking like that. My arguement at that point of time was that getting into the industry in a time when US and India were facing their biggest slump, I really didn't have much choice but to stick with whatever I had.

Today, getting prepared for my 4th change, my track record can still make any HR manager raise the same questions. However, I have hopes that the kind of profile I have been looking for all these years is finally coming along.
I have never been more optimistic and I hope things go as I want this time.

Tomorrow would be my last day in this office and then I would be off the technical world for a week. A 16km up the hill trip to Vaishno Devi awaits me next weekend and a new office after that.

Copy -> Brain -> Paste

People say that all that software engineers do is "Copy Paste". Here's a real life example why the Brain component is important.
I once wrote a code to get some data and cache it to make second time retrieval faster. Here's what the code for retrieval looked like that I wrote:

public ShowDetail getShowDesc(String territoryId,String showId) {
HashMap cmap = (HashMap)cache.get("somekey");
if(cmap==null) {
cmap = new HashMap();
}
ShowDetail showDesc = (ShowDetail) cmap.get(showId);
if(showDesc == null) {
logger.debug(showId+" not found in Cache ... Getting from Webservice");
showDesc = pwm.getShowDetail(territoryId,showId);
if(showDesc != null) {
cmap.put(showId,showDesc);
cache.put("somekey",cmap);
}
}
return showDesc;
}

Basically checking if the data exists in cache, if not, getting it from webservice and putting in cache.
Another fella needed to reuse the entire code (translation: copy paste everything). He probably didn't understand the concept of cache, or probably he did understand but didn't want to use it. Whatever be the case, here's the code that finally came out:

public ShowDetail getShowDesc(String territoryId,String showId) {
HashMap cmap = null;
if(cmap==null) {
cmap = new HashMap();
}
ShowDetail showDesc = (ShowDetail) cmap.get(showId);
if(showDesc == null) {
log.debug(showId+" not found in Cache ... Getting from Webservice");
showDesc = pwm.getShowDetail(territoryId,showId);
}
return showDesc;
}

The first 2 lines itself are amusing enough for starters. I used to laugh on such things some time back, but it not funny anymore.

Bunti aur Babli

Yeh world hai na world, isme do tarah ke log hote hai. Ek jo bunti aur babli ek hi baar dekhte hai aur dusre jo bunti aur babli ek se jyada baar dekhte hai. Hum dusro main se hai.

I enjoyed it more the second time. Why ? Because I knew by that time that movie is pure comedy and even the supposedly thrilling sequences are also comedy.
The movie doesn't get boring even for a minute. If I break the movie into infinite parts of infinitesimal frames and rate each frame, each of them will get atleast a "decent" rating.

The weak part? Lack of details. The movie has too many cases due to which each case doesn't get enough details for viewer to understand how exactly they did it. This also made me wonder why do they become so popular by interval that every newspaper is publishing their news. The cases lacks the certain spark to distinguish them from ordinary thugs.
Secondly, the lack of thrills. bunti and babli do not actually live on the edge. Even though Big B himself is behind them, their life is pretty easy most of the time. Wasn't really expected.

However, its being a long long time since I saw "housefull" in the theatres in jaipur and all three bunti, babli and DCP dasrath deserve the credit for their fine performances.

Echoing my thoughts

What is more important? Writing well or conveying thoughts. People who write well get all the laurels but the purpose here is the the latter, hence I would simply point to this post and say that I couldn't agree more.

I remember a question asked to me in an interview when I was a fresher. He asked "Why do you want to be a software engineer?"
I answered "Because I like Computer Science, or mathematics in general. I like it because it has straightforward equations for every scenario, not dependent on physical or environmental factors. Things are much more clear and reliable in that sense."
He responded "That seems untrue as one never knows when a piece of code will break while a building once made lasts for more than 100 years."
My reasoning "Code only behave the way it is written. It cannot behave in any other way depending upon the heat or coolness of the weather or simply because its not in the mood."

My Google

Check this out. Google is offering a personalized page similar to My Yahoo. I don't want to get into the "Google is not a portal" kind of debate right now, but what's most amazing about the site is yet again the "UI".
This has a drag-and-drop portlets functionality. Just add all the portlets you want to view and then just drag and drop wherever you want to place it.

Remembering Gmail's UI, How is it that only Google applications provide these amazing out-of-the-box kind of UI functionality that others are not able to imitate?

Yahoo Messenger 7 Beta launched

The latest beta of yahoo messenger is out and I decided to give it a shot.

I remember trying out the yahoo messenger 6 beta last year when yahoo gave a completely new look and feel to their messenger and added a lot of features. Apart from the stealth setting feature which I found potentially useful, it was a disappointment. Unstable in terms of memory usage, sluggish responses especially when starting (I started it from taskbar, the whole taskbar used to hang for sometime till it started) and when signing out.

This beta however, though boasts of only few new features, is much more better with instant responses. My taskbar doesn't hang anymore, starting and signing out is done in a flash and the overall UI of the application is improved with fonts in the conversation window being better now to say the least. Also, the message archive can also show nicknames instead of yahoo id as per your preference setting.

The biggest USP as claimed for this release is the PC-to-PC Call feature, which is basically similar to the voice chat feature provided earlier, just that instead of the voice chat button, there is now a call button similar to what skype offers. The additional feature here is that one can now also leave offline voice messages. However, Yahoo has made it clear that unlike skype, which offers PC-phone calls, yahoo will stick to PC-PC calls.
Currently all the new features yahoo offers can be used only if both sides has the latest version, which is not the case with me, so with feature testing not possible for me, I would vote thumbs up for the better responsiveness and thumbs above average for better UI.