Code Farmer

Syndicated blog

2007-01-08T08:44:38Z

Hi All. Thanks to Yathin, I have syndicated my blog. Given below is the syndicated url.
Kindly add it to your friends list.

http://www.livejournal.com/friends/add.bml?user=codeczar

Ciao.. Off to a meeting now.

Need info

2007-01-08T06:33:05Z

How can I generate a syndicated rss feed which my friends on LJ can add to get my posts from blogspot?

PS: I know LJ is better so dont flame me for being on blogspot

Blog movement

2006-12-15T17:10:37Z

My blog has now moved to http://codeczar.blogspot.com

Why do I want to go to the Sahara?

2006-11-08T15:29:50Z

So that I dont have to ask others what Sahara looks like...

My experience with booking online tickets for Air Deccan

2006-11-06T04:30:24Z

Ok. So here is the story. My cousin is getting married in December and I had to book tickets for my Mom to travel to Delhi. Browsed the net to find good fares and got a decent deal with Air Deccan, 7398/- to and fro. So I go ahead and fill in the card details (on my Firefox browser) and submit. I just get a blank page. No confirmation, no response nothing..
If that wasnt enough to piss me off, I had to register again (using Internet Explorer) and in the hurry I left the Salutation as Mr. instead of Mrs.
But they had another box for Sex where I correctly chose female. Filled in the card details and submitted.

I realized my mistake on the e-ticket, when there was a Mr. printed in front of her name.. So I decided to call Air Deccan and get the problem fixed. Before I could talk to the operator I was told that the call is being monitored, I wondered why. This lady picks up the phone and I tell her what happened. (Actually I still thought I entered a Mrs. and not a Mr.)

Then she tells me there are two separate boxes, one for Salutation and one for Sex. "Sir you should have changed the value in the left box also" and I argued "How can you have a female who is a Mr. ? Who wrote your online ticket booking application". She also told me it would cost me 200 bucks per ticket to get the change done. Well at first I blew my top and then agreed to getting it changed.

The next thing she said was absolutely ridiculous. She asked me "Sir, would you like to change the Salutation from Mr. to Mrs. for both onwards and return trip." That really got my trip and I started blasting her, telling her things like "What kind of a stupid question is this? How can she by a Mrs. while going and Mr. while coming back". After few seconds sanity prevailed and as I was about to tell her the credit card number the line got disconnected.

So this is what I am left with.
1) An e-ticket for my Mom with the title as Mr. (Will get that fixed at the airport)
2) No idea what happened to the first transaction (HSBC says it will take 3 days to reflect my purchases on the card)
3) A wait of three days and nightmares of interacting with Air Deccan folks to get the extra ticket cancelled if it was booked.
4) Loathing for the sites which do not support Firefox.
5) A blog post about Dhakkan

Finding Chuck Norris

2006-11-03T10:03:26Z

Search for Chuck Norris now

Internet Quotes

2006-11-02T10:44:07Z

Internet quotes

A few good ones from them:
"If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0"
"The best accelerator available for a Mac is one that causes it to go at 9.81 m/s2."
"My software never has bugs. It just develops random features."
"Programmers are tools for converting caffeine into code."
"The great thing about Object Oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones."

Commiting political suicide

2006-11-02T10:20:13Z

How to commit political suicide in one easy step

Call your troops dumb..
What was he thinking when he made such a comment.

American troops are working hard in Iraq. Why they are there is a separate topic in its own but you don't call them dumb.

Something to add to it. He served in the navy in Vietnam.

So what does that make him?

All work and no play

2006-10-30T16:17:49Z

All work and no play makes Aakash a dull boy. So Aakash decided to do something about it and bought PS2. I bought "God of War" and the "Hitman" (For the uninitiated these are games) DVDs along with the console. Well to say the least these games rock.. They are awesome fun and you feel like playing them again and again.

But there was a similarity that I noticed which was kinda weird. Both God of War and Hitman had their main character as bald people. Well going bald aint so bad after all..

The first main character with hair that I encountered during my PS2 endeavours was Lara Croft .
TombRaider Legend is a good game. Still playing it..

So any PS2 gamers out there. Do suggest some good games.

Sun buys Hewlett and Packard

2006-09-18T04:51:08Z

Sun Microsystems have bought Hewlett and Packard.. Yes its true if you look at the blog entry of the CEO of Sun "Jonathan Schwartz"..

So here is the story..
Some artists came up with the idea of mixing technology and art and put in a Java enabled mobile phone in their art which enables them to trace the location of their art. And they display the location on google maps (Pfft!! They should have used Yahoo! maps instead) on their website..
Artist's site

These guys made a sculpture of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (and their garage ofcourse). And according to Jonathan's blog they unsucessfully tried selling it to HP and they didnt want to buy it so out of his respect(Ya right!!) for Hewlett and Packard he bought the piece of art .

He just doesnt stop there he poses with them wearing a Sun T Shirt.. Cheeky eh!!

Now this has given me a business idea..
If HP would have bought the sculpture I would have approached MF Hussain to make a portrait of Hewlett and Packard and sold it for double of whatever MF Hussain would have charged me. Jonathan Interested??? I still can ask Hossain to make a portrait of Hewlett and Packard or may be Ray Ozzie or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates :)

Ray of Hope

2006-08-03T09:29:57Z

Online stock market of words...
"Your ideas are worth no more than the media coverage they get"

www.trendio.com

Got hooked on to this game last week.. Really interesting game. You play stocks with words and based on the frequency of appearance of the stocks in news the value of the stock goes up or down...

This game is a real life saver. When you are down and dont feel like working for some time.. When you are waiting for a meeting (like I am now), When you have nothing better to do.. go play this game..

Do we even care

2006-07-27T05:32:23Z

I am deeply saddened by events in Lebanon. Some political leaders just dont get that war is not the solution to all problems. I am not taking sides here but I feel that the seen of destructions seen below are really uncalled for.

I heard in the news that some Hezbollahs are carrying M16 assault rifles...

I wonder where they got it from????? Any guesses..
And the people who sold them to it should not expect them to hang the rifles as a showpiece in their living rooms..

And then they send their secretary of state to negotiate for cease fire.. (It is like giving a kid a lollipop and asking him not to eat it)

My question is WHY? Is this war needed? Dont think there is a simple answer and even if there was one, I would not understand it but just imagine if this happened in your very own backyard...

Peace!!

Trek from MM Hills to Nag Male

2006-07-26T05:47:19Z

After hearing our black magic stories we got a bus to MM Hills at 10:30 PM. I was so tired and wanted to sleep badly (Working in Yahoo can be tiring you see) so I just packed myself in my seat and slept like a baby..

No I dont know the guy sleeping next to me who was using my shoulder as a free parking for his head but I was too tired to mind it..

We reached MM Hills at 1:30 AM on Saturday and spent 10 minutes searching for our Guesthouse "GuruDarshini". The names were very confusing we came across "ShivDarshini", "GiriDarshini" and finally "GuruDarshini". We woke up the guesthouse staff and got ourselves two rooms (Oops.. If I still havent mentioned we were 8 guys who went for the trek.
Harish (The organizer of this trek and the model of the group), Aakash (Thats me), Jagga(Fanta man and professor in History) , Shivyogi (Time keeper and Tent man), Anil (just playing Anil), Vijayendra (Mr. Minneapolis), Sumit(our very own senior citizen) and Srinath(our cameraman) ).

From left to right the folks are: Harish, Vijayendra, Sumit, Jagga, Shiv, Anil, Aakash (Moi) and Srinath

So we guys got two rooms (number 19 and 22). But we were not alone in the room, we were given company by the wonderful resident cockroaches :)

After our morning tea/coffee we started exploring MM Hills and even before we started our model starting giving poses

Before going ahead you should realize that if you go on a trek with Harish and he takes a photo of you or the group he expects the favor to be returned within 30 seconds.. So 70% of our photos have harish in them. This number is greater than 50% because of some snaps taken by other folks.

We went to the "Malay Mahadeshwara Temple" and roamed around in the confines of the temple.

We saw people praying (Ya right!! like we would have seen people playing golf in the temple) and they placed their hands on a stone and we doing some ritual.. No idea what it is.. Putting the snap here so that you could let me know what it is.

The good thing about the temple was that it was not crowded with tourists taking snaps and running around all over the place. The place was really nice and relaxing, the problems were outside where you had some beggars and people forcing you to buy pooja samagri which you didnt want. But I think we can handle all that..

Then we saw the temple elephant who was 35 years old but looked way older when we looked at his toe nails but we just took the mahoot's word for it.

There were many donkeys in MM Hills (No we are not refering to ourselves) and we also saw one who looked really cute like the donkey in Shrek..

Had breakfast of Idlis and Vada. The person who was serving us kept asking us if we wanted "Upma" and Harish kept correcting him, asking him to call it "Upit" as we were in Karnataka, and "Upit" in Tamil Nadu is called "Upma"

We went over to the forest rangers office and waited for our guides to turn up. They were gonna take some time so we went back to the guesthouse and bought our luggage to the forest office.

(Natural photo on the way back to the guesthouse)

We came back to the forest dept to see another group from YHAI waiting to go for the same trek..
We also met our guid "Naganna" a local from MM Hills who was going to take us into the Jungle...
Naganna can be seen leading the group in the photo below.

So our trek finally started around 11 o clock.. For the initial part we were just trek on a tar road and being sarcastic and saying "Ya right, Walking on tar road is a really difficult trek". We were soon gonna eat our words..

We soon hit mud and stone roads..

After some time the road was just a stone road and we came across some beautiful landscapes. We saw a couple of houses in the distance with trees around them and hills behind them. Looked like the kind of paintings we did in our childhoods. The only thing missing was the sun rising/setting behind the hills.

(The picture doesnt do justice to how cool the place looked)

After trekking for some time we took a lunch break.

where we had company with some dogs.. We had overtaken the other group to the lunch point (The other groupd got a 500m head start as they covered the tar road distance in a Swarak Mazda) and they soon joined us. Their guard had a gun so we started fooling around with it (Disclaimer: The gun did not have any bullets in it and the cartridge was empty and removed. Warning: Never fool around with guns)

We had harish trying to find good spots to take photos :)

We got some *Free* food from the YHAI folks. So nice of them to offer us some chappatis and we really enjoyed them. PS: We are gonna pack the same food for our next trek.

After restarting the trek I got a cramp in the upper thigh and we were taking breaks very often thanks to my cramp. And we utilized the breaks to the fullest.. Here you can see me and Harish modeling for Glucon-D. Amitabh Bachchan watch out here we come..

Here you can see Harish and our Supandi(Anil) taking a break under the tree.

Look at Anil, he looks so tired. Thats what carrying a tent for a long distance can do to you :P

The terrain was very tough and you can see here how steep the inclines were..

and a break for posing for photographs is ever welcomed. Her we can see our model and cameraman trying to recreate titanic scene at the edge of the cliff.

A piece of Trivia about the background of the picture. There is a dirt trail in the background where Verrappan has killed the SP of police after deceiting the SP by telling him that he would surrender. He cut his head of and threw the body on the road..

Here we can see jagga taking in the view

Finally we reached the village and here is the proof :P

Gotta go now. Will continue later...

Mensa test

2006-07-19T07:19:14Z

Yay!!! I cleared the Mensa test (www.mensa.org , www.in.mensa.org). Got a 99+ percentile on the test so that certifies that fact that I am in the top one percent of the human population of Earth in terms of intellect and analytical thinking.. It would sure look good on my resume :) Pretty excited about this but then there is this joke about mensa people I would like to share..

A mensa meeting was going on in a restaurant. One of them realized that the salt shaker had pepper and the pepper shaker had salt in it.. So they started discussing on how to move all the pepper from the pepper shaker to the salt shaker and vice versa. People came up with really brilliant complex answers :) But not everyone agreed on any one solution.. After 3 to 4 hours of discussion the waitress came along and asked them what all the discussion was about..
They explained what the problem was and she said "Well is that it.. Why are you breaking your head on it" and exchanged the caps of the salt and pepper shaker and said "Done.. There you have it. Pepper in pepper shaker and salt in salt shaker".

So basically the point is that you dont have to have a certificate to prove you are brilliant.. But it doesnt hurt to have one :P

Tough questions

2006-07-18T12:32:48Z

There are some questions which are universally branded as the wrong question to ask... For instance asking a lady her age is definitely a big NO NO.. (The only answers you will get lie between 16 and 24, It is like their age gets frozen at 24) Asking a politician if he is corrupt, (The answer is always going to be a big NO.. But in reality it depends, whether they are corrupt or not)..

Then there are some demographically wrong questions.. Asking a French/American national whom you hardly know about their family might offend them..

Another question which offends people is
"What is your salary??"

Ref: http://gayathri-rg.livejournal.com/2191.html

Trying to find out a list of questions which usually offend people...

Pulling a plain

2006-07-18T11:07:08Z

WARNING: This post is obfuscated and you need to know the context to understand this..
After reading this you might think I have lost it but it would make sense only to a subset of people..

The last weekend on Sunday around 3PM I received a call from a friend of mine... (Lets call him plain)..
Plain gave me some news and asked me to meet him at 4PM at corner house in Sheshadripuram...
Due to some personal reasons like giving company to my fishes I could not make it to Corner House...
I missed out on a Historic!!!1 occasion but what was more shocking was the news I heard the next day.. .
I was ill and didnt come to office, Happened to check my mail from home and my Jaw dropped... Plain had just pulled a plain on us... What more the occasion was compared to a Formula one race... I wonder why it was a Formula one race and not a WWE match.. It could have been like, First I become the main contender and then and win the championship instead of qualifying and race day... It could have been compared to cricket also, but why F1..

Tell Me, Tell Me, Tell Me Da!! Tell Me!!

What was more shocking was the day after sunday another friend of mine(lets call him Mitwa) tells me that he has stopped drinking and so do some other guys lets call them Freeloader and Foreigner.. Mitwaa pulled an Aane yesterday by replying to each and every mail..

Whats up with this world... Everyone is pulling a plain...

Wonder if I will be able to pull of one...

Comment!!!1

Something Fishy

2006-07-18T04:31:49Z

Well if you find fishes gross you are warned do not read any further.... (Better to be careful and post a warning rather than finding a comment like "I find fishes gross, You should warn people that this post contains fishy material" )

Got this new aquarium with 11 fishes in it.. 8 golden gold fishes, one black glod fish (Yes, black gold fishes do exist http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fresh/goldfish/BlackMoor.php ) and two sucker cats...

Well the fishes are really cute and have lots of fun playing with the neo action figure (neo from Matrix, http://images.movieeye.com/store/images/matrix-revolutions-neo-reloaded-mr-anderson-normal-clothes.jpg) in the tank..

Got to rush for a meeting.. Will give more details about the fishes later..

Himalaya Trek

2006-07-14T11:58:31Z

Really nice pic that was taken during the Himalaya trek...

Webservices, CSS, HTML, PHP, Javascript

2006-07-14T06:26:00Z

Yay!!! Working at Yahoo! rocks...
Last week I got out of my C/C++ shell and was exploring frontend coding and webpage related stuff...

Learnt so much about web technology in one week :O
I didnt learn so much in 4 years of engineering...

To give a 50 thousand foot view of these things being used in web development:
HTML : (Yes we know what it is) used to specify structure only (Can be used for presentation but refrain from using it for that)
CSS: How to present the structure (used with HTML to define how each tag needs to be displayed)
XML: Returned by webservices (CSS can be linked with XML to display XML in a prettty way)
PHP: Used to write dynamic code plus curl webservices (Hehe.... this is cool).. Can be used to write webservices that return XML
Javascript: Do fancy stuff on client side..
AJAX: Make asyn requests to webservices to make users go OOOoooh that is coool....

If you didnt understand a single word of what I said thats ok...
I was just too happy with myself that I had to scribble down what I accomplished in one week :P

Transformation

2006-07-01T07:28:42Z

Its a saturday and I am at office.. How boring??? Let me take this time to scribble about some transformations that I have noticed in myself. (No, I am not mutating into an green alien, These are some technical mindset transformations)

I happen to be one of the old school guys. The "Do it yourself" types. Before coming to Yahoo! all the code that I wrote used datastructures (like tree, list, arrays and what not) all of which I wrote. Never even bothered reading STL (BTW I still havent read it). After coming here I realized what I have missed out on, how quick I can develop my programs by using STLs. Apparently I dont think I missed out on too much in this front as I compared the efficiency of the code writen using STL and my own style and guess what as expected my code was faster than STL (Yay!!). But I guess in IT industry you should always use components which someone else has made, so if something goes wrong you can quickly start pointing fingers :D . Plus nowadays we have really powerful machines so the ease of writing code wins over efficiency of the program and I think I am a convert. PS: Still while writing code for some programming contests I prefer writing the data structures myself..

The next transformation that has happened to me is that I have developed a soft corner for front end programming. (Oh No!!! What have I done, Am I gonna write front end code, all those HTML tags will drive me crazy)... Well its not all that bad, PHP is just like C (That what they always say, Comeon try the goat liver, it tastes just like chicken ).
Infact I found PHP to be more easy than C, and with the knowledge of a few basic HTML tags and PHP I was able to write a decent enough website.. (What qualifies as decent varies from person to person so dont laugh at me if and when you see the site).. And yes I also picked up some AJAX basics.

I also realized that the best backend programmer that you may be, it is the frontend that gets the eye of the user. The success or failure of the site and the product will depend largely on the frontend and then the neat features. What use are the features if you cant just find then on a page :D

So I can safely say I am a new STL convert who doesnt mind doing some PHP stuff :)