The Invincibles

Thats what ESPN called the great team of Arsenal while they were playing against Norwich in the Barclay's English Premiership match, to create history this weekend. Arsenal is the only team in the history of the tournament to have an unbeaten league record to 44 games !!! Another site pointed this piece of information


"Arsenal look a good bet to remain unbeaten for some time but Wenger will be mindful that game number 50 is against Manchester United at Old Trafford."

I really wish that Arsenal remain unbeaten and claim the 50th match with a victory over MU. That would be one hell of a match to watch.

Well, apart from this, there seems to be a pretty bad scene going on in the city with around 80 theaters deciding to stop screening of movies, if the Karnataka government does not roll back its ridiculous decision of "not allowing the screening of any non-kannada movies for the first 7 weeks of its release". I wonder if this move was really being backed up by the kannada movie producers organization. There is no logic in this move to help promote kannada movies. They should stop making such ridiculous demands on the government and let their movies do the talking for a change. I am sure, the piracy industry and the VCD/DVD shop owners are gonna have a blast this month in Bangalore.

Zero bugs ...

It is just one of those rare days today when i have come to office without any bugs to work on ... we just cleaned up all the bugs we had for the current evolution-exchange 1.5 release. [ Ofcourse, we applied all the project management techniques a couple of weeks ago and pushed the normal bugs to the next release and limited ourselves to the most critical of the bugs for this release ]. Its good to have achieved this goal three days in advance. We are now brazing ourselves for any last minute surprises.

While discussing about these bugs with my friend Harry [ no .. he is not a potter :p ] yesterday, he reminded me of the famous quote by Djikstra

"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, never to show their absence."

Isnt that sooo true of the code we write ? You invariably always miss out atleast one scenario where most probably your code would fail. But then, there are millions of dollars earned for just having patches and fixing these very own bugs. This may be fine for small enterprises, non critical applications or even less critical desktop software, but have you ever wondered what would happen if the NYSE comes down even for a few seconds ? Its a huge loss of money, ranging even to millions of dollars. Well, one of my friend introduced me to this highly reliable family of systems called Nonstop which help in such highly mission critical applications.

Coming back to the desktops, and GNOME, here is one link where one can search the Gnome cvs repositories to collect the data on the frequency of commits done by the authors. That link actually gives the data on the commits done by me.

Need to get back to some reading now. More here later .....

Busy man ...

Only a busy person can enjoy his leisure

Thats so true ... This statement is actually a corollary to the Perkinson's Law which says that

"your work expands to fill the time alotted for it".

I have actually seen this happen in my recent 2 projects [ ICE and Evolution ] i have been working on. So i think, the corollary should also hold good. Ironically, the reverse of that need not necessarily be true ;-) ... People do enjoy their leisure, but that does not define them to be busy ... but yeah ofcourse, its upto the person to define what he means by being busy. What if he is busy in enjoying his leisure ... hehehe ... ok lets stop this non-sense here.

I have been very busy for the last couple of weeks and never found anytime to update my blog. Hmm, not just a couple of weeks, but one full month !!! ... Well, a blog is not necessarily to be written daily, so i dont mind updating it here sooo late ... We have been cracking down a lot of bugs in Evolution Exchange Connector, and we hope to have a bug count of zero by this weekend. I shall write here some more details that i had been planning to write all this while, but may be in some new posting later.

Apart from work, i have been enjoying some real good fun on orkut these days, with a nice fun game about asking and answering questions about Amitabh's dialogues. Basically you have to guess which movie the dialogue is from and you then have to post another question for others to crack. Its really funny and bringing alive the orkut community there.

Back at office, we are planning another event in Bangalore, called the "Gnome Bangalore Conference" .. its mostly about having all the Indian hackers meet for a day and spend sometime together. Ofcourse, there would be the usual propaganda of some cool technical talks and demos and stuff like that. I have been assigned the job to overlook all the activities and see that things get done on time. Its kinda fun to keep poking at people time and again, reminding them about their deliverables. :-)