Walk Alone

Just read this. And it had me sweating.

BASIC is the first language I learnt. Not that it slowed me when learning C/C++; once I got over the fact that using ‘goto’ is bad. I was banking on the fact that Oracle would be similar to MySQL. Which could be mastered in a month, atleast enough for a fresh-out-of-college job. This post blew away my presumptions. Perl I could pick up. Oracle seems a tough bet. And given the analogy, it looks like the odds are heavily stacked against me.

And a Happy New Year to you too, Mr. Smith.

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Bhise has published his first fiction. On FF.net, no less! Carry on, dude, we will be waiting for more.

I got a Nokia 2600, thanks to my father. Classic Nokia design and a great phone for a first time user. What it lacks (seriously lacks) is connectivity. No WAP. No GPRS. No IrDA, USB or Bluetooth. This is one phone thats in a world of its own. But look at the bright side of things. I won’t spend my time changing wallpapers, logos and tunes. This phone is meant for talking and thats what I’m going to use it for… a pity really. I’m now tracking all the connectivity-enabled phones in the market. I wonder whether I can swap it for a 3100 or 3120 anytime soon? Maybe. Maybe not. You never know.

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The OOAD project is giving me a lot of trouble. I’m seeing the worst of human nature here. Oh well, its not like I’m some perfect individual. Far from it. But the actions of certain individuals defy comprehension. Everytime I say, “No, he won’t do that“, that is exactly what happens. Each time, its like some acid chipping away at a rock. I’m respecting the guy less and less.

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Last Friday’s post has come in for a lot of derision and scorn. Now what can I say? Hold it against me that I’ve not travelled around in the city as much as you guys. That some (or maybe, a lot of) places in the city are still unknown to me. That I’m naive or rustic when it comes to knowing this city’s landmarks and locations and routes.

So what? Kill me?

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Is it just me or is Blogger not accepting images today?

update: Uploaded the picture, standard mug shot.

I helped start a group blog - spcetrical2002. Predictably, it has lost steam after the initial posts. That came as no surprise. None of the members were prolific bloggers. So here’s what I thought up. It may be an entirely new software or it may already exist somewhere. It simply aggregates posts from multiple blogs into one blog.

All the blogs from Blogger have Atom feeds. This blog’s feed is here. You can also get it by clicking the Atom XML Feed button. In IE, the output is plain text and images. In FF, you also have clickable links. The most important point is that the XML output is constantly rendered across the two browsers. (Opera results, Thite?) Now lets say we successfully write a script that collects N such feeds. Let it be PHP or Perl, because it will be a script run on some server. This script will first store the N feeds in whatever format is convenient. Then it will parse the feeds and harvest the ten (or fifty, as the need is) latest posts. This is possible because the time-stamps are in a fixed format and we should be able to parse them easily. The posts will then be rendered on the web-page. This checking for new posts can be done periodically depending on server load.

So, is it a new script or something available on the net already? Any PHP/Perl programmer out there reading this?

The banner above is in response to the email below. Can’t resist the bumper sticker mentality.

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: [ILUG-BOM] stop software patents!
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:37:12 +0600
From: Svaksh <svaksh@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Svaksh <svaksh@gmail.com>, “GNU/Linux Users Group, Mumbai,
India” <linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in>
To: GNU/Linux Users Group, Mumbai, India <linuxers@mm.ilug-bom.org.in>

hi,

on 6th of July, the European Parliament will vote on “software
patents” and if approved will codify US-style Software Patents in the
EU.

http://noepatents.eu.org/index.php/NO_Software_Patents
and
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/

Cant say how much impact it will have on India (i think it will) but
we can definitely protest so if any list members who have websites are
interested they can participate in the “web strike” or put up banners
until the vote.
here is the link :
<http://noepatents.eu.org/index.php/Web_Demo_Against_Software_Patents>

–
svaksh

update - the banner was removed on 2005/07/14. The link reported that the battle was won.

Thank the Gods that be I discovered this before chucking my BIOS battery. My system clock kept dropping back by 5-7 minutes. My first reaction (confirmed by my knowledgeable friend) was that the battery was running low. But then, it should have kept dropping back or shown some random, erratic time. This event stabilized around 5-7 minutes. Then I thought it must be the (k)ubuntu linux which was always trying to access its ntp server. Keyword being ‘trying’. Then during a bout of boredom, I was fiddling around with the system clock widget and guess what - the damn thing was accessing time.windows.com everyday at 3:51 PM. Swift click to disable it and now my system time is constant. Until that moment I had no idea that this synchronisation was taking place. Linux was good enough to let me know. But Windows… its a good thing I’m moving away at full speed.