Hectic week

This week was undoubtedly one of the most hectic weeks for the past 2 or 3 months. Almost every evening i was meeting my house broker to see various houses. I finally decided on one house this thursday. Its pretty much sufficient for one guy ;) .. with a good bedroom, hall and kitchen and ofcourse the bathroom. Its on the first floor, near a park, in a very silent lane [ except for a couple of dogs i guess ;) ]. The only thing new for me now, is to learn to stay alone :-(, with my earlier room-mates shifting to separate houses. It was such a pleasure living with them. I hope to keep meeting with them often even after we start living separately.

Every eveving, I had to rush to catch hold of this broker since he usually is not available otherwise. They are so much in demand these days in Bangalore. On the weekend, when i actually met my new house owner, the broker had another customer literally sitting on his head asking him to show him some house he promised. The owner seems to be a nice guy and i hope to not have much problems. The best thing about this house is that the owner stays about 25 kms away from my new house. I am sure its one real good thing that made me decide on this house.

As if this was not enough, our test engineer for Evolution Exchange connector, suddenly woke up from his slumber and started filing bugs left right and center. The bug count dramatically rose up [ which was quite expected if anyone tested the component ;) ]. But, unfortunately, most of the bugs were very rare case scenarios or negative test cases and not so interesting to fix apart from a few good ones. I have started working on those interesting bugs for now. One very interesting bug is that, if i get a task forwarded as an ics file and i accept it, evolution hangs. Well, that was what the bug said, but my RedHat 9 box, had a pretty different story to tell me. Whenever, i tested this bug, it was just not evolution, but the whole machine that was getting locked up. I could see the CPU being hogged [ the CPU red light was glowing continously ], and no keyboard inputs were being accepted. I tried a ssh to my machine from another test box, but that also timed out. Was very annoying to have to reboot my machine after it being up and running for a month :-(. To gather more info about this bug, i left it hanging in the evening and came back in the morning and saw that the machine had reached some sanity and was recognising the keystrokes, but was nevertheless damn slow. So, i have decided to debug this on the tester's machine itself ;)

Before i forget to mention, there are a few very nice blogs written by fejj which i would like to mention here. One is on profiling tools, another is on effective searching and a follow up of this on binary search trees. These are all quite elementary in nature, but i liked the approach in which he explains this. And as he later points out, there is a wealth of knowledge on different tree implementations at http://www.msu.edu/~pfaffben/avl/

This week is gonna be another busy week, and i am planning to do some reading too :-) Hope i am able to balance my time between hacking and reading.