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