Here it begins

In about fifteen minutes from now a taxi will take me and my wife to the Airport and so will begin my sabbatical and the ensuing trip to Europe. Travelling to Europe has been my dream for a long time and it has finally come true. We are travelling to France, Italy and Switzerland, in that order. It is a 20 day trip and self arranged. Setting up the whole trip ourselves, i.e. without a travel agent, was a lot of hassle but at the end we feel a sense of satisfaction as the trip seems like our own creation. I am looking forward to the days off from work. I know that I thoroughly deserve this break and I wish to make the most it i.e. lie idle at many different places. After all, lying idle at the same place is itself a lot of work.

 

Rashmi is getting restless so I gotta go. Hope to write again soon.

 

Au Revoir

The mixed feeling

I have been really busy with the developer summit event that happened at Adobe over yesterday and today. My team, which consists of mostly new members, took a very active part in it. Overall, we were amongst the top performers. We ended up winning good number of prizes, one in each of the team events. There was only one team who won more trophies than us. Now frankly I should be happy and I am but there is still some sense of loss. With the amount of effort that we had put into preparation, we should have won better prizes. I am not saying that we deserved better prizes, we didn’t the other team was better than us, but that we didn’t get output in line with our efforts. The area where we lacked was creativity. Now, creativity is hard to learn. After all, creativity  is about breaking the conventions to come up with interesting things. I love innovation and, at least I believe, that I am able to come up with innovative solutions to technical problems. But I don’t have the same creativity in arts, including of course performing arts. Some people are really good at it. When you require this kind of creativity then your best bet is to get hold of people who have this gift. You can try to be creative yourself, and occasionally you will see good results, but frankly a genuinely creative person has an unfair advantage over you. Your effort will simply not help that much. That is what I think at this point. Well, this is my first reaction so it might not be accurate but first reactions do carry some value and so I am expressing mine here.

 

Thankfully in my line of work creativity in arts isn’t that required or useful. What a stroke of luck! Somehow, I have ended up choosing a profession where my strong weakness is not a big handicap. I put this on luck because my choice of profession has not really been a very though out decision. I have sort of gone on with what I liked doing. When I passed out of college, software was a good option, it paid well and I liked computers a lot. It was one of the best available choices but it was also the only choice that I tried.

 

Anyway here I am, with mixed feelings. On one side, I feel overjoyed over the success that my team members have achieved. Not only in terms of trophies, which will give them immediate gratification, but also in terms of the experience that they have gained in working together and making things happen, which they won’t realize for a long time but benefit from implicitly. I also feel that I have let them down a bit. It would have been great if I were this creative guy who wins them the first prizes, but I am not.

 

At the end of day you have to take life with a pinch of salt and say to yourself, “All is well”.

Cent OS Linux

These days I am trying my hands on Cent OS Linux. Cent OS is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but is free.

 

So what’s this enterprise fuss all about. On your personal system you would want to try out the latest and greatest stuff. If the stuff doesn’t work you can remove it or if things go horribly wrong you can just reformat your system. When you are running a server used by thousands of people you don’t have such flexibility. Machine restart, which is a normal operation on personal desktops is a big deal on enterprise servers. Such operations have to be notified in advance with estimated downtime. Before you restart the system you need to take it out of the load balancer pool and when restarted, add it back. In a nutshell, you are much more likely to want things to work perfectly on your enterprise servers than you would on your personal computer.

 

So, what can you do to make sure that things don’t break suddenly or frequently on your enterprise server. One thing you can do is to stop adding new functionality and only take fixes. This is the philosophy behind Cent OS and RHEL. Once in a while(typically seven years) a major version of this enterprise OS is released. In between releases, only bug fixes are picked up for the installed software, no new features are taken. This is a very difficult thing to achieve as most software would keep adding functionality. The guys behind Cent OS do this difficult task for you and provide you easy to update patches. When I say easy to update I do mean it. Updating is as easy as running a simple command like “yum update”.

 

So if you do not want the latest and greatest changes to server software and just want to run your code in a predictable way then Cent OS is for you. It is surprisingly easy to learn but make sure you do learn it. Unlike windows where you can just find things by groping around, you do need to learn your chops on Linux. But, once you do so you will be way more productive. Working on windows is like playing Teen Do Paanch; it is easy to learn but that’s it… you don’t learn further. Working on Linux is like playing a sophisticated game such as bridge or poker which takes a while to learn but where there is a new thing to learn every day.

Finding Files on Linux

Short and sweet command:

find –name pattern

 

e.g. if I wanted to search for all files that start with document, I will say:

find –name document*

 

That’s it.

Nine reasons why used books are better than new books:

1. They are cheaper.
2. They are good for the environment. By buying them you save paper, hence trees, that would have gone into the new book.
3. They have the important sections marked.
4. They are already creased so it is easier to open them
5. They are already creased so you don’t have to worry that you’ll crease them.
6. They connect you to a person. Sometimes there are funny comments at places by one of the previous owners.
7. They offer better return on investment. Their resale value is better as compared to the resale value of a new book.
8. They have a certain surprise element. Chance discoveries like an old dried flower or an interesting bookmark are real possibilities.
9. By buying them you give use to an item that would have remained in the owner's store room for years and years.

Ditto rocks

There are many advantages to using ditto over using the plain old Ctrl+C but I was pleasantly surprised to find another one today: Ditto maintains the clipboard across shutdowns. Wow!!

Man on the wire

Today, while going through a tutorial to improve my English grammatical skills, I was seeing the documentary Man on Wire in chunks. It was after a long time that I was watching a documentary. The act of watching was serving the purpose of providing the much needed rest between sessions of stress. This meant that was much more relaxed while watching the movie, compared to last time when I found the movie a bit slow and had the tendency to fast forward it. While watching in this manner though I found this documentary very interesting.

This documentary is about a tight rope walker who wants to, and ultimately gets to, walk on a rope connecting the twin towers, without anything to save him if he were to fall from the rope. The movie is mainly in English but there are lots of monologues in French so I couldn't understand those parts. I found the movie very interesting and many of the scenes were quite exhilarating for me, more so because I am afraid of heights. The protagonist's passion for the hobby and for the ultimate goal of walking over the towers is well depicted. Even the protagonist's friends who help him arrange the spectacle, which was not easy bu any means and is a major portion of the movie, seem to have a lot of desire for making it happen. They are excited and a little bit concerned at the same time. There are funny little anecdotes interspersed in the movie that make the movie flow effortlessly.

Engineering aspect in the movie is also something that piqued my interest, being an engineer myself. There are a lot of strategic and engineering problems that the team has to solve to make the spectacle possible. They need to reach the top of the towers in a clandestine manner, be able to connect a rope on two ends to the two towers with the capacity of holding the rope walker's weight. All very interesting problems.

I am yet to finish the movie. I am pretty sure I'm going to like the end as well. I expect the final showdown to go down with event but I don't know.