Raasukutty's

Author: Rajeshwaran SP

  • Angels and Demons – The movie

    Angels and Demons, starring Tom Hanks. An adaptation from the book Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. It is one of the books I enjoyed reading, a unique blend of art of Rome and fast paced thriller. But on seeing the movie, I was totally disappointed. Here goes my reasoning behind it.

    I expected to see Rome and its beauty. Its churches, the art of Bernini, in its regal splendour, if not in the entire movie, atleast some portions of it. I expected to see the cardinals chanting the Carmelengo’s name, it is the highlight of the book. The speech between Langdon and Carmelengo, the speech that Carmelengo gives to Cardinals to justify the war between the church and science, the BBC correspondent and his adventures. I expected an aerial view of Rome, showing the giant cross that marks the Path of Illumination. I expected the final Illuminati symbol, the Illuminati Diamond to be shown.

    Lots of expectations, but all these were missing in the movie. So my verdict will be, if you have already read the book, Avoid watching the movie. If not, go and do watch it.

  • Fixing libmysql.dll issue in Rails

    To fix the error, “This application has failed to start because LIBMYSQL.DLL was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.”  while working on rails using mysql as the database, 

    Copy the libmysql.dll found in the mysql installation directory (mysql\bin) and paste it in your ruby installation directory (ruby\bin)

    Restart the server and viola, the error is fixed.

  • 3 yrs into IT industry

    Today, I complete three years in the professional software industry. I thank all who have lent their helping hand in making the journey possible for a guy with little knowledge in software to what I am now. There are still hundreds of miles to go. This is just a small step.

    Three years. Why is this special? With three years experience, you are no longer considered a newbie. People start to have expectations out of you. You are supposed to have atleast some basic understanding of how a professional software project setup is and how it operates. You are given more responsibilities in the projects. You also qualify for most next level positions in all the job search engines like Naukri or Monster.

    So what have I learnt or unlearnt in these three years? I should say a lot. They may not be big things, but they surely are something that is really needed.

    Things that I have learnt:

    • Debugging a program
    • Searching the internet effectively (Googling up things)
    • Write effective emails.
    • Sell solutions to the clients.
    • Work as a team.
    • C# and the .Net platform. (Yet to start using the features in version 3.5)
    • Technical Writing.
    • The bare minimal HTML, CSS and Javascript.
    • Talking on conference calls.
    • Using Source control.
    • Unit Testing.

    More to learn, more experience to gather, more to everything. Yet again, I am forced to quote, “Miles to go, before I sleep…”. Will be sharing the experiences here on this blog with you, as and when they happen.

  • Dreams

    Borrowing the idea from Sharon‘s post on prophecy of dreams, here’s my take on dreams.

    Dreams are a way to vent out your mind, that is what my mom says about dreams. They reflect the deepest desires in your heart. I dream a lot, by lot I mean everyday. All my dreams are centered on the theme “Me, Rajeshwaran”. I always and mostly 99% of the time dream in the first person, i.e., I dream where I do things, not that I see me doing things.

    One that I have told all my friends about and to the person involved in this:

    “I am in my college’s hangar (MIT has a hangar, where aeroplanes are supposed to stand. We use it for conducting culturals and indoor games, that is a different matter altogether), sitting in the very last bench in one corner. I see her (the heroine), coming a taking a seat next to me. I am in a sober mood. She starts the conversation asking me why I ignore her. She asks me to come closer and sits next to me. (I still remember with precision, the dress color she was wearing, a black shirt with white flower patters and a sky blue jean). One of our college professor, a close aide of her father, sees us there and moves past us. The scene ends there. (Might be, I changed to a different position in sleep, that changed the course of the dream). It again starts, where she and myself are holding hands together, ready to begin a run. We are chased on a bike by the same professor, who saw us chatting. We run across our college roads and reach the Rubber and Plastics Department. There we see a small cottage (There  is no cottage in MIT near RPT dept.), we enter it, actually it a small illicit arrack shop. I search for known faces all over, I see a very close friend of mine coming towards me. He asks me why I had brought her to this place, I tell him that the professor is chasing us. We turn back, at the entrance. we see her father standing. He calls out her name and asks her to come with him. She just hides behind my back and says, “I want to stay with Esh.”

    There the dream ends. What to conclude from this dream? But the dream was one that I will remember forever.

    Some one month back, I had a dream, where I am standing on a mud path. I have to go some route, I see a lion eating a deer lying on the mud path just ahead of me, turning to the right, I see one more lion roaring and getting out of a small pond on the way. I turn to see another path, where a tiger is just lazying. I decide to take the path, where the lion is eating a deer, my consciousness in the dream, says, since the lion is eating he won’t mind you taking his path. Totally weird dream, could not make a head or tail of it.

    Just share your dreams. I invite Sudar, Yuvi, Sukumar and Kaddu to continue on this meme “Dreams”.

  • Weird Feeling

    I have a very weird feeling in me today… I feel, I look nice and better today, smart, handsome. I am feeling intrinsically happy. I don’t feel words to express this feeling. I feel light.

    Wow! This is something you got to experience. What is happening to me? This is not love. Come on, (Sudar, Soms, Sri and Mani … wicked…), believe me. I have not met any girl, to turn me inside out. I am not lying.

    I am experiencing a high! This feeling is really good. Light on mind and heart. Let me celebrate with some great Rock numbers…

  • Lucky Bamboos

    Now we grow ‘lucky bamboos’ in our office desk. For those who don’t know what a ‘Lucky Bamboo’ is, it is a chinese gift item, similar to the ‘Laughing Buddha’, which is supposed to shower luck on the person to whom it is gifted.

    So it was gifted to us, by Saranya. She wanted all of us in the KCPSRS and in the 12th floor of Tidel Park,  to get lucky, lucky to get the work delivered on time, lucky to get more wealth, lucky on all fronts. Ramesh Kumar was instrumental in procuring the items.

    Bonsai from Saranya's Desk
    Bonsai from Saranya's Desk

    Now our Office Space looks greener, much to the dismay and greedy look of the colleagues from the 11th floor (we stay in the 12th floor). Some people even want to steal the lucky bamboos from us by creating a myth, that lucky bamboos provide luck only when it is stolen and placed. We now know where to look for if our lucky ones are stolen.

    What has the bamboos done to us? You could see Prem, tendering and nurturing the plants, by pouring water everyday. Suresh has new leaves on his plants, Ramesh’s and mine are still sleeping. May be they grow late, but will be latest (Abba, Mokka Mokka)..

    More updates on the lucky bamboos will be coming soon. If you need one, let my plants sprout, definitely, I will give you one sprout. That is a promise.

  • Memories

    Just when I was sitting idly this evening, flipping through a magazine’s page, this thought crossed my mind. Why is that I spend a lot of time before the computer nowadays? I would barely sit before a terminal in college for 5 mins to do real work. Mostly we used to watch movies, play games, that is what the computer was for in campus. Every computer in the hostel used to boast of holding 80 to 100 GB of movies. All downloaded from the internet. We never felt the need to learn anything from it. We used to play music all night on the computers, and that is it. I had a hell lot of work then, rather than sit before a dumb terminal. I had my friend (a roommate of mine) saying to me today as he was leaving out to meet his girl friend, why are you always talking to the computer these days. Am I really?

    Yes! I spend most of my time on GTalk or Twitter, talking to people, we call it social networking. I am proud that I own a website.  I feel happy to see the blog stats on wordpress. But what am I doing? Whatever that I am proud of does not exist, they are all virtual, living on the servers globally. Am I missing the real fun.

    Going back to the days in college, still they are the best days I could remember. No worries about the next day, no one to answer to, a hell lot of friends who were really doing the same time as you are, just whiling the time. Sitting on the MIT bund was a favourite past time. We had little pocket money, but life was fun and carefree.

    Going to Airways Hotel (that is just a small fast food shop in chromepet, chennai) at 2 in the night, with just Rs. 20, ordering 6 parottas and then sharing it with friends on the railway platform. It was more fulfilling meal than a great buffet lunch at the Residency Towers, with office colleagues.

    My college life shaped me well and taught me to survive. There was a(there were actually many.. but this is one I am actually speaking about now) girl whom I liked on the campus. We were friends; we used to chat on the phone the whole night over, talking on stupid things. It was the time when mobile phone market was catching up in India, so we had lot of offers provided by the Cellphone operators. My operator plan allowed me to speak at 10 paise per min. Wow! what a deal it was.

    I used to recharge for Rs. 530 a day and then go back to recharge in a couple of days. Days were fun. She was staying at her home with her parents and me in the hostel, but we found place and time to speak. From “GM, wat r u doing?” to “GN, sweet dreams”, SMS was our lingua franca. We chatted and chatted. But one fine day, it all blew up, and we fought. There were multiple chances that I would have made up, but then, I didn’t want to break the ice and so didn’t she. With that ended my saga with girl-friends or girls as friends.

    Now when I want to begin the conversation with a girl, I really don’t have a clue as to where to start with. (Kindly bear with me, I just reeling it all from my head, so I never know why things are not in the proper order… Anyway this is just a musing…) So why did I come to this girl-friend episode, Ya! No girl friend to spend the time with, and so I have more free time to waste.

    What about friends? I stay with  my friends here in a rented house. As a matter of fact, all my room mates are also the ones that I studied in college with. We had great time together, we used to bunk classes, work on the college culturals, advice juniors and enjoy life. We never did study at college. Who wants to study, when being in MIT was itself a privilege? I was good at doing multimedia work for the college culturals. We used to have films screened at the OAT every month. Before the film, we used to have slideshows, and I wield my expertise to fight the opposite team. It was fun time all the time.  So I should be spending time with them. But then, everyone works late in office. Welcome to Indian software market, here Working Late is synonymous to Working Great! I come home at 7 p.m and have a lot of tine until when my friends trickle in at 10 p.m.  (Don’t feel that I am in a dream company where I work a job from 9 am to 6 pm, it is just that the situations have not gotten worse yet). So chatting with friends to pass time has been ruled out.

    Coming to the TV, another idiot box. Only Star Vijay airs nice programs, and all nice programs start at 9 p.m, leaving me to do something from 7 p.m to 9 p.m everyday. Saturdays and Sundays are even worse. Unless or until everyone is home, it is a hell of boredom here.

    So why don’t I catch up with my family, my mom and dad and sis on the phone. Hey come on, how much time will you phone your mom and dad!

    That explains it! I am becoming dumb as the terminal before me! Someone cure me of this disease that has caught up on me, or which I have willfully embraced. What I need now is company! A real company, whom I can just chatter with! God, forsake!

  • What does it mean to be Free?

    Here is a nice video on what we mean, when we say Free…

  • Permalink Structure Changed

    The permalink structure of this blog has been changed following advice from Sudar. Originally the permalink structure was /archives/%post_id%. Now I have changed to /%category%/%postname%.

    I was quiet apprehensive to change at first, coz, I didn’t want the links to be broken and an ugly 404 – Page not found error to be displayed. There is a plugin from Dean Lee site.

    It makes the migration hazzle free. In the PermalinksMigration plugin setttings page set the old permalink structure. In the Permalinks settings page, set the new permalink structure and it is done.

    There is one thing I’m still concerned about. On the Codex page, it is instructed to avoid using /%category%/%postname%/, stating performance reasons. But this structure looks more elegant. Can anyone give me more insight into this?

  • Being a Code Monkey!

    Code Monkey: n, a person who writes computer code for a living.

    The term code monkey generally refers to a computer programmer or other person who writes computer code for a living. More specifically, it refers to a person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the more intellectually complex tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. The term is thus considered mildly insulting, and is often applied to the most junior people on a programming team.

    That is how wikipedia defines the term. I keep asking my self this question, Am I being a code monkey? I know I am better in converting a business requirement into code, than bother about what it implies to the business. I generally suck at testing. Testing is not my job, I can’t possibly find fault in my code. I write a piece, test it, if it succeeds in the first attempt, rather than delving to fix negative scenarios, I move on to the next requirement. Ipso facto, I am a code monkey.

    I, like most of my friends who work in software companies, just write half baked code for a living. We don’t create; we just fix code, if I have to properly call it. Most of us (software or IT professionals) in India, never realize that we are bad programmers. We have full blown IDE in our office, and we just churn out thousands of lines every day, without ever looking for alternative ways. If something bothers us, there is the ultimate destination, Google; just search, find and then Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V code, never understanding it. I am not blaming those who put effort to understand it before using it. I am just speaking about the mass of the programmers.

    Why don’t we realize? That’s because, we get the job done in time. At the end of the day, what matters is the output. We all try to make the management happy. What they need is delivery on time, and we are very good at it and also in times of crisis. Stay late, complete the work and you end up getting an ‘Exceeded All Expectations’ in your annual appraisal. With that comes a salary hike. What more do we need?

    So why am I complaining? I have a job, I get a decent pay, everyone is happy out there, being a code monkey is not a big thing to worry about, many (I didn’t want to use a most here, and hurt the reader’s ego) of my friends are also code monkeys. Why is there a need for this post then?

    I would have lived in the glory of my ego, if not for reading through the posts of Jeff Atwood and Steve. They are two people whom I admire for their writing on programming and programmers. Jeff admires Eric Lippert and Steve admires Knuth. So to me what are Eric and Knuth, programming Gods!!!

    Steve says in one of his posts

    Almost everyone thinks of their programming ability as being just fine, plenty good enough. They can get by, get the job done, do pretty much anything they’d need to do, given time and patience.

    It’s quite a nasty shock for many of our interview candidates when they find they’re unable to do something as simple as reverse a linked list, or open and write to a text file. They’re not shocked that they can’t do it; they’re shocked that we’d ask. Those are specialty skills, and not their specialty. They haven’t been doing much “low level” stuff like that lately.

    Not all interview candidates are shocked when they can’t do it, because many of them don’t realize they’ve written something that could never work: broken code that’s not even remotely close to a correct solution. These programmers are particularly cheerful, being so clueless that they don’t even know they’re clueless.

    Jeff says in his post,

    There are two “classes” of programmers in the world of software development: I’m going to call them the 20% and the 80%.

    The 20% folks are what many would call “alpha” programmers — the leaders, trailblazers, trendsetters, the kind of folks that places like Google and Fog Creek software are obsessed with hiring. These folks were the first ones to install Linux at home in the 90’s; the people who write lisp compilers and learn Haskell on weekends “just for fun”; they actively participate in open source projects; they’re always aware of the latest, coolest new trends in programming and tools.

    The 80% folks make up the bulk of the software development industry. They’re not stupid; they’re merely vocational. They went to school, learned just enough Java/C#/C++, then got a job writing internal apps for banks, governments, travel firms, law firms, etc. The world usually never sees their software. They use whatever tools Microsoft hands down to them — usally VS.NET if they’re doing C++, or maybe a GUI IDE like Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java development. They’ve never used Linux, and aren’t very interested in it anyway. Many have never even used version control. If they have, it’s only whatever tool shipped in the Microsoft box (like SourceSafe), or some ancient thing handed down to them. They know exactly enough to get their job done, then go home on the weekend and forget about computers. 

    It hit the nail. Once in an interview I was asked to write a program for a linked list, I was dumb struck. The interviewer was a ex-employee of Microsoft. He just posed this question as the first one in the interview. I just drew the Linked List representation and told him this is the algorithm. He wanted me to write the program on paper. I just couldn’t get it done. (It is a different story that I came back home furious about myself and settled down to complete writing the program in one sitting. I could not get it when it mattered.) That is when I knew, I am a terribly bad programmer. 

    I have been living in a Matrix(Movie), like Neo, oblivious of the fact that real programming is not what I do. Real programming is a lot more than what I do. Reading through the writings of Steve and Jeff, I realized I am being presented the red pill. I could either take the red pill and delve deep into the Truth, or just ignore it, and continue my living.

    I am taking the red pill!!!

    There are a few of posts that I would recommend to the curious reader.

    Being the averagest

    Practice Programming

    Skill Disparities in Programmers

    Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

    Mort, Elvis and You

    Two types of programmers