Some interesting blogs

A list of blogs that I usually find interesting.

* Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart : he is a distinguished engineer at Sun for webservices and XML : he started off with emacs dev :)
* Ron Ten-Hove : spec lead of JBI (JSR 208) the integration spec which is creating a huge buzz now !
* Chris Melissinos : he is the Chief gaming officer at Sun and a must read for gaming freaks !
* Jim Waldo : he is distinguished engineer and lead architect for Jini , I guess I might have already mentioned about his blog earlier on also ...
* Peter Saint-Andre : he is a primary spec author for most of the JEP's and RFC's in the IM space !
* Greg Papadopoulos : the CTO of Sun :-)
* Tom Ball : really nice articles about java.
* David Dagastine : some insightful posts on runtime interaction in an MT app and about synchronization/locking impl ... discusses java related details , though principles under consideration are generic.
* BileBlog : really vitriolic ranting on just about anything ... though normally focussed on java , jakarta , apache , opensource and the like. Relaxing read ;-)

In case you are wondering of the other names on my blogroll , other than college friends or friends I have already introduced here , I have :
James Gosling - no intro required there :)
Tim Bray - co-founder of XML (read more here).
Todd Fast - architect in Sun developer tools team which I used to be part of.
Chris Webster - uber cool engineer ! He was the architect of j2ee support in netbeans 4.1 (among other things) : I was in his team for about 4 months.

1 house , 2 days off , 3 friends

Realised at around 3 at night on wednesday that the next day (theoretically , already the next day!) I was supposed to go to the new house parents have bought in Bombay for the initial "puja" and the "housewarming" ceremony.
The actual day when the ceremony was to happen was always "some friday a couple of weeks later" to me ... so I realised with a shock that I had to complete some chores - including sending a mail to manager for the leave of absence, picking up aunty from station , inviting friends (missed this one :-( ) , etc ,etc.
Two days of hectic work (less mental and more physical - something I am very very unused to !) later I am back at the old place.
Everything went beautifully. The house is really cool - parents have done a great job of finding a really cool house and modelling the interiors.
The house is a spacious 3 bedroom apartment that has this awesome view with this light soothing breeze flowing in all the time.
The neighbours seemed friendly enough and other than the access road being worse than a paddy field (rains, flyover construction - the excuse list is long and checkered) , the location is really nice.
No , we have not yet moved in ... should be done shifting next weekend.

Since I had not realised about the actual day of the "puja" , I had promised - more like mentioned , to Neeraj and Fouzan that I will try to meet them this weekend ... and come Sunday morning , NY wakes me up at the ungodly hour of 9am (if you sleep at 5am , 9 _is_ ungodly - add to it the physical exhaustion I was feeling !).
Managed to survive a bombay metro rail ride to Fali's place and we spent a very very lazy afternoon/evening there.
Neeraj (with assistance from Vijaya) made a really sumptuous chicken curry - absolutely lip smacking stuff ! (He should consider change of careers :-D )
That with curd and rice made our lunch complete ... I overate like a pig :-)
Lazy conversation sprinkled with attempts to watch a movie , some sitcoms and dilbert cartoons later , we all found ourselves dozing away peacefully.
More discussions , banter , gossip and swapping news later it was time to push back home ... another nightmarish ride back via train and I am safe and sound in front of my comp - where I belong :)

When ... Neeraj calls me "Eda , I have been trying for 4 hours and I still cant kill the Gaurdian of Soulcube in Doom3".
ROFL - perfect ending to a blissful weekend :)
Should have toyed with him before letting him in on the arcane skills of doom gameplay ;-) ... but I took mercy on him and /me being grateful to him for giving me lifts all around town - I put him out of his misery.
He has a long way to go ... but atleast he is on the right track (sounds corny , doesnt it ? :-P)

Ok , this became a "What I did this weekend" post - not what was my original intention ...
I wanted to talk about some of the problems that fali asked me (java and OO related) and some general thoughts on application deployment design considerations (built upon what Vijaya is facing , what I am facing at work now and some other articles I read).
Just lost focus ... feeling a bit tired right now - maybe someother time I will talk about these.

And before I forget, big congratulations to Anthony Cozzi , the author of zappa.
Zappa won the WCCC'05 (world computer chess championship) with an awesome score of 10.5/11 !

Back ... after a brief hiatus

3 weeks of "silence".

In this time , I expierenced torrential rains which brought Bombay to a standstill , attended Aparup wedding (- was in Bangalore for a week for that) and went through a lot of "pain" 'cos my net conn went down :-(

The rains were a sight to behold - the day it started , when I woke up from a siesta I thought it was 7-ish at night ! The sky was so grey and dark it was scary.
Luckily (if you can call it that) , very few lightening/thunder related accidents ... I better not attempt to describe the aftermath of the downpour.

Managed to make it to Bangalore on friday (2 weeks back) - luckily : 'cos the airport was open only for a short window of time allowing me to attend the wedding which happened over the weekend (30th/31st july).

Which brings us to a curious coincidence -
When I came to Bangalore 4 years back , Alok picked me up from the airport and all of us (a batch of about 38 freshers who joined Sun) were put up at Hotel Chancery ... on 30th (29th ?) of July 2001.
This time , 'cos of flight delays , Alok came down again to pick me up from airport and guess what - Aparup's reception was at Hotel Chancery !
It was kinda weird :)

Stayed with Alok and Jenny last week ... had a great time - and since Jenny also loves chocolates : we were muching away to glory most of the time ;-)
WHile I was there , watched a really nice chinese flick with them - "House of Flying Daggers" : really neat movie :-)

Was tied up a bit during my stay there and could meet only few (most others seemed to be unreachable by phone).

Which brings us to the last part of what I wanted to post about .... more like a rant.
I have been quite satisfied with MTNL's ADSL broadband connection - though it does not come anywhere near the 512KBps I am paying for , it is quite stable (which is very important for me ) and still gives decent bandwidth.

I come back from Bangalore to find it not working ... went through the bureaucratic hoops to raise a complaint , etc , etc.
Considering the recent onslaught of rains , I did not expect prompt service - hell , in any other city in India the phones would have been down for another month or so I guess !
But the problem was that , the carrier was back up but the modem was not able to train to it.
Used a slow WLL backup conn (parents) to trawl the web for possible solutions , gave up in disgust after a lot of searching and started fooling around in earnest.
Modified tonnes of settings - there are a lot of them , with lot of combinations possible and it is NOT script friendly - requiring reboots for any change to take effect. So it was all manual :-(
The modem as such runs on linux - so there was some element of silver lining in the whole episode :-)

3 days later , I am getting it to work !

I found that the modem requires a firmware upgrade and that MTNL has modified the modulation type - shouldn't these people not inform the users beforehand about a change like this ?
I would assume that most , if not all , MTNL users will be disrupted by a change of this sort ... more relieved to get back my conn right now , maybe by tommorrow morning , I will be amazingly pissed at the way MTNL took a dump on me :)

To bed now , Vincent is tweaking/testing/bugfixing/etc his program in earnest for the upcoming World computer chess champs - all the best to Diep !

Which reminds me , Alok described an idea for solving a suduko and when I got back , finished an impl in about 10 mins or so (surprisingly simple code !) ... and guess what , it takes a fraction of a sec for the toughest problems I saw on the web.
Considering the permutations possible , his idea is a very powerful heurestic - will post the code someplace soon I guess ... or maybe not , there are tonnes are solvers already available :-)