shameless-plug-and-google-bomb dept.

I'm trying to write a programmer's guide to object oriented perl. Object Oriented Perl looks very similar to
C++, but only superficially. The underlying mechanisms are very different -- in fact they very much resemble an afterthought. I am still grappling with it, but I plan to write out a learn-as-you-go report that people may find useful.

You can read W0lf's Guide to Object Oriented Perl for C/C++ Programmers, here.

boot-me-up dept.

All those years I wasted waiting for my machine to boot up...

the-blogs-of-war dept.

Blogs are a wonderful thing. The fact that every human being with Internet access and time on their hands can broadcast their thoughts is a trully disruptive and enchanting idea.

Now if only we did not have people who sound better only when they shut up.

But it ain't a perfect world.

There are some blogs I read that are so unashamedly mediocre, that they cross the threshold into sublime humor.

I hope, dear reader, that this blog does not serve the same purpose for you.

If it does, well, I intended it to be so all along :-).

But seriously, there is a blog out there called Vantage Point which I read often. I mean its in my Safari RSS Feed list. What happened to this guy is truly frightening.

Any medium is great at first when there is a barrier to entry to access and use it. It just gets harder to mine all the good stuff as it is created and published in real-time. With today's cutting edge technology -- essentially Pagerank, content can only be found when it has already enjoyed a certain degree of social acceptance, or unless it is so distinguishable from the crazy mass of words that is the Internet that it lights up like a Christmas Tree.

With this technological barrier still in place, the blog as a source of innovative writing is finished.

Unless the content location technology is upgraded soon, there is every likelihood of the loud, stupid voices in the world drowning out the sane, rational ones.

So for its next avatar, I would like the blog to be complemented with an intelligent search engine. Something which checks for tell-tale signs of insight -- dunno what those could be...good grammar? Allusions and references? Originality (Even Shakespeare wasn't original)?

Or should we just teach a Bayesian filter the works of all the great authors in all languages, and then use that to rank content?

Hmmm...

a-real-book-review dept.

I am currently reading the book The Best Software Writing I (ed. Joel Spolsky). The editor is of course, a high profile blogger and code-philosopher. The book is organized around the same topics that the editor deals with in his blogs i.e. software processes, defining product quality, some hiring heuristics, lifestyle issues for coders and a bit of business sense thrown in for good measure. And of course the outsourcees. Grrrr...The outsourcees...Those evil-smelling, foul-talking, gibberish-spelling spineless serfs from the nameless land. I was thinking of Chaplin's "Der Juden" rant as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator. If you haven't seen it, its the greatest impression ever. Actually, those are the kind of subjective statements you are likely to find in this book.

But its eminently readable, and some of it even makes sense.

However be warned: it is written from the coders' perspective. Which means that the world-view this book reflects belongs to people who spend 90% of their working time (which may be 90% of their actual waking time :-)) hunched over their monitors furiously assaulting their keyboards - and the remaining 10% being assaulted by the QA and marketing teams in meetings about bug fixes and product specifications. So expect a whiny-ass tone and lines like "A good manager should...blah, blah, blah...".

There are no conclusive answers to some of the social questions raised, only vague solutions like "hire developers, not programmers". Hmmm...and why and how do people make the transition between these two extremes? There are vague indicators, but again, most of the solutions proffered by the book take the form: "you either do or you don't". Not a very scientific approach, if you ask me.

a-new-kind-of-ring-tone dept.
Hmmm...a man invents a whole new paradigm of science.

All to what end?

Downloadable ring tones.

do-the-evolution dept.

My grandfather, who also claimed to be a writer of some sort, always talked about a book called Janus: A Summing Up, by polyglot, philosopher and novelist Arthur Koestler. It was a theory that he expounded on every alternate day at the dining table, until all of us had it memorized -- well almost. It is a miracle how much information the human mind can retain even without the ability to comprehend it :-).

Janus is a two-headed Roman God, and from what I remember of the book, it had some dire predictions for humanity. It sure began on a sombre note -- with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- about how after that day, humanity exited the age where human beings had to face destruction as individuals, and entered one where humanity itself faced destruction as a species.

The scare-mongering just got worse from there. The two-headed allusion was of course, directed at a duality of the human mind -- the 'philosopher' and the 'hunter'. Presumably, the philosopher makes and lives by rules and aesthetics. The hunter, on the other hand, relies on instinct, and is a much more unpleasant sort of animal.

The ultimate question then, was -- which of these two dualities is the dominant one. And if one factors in evolution, are we moving from being dominant hunters to dominant philosophers? And if so, is that a good thing?

And then , where does humanity itself fit into this interplay between the two? Are we heading towards becoming a more refined, intellectual, gentle race of supermen. Or are we just kidding ourselves, and sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

My grandfather, of course, could play around with this if he wanted to. For those familiar with his work, the play 'सूर्याची पिल्ले' contains an inside joke on the doomsday prophecies of Koestler.

I personally find either extreme distasteful of course-- more so the dominant philosopher types -- ever been with some one that made logical arguments founded purely on deduction i.e. other people's theories, without any substantial experience with the human condition in its myriad forms? You know them -- they live by certain books, and idols, and substitute practical experience for a lot of 'ism's they can throw about in casual conversation :-)?

God! I mean even Sherlock Holmes relied on induction now and then. (See : his experiments with opium)

Of course, for a naive adolescent, ideas like these can really get you to wilt in despair.

Which is why, its a relief to know that the human mind is on the move after all!.

release-me dept.

There has been a long silence on these pages, and for good reason too.

For the past three weeks I was sucked into a team that was ceaselessly working towards releasing a product.

I have done bits and pieces of products before, but this was the first time that I got a ringside seat (actually, you could say that I was in the ring most of the time -- and without the benefit of a second) to the entire process of making a product shippable.

Now that the beta release is happenning, I can take a breather, look back and analyse the past few weeks that blazed through my life like Hurricane Katrina.

First of all, I consider myself to be a reasonably dyed-in-the-wool geek. Getting through this milestone was very important to me personally, and my ego dragged me through days and nights of nervous fidgeting, frantic coding, trivial but frustrating political games, and finally, the joy of seeing a multi-organism jerk suddenly into life, and establish a steady, but reassuring pattern of its own existence.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what I signed up for many years ago in my undergraduate years.

This makes the circle complete -- or rather, makes it turn in on itself, starting that inevitable self-feeding spiral that any creative person aspires to ride, for as long as the surf is up, and the heart clamors for more.

blast-from-the-past dept.

Another bit in my continued re-romancing of the Java programming language. This makes me feel like a starry-eyed nineteen-year-old again.

ajax-watch dept.

As part of my weekly watch on the world of AJAX, came across this article that is a much more technical, non-evangelist, and lucid exposition of the innards of AJAX applications.

ashes-2-ashes dept.

Hands down, the best test series ever.

redundant-information dept.

Didn't need an academic to tell me this.

धनुष्य-बाण dept.

बाप गेला घाम गाळूनी
जगाचं पडलं बाभळ-रान
हरेक गुंगला आपुल्या नादी
मग त्याचे का ना विरेल भान?

भणंग शिकारी सुगंध शोधे
रान पालथे करूनी, आज
तरी ते सावज मात देतसे
सवंगतेच्या अंधारात.

गळेल घाम अन् निशा अंथरेल
संथ मंतरेल दृष्टीपथात
तरी तो कालचा डाव न रोकेल
उचलेलच कोणी धनुष्य-बाण.

alone-in-office-on-a-bleedin'-saturday dept.

It is deathly silent here
Silent as a lonely grave
Quiet as the still, watchful waters
That stealthily but surely tread

Black, grey, stoic, surrounding walls?
Guards beneath a deceptive veil
The cold, unceasing metallic hum --
No warm footfall -- whispers "all is well"

It is deathly silent here
No voice to break the music dead
No living laughing working now:
A cold, penetrating, eternal haze

jargon dept.

AJAX or Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The application coding technique that products like Gmail use, where the application is written in browser-independent Javascript, and communicates with a server back-end using XML/SOAP based transports.

The essay by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path that coined the term. Seems fairly recent, only beginning of this year.

तो-मी-नव्हेच dept.

मराठीत आणि इंग्रजीत लिहीण्यात अर्थातच, फरक असतो. हा फरक वरवरचा जरी वाटत असला तरी तो कुठे तरी खोलवर, मनाच्या अंतरिक प्रक्रीयेत दडलेला असतो. पण या दोन भाषांचे संतुलन बर्याच लोकांत एका बाजूस कलंडल्यासारखे वाटते. अर्थात यात कुणाचा दोष किंव्हा बरे-वाईट असे काहीच नाही. एखाद्या भाषेत आपले प्रभुत्व वा भाषेची आपल्यावर पकड असणे हे बर्याच प्रमाणात आपल्या सामाजिक व आर्थिक परिस्थितीवर अवलंबून असते. शेकडा नव्व्याण्णव लोकं त्यांच्या वाटेस आलेल्या परिस्थितीला बळी पडून स्वतःच्या नजरेस पडलेल्या दृष्टीक्षेपालाच सत्य समजतात. अशांतून भाषेवरून भेदभाव वगैरे प्रकार निर्माण होतात.

पण २-३ भाषा येण्यासारखे सुख जगात नसावे. प्रत्येक भाषेत विचार करण्याची प्रक्रिया निराळी. हर शब्दांत निरनिराळे संदर्भ दडलेले. प्रत्येक भाषा ही एका विशिष्ट संस्कृती, राहणीमान व विचारधारेची छोटेखानी मूर्तीच नव्हे का?

मी आता मराठीत लिहीत आहे, तर इंग्रजीत लिहीणारा 'मी' कुणी भिन्न प्राणीच असावा असे वाटते. तरी 'त्या'ची ही जागा मी थोड्यावेळापुर्ती का होईना, हडप केली आहे.

च्यायला...एवढं लिहूनच बोटं दुखायला लागली राव. लई झालं...

hit-search-to-download dept.

If you have the energy and the bandwidth, you can try this.

OLS dept.

Jonathan Corbet of lwn.net has put up an interesting presentation describing the roadmap for the 2.6 linux kernel.

Interesting reading is the change in the current development/release engineering process being followed by the core developer team.

mergers-and-acquisitions dept.

Cisco planning to buy out Nokia?

page-rank-really-works dept.

Failure, according to Google.

Thanks to Pushyamitra, for this astute observation.

perversions dept.

Well, I'm not ever, ever going to have a Subway sandwich again!!!. Brrr....pthuuuiiii....gargle, gargle, gargle...pthuuuiiii...

And here's something from the same evil brain -- The Complete Jailhouse Diaries i.e. a survival guide for first-timers in the slammer.