Acid Ink

Will be back to bug you :P

2009-05-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

Yeah, looks like i was on a sabbatical this long... anyway, looks like time is right to be back to be able to bug you folks. will try to keep pure tech stuff out of the way and if at all something does appear, il make sure it has got something to do with a humor or an interesting narration whatever. Cia soon.

A laughingstock!

2008-07-23T02:18:00.001-07:00

Recently, one of my friends posted me this link. Its a commercial to promote "Ruby on Rails".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99EHyG2jQA

I was in splits in just 2 seconds after the video started. It goes on like this, 2 guys on stage - one claiming to be RoR (Ruby on Rails) and the other is .Net... the .Net guy speaks up - hey there is a new feature in C#3.0 (Am already wondering, whats the framework got to do with the language, anyway lets listen to what he has to say) and the new feature is called "Dynamic Typing" (I was like - what the heck? I never knew! ) He continues, it is called "var". (Am in splits! Cut off the video right here)

What i would call this is "mediocrity". You are promoting a programming language and you do not know what the heck is "Dynamic Typing". Alright guys, nice commercial, i've got a good impression on RoR and i swear i'd never even think of using it, even for a hobby project !!

The Road Block...

2008-07-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

Aw, the 18th of July 08 was an unforgettable day. So it was a friday evening around 5pm i was sitting in a Bus, heading towards Seattle from Bluemond. Things were pretty usual on that friday till i noticed something absurd, something really funny. We were travelling over a ramp that would help us enter WA-520 and i could clearly see that Bluemond police have cordoned off WA-520 and the road was blocked to public transit. Hmm, something goin on.

We cruised along (dont ask me how, shall get to it soon) and within minutes merged onto I-5 and holy lord! I-5 suffered a similar fate. Cmon, you gotta be kiddin me, whoz blockin an Interstate highway? Only difference was it was the Seattle police this time. And i just noticed an array of police officers whizz alongside our bus. Every exit, ramp, entry, in/out of I-5 was blocked.

Our driver turned on the local radio, i heard it say, "For some reason, I-5 seems to be gridlocked". One of my friends pulled out his y-phone and checked the traffic. Trust me, what we saw was funny, very funny. The traffic before us was fully green and behind us was all red ;) Well, it was like this, since we, Xsft's interns had to goto seattle from bluemond for a party, the company had had the entire route blocked to public transit but open only to us. Waaw, its so evil but without a doubt good to be on the other side of a road block, atleast for once :)

Yaaaay !!!

2008-07-22T23:26:00.000-07:00

YaaaaY! So, what the heck am i screaming about :)
Alright non-technical folks, am gonna disappoint you, this is purely a tech post.

So, there is this spec for partial methods in C# :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wa80x488.aspx

And the very last line says:
You cannot make a delegate to a partial method.

Why:
Am not pretty sure of the reason behind this design decision, but one of my friend points out that the reason could be,

say you have a partial method declaration like partial void foo();
and a partial method implementation like
partial void foo()
{

}

Lets say now that you make a delegate to Foo, and after sometime, you may choose to remove the implementation from the code. So partial methods allow the impl to be removed and declaration to still be there. But still you'll have your delegate pointing to foo and it will result in a build failure for the project and may be they preferred not to encourage such confusions?

Alright, whats the big deal about it?
Well, have u tried creating a delegate to a partial method ever?
Darn it, it works! I mean the C#3.0 compiler shipped with Visual Studio 2008, accepts a delegate to a partial method.

Well its not a tricky bug or a gotcha in the C# compiler that i stumbled upon, but a mere non-adherence to the compiler spec(the ultimate authority).

I even thought it could be a documentation defect but turns out that its not so. Right now, the C# team is investigating this.

Anyway, finding a bug in the shipped C# compiler is something that i could scream about... so, YaaaaY !

Whats cooking?

2008-06-22T21:44:00.000-07:00

Helloooo !
Been a long time since i roughed up the space here... so what was i upto?
Well, been quite busy - going places around WA and OR.
Covered Snoqualmie falls, Mount si, Mt St. Helen (Active Volcano) in Washington and the International Rose Garden, Mt Hood, Horse tail falls, Multnomah falls in Oregon.
Shall post the pics on picasa soon, stay tuned :)

From Lunch Alone To Luncheon !

2008-06-04T23:39:00.000-07:00

My first day at Redmond started off quite remarkably. It was exactly lunch time when i realized that i had no one to lunch with! I was standing alone, lost in the overwhelming crowd of Bldg #41's cafeteria. I turn left right but no dice. Alright, so be it, lets grab a bite and get back to work, i thought. I quickly parsed through the array of stalls - mexican, chinese, lebanese but they all had one common defect. Absolutely no veg stuff at all. It can't be that bad., i scanned one more time and in some unnoticeable nook i found veggie pizzas. Bingo! thats it. Thats all i could ask for. Somehow lunch for day #1 had been taken care of!

The Second day was a bit better in the sense i already knew where to get what i can consume. I went right up there and picked up the pizzas. Thankfully, a different topping today but if it wasn't so i wouldn't have complained either. Sigh! Lunch alone. Again! When i was almost done, i met some guy who was searching for company. I nodded him to join me and we spoke over lunch or whatever was left of it.

The third day was more better. My mentor and another team member took me for lunch. I should say they were pretty cool, discussing day to day activities than arguing over tech stuff. We were discussing China's quake, Jaipur blasts and Myanmar floods and fund raising ideas to counterbalance the miseries of the world.

The fourth day saw some progress as i discovered an Indian cuisine at Bldg #43's cafe but still it was a 'lunch alone' for me.

A week folds over, without creating a proper lunch pattern for me. Very well, so be it, i was saying to myself. A dozen days later, today, there is Jan, Har, Div and San with me. We lunch (not just that, we do a bunch of more activities) together these days! My 10 min lunch break unrolled itself to a full blown 60 min break. We bring food from home, buy food from the cafe and swipe a lot of food from the rest of the gang. A proper lunch these days consists of good swipes from atleast 5 different plates ;-) The food strewn, sauce smeared table reminds me of my Undergrad days. 3 years hence those good old days, to me, it appears that the best things in life haven't changed a bit. Perhaps life's code is recursive too!

Break? Fast !

2008-05-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

It was 8 am, i was in my office already. Had some good amount of work to finish up and i was early on that day, skipped breakfast(whats that?) as usual. I tried to get down to work but the box of corn flakes in my office draw was tempting (neram da). Aalright, it wont take more than a minute. I withdrew a lil bowl, put in some crispy flakes, crunchy oats, strawberries (i stock a lot in my office draw), off to the cafeteria - some sugar n milk and in goes the bowl to the microwave. Back to my seat, what more to garnish with? A touch of honey and breakfast is ready! It was simply a wow! For a moment, I felt like i've never had better stuff before. At the very instant, dosais (my staple breakfast back home) flash before me and the song vaseegara was fading away in the background. Snap!! I could only manage to let out a sad smile. I force myself back to work to put up with another day but not before inking this.

Coming soon...

2008-05-26T00:34:00.001-07:00

Coming up next (Sometime soon),

"A walk down the pike street..."

Stay tuned ;-)

Whats New in C# 3.0 - part 2 : LINQ - Language Integrated Query

2008-05-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

Perhaps 'The Most Impressive Feature' that comes with 3.0 if u ask me.

A Very powerful feature, in the sense that it adds 'Query Language capabilities' (Declarative?) to C# (an OO language). What i mean is, just instructing the compiler 'what you need' rather than telling it 'how to do that'. Sounds familiar? yes, that's what SQL constructs do for you.

Select cname from customers;

All you say is get me all the customer names - you dont specify how to do that. The SQL query processing engine does that for you. How good or how useful will it be if C# had such querying capabilities?

You can query from a collection of objects, or an XML or a Database in pretty much the same way. The same piece of code can query any data source! There are a few nifty issues surrounding this, like, the objects should implement IEnumerable, the structure of the SQL query will be a bit different from the Standard SQL syntax etc.

Rather than me explaining how linq works, i get u guys straight to a channel 9 video. I promise its really good and worth watching!
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=1&PostID=114680#114680&d=0

The future is C#.

A short detour from C# , a mock at some "angel"

2008-05-20T17:37:00.000-07:00

< /evil >

That was inscribed on some badge that i got. Well, to cut a long story short, it was a freebie from "dugle" and the inscription signifies "end of evil".

If you dont know what represents "evil", scroll down a bit and read my post "Inspiration starts Somewhere!".

I wasnt very amused by the much hyped "end of evil" propaganda anyway and then one of my friends fwded me this link today:
hit-pause-on-the-evil-button

Dearest Dugle, Practice before you preach.

Readers, as you'd know, the net is not a secure place anymore.
And every company's motive is to make fast buck. There is No Angel in this "Web Space".

*dugle - 'a lie', in madras lingo and not some XYZ corp incase you misconstrued stuff here.

Whats New in C# 3.0 - part 1 : Implicitely Typed Local Variable Declarations

2008-05-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

Here we go! True to my word, i've started up on the C# 3.0 series (making no further guarantees tho ;-) ).

Implicit typing of local vars:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Crudely translates to 'monkeying around with the syntax of declarations'.

The 'type' of the local variable being declared will be 'inferred' by the compiler from the 'expression' that is used to initialize the variable.

A Very Rough Syntax aka CFG (*):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
'var' identifier = expression;

Examples:
var i = 5;
var s = "hi";
var objCat = new Cat();

The above examples directly translate to,
int i = 5;
string s = "hi";
Cat objCat = new Cat();

Semantic rules enforced(?):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Obviously, you need a initializer on the right hand side.
2. And the right hand side is an expression. The right hand thingy cannot be an object BUT a NEW expr that includes an object is accepted.
3. Compile time type of the initializer expr CANNOT be a NULL.

Scoping issues:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you declare a local variable by specifying 'var' and if a type named 'var' is already in scope (User defined perhaps?), the declaration refers to the already existing type. However the compiler generates a warning to alert you.

Note:
~~~~~
This article is just my understanding of the language's spec., hence might be subjected to all forms of human misconceptions.

(*) - Not from Spec, so i do not guarantee correctness
(?) - Not exhaustive, i have listed only a few out of many

Up next - Whats new in C# 3.0

2008-05-19T15:29:00.000-07:00

Alright, enough of story time. Lets get down to business.

Looks like i've been out of touch with C# for quite sometime, prolly my knowledge is still in v1.0 while C#'s current version is 3.5
Lets skip 2.0 (its too old now) and get right into 3.0 framework (1 year old already but yet quite new to most of us).

So, stay tuned folks, the next few posts will take you through the new additions made to the C# language in its revision 3. I hope to cover some of the interesting features like "implicitely typed vars", "extension methods", and (brace urself) "lambda expressions" and "Linq" if time permits. Lets see how far along i can get :-)

Cheers!

A thriller in three lines

2008-05-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

Kate was still awake in her bed, it was half past two on that chilly night, trepidation hit her with full force when a grisly silhouette manifested itself on her bedroom walls...

Oops., i just remembered that i have a meeting with my boss, gotta go, you are welcome to finish the story ;-) And you have half a line left to wrap it up!

Can i get an 'Encore' ?

2008-05-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

It had been quite sometime since i used any of the utensils in my kitchen.. Typical of any Computer Science Grad student here.. The exams were over too.. There was no reason for me not to go and cook some food but i had grown too lazy for it.. Thought id stroll out for dinner ( dunno what to call it but it was 5pm already and the sun was already low in this Eastern Part of North America)

My roomie had once talked about one good place called 'steamers' where they serve 'Indonesian' style food. I decided that was the place for tonight!
The menu is here: http://www.steamersgville.com/ourmenu.htm

I decided on the Coconut curry and rice with Veggie & Tofu Add Ons. From previous experience, i restrained myself from choosing the 'Hot' Flavor.. I settled for 'Medium' this time but still no difference. I could feel the sting of Hot spices all the way from tongue to throat.. The food was Hot, Spicy but sumptuous, no less!

Hold on for a minute.., i get a strange feeling of seeing this scene, playing this act many a times before but it was set elsewhere on this planet and there were more actors with me.. Whirl you back real quick 4 years behind time., there i was, couped up at a lil canteen within my UG college campus.. I just transferred you to the Southern Tip of India now. Simply called 'Crescent Canteen' with no 3/5 star nick names or caliber, it would be a desolate place until 6pm in the evening when all the students really huddle together to satisfy their stomach ( should i add, "after satisfying their hunger for knowledge through the whole day" ? ) It was our routine to raid the canteen typically 2-3 times a day. 10.15Am during the recess, 12.20Pm lunch break and after 4.20pm when the day ended.

The gang was there at 7 pm on that day after extended hours of work in the lab ( a typical semester ending scenario) , tired and exhausted ofcourse ;-) There was Mb, Harry, Den (now Rabbit), Kams, Cat Go, Buggy, rooney ramsamy and me. Might have been more people too coz it always happened so whenever someone bought food :D Money was pooled in, I swear the highest denomination of currency that caught my eyes was no more than "10 Rupees". ( Make note - you current gen college going high profile hot shots! ) We were 8 in number anyway so still managed a decent sum of money. (Just for the records, Roonie Ramsamy and Ajith made a record collection just by collecting 1 Re per head in class for reasons not revealed till date :D) We ordered fried rice, french fries, noodles and what not but i should stop and mention about the "chola pooris". Priced at 10Rs, they were served "sizzling hot" and the 'literally red' channa complemented it pretty well. Any sane person would refrain himself from taking a dig at the still steaming poori but not us! It would take us less than a minute to plough through the poori and the 'red coal' like channa. God knew of its ingredients but none of us gave a damn. The searing heat on the lips barely bothered us. Any innocent on-looker would take us for savages but what the heck, who gives a damn?. The upturned chairs, rickety tables strewn with food and smeared with tomato/chilli sauce usually indicated to us that its time to vacate the place ;-)

Ssss.. The Indonesian delight was burning on my lips and i snap back to reality.. There was none beside me to grab my food.. I slide my hand into my pocket, out pops a piece of paper. There is no face of a smiling Gandhi or the Tri-headed Triumphant Lion, instead is a stern Lincoln staring down at me. There is no inscription reading "10 Rupees" in 12 languages either but something that says 1$. I brush aside the dollar bill and pull out a lil plastic card which people use to pay for their food in this part of the world. I walk out, with immediate thoughts of asking those 8 names mentioned in this write up a simple question - "Can i get an Encore?".

P.s: Readers, Excuse the 'Blah' this time ;-)

Take a bow to Mr. Pervasive

2008-05-08T01:12:00.002-07:00

It took me at least a couple of years to give myself a 'Go!' on creating a blog. Primary reason attributed to is Mr.Time ;-) But then, it took me just a couple of seconds after setting up my blog to write my first post (strange? Not really, tell you why later ;-))

I was still marveling at the 'push-to-post' technique of blogging that has become so prevalent in this modern age. Believe you, me, 80% of the web space is junked up by web logs. Ah! Alright, you caught me, true - i made up the numbers just as CAT aspirants tend to (sorry folks, cant help but to poke this one at you all) but the number is quite close to what i said :D

Yeah, back to the topic, i was marveling at the ready-to-choose templates and stuff and i incidentally reached my profile page(http://www.blogger.com/profile/16491995901447178281) and then something catches my eye. A profile visit of 7 ? just moments after setting up the page? Good Lord! What is the world coming to? Are internet users so jobless? Fine lets see that, press Refresh, visits increased by 1. Ah, i get a strange feeling here.. something to which i've always had the knack of finding out.. Refresh again, same result. One last time, visits now up to 10.
Why in the heck should my own visits to the page count towards Profile Views? Wrong? Er. No but certainly Funny! Whatever, now to justify the title ;-) lemme introduce you to Mr. All Pervasive - none but our very own "Software Bug" (push-button-hosting wont be spared either). Take a bow!

There, thats all it took me to write a blog ;-) So, it isn't strange after all that there are trillions of blogs all over the internet. And by the way, Welcome to 'Acid Ink'.