...on and on and on...

Found this really loooong sentence in the book I am reading, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.

Whoever, at that day, had passed through the little city of Vernon, and walked over that beautiful monumental bridge which will be very soon replaced, let us hope, by some horrid wire bridge, would have noticed, as his glance fell from the top of the parapet, a man about fifty, with a leather casque on his head, dressed in pantaloons and waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow was stitched which had been a red ribbon, shod in wooden shoes, browned by the sun, his face almost black and his hair almost white, a large scar upon his forehead extending down his cheek, bent, bowed down, older than his years, walking nearly every day with a spade and a pruning knife in his hand, in one of those walled compartments, in the vicinity of the bridge, which, like a chain of terraces, border the left bank of the Seine.

Now this book is translated by someone but I don't know if the translator will take so much liberty so as to add such a huge sentence without it existing in the original work. In my memory I haven't read a longer sentence than this, if you have seen something longer or even feel that you can write one longer let me know ;-)

Seize the bugs!

lAfter quite a long gap I got a break from enhancing my PowerPoint skills and got chance to do some hands on debugging. 3 instances which given the time I spend on PowerPoint, were heaven sent…

The first bug we were tracking down was a fairly tricky one since we didn’t have the hardware to test our code. So, two of us who were looking at this had no option but to just peer at the code. Everything seemed absolutely fine, the previous developer needed the contents of a widely used structure. But since this structure was in a different file had made an EXTERN out of it and then proceeded to use the contents. Initially we never even suspected this structure could be the problem. But after looking at all the other parts of the code and eliminating all the other scenarios we were left with nothing but to verify this variable. Nothing looked wrong at all; it was being filled upon initialization in a separate file and then being used. After lots more of staring and global searches we noticed that the structure being filled upon initialization was the local variable of the exact same name. The global had never been touched but since the names were the exact same and also that the variable was very widely used the developer had not verified that the wrong variable was being imported. So we just proceed to use the right one and things were fine.

The second one was a painfully slow debugging session that required about 3-4 hours. Here the software would start fine once, twice and but during the third time would get screwed up. This was slow because after u ran it the 3rd time there was no option but to reboot the system. And since it had the Vista OS it would login to a normal user account first from where you had to logout and then login to the admin account and then start the debugging. The intern in our group was with me on this run. We did so many reboots that we lost count but each time we painfully small amounts of progress. To what we didn’t know and to where we didn’t know either. Finally we found that for some strange reason the processor affinity being set in the application was not carrying over to the driver. This is given, we had no doubt that it carries over from the user space to the kernel space. We couldn’t figure out why the affinity was not sticking for this particular application whereas another application using the same driver was working just fine. We gave up on the reason behind because time was short and made a simple fix of re-asserting the processor affinity in the kernel one more time and things began working.

The third was a minor one where it took me 2 minutes to solve a problem that someone had spent an hour and a half looking into. It took me 2 minutes because I knew this problem existed and had faced it before :D. What happens with this tool is that it quietly installs a driver in the system32/drivers directory and never uninstalls it. So when you have a new driver your changes never show up since the driver already exists in the drivers directory and the OS picks it up every time from there (because the registry entry points to there also). So you have to remove the registry entry and additionally go delete this file only then will the new driver get loaded. Stupid thing, will need to be cleaned up by the next release :P

That was a good trip...

11 of us went to Dubare in Coorg about 2 weeks back. I won't write in a lot of detail because it’s been about two weeks and I am probably too lazy right now, but here are some of the memories...

- The rough night time journey in the back of the 12 seater bus to Dubare. In the last seat, A and me couldn't sleep a wink.
- The miniscule size of the upma serving for b'fast and S's reaction to it: "Has he given me this for some quality testing or what?"
- The charming bungalow...sigh!
- The trek through all the greenery...(double) sigh!
- The boat we used to cross the river. When I say boat I mean 10 odd 15 feet long bamboo sticks tied together in a bunch (not laid out flat as in a raft) :)
- The numerous shallow river crossings done on foot on the return trip of the trek and the awesome teamwork :). P's ankle getting twisted was slightly scary.
- The picture I took of K and P ;)
- The campfire and "office" conversation with S and N.
- The post dinner late night carrom games and how we, the weaker team, frustrated the "pro" team 3 times in a row by taking the queen each time.
- The sunrise on the bank of the backwater lake. Getting a view of Kumara Parvath from the bank and showing off saying that I have climbed that mountain. :D
- Cricket in the driveway and making rules on the fly a la "Calvinball".
- Rafting and then the subsequent jumps off the raft. Teaching the first timers to float over from their backs to their stomachs. Single handedly "plucking" 3 people out of the water on to the raft :)
- The numerous jokes and imitations done by S in the bus...the bus. They were really fun because all of us had experienced those things at some time or the other...the other...and we were all able to relate…to relate. :)

There are so many more small memories; A trying to command a stray dog; K saying that the dog will eat bananas and R running to establish the proof; the dhinchak dvd player; kajara re; people learning to stay afloat and their individual reactions :D; the coracle ride; the food provided by the hosts (including kiwi fruit); Parushrama and Prashant; etc etc...(triple, quadruple, penta, hexa...) sigh!

The rates have gone up...

That is how the vegetable and fruit vendors in Bangalore "mourned" the death of their beloved actor Dr. Rajkumar.

Some of the other ways people mourned in Bangalore :
- Police beating up innocent bystanders
- Not so innocent bystanders beating up the police

- A news cameraman getting bitten!
- Burning buses and smashing car windscreens
- Auto rickshaw drivers in general charging 20Rs more
- All channels other than news channels on cable tv getting blacked out.

Saw lots of people generally frolicking and having fun on the roads burning tires and other misc things.

A few of us couldn't even properly say bye to a close friend who is leaving Bangalore tomorrow :(

I hate to think what might have happened to this city if by chance Dr. Rajkumar hadn't passed away due to natural causes...

Yeh meri kahani

Really beautiful song by Strings from the movie Zinda...

Chubten kaaten yaadon ke, daman se chunta hoon
Girti deewaron ke aanchal me zinda hoon

Here the writer, who is caught/stuck in a hopeless situation, is saying that he is selecting thorny (painful) memories that he has been carrying with him. Then the second line is that he is alive despite the fact that everything is crumbling around him. Really liked the fact that despite all this pain he calls it "aanchal". Aanchal is usually used to describe a happy/safe/protected kind of place.


Koi nahin hai, koi bhi nahin
Na pass na duur
Ik yaar hai dil ki dharkhan
Apni chaahat ka jo elaan kiye jaati hai

Here the author says that there is so much loneliness that his heartbeat is his only friend, one who is going on professing her love with every beat.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman...

EHM: Economic Hit Man

John Perkins an ex-EHM wrote a tell all book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman".

EHMs have existed for decades but have become more important with the current increase in the rate of globalization. They are responsible for selling inflated development plans to poor and developing countries and convincing them to buy into these grand but totally unrealistic and unachievable plans. In the process the poor countries are cheated out of their natural resources and left riddled in debt and are brought to their knees. Then this is used as leverage and circle continues. This whole system runs into trillions of dollars all being siphoned from the public into private corporate houses in the US. John Perkins gives several such examples about countries like Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela. He describes how companies like Bechtel and one he worked for gained from this.

Also when EHMs fail to convince a country or its leaders to buy into their plan or when a leader of a country starts going astray in the middle of the plan the result is military action like the invasion of Panama over the Panama Canal and of Iraq.

My colleague Rajeev has written two nice posts about the book and you can read them here:

Confessions...
Confessions...(II)

Learning to Fly...3 times over

There are 3 songs I know by this name...all of them near the top in my all time favorites list.

Pink Floyd has a haunting "Learning to Fly" with a nice lead solo at the end.
Foo Fighters have a fast and raunchy "Learn to Fly".
Tom Petty has a "Learning to Fly" with a folksy bluesy twist.

Here are some lyrics from these songs...

Pink Floyd - Learning to Fly
No navigator to guide my way home
Unladened, empty and turned to stone
A soul in tension that's learning to fly

Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly
Think I’m done nursing patience, It can wait one night
I’d give it all away, If you give me one last try
We live happily ever trapped, If you just save my life
Run and tell the angels, That everything is all right

Tom Petty - Learning to Fly
So I started out, for God knows where
But I guess I’ll know, when I get there
I’m learning to fly, around the clouds

But what goes up must come down
I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings
Comin’ down is the hardest thing

Fargo

I suddenly realized I haven't been giving the movie Fargo as a "must see" recommendation to people. This struck me when I was watching the BAFTA awards on tv and William H Macy came to present an award. He, Steve Buscemi and the other top 2-3 cast members in this movie do such an excellent job.

Disturbing movie overall. Set in the cold US states of Dakota and Minnesota (Minneapolis), this movie has an extreme "chill" factor to it. The movie is about this person who in desperate circumstances hires two men to pull off a kidnapping of his wife. Basically to extract a ransom from his father in law. Things go way off plan and get out of hand. To make it worse a pregnant cop starts investigating and she turns out to be an extremely virtuous and persistent officer.

I'll take a bold step and go ahead to describe it as an antecedent of the kill bill movies. Though it is not as fast paced as the kill bill movies, there are scenes that are as horrific as they can get.

Go watch it...