Retrospection

Lake view, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

This was sometime in the mid of December last year. Was a very very frustrating time for me. That particular weekend, i just didnt find any peace. Was getting so agitated with each and everything and everyone. It was tough. I guess everyone goes through such phases in life a few times. Earlier, while staying alone, it was very easy for me to seclude myself from all and just retrospect. But now, things were a bit different. I drove away and sat beside a lake, just thinking about all the things in my mind. I have this habit of noting down the things on a piece of paper so that i dont loose the threads running in mu mind. That day, i was surprised to find that I had close to 20 items running in my head !!! Well, definately not all of them going no simulataneously in my mind, but those were the things that i had to get done. A hell lot of backlog of things to say the least :(

Discipline in life, they say, helps to focus your thoughts and channel your energies well. It isnt that tough to learn about discipline. Whats tough is to be disciplined. The main reason for not doing most of the things was may be I had plenty of things on my plate at once. I had to prioritise them and start finishing up one after the other. It was good that i wrote down those things, as it helped me remember things that i lost track of.

While thinking about all these things, a few more general thoughts came to my mind. Its said that work grows to occupy the time alloted to it. This is a very well known fact in all the industries where estimations are done, and finally at the end of the day, people realise that the alloted time was never sufficient to complete that task. Its just the result of work growing to cover up the time you had. I guess, the reason is just not that. The reason, most of the time is complacency, which leads to procrastination. I also believe that one tends to comlpete more work, when his hands are full with a lot of tasks. This in a way complements the earlier thought about work expanding itself in the allotted time. If you have enough tasks on hand, which put you in a crunch situation, you are bound to complete most of the tasks. Ofcourse, the drawback of this could be that the work might not always be effecient, depending on the skill of the person. I guess, thats why they say that its only a busy person who enjoy's his leisure :)

Movies

A List of movies that i have watched in the past couple of months after Ramzan

• The Legend of Zorro

This should rather have been called as "Family of Zorro" :) ... Watching Antonio Bendares and Catherine Zeta Jones with Zorro Junior playing tricks and fights was more fun than entertaining. Bendares was looking older, as if he had lost the touch for the fight scenes. Catherine was at her best in her role, and protrayed it really well. You can watch this movie for her :), or well, for the Zorro Junior. This kid has a few nice scenes maintaining the tradition of the Zorro family fo saving the less fortunate people. Its fun watching this kid, but he unfortunately doesnt have a lot of scenes. It definately was not as good as the Mask of Zorro. Sequeals always seem to be failing badly in Hollywood.

• Dus

Thats exactly how much time you would want to sit watching this movie. Pathetic movie to say the least. The only good part was the "Dus bahane" song in the starting when they show the titles. And probably "deedar de" later on in the movie, for its good music, though the song picturisation is nothing less than some really bad remix songs you get these days. The story line is so easily predictable, and ... oh well .. forget it .. i dont wanna write anything more about this movie.

• Aashiq Banaya Aapne

This movie has some really good songs. But alas, only songs dont make a movie. Tanushree Dutta was good in this movie. The funny part about her was that, whenever she smiles in the movie, it looks like she is holding one roshogulla in each of her cheeks :)

• Main Meri Patni aur Woh

This is by far the best movie in this lot, and definately a good movie that i have watched after a long time, may be the only good movie I watched after Page 3. Rajpal Yadav is just awesome in his role in this movie. He has portrayed his role of a simple living bachelor, earning enough for himself, who is the best at his job [ librarian ] , and then, the role of a prospective bride groom, trying to break the ice with his prospective bride, and then the suspicious husband to perfection. The setting in city of Lucknow, with some very nice Hindi dialogues, and a simple story line, make this film very much watchable, though it kinda looses its hold somewhere in the middle in the second half, and then the much expected climax is made very sentimental, and kinda gels in with the mood of the movie. The gazal in the movie "Guncha" is very good, and ofcourse so is the sound track. The first part of the movie is very nice and funny, with all the marriage proposal fun, and then the added irregularity where the bride is actually taller than her bride groom. Some very well executed scenes to watch here.

Ajay's engagement

December 18th was my best friend Ajay's engagement. It was in Hubli, and i hadnt visited Hubli since the time my parents shifted to Bangalore. So, this was the first time that i had to stay in a lodge in Hubli. It sounded like a good adventure in itself for me. The engagement party was in the morning, and so i planned to reach Hubli a day before on 17th in the evening. Reached Hubli at about 10 in the night, and booked a room in the very famous "Modern Lodge" there. It was a single bed room, and instantly reminded me of my final year at college hostel. Just that there were no friends to be along with here.

Woke up early in the morning, and took some cool snaps of the railway station in the morning mist. Had to wait for a long time to have my shirt ironed there, since it being a sunday, no shops were scheduled to open by 10 !! Luckily, the engagement was postponed to 11, and i had enough time to be there on time. So, i did a quite a bit of site seeing around the railway station, going to all the well known shops there, and taking some nice snaps too. I was lucky enough to get a very cordial auto rickshaw driver, who took me to the venue. He was a very old man, and was kind enough to ask me if he should wait there at the venue till the end of the function, since it wasnt easy to get an autorickshaw from that place back to the station. He even reminded me that i had to reserve my ticket before hand [ which i had already done, and regretted it later on ] so that i can have a hassle free journey.

The king of the day, arrived at 11:30 in his car, and had a grand reception, with flowers showering on him at the entrance. Was a royal welcome i should say :) We were then asked to have our breakfast, and we then came back to the main hall for the main ceremony. I was thinking that this would be a very simple ceremony, and had already booked my return ticket for the 1 pm train, since i couldnt get the ticket for the 6pm train. But, the ceremony turned out to be rather a very long one, with all the pooja, and other things included. I had to leave the function midway, and Ajay was courteous enough to introduce his fiancee to me, before they exchanged the rings. I later on came to know that the function lasted till 4 pm in the evening and that Shilpa, Ajay's fiancee, actually song some 3 songs, and Ajay was completely bowled over.

The return train started at 1:30 pm and I came back to Bangalore, or is it Bengaluru already ? whatever .. i took this pic for posterity. Had a great time taking some cool sunset snaps on the journey back home.

November 2005

This would go down as one the most shocking and most volatile month i ever had in my work experience. People were back from a lovely long Diwali weekend, and we get to hear that Novell had plans of laying off resources :(. It wasnt very clear if Bangalore division would get affected, but when the announcements happened we were all shocked to hear that Novell Bangalore would also be hit this time [ probably the first time this has happened in Novell Bangalore since its inception in 1995 !!! ]

Unfortunately, the team that I was leading had to take the brunt :-(. It was very sad and shocking to say the least. This Praveen's Blog entry, is a good reference to this.

I had already hinted at moving to a new team, and was expecting something to hear on it by December. and then this happened, and i was given the opportunity to move to a new team. I am currently working in a closed source security team. The team is very enthusiastic and I hope to contribute well in this new team.

October 2005

Yeah, again i am late to update my blog !!! So thought of writing down about the missed months.

I was really preparing myself well and eagerly waiting for this month, as we had the holy month of Ramazan in October. Its amazing how well disciplined and regulated life can be. On the forefront, it might look like just not being able to eat for close to 12 hours a day might actually make you weak, but then, just the fear of not going down with hunger keeps you on the run. Not eating just a trivial thing to do compared to the other so much more important things that one has to do in this lovely month. Controlling yourself from not getting angry at anything [ which i think i lost a couple of times in the month :( ... ], and controlling yourself from not doing anything "bad", gives you so much strength.


Bunch of Roses, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz

Apart from the donts, the "do's" are something that keeps a person going in this month. The holiness of this month, and in regularly praying all the 5 times a day, and reciting the holy Quraan, makes you feel so pure and happy. Just the simple act of being truthful cleans you of all bad feelings. The enthusiasm to go for prayers all the 5 times, and in the nights for Taraven prayers was really great this time. It was even more tough, since it was often raining in the evenings and we had to tread through the rains for the night prayers. By the time it was 10:30 in the night, I was getting so dead tired that i just couldnt do anything else. I was getting some really peaceful sleep in the night, and was waking up fresh at 4 in the morning. Ofcourse, there were some occassions when i was not getting up with so much freshness, but it was some really good habit to sleep early and get up early for the morning prayers.

Looking back, it looks so strange that we dont follow these things always. Being truthful seems to be so easy in the month of Ramazan, but so difficult in the rest of the year. Wish we had a few more months when it was compulsary to do things that we do in Ramazan. As a small start, i have started praying as much as I can even after Ramazan now. Praying now is giving me a lot of good time to focus my energy back, and also provides with some real good time to retrospect on myself. Especially, the afternoon prayers here are giving me a good time to get over that feeling of sleep I always tend to have after lunch. By the time I am back to work after the prayers, i am fresh again. The only other thing remaining now is to find some good ways of making some good use of that fresh energy that i have :)

Fountain

Fountain, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

Now that Blogspot allows me to add photos, i thought why not add a photo to each of my blog ;) ...

This week has been a lot relaxing compared to my previous weeks. Mainly because, we were pushing ourselves very hard to get in as many fixes as we can before the hard code freeze of Gnome 2.12 release happening this September 7th. We finished all our major work on time before the hardcode freeze which happened on August 29th. Our only concern this week was to fix any outstanding critically bad looking crashes that might be found by the QA team. And with Murphy smiling on us, they did find 2 horrendous bugs, which we got fixed on the first day after the freeze itself. So that was something good. We planning to go on a small outing sometime in the next week to celebrate the hardwork we all have put in :-)

With all the work done for Evolution 2.4 release now, we started shaffing out bugs and find the really critical ones that we would want to fix for the next 2.4.1 milestone which would be a bug fix release over 2.4 in the first week of October. Planning for all these things is really nice and fun :-). Atleast you get a feel of how bad or good your own software is :). As they say in hindi "pata chalta hai ke tum kitne paani mein ho"

Just been relaxing a lot this week, and we need to start working full force from this monday onwards ... oh those manic mondays !!!

VidhanaSoudha

VidhanaSoudha, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

This lovely pic has been chosen as the Boot up screen image for SuSE Linux 10 Beta 3, representing Bangalore :-)

Now even more people will get to see this pic !!!

Independence Day

We had a long weekend this Independence day. We had three days off, Saturday to Monday. Well, spent the first day in office and the second day at home with lots of work.

The third day was some great fun. We had planned for a bike trip to Shivana Samudram waterfalls. We were four of us on four bikes. We started at 7 in the morning. The whole day was cloudy, and luckily it didnt rain anywhere. Just a light drizzle for about 5 minutes thats all.

On the way I found this school where they were celebrating our Independence Day. The kids were singing songs and then the girl in this pic behind the mike was giving a well by-hearted speech on Mahatma Gandhi. It reminded me of my days when i was on stage and was strictly asked to make the speech look more real and should always be fun-filled, with light jokes to wake up the sleeping audience :p

We went by the Kanakpura road which was a very good road. Just 2 bad patches. The whole round trip was about 300 kms, and luckily we didnt have any hiccups.

We reached the waterfalls at 11 am. We were supposed to meet another gang of freaky bike riders who had been biking for the past 5 days !!! Yeah, they had been to Tamil Nadu on their bikes to attend some friend's wedding and roam the whole of Ooty and its surrounding areas.

We went down towards the base of waterfalls. It was a very tricky path going down. Well, some adventure. Nothing so great though. The most surprising thing was the huge crowd that we saw. It was astonishing to see a traffic jam on the way to the parking lot. The gate keeper said that he had never seen so much rush here, and that the previous day being a Sunday, there were close to 2000 cars !!! All, because it was a long weekend and this place was very near to Bangalore and also, the waterfalls was full with the rains coming handsome this season.

After spending more than an hour down there in the cool breeze, we decided to go back. But, our great monkey friend KP Rajesh, decided otherways and stayed there for a few minutes before starting his way back on the top. But that fool, thought that we were going towards another stream flowing there and went searching for us all the places and left us scared and worried for one full hour !!! At the end he comes up and says, I thought you guys were going to the stream down there and went searching for you'll !!! ...

After that one incident, we started our way back to Bangalore. On the way, we took a diversion and went into a forest which runs along the river Cauvery. It was an awesome stretch. The initial part of the road was through a village and the road was untarred. After a stretch of about 5 kms, the remaining 20kms stretch was just wonderful. We had beautiful scenes and a very cool breeze all along the way. Especially since it had just drizzled lightly, the air was sooooo fresh and pure :)

We finally reached Bangalore sharp at 9pm in my watch and waited for those crazy bikers who were getting delayed since they were taking snaps :). One the guys had bought a new digital camera, and took pics close to 2.5 GB !!! in 5 days. That was heights of craziness for me. I wonder if he will ever watch all those snaps even twice in his entire life ...

As usual, came back to a very hectic work schedule and got time only to post this blog only today !!!. Hope to improve on this more and start blogging on the day an event happens :)

Gone to ashes

Wow ... what a match it was !!!

I was really thrilled to watch a test match getting sooo close and being so well fought by both the teams, England and Australia. I really pity the Aussies, coming so close and loosing it ... boy, thats painful. This match was so exciting and interesting that i didnt even see the other one day match that was being played between India and West Indies.

Aussies chose to ball after winning the toss which many people were criticising. England were alll out for 408 on the first day [ quite a good run rate that is ] ... and then the Aussies were all out for 308. A very good fight back from England. And then a still better performance by the Aussie bowlers, especially Shane Warne and they restricted the lead to be just 280.

The only time that aussies had chased more than 270 against England was in 1949. So the odds were definately against them. Not many players played any long innings in their reply. Ponting got out for a duck, which didnt help the matters anyway. Australia had lost 6 wickets and still needed about 150 runs. Clarke played some sensible cricket and chased well. But he was out for a beauty at the fag end of the third day [ yeah right ... the whole match lasted only for 4 days !!! , infact it was 3 days and 100 minutes to be precise ]. By the end of the third day, after taking an extra 30 minutes to finish off the tail of Australia, the aussies needed about 100 more runs with Shane Warne and Brett Lee at the crease. There were only 2 wickets remaining.

Shane Warne played some really sensible cricket and scored the highest runs in that innings for Australia [ 42 ] and brought a glimmer of hope. Kasprowich was the last come to join Lee after Warne was out. Lee was a surprise to watch. Though he didnt face the ball well, especially the bouncers by Flintoff, he did play some lovely cover drives at times. Lee got the brunt of all the bouncers and was hit atleast 5 to 6 times on his left hand facing those deadly bouncers from Flintoff. Kasprowich played the best folly to Lee and with the England bowlers taking it easy and bowling all bad bowls, the runs were coming eaily to Australia. The moment Aussies needed less than 10 runs to win, you could the panic getting into the England players. They were really tensed. If it was not for that good surprising bouncer from Harmisson, and had Kasprowich played that delivery well, the Aussies would have had a great come back victory. Englad won this great epic match by just 2 runs !!!

Sporting weekend

After a hectic week, it was very relaxing to watch some very tightly faight matches. Its a rarity that one should get a chance to watch 2 fighting matches on the same day, and played in the same country [ England ]


The first one was the Wimbeldon women's final match faught between Lindsay Davenport and Venus Williams. Oh, i hated the outcome of this match. Davenport was undoubtedly the better player of the two on that day, but Lady Luck smiled on Venus. Venus had such a horrible time playing that day. She had the most number of unforced errors. I guess that says it all. But, yeah some shots [ infact the ones that really mattered ] were won with great skill by Venus. She was gone and out of the game and pulled back in to win the Championship point. But, i guess, Davenport getting injured also helped Venus. One could very easily see that Davenport was not comfortable moving whatever little she moved earlier around the court. So the luck definately favoured Venus. But, we were lucky to have witnessed the longest women's wimbeldon final [ 2 hours 45 minutes ] and the last set going to 9-7. There was some awesome strokes played on court that day which was really amazing to watch. It was amazing to see the way Venus was always in catchup mode all through the match, and had to fight hard for each point and Davenport was zooming through the match all the time except for that one glitch in the final set when she gave away the break to Venus.


And the other match was the tie match between Australia and England for the Natwest series. Damn, i wanted to write about this since july 4th and i am getting time only today ... 4 days before July ends to actually complete this draft :( ... but anyway .. that match i still remember. Last over England needed about 10 runs to win with 2 wickets in hand, and McGrath was the bowler. He was bowling very very low to his standards. He bowled 2 full tosses and one of them went for a boundary as well. He saved his face by getting Gough runout in the third ball. But the worst thing was that England needed just 3 runs to clinch the title of the last ball, and they managed just 2, that too after Gillespie misfielded. It was indeed a very bad of ending a final match, with both the teams sharing the honors. But, if you watch the match closely especially the last over, one can very easily get a hint of a match fixing happening there. I hope i am wrong, but it looked really foolish of the Aussies to misfield of the last ball, to give England that vital run and give away the trophy.

Never miss an opportunity

You definately will either laugh on this or will go nostalgic thinking about how you made use of that great opportunity you had in your life sometime back :-)

Well, if its neither of those for you .. then enjoy this never ending fall

International Celebrity

It had been ages since i last talked to my room-mates and while thinking about their whereabouts, i was surprised to realise that i didn't even know which part of the world they currently were. So i shot out a mail to find out about them and i was really amused by the replies i got :)

Ananth, the tallest of all, was dragging along his days at Austin. He is on an official business there. Expected to return back to India, sometime in July. Guess what, after all the lack of motivation he got from us so that he would not try any para gliding at Jakkur in Bangalore, he found like-minded people in Austin and here you can see him sky-diving :) [ he is the one in green ]

Prashanth, was back from US, a couple of weeks ago, and we found out that we haven't met for about 3 to 4months now !!! A visit to his home is pending now.

Now comes the very great Murali, aka David, aka "King of Brunei imprisoned in Singapore". Poor lad, he was supposed to be there in Singapore for 6 months, and it has already been closed to 2 years that he hasn't found a way back home.

Prashanth gave a very nice description about our very won David, to show how much truly international he has become :).

<snip>

Here is the list of where David spent his last few birthdays ( July 13'th)

2002 -- Bangalore (remember the India-England match Natwest)

2003-- Singapore

2004-- Guntur

2005-- Germany.

This man is truly international!!!
</snip>

I really liked this description and thought about the places where i have spent celebrating my birthdays ...

And i went nostalgic ........

Catchy Colors Photoblog

Catchy Colors Photoblog

This is a very very beautiful blog. This blog consists of some amazing and colourful images taken from flickr.com. Here you will find pictures which have the most catchy colors as is evident from the title of the blog :-)

I had to blog this so i can have a bookmark of this and let all you readers know about it :-)

Rainbow

rainbow, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

Thats a lovely rainbow on the foothills of Ooty.

In the State of Fear

Yes, you read it right. Its not just me, but we all are constantly in the State of Fear. Well, thats what Crichton says in his latest novel, "State of Fear" .. Its an intriguing description of how we fear "global warming" and how various people in this society use this fear to their advantage. Well, the most interesting part of the novel is that, nations have always used this "State of Fear" to control its citizens from time immemorial [ i hope that doesnt exaggerate the point :p ] ... global warming just happens to be the current "Fear" for all of us.

The way Crichton takes you through this is very interesting. I dont want to leak out more information from the novel, and spoil the fun of reading it. I have been into this novel for close to 3 weeks now !!! and i havent yet completed it. Well, i know its a very slow pace, but i dont get a lot of time to read novels these days :( ... Thanks to Bangalore traffic, i have completed almost 90% of the book in 3 weeks reading the book while travelling to and fro between office and home. Otheriwse, i would have taken even more time to read it i suppose.

A couple of weeks back, my uncle and aunty had come over to our home. This was infact their first visit to our home. It was good to have them, but i hope they were not bored. Atleast they didnt seem to :) .. We had been for a small trip to Nandi hills, which was incidentally, my first long trip on my new bike :-). If it was not for my camera chip that gave way halfway through, i would have posted some nice cool pics here.

Last week, i had been to a wonderful trip to Masinagudi, a place adjacent to Bandipur forest, and very near to OOty. It was a very beautiful time of the year to visit that place, with light rains and green trees all around. We were 15 guys who went there !!! ... yeah right, 15 !!! .. we went in 3 cars and 3 bikes. I was not allowed to use my bike :( so had to travel in a car which was such a bore !!! ... If you like bike riding, you will definately not enjoy the car ride... The only adventurous thing we did there was to go for a night safari in an open jeep, and we sighted 4 bisons, as close as 5 meters away from us !!! ... the jeep dirver was so confident, that he would turn the jeep right into the bison, so that the jeep flood lights would focus on it and we could see it and capture some images. Unfortunately, none of us had any good night capturing cameras :( and we didnt get any great snaps of those beasts. We also saw quite a number of deer. so many that on the way back, we didnt find sighting a deer interesting enough anymore. You can have a look at some of these snaps at http://flickr.com/photos/s_raaz/sets/481979/ [ I have one snap for our Kannada film industry fans ;) .. so enjoy it ;) ]

Gnome cvs servers are being relocated by RedHat, and because of this outage, we are not able to do any great work today and hence this blog :p .. Well, it was really long that i had posted anything here anyway !!! Should be posting a good snap too now in my next blog.

Long since no see :-)

Oh, its been ages since i have blogged anything here. Lots and lots of things happening around. First of all, my parents have moved to stay with me at Bangalore, so thats the good news now :) ... Good food i should be saying :-) rather.

Finding a decent house, in the given budget with the list of "mandatory" things to be in a house, was one hell of a job. But then, all's well that ends well :) .. All are happy with the home, and thus the 3 weeks of effort and seeing close to 30 houses, has atlast yielded its results. My parents actually didnt take much time to get adjusted to Bangalore and that was a good thing indeed. But after staying alone for close to 9 months, its been a bit tough for me to get adjusted instead :-) ... yeah, i know it sounds strange, but thats the way it is. I am slowly getting used to the fact that i need to reach home early, and that i need to think about other's schedules before i make my own, and any plans i make for an outing should have the plans of the rest of them matched as well.

On April 30th our new LDG group had been visiting to Talekadu, a fun-filled holiday resort, where we spent some really good time. Some of the good photos on that trip are here.

There has been a lot of work going on for the evolution 2.4 release for exchange, and here is a list of things we are currently working/sloggin on. We are planning to finish of these features by June 15th, so that we are intime for the actual feature freeze which happens to be on July 11th according to this GNOME release page.

And before i forget, here's my best friend's blog :-) .. and another blog of my new team-mate Praveen

Test from email

Sending this from my gmail account.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Quick tricks i learnt

Well, this past month, been reading a lot and also finding some nice quick tricks on the way.

1. This one is really cool if you are usually reading about bug reports on bugzilla. Use firefox quick search feature. Create a quick search for yourself and just type "bugs 65532" and boom, it lists you the bug report for 65532. "bugs" is what firefox calls the "keyword". Well, Harish actually told me about this, and its kinda cool feature i keep using quite often.

2. Gmail has added a new spell check feature. A bit sliggish, but works. And yeah, if you havent noticed the similarity, gmail actually uses vim navigation keys.

3. Found a nice article on Chip mutithreading. Is a good reading.

4. Found some tips for mastering email overload :-)

More to come ahead ...

The fun of reading a book

Do you remember when was the last time you experienced the fun of reading a book? Well, if you really think well, its not when you are holding a book in the late night at around 2, fighting hard to not leave the book and still get some sleep soon so you can catch the bus in the morning, nor is it when you read that one more twist in the story that makes you praise the author in awe, but its actually when you discuss about that one great book you read with another reader who was also fascinated by the same things that clicked to you as well when you were reading it.

Well, thats exactly what happened when i met someone on my way back home in the bus, when he saw me holding Crichton's book "The Terminal Man". We unanimously agreed that the best part of Crichton's books is the detailed explanation of the things in the field around which the story is revolving. The most common thing in all Crichton's book, apart from the vast knowledge you get to gain from the detailed research that he puts in to give you that information, is that one central character, who for most of the time, is completely ignorant to the technical details of the industry in discussion. This thing is very much evident in two of Crichton's books I read, one being "Airframe", discussing about the aeronautics industry and the other one being "The Terminal Man" which revolves around psychology, brain surgery and computers. Well, this also reminds me about "Prey", another Michael's book, which dwells into microbiology and computers and nanotechnology.

I was recommended to read. Robert Ludlum's "Airport". I guess, thats the next one i am gonna read.

Its been really long since the last time i posted anything here on this blog. It was some real hectic time with last minute things going in and our friend Murphy always standing there and smiling on us say, "I told you, if something can go wrong, it definately will" ... Arrrggghhh !!!. We completed evolution-exchange 2.2.0 release as part of Evolution 2.2.0 for GNOME 2.10, and also completed 2.2.1 release. We are all now preparing some requirements in a very unique way, in a wiki, to gather as much information we can and decide on the most important things we can concentrate on for the coming up 2.4 release.

Picasa

Not much work done in office today. Been triaging bugs and reviewing patches. Need to start full steam on the 50 odd bugs screaming aloud for Evolution Exchange Connector 2.1 release slated for sometime in mid-march.

My cousin, Feroz and his friend Najeeb, working in the nearby Wipro office on Hosur Road joined me for lunch today, and we generally chatted about work and other stuff. Took them around at the work place and was surprised to know that they have some space crunching at their offices. They accommodate about 3 more persons for every person in our office. That leaves room for very less privacy ;)

This weekend i downloaded Picasa , a image/picture management tool from Google, and was amazed by its simplicity and rich features. Its a must have tool for people having pictures on their desktop. Unfortunately, Google, is going the M$ way and has this only for M$ and not for Linux, though f-spot seems to be a very close match for this. I havent yet tried out f-spot and thats the next thing on the cards now.

Picasa has this cool feature where you can directly upload your images to the blog as i have done in the previous blog below. What fascinated me most was the speed with which the pictures got uploaded. I have a dial-up at home, and it just took about 10 to 20 seconds to upload this onto the blog, while uploading these pics on any other site, would easily take more than a couple of minutes for me.

Time for some work now ....

Ajmer Sharief dazzling in the night 

DDLJ in Rajasthan 

In the evening 

Train to Ajmer 

Belgaum 

Cognitive Engagement

Found this article on the web and was fascinated by how less focussed computers have made us at work :)

One interesting thing to note there is that M$ actually has hired a cognitive psychologist as a senior researcher for this purpose. Thats some food for gossip on how much money M$ actually spends for creating a user-friendly interface. [ Though i keep hearing that MAC is supposed to be having the best user-interface. ] While on user-interface, have a look at Google Maps and just get bowled over by the sleek interface they have. There is also an article which has diagnised the technology behind this sleek interface. Just waiting to see Indian roads on the google map soon :)

Something ...

Hmmm ... nothing great happening this week around. Lots of bug fixing at work, with all the new features being tested. We have parallel targets nearing now ... the 2.0 final minor release and the first major release for 2.1 ... so its a bit hectic at work.

Last weekend, attended my cousin's [ Abdullah ] wedding. It had been more than a year since i met my cousins and was really good to see them again. The worst thing was that, its just February first week and the summer has already started there. Was drinking water and soda like crazy all day long. I had recently bought a handycam and experimented with it for shooting the wedding. It was a great hit :) ... I shot all the events from the morning to the end of the wedding in a one hour roll and in the evening when the bride reached her new home and people were relaxing from the all day work, i played the roll and they were all sooo happy to see the whole wedding all over again :) ... They laughed at some really funny incidents that i captured and were amazed at the timing of the moments captured. I was myself surprised that some small incidents when seen in isolation look so funny :). Now i am struggling to find a good software to create a VCD from that roll.

Last week, i witnessed one more tie match in cricket. It was the second one day match between South Africa and England. South Africa were batting second and were in need of 60 odd runs in 40 od balls with 7 wickets in hand. Kemp and Gibbs were in, and watching Kemp hit the England bowlers all over the place was a treat. Eng had no way to win this match. Then came in the experienced Darren Gough and got a couple of good wickets. Gibbs and Kemp were back to the pavilion and even Pollock went back. SA finally needed 8 runs of the final over with 3 wickets in hand. The match had turned around completely. But England had finished bowling out all its good bowlers and captain Trescothik asked new comer Kabir Ali to bowl the all important penultimate over. The first over was a noball and was hit for a boundary !!!. SA needed 3 runs of 6 balls. The match was turning again. The next ball was a duck. The pressure mounting and SA lost a wicket in the next ball. SA now needed 3 runs of 4 balls with two wickets remaining. The next ball, SA lost one more wicket for a runout, and the match was running down to the wire. Finally, SA managed to score 2 runs and levelled the scores with still one ball remaining. The England wicket keeper used his presence of mind and was standing upto the wickets for the last ball and all the players inside the 30 yard circle. The batsman missed the short and started running, unaware that the wicket keeper had already collected the ball and stumped him to end the match in a tie. This match was some thriller to watch. This was England's only third tie ever.

ManU just 2 good for Arsenal

Spoilt my sleep to see Arsenal lose. Thats all that happened yesterday :( .. Was awake till 3 just to see this great team lose to the sheer skill and brilliance of ManU.

The first half was nothing less than a scintiallating encounter between two bitter rivals. One running on a high wave after winning five of their league matches out of 6, and the other wounded and hungry for revenge for what happened on Oct 24, 2004. The players were all charged up and there was a foul in the very first minute of the match. Both the teams played very attacking game. An attacking attitude physically and an atacking football as well. There was one attack for other. The first goal was scored in the 8th minute, a beautiful header by Viera from a Henry corner. Giggs scored the equalizer in the 18th minute. Arsenal were back again with a superbly executed goal by Berkamp. It was a very good first half and Arsenal were leading. They had to defend it and thats what they failed at.

The second half was full of some excellent football by ManU. They just over-powered the Gunners. Ronaldo was the hero for them scoring 2 of the goals in just 4 minutes and giving ManU the much needed lead which their strong defense lineup defended it really well. An unexpected goal by the substitute O'Shea in the dieing moments of the match drove the last nail in the coffin and it was all over for Arsenal. They had lost the battle for the championship to the resurrected Mourinho's men, Chelsea, and now are on the verge of losing the battle for even the second place.

I was really disappointed to see the lack of form of Henry. He had the ball with him but never ever converted them to goals. Well, the only consolation being that he was instrumental in both the goals scored by Arsenal. After a loooooong run of wins, Arsenal are seeing down the drain and i guess its time for them to bounce back with a bang. Waiting for the moment to see the Gunners go gung ho once again ....

Back to you ...

Its been a long long time [ about 3 months !!! ] since i last updated this blog.

Quite a things have been happening around for the past three months....

To start off with some new things in life ... bought a bike, a HeroHonda Splendor. Already had 3 services done and its really a charm to drive on. Makes my life so much more easier to travel around the places near my house. Even took it a couple of times to office [ unfortunately those were the 2 sundays of my life that i worked at office ... broke my pledge of never going to office on a sunday :( ] .. but then, the ride to office on the highway was really good :)

My uncle and aunty performed Haj this year and they are back just yesterday. I will be visiting them the coming weekend. Really looking forward to meet them. And its the first time that i will be seeing their grandson, who i have heard is quite a notty kid for his age, which makes him even more interesting to meet.

Things have been pretty tight on work front. Thats precisely the reason for me not blogging anything at all. A very hectic schedule with lots of features being added to the exchange connector 2.2 version and the more stable 2.0 release having its last minor dot release 2.0.4. More information on the sources and builds are available here

More frequent updates to be expected here ... (hopefully)