Reflections

days are surely flying or i am in a special zone ;-)

2011-09-10T05:40:00.002+02:00

Haven't made a post for 2 months now !!!!
Coming to think about it, I was a trifle busy these days. There are a lot of things occupying my mind and I am certainly not getting leisure time. At work front, things are looking good. NR has been too kind to me and work items have been motoring along well. Work hours have been a hell but that's ok. One can not get everything at the same time :-)

I am now focusing on Zen and I must credit Osho for this. Some time back I was very confused. I had become certain that there can't be an entity like a God that humans have envisaged and that i have praying to all my life. But I also did not want to become nihilistic, completely ignoring everything around me and living like a thinking automaton. I don't want to entertain negative thoughts but if I reject everything about a supreme power then there won't be any lofty goals to aspire to. This life is too evil, too churlish to believe in. Then I read an article by Osho in which he made almost similar arguments and exhorted his followers to try out Zen, a philosophy which does not force any god down your throat. And I obtained D T Suzuki's book on Zen almost by serendipity. I loved its initial chapters and I tried some of the things that he had outlined. And seriously I loved them. I am still very ignorant about zazen but what ever I have learnt about it, it is certainly something I would like to master.

why do i need a god?

2011-07-24T06:58:00.002+02:00

Why would someone need a god? someone to pray to? someone to look forward to, for help, for succour? It is so easy to blame the fallout of your actions (executed due to your choices) to a higher power. That is why the concept of god has been so popular throughout the history of mankind. Someone to be feared, someone who would judge us one day, someone who would either welcome us to the gardens of eden or who would push us to penitentiary. All my life I have been fearful of earning God's wrath. All my life I have prayed to a higher power for blessing, so that difficulties can be surmounted by some divine power, so that I can be saved from unsavoury incidents, so that I can always get the best of everything, so that I can get love, so that I can be appreciated for my work. Nietsze had said long time back that god was dead, that he has been dead for a long time. Osho said that if there is no god for you, then learn to live with that empty space. William Bramley says that the concept of god was created by an alien race to keep us humans under control. So the final burning question is - is there a higher power? Should we pray to him? Will He ever manifest Himselft to us? Will it be also vengeful or will it be merciful? And what if there is no such higher power? Will that make our lives harder to live? So, was G. right? that an evil magician has put us under a spell so that we only focus on day to day life and not focus on our spiritual growth.

random number generators

2011-07-23T05:51:00.002+02:00

Of late, there have been many concerns, raised in general by our disgruntled operators, that the random number being generated is not good enough. We have been using java's secure random generator which is very very good and so the possibility of someone guessing the next no in sequence is impossibly low. But I was asked to do some searches for some other algorithms and so it began. In the very first search I found out that there are much better algorithms available openly like mersenne twister or xor shift rng with huge period and good randomness. I found that xor shift rng algorithm can be easily coded and so after some more searches, the code was ready. We launched it on the test machine and I set the sample size to 2000 (pretty low, but that is what our operators do, take the latest 2000 values, i know it is pretty weird but...). When I compared the 2 results, one from the secure random generator and one from the xor shift rng, the results looked more or less same. There were some results which were favoured more, while there were some which were not favoured at all. Then I increased the sample size to 300000 and let it run. This time when I compared the result, the xor shift rng's results did look more balanced as the count of individual results was more or less same to the average count that should have come. As of now we will put in the changes to only 1 game and then we will see.

are we slave race, really?

2011-07-17T07:57:00.002+02:00

These many years I had been bothered about the lack of control seen in our kind, the kind of urgency that we display, the utter lack of peace at any moment, the violence and aggression exhibited, the thieving nature, the aggrandising characteristic. It almost seems like our race is doomed, that it would be better for everyone if we all would just be killed, be exterminated. On top of that, I did not understand at all the same behavior exhibited by our so called gods, the vengeful nature, the extreme punishment meted out by them. And this was true for all religions.
Recently I read The Gods of Eden by William Bramley and I must say that a lot of my questions were answered. Basically he says that human race was created as a slave race in exact replica of our creators who took pains to make us as dumb as possible so that we can keep on doing what they expected us to do without us trying to emulate them and become some sort of competitors to them. This is exactly the same thing stated by Guirdjeff that we all are sleeping because some magician wants us to live but not to break the shackles and become free ourselves. This idea can easily be stretched to the kind of mean monstrous machines as seen in movie Matrix but the truth is far closer home. Mr Bramley quotes extensively from ancient scriptures and a lot of what he says makes a lot of sense. It finally made me to discard the last remnants of the god like figure ingrained in my psyche. It was much easier for me this time to discard what I had learnt all my life. The worst part was when I ran into some enormous difficulty. If this would have happened 3 years back, I would have taken refuge in my god. But this time around, it was first a bit of shock that I don't have anyone to turn around and expect to be protected. Then the realization made me a lot sadder because from now onwards it is just me. I am still curious about the true nature of mine and whether I should identify myself with my self (?) or with my mind. And it has been fascinating to suddenly interrupt a train of thoughts and to think about whose voice was it, my ego's, my mind's or really my true self.

cars 2 is boring

2011-06-26T16:23:00.002+02:00

on an aside, we saw the cars 2 today and it was definitely a bad movie. there are some sequences that are good, especially the starting sequence involving the mcmissile but then the movie goes for a free spiral downwards. there is no story, no plot and seriously mater was irritating :-)
that actually set me thinking. i have been planning a novel and have spent some time thinking about characters. what i lack is a definite storyline, which will connect all the events coherently. let me just put it this way - it has been very very tough. writing paragraphs and sentences is easy. conjuring up conversation is hugely difficult. making it real is frighteningly impossible. so i should not be too harsh on bad movies or bad books. at least they tried.

where have i been?

2011-06-18T06:00:00.002+02:00

last time i checked myself, i was doing ok in this world, was reasonably fit (mentally as well as physically) and things were looking rather well. then the news came that our company has merged with another. that event caused so many ripples, created so much turbulence that it is only today that i remember myself again. what have i been doing? creating games, yes. developed a game resembling rat keno, no mean feat here :-)
worked hard, watched movies, read books. but it was not me. i don't think you will understand it, but it was me on an auto pilot. it was me all right doing things, but not in complete control of myself. with things happening quickly, the mind automatically steps forward and starts driving things and I, the real me, goes in hiding, safe in the belief that all is well. so where does that leave me and in what state?

lost symbol and other books

2011-04-10T13:45:00.003+02:00

I know that I am very late, this book has already made ripples and Dan Brown has won many accolades, but still, having just finished the book today, I must say I was impressed. Da Vinci code was a much better read, but this book is also very good, though the preaching at the end started getting on my nerves :-)
Marrying the concept of science as we understand and mysticism as experienced by mystics has always fascinated people. Some time back I got an opportunity to go thru PD Ouspensky's works and he was basically trying the same, trying to understand this world as it is truly, not as is felt by our senses and is given shape by our mind, but as it is, in its real form. There were some amazing observations. Finally I found the courage to read the Beelzebub's books (G's book) and it was hard to understand. I think G's intention was to create a Bible kind of book, full of parables with layers and layers of meaning hidden, sometimes in word play, sometimes obscured by the way the words have been used. Very very difficult to understand and on top of that, the implicit assertion that he knew the secret history of mankind and some really tall claims as to why mankind lost its way were very very hard to digest. Finally the only thing driving me thru that book was to inculcate in me an attitude to tolerate something which my mind was rejecting as bullshit.
After all these readings and meditation, the only thing I am certain of is that I am totally and thoroughly confused. I agree with the sentiment that nothing is secret and that everything is freely available. You need the eyes to find what you seek. And to develop that vision, you have to work very very hard, first to unlearn and then to learn.

what exactly is spiritual growth?

2011-03-20T06:31:00.002+01:00

We lost our broadband connectivity some time back and that is the reason behind the gap between blog entries. Over this period of time, I read some very interesting books and tried some novel methods to remain centred and to be present in the here and now. And then last week, I ran into Tertium Organum by P D Ouspensky which has forced me to do a quiet evaluation of what ever I have learnt over this life. What an amazing book !!!! It does not spoon feed the reader but leads him on to a stupendous journey and then leaves him exactly at the right time so that the reader can explore things on his own. The book is simply ingenious as it marries mathematics to inner awareness. As of now I am still trying to understand the 4th dimension and the nature of time. It is taking a lot of time but for a change I really want to do it slowly. The more I think about them, the more nuggets of wisdom I extract.
Come to think of this, is this really some kind of growth for me? can i call it spiritual growth? or is it just another lesson that i need to learn before life introduces me to another set of challenges? All my life, I have witnessed this fact, that life would present me with a set of challenges and once I have learnt my lesson and am ready for next set of challenges and am willing to face the next set, my life would go topsy turvy and I will find myself in another context. Initially I was very jealous of simple minded people who learn one set of challenges and who live in the same context, day in day out. When I tried this out, I started festering. My life almost became meaningless. And so I was forced to make changes and move on. And now I am here, learning some new lessons. But now I am not impatient for the lessons. That was one of my learnings :-)
Recently I started watching Roadies 8 and it is indeed a different concept. So far it has been enjoyable. There was a guy A. in the group who was really very loud, very boisterous, very abusive, politician kind of guy. He reminded me of many such characters who I had the misfortune to meet. For A., though, the comeuppance was swift. He has been kicked out of the game. Sometimes, I would marvel at the foolishness of such people. Do they really think that they can somehow keep on fooling people all the time? I don't know. Recently I have stopped believing in the causes and effects theory. Things happen, just like that. And one has to accept it and keep moving on. Retribution for the mess can happen or can not happen. That is not in my control. But my thoughts and emotions are in my control and I will choose to turn my back on such unsavoury people.

walking in zen, sitting in zen

2011-01-16T08:59:00.004+01:00

After a long period of time, I found another book by Osho on zen "walking in zen, sitting in zen". It is another collection of his discourses and needless to say, it is very enjoyable. The language used is funny and serious and a far cry from the very plain english that i had found in the immortals of meluha. And on top of that osho's book is about meditation, my favourite subject, about which i love to read but fail to practice :-)

on the work front, i was loaded with work, games had to be modified, some modifications had to be reverted back, it was kind of nonsensical yet very draining and stressful. But I did find a very interesting thing about screen resolution. You see, the older laptops have a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 and the newer ones have a resolution of 1400 by 900. So, if one game's images work well on newer laptops, it may not work on older ones due to this resolution issue. If the cards are well spaced out on our monitors, they may be crowded together on the older laptops. Initially, it was mind boggling. How can something which work well on our pcs won't work on other laptops? Our woes boiled over this friday when we rejected 7 issues from clients on the ground that we can't simulate them :-)
But then we did find the root cause behind such issues and so by setting screen resolution to different values, we were able to see many display issues and were able to fix them on time. had to work on saturday also, which was very painful yet very rewarding too.

challenges of making game run on differently powered pcs

2011-01-09T06:35:00.003+01:00

If you are working on a game which you want to run on differently configured PCs, there are a bunch of things you need to take care of, especially when it is driven by a timer :-)
So, if you have a game which is timer driven, the result to be shared with all the clients and the result to be displayed on the client which takes time (9 seconds on windows 7 with 2 GB ram, 7 seconds on windows 7 with 4 GB ram, 13 seconds on windows 7 with 1 GB ram, 11 seconds on windows vista with 2 GB ram, 15 seconds on windows 7 with 1 GB ram, 15 seconds on windows xp with 1 GB ram), the problems compound. The decision basically boiled down to whether we would put different conditions for display depending upon the pc configuration so that we can control the result display on the client and so that timer can remain synchronized on all the clients or we would want to do something to the architecture itself to somehow synchronize the timer on the server with all the clients. After 1 week of trying out different things, my mind was full of thoughts and of pending doom. And at that instant, I suddenly realized that if I continue in this fashion, the problem won't be solved. I tried calming my mind and gradually started ticking off things that had not worked. After some time, my list was empty but my mind kept on churning ideas. And one of them just simply clicked. Depending upon the time spent in displaying the result, I just had to start the timer at the right value so that it remains synchronized with the server. Very simple solution which did not add any complexity to the code. And it worked too. So far, no one has complained of timer synchronization issue.
There was another such issue yesterday. 2 threads were using the same static flag in their run conditions, but one of them was working and the other was not. And this would happen only in 1 particular scenario when the clock would wait for a condition to fulfill before starting. After some time, I realized that it was a race condition. The one thread which was not working was being created before the 2nd thread was created. And the variable was being initialized in between these 2 calls. So, I set the variable before these 2 and it all started working properly. So how did it work for other scenarios? If the thread displaying result was being run, the 1st thread would have to wait. By this time, the other thread would have created the 2nd thread and set the flag to true. And so it was working properly. But if for some reason, the result displaying thread would go to sleep, the 1st thread would be invoked and would exit quickly but the 2nd thread would work properly :-)

apsara is a flawed book

2010-12-18T05:43:00.002+01:00

I recently read Apsara by Surya kant Tripathi Nirala and I must say that i had great expectations from the book. The hindi was flawless and the sentence creation was amazing. But the poet went overboard in describing the beauty of heroine and went wrong in making the heroine a pure one despite being a prostitute. The plot picked up pace later on and the way the poet described some scenes were mind blowing. The end was swift and I don't know why I was dreading that the end would be on a tragic note and that's exactly what the poet did. All in all, I found the book to be flawed. Nevertheless, it was a good reading and some of the characters would stay with me for some time. The concept of Apsara or someone very beautiful is akin to the concept of anima and animus by Carl Jung. The same concept was also discussed in detail in Amrit aur Vish. Looks like this concept was very popular among writers some time back.
On the office front, the scene has turned bleak. After the euphoric month of november, when i seriously thought that i would reap rewards for my hard work, I was given rude jolt in the month of december. I need to change my circumstances but I am floundering. Must find a way out of this self created mess.

amrit aur vish

2010-12-11T14:22:00.003+01:00

I haven't read a hindi book for a long time and when I ordered amrit aur vish by amrit lal nagar, I did not have much hopes from it. I have never read any book by nagar saab and so didn't have many expectations. but boy, was i wrong? this is one amazing book, simply delicious. The story moves in 2 dimensions where in the author is one protagonist who creates characters for his novel from his acquaintances and relatives. And the hindi used is simple dialect, khadi boli, which sounded so funny initially but then started feeling so home like. I finished it in 1 week, reading it very slowly, feeling the taste of hindi on my tongue. This book also gave me an inspiration to start writing my own story. It does not matter if there is no plot or characters. Just start writing and after some time the plot will make itself apparent and once it happens, it will take a life of its own. I am going to do that and on this blog itself :-)

movies, books and flash client

2010-12-05T08:13:00.002+01:00

Once we had completed the project on time and with good quality, I knew that we won't be having any bugs or issues. perhaps enhancements could come in, but they are anydays welcome. but nothing for the whole 1st week exceeded the expectations. so first 2 days were spent in testing and more testing and the last 3 days spent in development of flash client for roulette. with no great pressure at work, i spent some time in my other pursuits which i indulge in from time to time. it charges my batteries and makes me feel whole. So, i started reading books, from short stories of anton chekov and arthur conan doyle to inane books such as thrillers and mysteries, like murder at temple street. I also spent some time in savouring Durgesh Nandini. It is a good book and I had nursed a desire to read it for a long long time. I am currently reading Amrit aur Vish which is a classic.
I watched Golmaal 3 and I laughed a lot especially the scene in which Prem Chopra meets Mithun is amazingly well made. I also watched Rakt Charitra 2 for Suriya and I seriously adored his expressive eyes.
I spent time with Kush. Well, he is a grown up kid now so we spend most of the time fighting with each other, I trying to instill some discipline in his life and he trying to create some space for himself. So far it has been great fun but I believe Kush is going to be very demanding when adolescence would step in.
The year is almost come to an end and I need to sit down and plan about where do I want to see myself at the next year end. This year has been a mixed bag, really, with some very low days and some really really euphoric ones. But hope springs eternal in human hearts and let us see what kind of challenges would I face next year.

3D effect to games

2010-11-13T05:04:00.002+01:00

When we were asked to give 3d effect to our 2d game, our first reaction was "impossible". But then we began exploring options and found that using adobe photoshop, you can give perspective to images, adding depth to them. Once we got the images, we integrated them in our code and found that it didn't help matters much. So, we made the wheel zoom up and the effect was palpably three dimensional. But then our woes began, the ball won't stop at the desired location, the result won't hold, the result on zoom wheel won't hold. We kept on figuring out issues, fixing them till it was 7:30 when we all went for drinks. But we do believe that by Monday, it should be done.
There are a lot of things on my plate and I have to take care of them by this weekend. Let us see how many of them get ticked off from the list :-)
Have been seriously considering cultivating a hobby but which one would suit me is the million dollar question. As of now, I consider reading books as my hobby but that does not give that much satisfaction to me now so I know it is time to move on to newer things. Will have to devote some time to that.

it has been time

2010-11-07T11:31:00.003+01:00

Off late, I have been thinking a lot, reminiscing past events and evaluating the course my life has taken over the past 2 years or so. Can't say i am terribly disappointed but can't say that i am incredibly satisfied. I think this feeling will last for some time.
The work front has been incredibly hectic these past 2 months. We started with the challenge of creating new games for a niche and for the next month or so, we created 9 games, all of them luck based and still fun to play. Then we got another client and had to create a new game for him in 3 days. That was very very difficult. I had to do a night out after a long long time but the work was completed on time with ok kind of quality. I say ok because i belong to the old school where testing should take more time than coding :-)
Diwali was a damp squib this year owing to the work pressures but in any case my in laws had come to visit us so it was not an absolute failure. That's how things stand in my life, ok kind of quality but leaving the scope for improvement.
On the brighter note, here is Kush singing Que Sera Sera

challenges on all fronts

2010-09-22T13:58:00.003+02:00

Last week, we finally had our long pending discussion on new games development and the challenge put forth was to come up with 50 new games in 1 year time. It sounded really ridiculous at that time. I mean how can you come up with a new game in 1 week time? But we started with our first game and I soon realized that it is really a very trivial task. As long as games are simple, the target can be achieved. So we are done with our first game. But now we have run into a huge roadblock. How do we keep on coming with ideas for new games? As of now, I am just stuck. Let us see if the team comes up with some good ideas.
I am still in the doldrums. Do I want to maintain the status quo or do I want to move on? The moment I thought of moving on, I started dreaming of lost baggages and of catching trains. My mind is really fertile :-)
I had been having a lot of dreams these days and even had one huge nightmare. In this frenzied dream, I was jumped upon by a ghost (a mummy, can't be anything else) and it was more than enough to wake me up :-) Are dreams really portenders of future events? Do I really want to know about my future? What if I learn the secret of what ever is going on around me and this knowledge cripples my decision making ability because I would be agonizing over the rippled effects of my action? I guess that is why the mind is so ignorant of all those things that have already happened or of things that are going to happen? Very interesting train of thought :-)

things get hectic once again

2010-09-11T12:38:00.002+02:00

Ever since I have shifted to Pune, things have been very very hectic. In the initial weeks, it was all about finding that perfect rental house and then once we shifted, it was about finding a good school for Kush. We drove all the way to Pune from Panjim. The distance was only about 500 kms but it took us good 8 hours with all the breaks and bad roads and some traffic jam. In any case, it was a good drive.
The workplace environment has been made doubly difficult, now that the new HR VP has joined hands with early perpetrators of crime against employees. Now I can't carry a mobile phone, can't make any kind of call from my desk phone, can't receive any call on the phone, can't chat with friends, can't surf internet. The list of can'ts is growing daily. Some of the hilarious additions are can't come to office without good deo, can't go to loo without asking permission for it and that too under supervision only, can't talk with other team members, can't discuss anything but work at workplace. Of course, this list is only applicable to the 2nd class citizens. The privileged class gets to do all this and much more. George Orwell's "all are equal but some are more equal than others" saying keeps on doing its rounds in my head :-0
In any case, I was helped a lot by people around me so I shouldn't really complain. And I intend to change my perspective towards life in general. I have been looking at life from a tinted shade, that of despair and gloominess and hopelessness. But life is not only about setbacks. it is about achievement too. It is about counting blessings too. So I have started practicing the mantra of staying positive, not only at workplace but also in general. As of today, i am very happy that Kush has joined a good school here and so far he loves this school. Next month, there will be a test and the class has covered a lot of ground on some subjects, so Kush has to do a lot of catching up to do.
Last month, I read Issac Asimov's collection of short stories. Some of those stories were amazing, like that of Hostess. I loved that story, loved Asimov's insinuation that humans carry a parasitic intelligence which takes over the bodies and minds of humans during sleep time, which lets humans grow only till a limit and later feeds on the humans thoughts or whatever. And then I read about Sri Aurobindo's conjectures on various dream states and how he maintained that there are different worlds out there, not only the one in which we participate but also those that are accessible only through dreams. Sort of like the Tibetan's Shangri La concept, a place where you go only through your dreams. i will do some more research on this, it is fascinating stuff.

nihilism makes sense

2010-07-31T06:01:00.003+02:00

If you are fond of reading scriptures or sacred books, then one thing will surely make you take notice - the insistence on the transience of all the worldly things, how all things are going to end one day, how nothing is permanent. It is so easy to read them but how many of us have really experienced it? I have been reading books for a long time now and one excerpt from "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" had really jumped out of the book and taken hold of me. It is related to the experience that the protaganist had when he was living a life of seclusion. The undercurrent is that of utter loneliness, of standing on top of a cliff and seeing nothing around, of having no one to talk to or to share things with. I could relate to it but I had never felt that way. I had felt lonely but it was not a despairing kind of loneliness. And I always wondered on how the author might have felt at that moment. Was it depression? Was it desperation to attach himself to something living?
And then while watching the movie "Crouching tiger, hidden dragon", I heard the warrior who had just returned from a session of meditation from the mountains who said the same thing " it was so lonely. I didn't feel blissful. I felt sad, an infinite amount of sadness. i couldn't take it".
Some days back, I had the same experience. I was standing behind the office taking my usual break, when it suddenly hit me. All human beings are so lonely, lost in their lives, in their thoughts but really drifting here and there, not only in physical world but also in thoughts, never being in this moment, learning to live in past memories or in future plans. There is nothing beyond this life. Death is not just a beginning. it is the end. There is nothing like heaven or hell or an eternal life or deliverance or any such bullshit. There is nothing, just a void. nothing to hide behind, nothing to look forward to, nothing really to focus your energy on. At that point, i felt a sadness well inside me and it shook me. I at first thought that I have gone into depression and I tried hard to shake this sadness off me. But I couldn't. My thoughts keep on returning to this feeling. Now I am reading about nihilism. May be the philosophy would make some sense to me.

archer has not lost his touch

2010-07-25T12:27:00.002+02:00

It has been a long long time since I blogged. Things were pretty hectic and confusing. AW and gang had shifted to Pune w/o paying salaries to anyone and we all patiently waited for it, though the patience started wearing thin after 20th. On 20th I went to receive VS who went to Axis bank to withdraw a large sum of money and we had to deposit cash in the OBC bank. Easier said than done !!!!. The cashier refused to accept so much cash, we had to go to manager, who talked to cashier who talked to us who talked to AW who talked to manager who again talked to his cashier and after 1 hour they decided to accept the cash !!!!! It was the kind of mess that gets very little press but which is the daily routine for thousands of people who need to get things done in banks or in govt offices. Very sad state of affairs...
I got the latest short stories collection from Archer "Thereby hangs a tale". Some of the stories are very good while others are ok kind. One story where in the receptionist fools a visitor to sleep with her was very very good.
I also watched Toy Story 3 which is a must watch movie. Seriously, the animation movie is one hell of a movie which can be watched by all age groups. There were some scenes in the movie which caused a lump to develop in my throat, it is that good a movie. I have also heard a lot of praise about Inception so I am going to watch it soon.
On the work front, I managed to make 400 bots sit together on different tables and the back office records matched too, which was a huge challenge. Now all the records match, grs entries with real chips delta in t_user which also match with the login session records. I had been meaning to solve this problem since January this year so finally solving it was a huge milestone for me. Now I am targeting 1000 bots to sit together. I hope every thing works out well then.
We have also started our search for a good school for Kush in Pune. One school Symbiosis International School is ready to admit our son but the fees are very very high, 2.2 lakh per child per year. I don't know how many people can really afford that kind of fees. DPS refused to even consider our application. Tomorrow I will talk to St Mary's which has a great reputation and which is a ICSE affiliated school.

change management and Pune office

2010-07-04T12:04:00.004+02:00

Our company is shifting to Pune this month end. There had been a lot of rumours flying around for the last 2 months or so about the move to Pune and how it is inevitable. But there was also a lot of secrecy, lot of hush hush so that no one was clear as to what was going to happen. I was only privy to the information that AS had been dispatched to Pune to scout for office space and that he had shortlisted some 2 or 3 of them. But apart from that, I had nothing going for me. If you are familiar with change management program, the first thing that they would tell you is that the vision has to be communicated to all the stakeholders and that each and every employee is a stakeholder. But here the vision was lost. No one knew why the move has to be done. It sounded more and more whimsical. The next step in the change management program lies in the initiatives taken to involve all the employees, to win over the cynics and to fire up the enthusiastic volunteers. But here the only decision that every one had to take was how soon can that person join the Pune office. The next stage in change management program is to monitor the initiatives, to help teams overcome obstacles. At this stage, every success is celebrated and employees are coerced to share the same vision. Right now, the office space has been taken up, 2 teams have moved there and forget celebrations, there is a full fledged war ongoing to kick out some employees, to make things so hard for them that they themselves choose to part ways. The last step in successful change management program is to maintain the vision and to keep on facilitating the various initiatives. Well, for sure, this company doesn't follow the normal processes. As long as AS and AK are there to poison AW's mind, as long as these fools keep on fooling everyone to believe that they are focusing on jobs when they spend all the time on online games and of course in ogling the girls, as long as these fools keep on pushing out good people so that their own inefficiencies and incompetency are not highlighted, this company is going nowhere. So it really doesn't matter :-)
I don't really subscribe to the prevailing sentiment that AW is totally oblivious of the misdemeanours of these fools, that AW himself encourages them to behave in such manner because he wants to create a company in his own image. I really feel that AW is aware of all the hanky panky going on in the company and that he sometimes takes these fools to task also, but he doesn't let them go because these fools serve him as personal valets also and no one wants to lose their servants for their follies, so these fools live another day. From the past few day, I quote some events ---
1) AS was entering office when AW called out to him "arre donkey, idhar aa", leading to a lot of mirth all around
2) Someone complained to AW that AS was actually sleeping during night shifts and AW called AS names which are unprintable here :-)
3) AW gave a dressing down to AS when he overheard him speaking to a new woman employee.
4) AW had stopped AS from going to office for the past 15 days or so and these days were spent in great peace by everyone over here.
5) Even AK was not spared. He has been forbidden from playing out songs loudly from his system. I was sick and tired of listening to Justin Bieber's girlie song "baby baby baby o".

is maintaining sanity far more important than career growth?

2010-06-26T10:09:00.002+02:00

The past few weeks have found me a little bit less loaded and so the time has been spent on introspection and on general reflection of life now and in future. And whenever one reflects on future, either the thoughts turn to daydreams if he is optimistic about it or the thoughts take on a morbid pattern with large doses of melancholia and a general sense of incompleteness taking over the spirit. Unfortunately I was feeling low and so my thoughts would always veer on my current status in life and on the missed out opportunities, and on what would have happened if things would have gone according to our script. And well, that set me thinking. I have always been a hard working guy who will slog if there is a need and who takes immense pride in his work. But I have also found that after a bout of difficult schedule, I always needed some time out to recharge me, to prepare me for another cycle. And for me work is not the only thing that defines me. There are many many other things that I absolutely need to do to make me feel alive, to retain my sanity. There are people who keep on working hard, jumping from one project to another, compromising their personal lives to accumulate success on career front. But I am not that kind of person. For me my personal space is very very important. I have to spend time with my son. And I don't believe in quality of time spent, I am more biased towards the quantity of time. I have to take out time to chat up with my wife, with my friends, with my siblings. I absolutely have to take out time to read books or watch movies or write my own stuff. But I also have some regret about it. I believe I want the best of both worlds which is simply not possible. So is maintaining sanity more important than pursuing silly career goals which won't make me a better person? I don't know yet but I will figure it out sooner than later.

online marketing - is page rank that important?

2010-06-12T12:23:00.002+02:00

Ever since I joined this company, I have been hearing that the online marketing team is doing a great job and how the page rank is improving. Well earlier my time was well spent on making the platform more stable and on fixing the bugs. But the last 2 weeks the pressure has been quite less. Ever since I found the magical fix to make the vc client more reliable the number of bugs have been decreasing and now it is not even a trickle, it has stopped completely :-)
So apart from adding support for stud game and for Teen Patti game, my time is also being spent on online marketing stuff, especially on online affiliate marketing. Well the first thing I realized was the page rank for google is at the heart of a bitterly fought war where so called thought leaders are publishing articles after articles in defense of their stand. Do we really require people to focus obscenely on page rank? Or does the content win in the end? I know for a fact that the team here is quite dumb, that they follow instructions even when they don't understand what they are doing. "It is related to back links" or " page rank is what we are focusing on". And so it is AW's writ that runs large here. And I know for a fact that he is majorly obsessed with page rank. He has managed to improve the page rank of one site to 4 and he considers it to be a great achievment. There is a whole excel sheet with at least 100 entries of different web sites from where backlinks are demanded and to whom the link of our site is being sold. So the original question - does page rank rule?
Well, honestly, my knowledge is very limited and I am still doing a lot of research. So I will revisit this question after some time :-)
I have been thinking a lot about future planning and where do I see myself in 2 years time. As of now I am completely focusing on learning new skills so that I can float my own company and focus on it. But as of now I just wait. Even Milton said " they also serve who stand and wait".

one very peaceful day after such a long time...

2010-05-30T06:27:00.002+02:00

The past 15 days have been very hectic, very traumatic. Meetu's operation was due on 18th and in-laws were expected on 17th itself. But then they changed plans, included Chintu, Ruchi and Vidit too and then on 17th, managed to miss their connecting flight to Goa from Delhi. I had applied for a half day leave on Monday and then booked a taxi too. But then on learning that the darned flight had indeed left w/o my in-laws (the nerve of them), I had to cancel the taxi as well as the 1/2 day leave. Talk about stupidity...
Then on 18th, Meetu was taken for operation at around 11:30 and then no news came in till 2 PM. I was very very surprised. From the room to OT and then back, I kept asking for answers when I only got assurances. At 2:30, I learnt that Meetu has been moved to ICU and that appendix has also been removed along with the gall bladder. Everyone arrived at hospital at 4:30 and then there was chaos. Meetu was moved to the room at around 6 PM and so started the ordeal. The next day just flew, what from commuting from home to hospital and back. Then Meetu was discharged and we all came home. I joined back office and learnt that contract was being written. Now this contract had always put me at an unease, a growing sense of discomfort. Well, on Saturday, car broke down and I and Chintuji took it to Chowgule's service centre. While walking back, i got a call from VS that AW wanted me to come to his home. I refused hiding behind my car's breakdown and my wife's condition. A lot of discussions centred around the possibility of what would happen if i won't sign the contract. Eventually on Monday I had to go to AW's place and there after deliberating over it for 1 hour, I refused to sign the contract. AW got understandably angry but then relented and let me continue working. Then on Friday 28th, another drinking session occurred and I was told to move to Pune. I don't really want to but this time he doesn't look like relenting :-)
On the work front, I learnt about JXTable from Swinglabs which allows for row sorting from column for the application developed using JDK 1.5. I integrated it in the code of java poker client for mac and it worked like a charm.
Finally this Saturday 29th was the most peaceful of all. I was so relaxed, so at peace. Only my ma-in-law is here, there is no pressure on work or home front and I had time at hand to actually relax and just be here. Loved wasting every minute of it :-)

jeeves is really outstanding

2010-05-16T06:08:00.003+02:00

I had read some of P G Wodehouse's work, esp those of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster but that had been a long time before. Last week, when I saw a collection of short stories of Jeeves, I couldn't control myself. And so far the book has been outstanding. I had forgotten the way Wodehouse crafts sentences and I am really really enjoying it. My reading speed has gone down a lot. Initially I used to read very fast but then I realized that by doing so, I was doing a lot of disservice to the author and to myself. Books are to be enjoyed, to be read slowly, to enter in their world and to experience it the way the author wants to. Wodehouse works belong to that category as does Dorothy L Sayers'.
India has been knocked out of T20 world cup. The way they were playing they didn't deserve to be in semi finals. Would Dhoni lose his captaincy? He should. He is tactfully very naive and he is also arrogant. Doesn't deserve the captaincy :-)
Meetu's operation is due on Tuesday in the JMJ hospital. We checked it out yesterday. It looked ok to go so be it.
On the workfront, we have got in touch with the Rounders client so let us see what transpires now. I learnt a new game STUD, fixed some bugs in the client and server and ensured that the remaining bugs be fixed by VS. Nice card game though.

constant change

2010-05-09T06:20:00.003+02:00

things keep on changing constantly all around us. We change ever so slowly that we don't even realize we are changing. Relationships evolve or devolve ever so steadily constantly. At the workplace also, things have changed dramatically. I have been included in the inner circle of AW and some people are unhappy about it and some are happy but I don't care for either group. AW is a horrible man and his drink sessions and his lectures have become unbearable for me. I need a huge break from him and especially from this company.
On the workfront, things have stabilized very quickly. Now most of the issues are resolved and the client and server are performing well. Rounders n/w may even make the payment next week so things are looking really well over there.
Meetu has been diagnosed with stones in gall bladder and may need surgery. Her folks are coming here next week. We will have a second opinion on surgery and if the surgeon says so we will go for surgery.

sucess has many fathers, failure has none

2010-05-02T11:40:00.002+02:00

When I decided to do an mba, the idea was to jump ahead and abroad, get a good job and a good salary hike and you know just settle down in a haze of admiring eyes. I had never thought about the worst case scenario where in I would fail to get a decent job and would have to come back. That's exactly what happened and well, this is all now an old story :-)
But this particular event had other repercussions, most notably of the change in the relations structure. The barbs, the taunts continue till this day. The snide remarks are still repeated. Insinuations of being poor and of being foolish are still made. The hurt and the pain are now dissipated and i don't feel angry or hurt when I hear about such remarks. But I have started believing in the adage quoted in the title of this post.

Where to now?

2010-05-01T14:42:00.002+02:00

Recent events have really unsettled me. First VS's outburst which was followed by RN's departure and finally last night's AW's solid drama culminating in AK's outburst. Now you must understand VS and AK are solid, loyal soldiers of AW and if these people start protesting, issues are serious enough to warrant attention. What's going on? What is making these people react in such ungainly way?
One reason would be that AW's boorish behavior has simply irked them so much that they can't control their emotions. Or another reason could be to psych me out so that I start believing that things are really bad here and I should make a move somewhere else. why? because then it would be one person less to rake in the moolah. I don't know who to trust :-)
On the work front, I managed to fix one really pernicious bug. The behavior was very strange. Randomly, the moves buttons won't disappear on the client. It took me close to 7 days to figure out the bug. The issue was due to network delay. Once server sends a message to client, it would start its timer to monitor move time. Once client receives a message, it starts its own move monitoring time. But if n/w conditions introduce some palpable delay, then the server and client would be starting timers at different instants. So the server might even time out the client while the client is blissfully unaware. And then when server sends another message to client to inform it of whose move it is this time, the client should clear the moves. But it was not doing so :-)
Well the issue is fixed and done. Another step to make the client more stable...

a strange problem

2010-04-25T10:40:00.002+02:00

When VS accosted me on my usual break and expressed a desire to speak to me, I readily agreed. VS is a simpleton, who works very very hard and who doesn't get half the appreciation that he should be getting or even 1/4th of remuneration that he should be getting. Anyways, when VS stated that he is very disturbed who could not sleep the previous night, I was curious. When it turned out that boss had said something to him, I couldn't care less and I was ready to get back to work. AW has a horrible temper and he doesn't shy from saying whatever he wants to say, so it was kind of ok and VS should be more aware of it than others as he had survived almost 3 years with him. But then VS started weeping with tears in his eyes, I was flabbergasted. It turned out that AW had run out of cash (for all the big talk about being very rich, he is right now penurious) and had asked VS to lend him 3000/- but it turned out that VS had himself sent all the money to his folks and had kept only 3000/- for himself. So VS couldn't and AW gave him a huge firing. Well, more important point for me was about AW running out of cash. How would he continue the operations if he has run out of cash? And where are the clients, the multi billionaire clients who were ready to dole out huge amount of cash to join our bandwagon? All of the bullshit and drivel were finally turning up to be just that, false stories, lies. And so, I guess, time has come for me to make another move. Where? I don't know. Another phase where patience would do me a lot of good :-)

another milestone

2010-04-15T15:56:00.003+02:00

these past few days have been crazy to say the least. on personal front, it is time to repay another loan which means countless rounds of agony and torture for me to get the funds ready in time :-)
on the work front, boss played poker with some of his clients and realized that there were many many issues, most critical of which is the appearance of table freezing. when this item was first assigned to me, I could envisage only one aspect, that of freeze due to delay in proxy move. but even when it was fixed, table freezing kept coming up leading to all round frustration. I fixed another issue and suddenly there was an improvement. users could play for 20 odd minutes when suddenly the whole app would just freeze. From server to client, from one layer to another, it was fruitless so much so that I started despairing as to how could this issue be even fixed or was it one of those problems that one can never fix. There was one such issue at motorola which no one could fix. And then i stumbled upon it. just like that. I was of the opinion that due to n/w issues packets were not reaching client so it would freeze. But then I read somewhere that windows socket layer has a special problem. if the socket buffer is not emptied, sockcore won't send indication to the application to read further data. So if there was something unread in the buffer, the whole application would just freeze. All the time data was queuing up in the underlying buffer, but the application was unable to lay its hands on it :-)
And so another fix followed which dramatically improved performance. For 2 days consecutively, i have seen the application run for close to 4 hours at a stretch. It is only when the n/w conditions become buggy that the app starts to freeze and unfreeze. If the client doesn't receive packes for 90 seconds, it closes down gracefully. VS was able to play close to 150 hands over 1 hour with 2 of the actual players which is simply great !!!!!!!!!!!!
Well the issues never end, do they? there are still a lot of issues to be fixed but I guess this performance improvement would be considered an equal achievement as that of making tournaments run on Rounders network.

Osho's zen philosophy

2010-03-21T05:23:00.002+01:00

I have been reading Osho's book on Zen and i must say that the book is very interesting. Some of the arguments he makes are quite convincing but some of them are very controversial too. In some passages, he comes across as a supreme human and in some as a very real human :-)
One of the most controversial lesson that he imparts is about the mind's penchant for seeking pleasures even when the person is pretending to be abstinating from it. The example he gives is that of rishis meditating in himalayas who start dreaming of company with beautiful girls (the apsaras) who come from heaven to sleep with them. Osho says this is because the mind is fed up of meditation, of solitude and it has started craving for company. And this is all society's fault. Society at large frowns upon pleasures and encourages the constant clamoring for painful experiences. So if someone likes to drink a lot, the society would force him to give up drinking. The person would pretend to give it up but his mind is still attached with drinking so in reality he hasn't let go of it. The problem is still there, it has been hidden and kept out of sight. The person would start exhibiting different symptoms but the problem has not yet been addressed. Osho says that if someone is really attached to something, let him come out of this attachment on his own, at his own speed. Once he does that, the problem would be solved from the core.
And I feel this particular lesson has been used and misused and contorted to malign him. People accused him of encouraging promiscuity, of leading young people to extremes of pleasure seeking. This could have been true, but Osho's intent was something else. Of course I can't call myself an expert on his views from a half read book :-)
On the work front, there were a lot of issues, both on poker client and on casino client. One of the issues was very vexing. I wanted the client to close the gameboard if an important message is lost en route. But the darned window won't close properly. When it started closing, the darned thing won't start. When it started restarting, the darned thing won't work. The darned stuff killed me almost :-)
On Tuesday night, we had a drinking session with boss and his favorite prodigal employee AP. It was really painful watching them going bonkers in praising each other and of kissing and of twisted fingers being pointed for peace sign, of strange sounds emanating such as Ouch and Peace. It was so painful that I couldn't even enjoy my drink. After 3 hours I threw in the towel, drove home and slept fitfully. It took me 2 days to let go of all the frustrations that had crept in.

errors, mistakes and issues

2010-03-14T05:18:00.002+01:00

this week's post has to be dedicated to silly mistakes. anyone who is from software background in india would agree with the sentiment that 90% of mistakes that are being solved or fixed or analyzed are due to someone's silly mistakes. Before this week, I had been taking care that silly mistakes don't creep in, but then I can have some off days too :-)
RN has always been sloppy, always in a hurry to get things done, always in a hurry to catch that bus, never taking responsibility. this week she was asked to make some releases for poker and casino client and boy did she goof up ! as the manager, i have to take some blame too, but in my defence I can only say that I did verify her releases, tested them, made others test them. But in the final analysis of things, when RN gave release to VS, this last build should have been tested. This was the point where she made mistakes. And I paid the price. 10 PM on Thursday, 10 PM on Friday and 2 hours on Saturday were more than enough. I have now taken over the release management.
This week I also took interview of a candidate AR for HEC MBA. From his essays I could make out that he would be an average guy with lot of air and pretensions, who would always fall back upon standard responses. When I met him I realized my observations were spot on. His presentation was awful, his answers rehearsed, his career objectives completely obscured. His other interview was taken by AM, who had accompanied Abbott's CEO during VOL week. I wonder how he fared in that interview.

poker, bots and stress testing

2010-03-07T10:44:00.002+01:00

So, I have found my new challenge :-)
It started almost incongruously (these things have a habit of always starting this small and then getting a life of their own and then beginning to consume the person body, soul and everything). I had already tested 12 bots (those fake players who sit on poker tables and try to behave like real players) sit on some tables and play for some hours. That had given me some serious headache on trying to reconcile the rake with the win amount and with the total loss of real chips of users. But this time the challenge was to make 200 bots sit on tables and play. We started small with a total pool of 200 players with around 50 players sitting on the tables at any point of time. And the results were outrageous. The total loss amount didn't match with the rake and neither did it match with the total loss of chips. It made me crazy. Why would it work with 12 bots and not with 50 bots? The answer of course was not in the numbers, that was a red herring, a fake trail. The real answer was in the way bots were being disconnected and what was happening for these disconnected bots. That led me to some very good observations and some great fixes. Last time around we were able to make 50 bots sit on tables for close to 18 hours when we had to intervene and stop them from playing. That is something, so eat your heart out LK and AC :-)
On other front, I finished the Gaudy Night and it is a good book, a lazy read but with great characters, a great story with fake trails strewn all around and with motives floating around. Really very good read, kept me awake 2 nights in a row trying to finish the book :-)

how do you motivate yourself after achieving a tight deadline?

2010-02-26T18:27:00.002+01:00

Sustaining motivation is very very difficult, as I feel :-) Stretching yourself to complete work on time, to keep ruminating on what else needs to be done, all this drains a lot of energy. There is a great high in meeting the deadline, it is almost euphoric, liberating, morale boosting. This is the way I felt when I met the Rounders tourny deadline. It was a huge challenge and it took a lot of time and effort on my part, but it is done now. Time to move on to new targets, new deadlines. But then I forgot the recharge part :-) Forgot that I need to take a break, first, just to keep myself sane. There are other things I love to do other than work. Like playing with Kush or reading books or watching movies. And so I took it easy this week, fixing bugs and managing releases, but I also read "The Circular Staircase" and watched Rann and Ishqia. The book was good, kind of outdated now with all the twists and turns of plot painfully obvious now, but nonetheless a good read. Rann was bad, while Ishqia was good :-) And just when it looked like life is good again came the loan repayment request and so back again to all those mind numbing calculations :-)

living with pain

2010-02-20T12:00:00.002+01:00

Once we decided that we had to return back from HEC to India, I had felt a stab of real pain, of disappointment, of fear of what lied ahead. I lived with that pain for some 3 months or so. It became a pain body of its own ( borrowing a term from Power of Now), it started dictating terms to me. Most of my interactions were based on fear. My life became shallow, very shallow, almost stupid. And then one day I had enough of it, so I let it be. I accepted that there were lot of unknowns in my life and lot of bitter sweet experiences lied ahead, and so I just felt it as it was. What happened next was exactly what was specified in Power of Now. Its hold on me gradually lessened and I started living more freely. I came to Goa, joined this company. I was told that people mocked me here. I just let it be. After some time, people started respecting me. After some more time, I was anointed the leader and people accepted me as their leader. Am I at peace here? My truthful answer would be both yes and no. I love my work here and it reflects in my work quality here. I still don't have money to repay loans, my lenders are getting fidgety and I feel bad about that. And that hurts some time.
I have to make a complete payment towards my home loan this month. And in 3 months of time, I have to repay my loan off one lender. All my hopes rest on that elusive bank loan. Imagine living every day with the hope of getting that loan and managing fears of getting rejected for the same. That stress, that pain gets reflected in all other aspects of one's life, eventually manifesting as some sort of disease. I am right now treading the same path and feeling the same stress. Will Eckhart's suggested exercises help me in managing this phase without causing any grievous impact on me or my health? Let us find that out.

why not test code after writing it?

2010-02-14T11:27:00.003+01:00

This week has been spent on fixing bugs that other people introduced. Some of them have been very very difficult to find while some of them were just plain stupid. An example of a stupid bug is that just after tourny gets over, the winners get double of their win amount. Another example was that even if a player plays a play money tourny, his real chips (real money) account would be overwritten by play chips. These bugs are stupid bugs and result of lazy people, coders who just finish their coding and don't test it properly. This is not unique to this company here. I have run into this again and again, in all the companies that i have worked with. The main reason behind this sloppy work is the pressure that management applies on team to get the work done within some time window. But i still feel that this tantamounts to not getting the job done at all. I have pretty harsh opinions on this subject :-)
An example of a very very hard bug will be the one that Datta faced when testing with an id kentuckykid. When he was playing the tourny, suddenly his moves started getting dropped by the server while all the other messages were getting across fine. I went thru logs again and again to find that particular issue. He had logged in form one client, and then logged out, started out another client and was playing in the tourny w/o any issues or hassles. Suddenly at the time of table merge, he started facing this issue. I found that before he started facing these issues, he had tried logging in from the first client and had got the message that id was already logged in. And here, I found the issue. Exactly at this point, the previous presence was being marked as unauthenticated. The person who coded that had never bothered to test it. And left this mess. I spent 3 hours to find that bug and fixed it in 1 minute.
Well, the tourny is going great on Rounders. On 15th, we will have one final testing here to be personally tested by boss. So then from Monday, we start implementing 3 patti :-)

Tournament on Rounders working now !!!!!

2010-02-06T15:38:00.004+01:00

After all these days, poring through the logs to find that one hint, one clue that will help unravel the mystery, going nuts going thru the code logic to check if anything is wrong with the code, I was finally able to crack the code !!!!
initially we only let 12 players play the tournament and we found that it was working great. In fact some people came down to praise our efforts. But there was scope for improvement. Finally fixed those issues too and so today 20 people joined in, there were 3 tables and we just let them play. Not even a single issue !!!! Seriously, this is a huge day :-)
Now onto the next part of the puzzle. Omaha games work, but omaha sit and go crashes. Why? that is for us to find out. maybe the issue is with client, may be with server. Wait till next week...
Because this week was a 6 day week, I have been unable to start working on Tom Jerry game. Tomorrow I will spend some time on it.
On other note, I finished 5.1 something by Chetan Bhagat. OKish kind of novel, total time pass. The movie 3 idiots had some scenes inspired by the book, otherwise the book and movie don't have much in common.
On Friday, Kush was supposed to go on a picnic. I went against it as the picnic was being arranged on a spot where shade is a rarity and Goa has very very hot afternoons these days. I was concerned about it and so didn't allow him to go. And you know what, his teacher called up asking about his absence. Apparently they missed him a lot. I don't know, was I being too over protective? Should I have let him go? I need to think about over protection thing. I don't want to become helicopter parent making my child a cripple, unable to face life's challenges. Need to seriously think about it.

network congestion and other issues

2010-01-30T14:47:00.004+01:00

I have been pondering on the exact nature of issues being seen everytime we host a tourny on Rounders. Well, the issue of server marking client as disconnected is the crux of the matter, but why would server mark some client disconnected? the answer lies in the fact that due to n/w congestion packet loss starts accumulating and so after one move miss by a client, the server earnestly marks it as disconnected and stops listening from or writing to this client, leading to mayhem.
learnt a good funda of settcpnodelay function. You see during computer engineering classes, I had gone thru Nagle's algorithm which was designed to reduce load on network. In the client and server code here, I had found that settcpnodelay was set to false effectively enabling Nagle's algo. This led to a situation where packets would come from server only when the buffer was reasonably full and not immediately. This was leading to reduced load on network but other issues like moves not coming in from client etc etc started cropping up. So I disabled nagle's algo and so the packets started flying like crazy and soon due to n/w congestion packets started getting dropped and all hell broke loose, not a very good sign if one's job is at stake :-)
So now back to thinking about a proper solution and then implementing it so that we can host proper tournament on Rounders.
BTW for the Battleship game, I also made the cpu a lot more intelligent in attacking and destroying ships. It is not artificial intelligence, but I seriously thought about it :-) But then quickly dropped it. I have to first make tourny run on Rounders and then also use wxmac library to run vc app on mac. and on top of that, Kush is pestering me to create a game of Tom and Jerry, simple game but still sprites who have to move and run and jump. Good next level challenge :-)

why tourny on rounders always spells trouble

2010-01-24T06:25:00.002+01:00

Some time back, when AN was around, we had tested a holdem tournament on Rounders and it had gone well, so much so that i had even announced that tournament is working fine on Rounders. When this issue was raised again as to why work is not complete i was very very surprised. But then I tested a 2 table tournament and immediately saw the issues. The client would show the table to be hung, moves won't come on time, moves won't go to server, you name it...
Anyways so when I was given the go ahead to salvage the situation, i started looking at it from 2 perspectives - why is client not in sync with server and if client determines that it is out of sync, why can't it connect back with the server?
You see, I always was a sucker for school of thought of planning my work before hand and so after going thru the logs I noted that these 2 issues were of prime importance and went after my job. The 2nd issue of why client was unable to reconnect back was solved easily. The handler id was being removed from registry on the event of disconnection which was absurd. So fixed one issue. The other issue was a really tough nut to crack. After poring thru 80 mb of logs for one round of tournament and another 80 mb of logs for 2nd round of tournament i zeroed upon the issue. For some reason packets from client were getting dropped but packets from server were able to reach the client. In this event there is no I/O exception at the socket level so client is blissfully unaware that it is out of sync with server. Meanwhile server marks the client as disconnected. So now server won't let the client makes its moves, server wont even send moves to the client and all hell breaks loose. Well I thought that I have finally cracked the code. So I put in changes in a jiffy and started one table tournament. That went amazingly fine. So then 2 table tournament. Well for the first 20 minutes, it was w/o any issues. I almost thought that the major problem is solved. But then all the clients went into disconnection mode and couldn't connect back to server. Immediately I knew the reason. The check in java client was not good enough :-(
Well anyways, the new java client is ready. And one more round of tourny testing on Monday awaits me :-)
My 3 months of probation are complete here. I haven't yet talked to boss about it. I am waiting for them to make their first move. Will there be any hike, any promotion? The only hint that came was from AS who repeated what boss had mentioned some time back, that i will be getting some stock option in Mar/Apr. Well, that would be great, but what i need right now is cash to repay loans. The stock option would be great, but it is the cash which is the ultimate king. Need to seriously plan my finances.

All is well

2010-01-17T14:34:00.002+01:00

Sometime back, I was in a highly creative state where in I was able to really apply myself and force myself to think about a problem from different perspectives. At that time I hadn't watched 3 Idiots or read Chetan Bhagat's book. But I was ruminating on a new catch phrase that I wanted other people to use. And I zeroed upon e=m * c squared. Now what is this, you may ask? And the question is valid. This equation has been immortalized by Albert Einstein and every one who has had the misfortune to go thru relativity would know about this equation. But the way I conjured it up was in the sense of comical relief. Suppose some one asks me " how are you" and I reply back "e = m * c squared". That person will surely take it that I have completely lost my mental balance. If he/she were an acquaintance, the first thought would invariably be " i knew he was a little crazy, now it is confirmed". But suppose this person actually sees the smirk on my face and adds 2 and 2 and figures out that this particular response is something that is just meant in a comical sense and suppose that this person actually likes it so much that this person also starts using it, this thing could become a rage. Imagine for a moment that this particular thing becomes so big that it takes a life of its own. People would nod at each other and say " e = m...". Their eyes will meet in a crowded metro and they would immediately murmur "e = m...". Ha, won't that be really droll !!!!
So anyways I was conjuring up this scenario while lazing on my sofa. And then I watched 3 idiots. It is a good movie but there were some really really boring sequences, which spoilt my mood. But I must add there are some sequences which are really really funny. The movie deserves its success, controversy or no controversy. However I was talking about a catch phrase. And that phrase is, you guessed it right, All izzz well !!!! it has really become a nation wide rage. the phrase has been taken up by youngsters as well as older people. it is all around me and i love it. You can never guess what happens to your idea once it is taken up by masses. It just becomes bigger than you. The movie has raked millions. I am sure that there will be companies who has ridden on the crest of such phenomenon. I would really love to be at the helm of such a company !!!! Meanwhile all is well. Battleship game is almost done. The only issue that remains is that the game is not getting over. I will look at it tomorrow.

Battleship game for mobile

2010-01-17T07:19:00.002+01:00

In December last year, I saw Kush playing battleship on the Active whizkid channel. I loved the game and so did Kush. But soon after the game was removed. I promised Kush that I will develop our own battleship game and he could play it on the mobile for as long as he wanted. Now when I made that promise I didn't realize the time it would take or how busy I would be in December. So one weekend, I thought about the game and crafted the first draft of design. Then Kush's nanaji came to visit us and the entire project was sidelined. Come January and the code is still not complete. When I got a much needed 3 days break because of boss's marriage, I vowed that I will take out the time needed to finish the game once and for all. I spent 1/2 a day on Friday wrapped up with macbook and then another 2/3 day on Saturday, which led to huge back ache and some back spasms. I requested Meetu to rub Moov cream but that didn't ameliorate the pain. Come Sunday I am still fixing bugs. At present, the grids are ready, the battleships can be hidden, the hit grid box show up as Red and the player can play the game for some time. Unfortunately it sometimes crashes and i am trying to find them and to fix them. I don't know if I can do it today or if my poor back will be able to bear the strain. Coming next week, we have lot of work on our plate and things are looking pretty grim these days. I have finally understood the main reason of why employees are making a beeline towards exiting this venture. I will elaborate on that some time later. But now I am back to the battleship game.
BTW I also spent some time going thru the algo book that i had bought. Went thru the greedy algorithm and absolutely loved it. Will definitely use it for allocating task items to resources for the next project plan :-)

smorgasbord

2010-01-09T05:07:00.004+01:00

This week started with a complaint by RN that her performance review was due and she was very scared that she would be getting a very bad rating. You see there is no data being maintained here to track performance of any employee and every thing is impression based. How do you counter that? AKB who was supposed to run the show on ground floor was highly incompetent fellow who didn't have the guts to ruffle feathers. Well, I had always wanted to know about how the PMS happened over here and I used this opportunity to raise this issue. I had expected bad news but what i got was a complete howler. No one, it seems and I repeat no one has ever bothered to even think on those terms. Well, if I was so keen on getting processes here, why not throw my hand and do my bit? And so I volunteered. It is still a work under progress, so more on that later. Suffice it to say that the moment news spread that I was going to do it for my team, I got buried under an avalanche of advise and indignant protests of how things had been in complete shambles before. RN got an email from Boss after my talk with Arin which was very surprising. Good for her. She deserves the hike.
On the work front, I realized that the mpp was a tough nut to crack. It is easy to create one. It is very difficult to update it. You see if the project plan were fixed, there won't be any issues. But at our workplace, things happen, work items get added, prev fixed bugs re-appear in a new avatar. And so it is almost impossible to track the activities of team members. Anyways, I have decided to do this on a weekly basis, to save some time for me.
I had been trying to fix an issue of total loss amount not matching the rake when only the bots were playing. Ideally the amount they lose should get added as rake for the house. But there was always a gap. The first thing I fixed was the rounding issue of rake. The code was using deprecated version of Big decimal rounding macros. Replaced them with proper enum. The rake became proper but still loss amount was miles off the rake figure. Went through a sheet of over 1400 hands and found the issue to be missing entries for bots doing leave during a hand. Fixed that issue. Still the loss amount didn't match the rake figure. Went through a history of 2600 hands and found that because of my change, the bots who were doing sitouts were also being added to the grs table. So at least I have found the problem and so it will be fixed. But I had spent quiet some time in going through the excel data and was wondering if there could be a better way to crunch numbers. Vijay came to my rescue and used the pivot table to simplify calculations. I had seen pivot table in action before but had never found a practical need for it. If you have never used a pivot table before, learn to do so. It will save you a lot of time :-)
On Friday we were all talking about the food that we have and when I mentioned that we have non veg food once in 2 weeks, the audience was left dumbfounded. You see, Goans eat a lot of non veg especially fish and the concept of having only vegetables was something uniquely alien to them. Jai ho!!!!!! Now I understand the rationale behind the movement of promoting vegetarian food habits.

House edge of casino

2010-01-01T07:36:00.003+01:00

Anybody who is familiar with casino will also be familiar with the term house edge. House edge basically means how much a casino earns on average from each bet. Of course that means that the number of hands played has to be substantially large so that the individual wins and losses of players get evened out. When I was asked to compute the house edge for Baccarat, I was stumped. On googling the term, I realized that there are different ways to compute house edges for different games. For Baccarat, we had to determine the frequency of wins if bets are placed on Banker, Player and Tie. This was easy. After getting data from DB, I got the frequency of wins. Then for Banker bets, I computed the actual expected earning of a player by multiplying the win factor (0.95) with the % of wins on Banker bets. Then finally, going by the logic, that the win % of Banker bets is actually inverse of how much the player should be losing, we get the amount of how much the casino is actually losing. Ideally, for a game with house edge of 0, these 2 figures should match. The difference is the house edge of the casino for Baccarat game for the bets placed on Banker. This was straightforward. The tougher part was the way Ties were figured out. I had to compute the odds of such events and then compare them with the frequency of Ties events occurring. The difference was the house edge. Well, was I proud? Not really, because the house edge came to be substantially larger than expected. The world wide figure is around 1.5% for bets placed on Banker, but for us, it came to be 15%.
Next day, I received the request for computing house edges for rest of games. For Roulette, it was trivial. As we play American Roulette, there are 38 pockets, but we pay only 36 times the bet amount for a win on point. That gives us the house edge of 2/38. This was corroborated by the data from the DB. The harder ones were Videopoker, Keno and Blackjack. The first 2 are enormous because there are so many permutations and combination that it defied logic. The last one involves skill too and so it leads to very difficult calculations. I googled it and I found that actually very complex mathematical models have to be constructed and that some people have made it their career :-). There is a guy who goes by the name Wizard of the Odds. There are some really impressive information over there. Do check them out :-)
Anyways, so I was in a conundrum. I had to give some values for house edges and I didn't know how to start. Well then I had this brainwave. Instead of computing the theoretical values of house edges for these game, I could compute the house edges due to our server implementation. Well, then I got the data from DB and for each game computed the sum of all the bet amount and win amount ever played on our live server. For Blackjack, there were more than 10000 hands. For Keno it was only 250, which is understandable. So, the formula goes like this ---
House Edge = (Total bet - Total win)/Total bet.
This formula will give the actual house edges as experienced by players. Voila, the problem solved, I shared the house edges with boss. For Roulette, our house edge is actually 3% (theory says it should be 5%). For Blackjack, it is 5%. For Videopoker, it is again 5%. For Keno, it came to be 27% which is understandable as hands played were less.
Meetu's birthday fell on 28th Dec. I was in office but her father had come to visit us and they did arrange for a small celebration. On 31st, I was finally able to complete the first draft of project plan. The same night was spent in a long drunken revelry. I came home at 4 AM but Meetu was not mad at me. Thank goodness for that :-) So here is wishing everyone a very happy new year 2010.

Work pressures, last of Lisa project and beaches of Goa

2009-12-26T10:48:00.004+01:00

Well, last week i mentioned that 2 of server side programmers were leaving us. Well, one of them left very amicably. The other one probably has made a dash for it but i guess he has just added to the mess of it all. if Ajay reports on time on Monday, all will be well (hopefully) but if he doesn't, it will just add to the pressures. Ajay didn't come on Thursday and there was an open bug for Sit N Go tournaments where in the losers who become observers were not being cleaned up by server. So poor chaps, they lose and on top of that they can't login forever :-) If Ajay would have been around, it should have been fixed by him. But as he wasn't, it came to me and Vijay Simha to turn it around, which we did at 10 PM. Took the whole day in fixing one bug :-) And that has been the story this whole week. Things have not progressed much even after so much slogging. It does bring down the morale and all that bullshit stuff I used to read in the OB course. 3 days of break was something that i really looked forwards to.
On Christmas, we left on a package tour. I was dead against it as I hate these package tours. They promise much but deliver so less that one starts protesting. But Meetu prevailed and so we were in that damned bus. It took 1 hour to reach a temple of Sri Vetaal and then another 30 minutes to reach Mayem Lake. We did boating there which was fun. Then we went to Vagator beach. We just had 1/2 an hour but we went on sea scooter and Kush had a terrific time. Another 20 minutes of bus drive took us to Anjuna beach where we had just 20 minutes. Another 40 mins drive took us to Fort Aguawada (or something like that) and then to Calugate beach where Kush vomited all that he had eaten. By this time I was tired and angry at this whole waste of day. I firmly believe that if you really want to enjoy you have to give time and so no more just covering the points for me. If you decide to go to the beach, at least spend some good time over there. If you want to go to a place, give it some time to explore it. Otherwise it is just plain waste of time. On the plus point, all the 3 beaches were great so may be one of these days we will head over to one of them and spend some time :-)
Today I received an email from Jagdeep that Lisa project is over and done with. It brought back some happy memories and some really bad ones. I do miss the comraderie that we all shared for that project. It was a happy team and we really enjoyed a lot. I left it on a very acrimonious note and I still hate my managers in that team. For me Lisa project was over the day I moved to Motorola.
So, what can i expect next week? more work, of course, but some of it will be managerial. I will be implementing the whole new tracking process for the product team and that will take some time. I will have to learn the poker server code which will be another very challenging activity. Should be fun. The team has accepted me as their own and they have started respecting me. From here, things can proceed in only 1 way - more fun and more comraderie. I hope I can recreate a team like Lisa here. Then it will be really an achievment. Imagine in a short span of 5 years, creating a great bonded team, enjoying their work as well as each other's company. So God help me :-)

good to see the back of this week

2009-12-19T04:41:00.002+01:00

One of the most hectic and frenetic week has just passed. It was a week where in there was a lot to do and there was so little time to complete them. Add to that 2 recalcitrant workers who have put in their papers and who don't want to stretch, 1 boss who doesn't want to take a NO for an answer and you have a potboiler, albeit rather common in this part of the world. The target seemed innocuous initially, run the updated shill server and run the tournament on Rounders. Well, the shill server ran fine here and then on the d-day when it was uploaded on the live server, it crashed, froze tables and hung the game. Wow !!!! Then the Rounders tournament... every time we ran it we ran into a new issue. it almost became a joke, well actually a very bad one, reflecting the way earlier people treated this code. Anyways, when the shill server crashed on live server, I presumed there would be trouble, but nothing, not even a whimper. I couldn't figure that out initially, but then i learnt that VijayD and AjayN are both leaving and soooo, there was no point in giving them a dressing down, you see and I am fairly new to this code so giving me a dose won't help the matters either :-)
Well, the good news is that tournament on Rounders worked great. We achieved what LokeshK and his team couldn't. Lokesh had even gone on the records saying the task is unfeasible. Well, so much for that forecast :-)
Meetu has become a fan of Raaz pichle janam ka, where in a volunteer is made to undergo past life regression so that he or she revisits his/her old life and the expert seeks to find answers to questions that the volunteer might have had. To be very frank, most of the stories seem to be conjured up, work of the feverish mind. The volunteer seem to have already crafted the story and he/she just retells it. So far I have not found any observation worth remembering from this show but one has to keep an open mind.

Prodigal employee and fraudulent customers

2009-12-12T04:11:00.003+01:00

Well, if the last week was strange, this week started on a very surreal note. Amit, who had been fired last week, walked in at 9:30 along with boss. Well, well, the prodigal employee was back. Or was he? Monday and Tuesday were spent in watching his antics as he started throwing his weight around, shouting at people, intimidating some, browbeating others. It was both hilarious and nauseating simultaneously, comical and infuriating rolled into one. Add to that the drama enacted by Arin when Amit was taking a longggggg break. Arin was seen blabbering, shouting loudly, being obnoxious and once Amit came in, he went straight to enacting the nice persona. Talk about integrity and he is the living epitome of it !!!!! Oh, what surreal fun !!!! But it was too good to last :-) Amit walked out of office on Tue at 4 PM and rode straight into the sunset, never to come back (we all really hoped and prayed for that). The next day was spent in high anticipation. Will he come back? Won't he come in today? What will happen now? Well, Amit hasn't come in as yet and so has been marked as Employee Missing In Action. Anybody who knows anything about him is most welcome to share the news with us here. We just want to believe that he is settled where ever he is and that he won't come back to haunt us again. Oh, you ever elusive mental peace, how I beseech you?
On Friday evening, we discovered a customer who was defrauding us on a pretty regular basis. Of course there is a bug in poker server and this guy just stumbled upon it. And once he figured it out, he started milking in a very frenzied manner. By the time it was discovered that this guy was doing something funny, he had taken out 12K. Once we figured out the modus operandi, the account was requested to be blocked for the time being. Some 2 weeks ago, 3 players had colluded and committed a fraud of Rs 3.1 lakh again on the poker table. So, that's the next high priority item for now. Fix all the bugs related to money asap.

movies, work and long meeting

2009-12-06T10:09:00.004+01:00

I watched the movie Ajab Prem ki... recently and I loved the movie. The story is third rate, but the presentation is very very good. Be it the characters, settings, script, actors slipping easily into their characters, or the combination of all these, the movie watching experience was ultimate. some of the scenes were hilarious. And I really really loved Ranbir Kapoor. Amazing screen presence who gives all to the shot being filmed, he should be here for a long time. I also watched Kurbaan and I hated the movie. Apart from the terrorists being hailed as heroes and the movie defending their evil acts, the main actors could not do justice to their roles. I think it was because of director. Sample this. The terrorist gets hit. His estranged wife, who was shown to hate his presence, suddenly becomes caring and then in a bid to appease god, starts praying in a muslim manner while she was shown to be a hindu. bahut hi ghaitya movie :-(
so, watch ajab prem ki gazab kahani and avoid kurbaan.
On work front, I managed to make really really big strides, so that the reconnection thing should be wrapped up in 2-3 days. So much for casino. After Amit left, I was given the charge of poker too. Had 2 meetings with concerned people. Turns out that code changes are almost done. Review has to be done and testing has to be performed. So the next week looks packed. But these projects are moving rapidly towards maintenance mode. Let us see what comes once we reach that stage.
On Friday, I was called in for a meeting. The original purport was to share the estimate of work to be done that Amit was doing. So i assumed 10 minutes at the most. the meeting went on for 3 hours. we touched upon many topics, from the next steps to short term plans, the interest shown by clients. I learnt a lot many things that day about the company and the vision of boss, came out really tired but very very impressed. When you know that the owner has a vision and the commitment to go after that vision, it really puts one's mind at ease. You know that there will be days of struggle ahead, but once you know that there will be someone to back you all the way, you suddenly stop fearing and start believing.

disconnection, reconnection and one firing

2009-12-03T13:43:00.003+01:00

This week has been one of the most absurd week that I ever witnessed in my entire career. It all started inconspicuously enough. I had to finish the reconnection related stuff. I had done some changes for handling duplicate login issue which was now clashing with reconnection related changes. On Monday, I was 1/2 an hour late and I was summoned by boss. I later found that boss had reached office at 9:30 and was going thru all the entry records. Amit had walked in at 10 and put in a time of 9:45, which was caught and the perpetrator publicly questioned. On Tuesday, Amit walked in the morning and walked out in another hour or so. Why, you would learn in a little while. On Tuesday, boss walked in at 2 PM to check on who had got late after lunch. I had made it on time :-) But there was no work post lunch. Every one had to lend hands to dismantle and rearrange things. At 5 PM, I was called in for a meeting. I learnt then that Amit has been fired, not because he was incompetent but because he had referred boss as "upparwala" and that he had refused to work unless his salary was paid, which was really strange because the boss had promised to pay salary by 3rd of month. Then I heard a long list of transgressions on how Amit would come late every day, how he has taken a leave of 54 days in 5 months, how he would take leave w/o informing everyone. Basically a nightmare for the manager, who had turned a loose cannon and every one had suffered and how. Anyways, on Wed, my changes were still not working and Uttkarsha told me that it was her last day. Just like that, no inkling about that. Anyways, around lunch hour, someone started howling and there was complete bedlam in the office, with everyone running out the backdoor only to be kicked inside by boss who was handling things over there. What was happening? The case turned out to be a rude answer by Jayesh to Radha's question who got so terrified by Jayesh's threat of escalating things that she started crying and howling. Well, what did I do? I calmly walked out of office and went home for lunch :-0 By the time I returned, normalcy had returned. At 4 PM same day, I got out of office to take a break. Vivek came outside and coolly informed me that he has been given a notice of 15 days to prove himself or to pack things out. I chose not to react at all. On getting no reaction, Vivek got infuriated and informed that in 2-3 months, I will become the target to be fired on first chance. I again chose not to react at all. By the time my break was over, I was calm and composed and I had left a very disgruntled and disoriented Vivek behind. By the time it was 7 PM, I had found the bug and solved it. Thursday is St Francis day so a public holiday in Goa. I took my family to Panjim market and then to Caranzalem Park.
And so there are still 2 days left in the week. Let us see if there would be some more strange events unfolding , some more storms brewing, some more lunacy lighting up things....

new beginning

2009-11-29T08:45:00.002+01:00

Change has always been frightening to cope up with, especially the one where future becomes unpredictable. For quite some time, I had wanted to join a gaming company so as to experience first hand the travails of a online game creating company. And then I got this opportunity to work with Cybertech in Goa. At first I was kind of spooked out. A startup which has just moved to India, how good could it be? Turned out it is a great place to work with. The team has bright individuals, the owner is ambitious and to top it all, there are clients who are willing to buy the product, a far cry from my previous organization :-)
I had been told that I would be into development for some time and I had readily agreed as it let me use my experience and programming skills. As of now, I have already figured out the VC++ client and the Java server for Casino games. Initially it was overwhelming, but now after some really long hours, things are beginning to make sense. My changes have started working. And so on to bigger things :-)
Goa is a great place, the climate almost similar to that of Bangalore. It would be a little hot during the day but it would always grow cold at night. Pollution is much much less than as compared to Delhi. My office is at walking distance from where I am putting up. Only issue pending now is to get Kush admitted to a good school. Hopefully it should be done by next week.

Diwali 2009

2009-10-19T08:05:00.002+02:00

It must be because of my upbringing, my days spent at Bhagalpur, but the festival of lights is something that I really cherish and wait for the whole year. The story behind celebrating diwali is equally interesting, I have loved Ramayana since my childhood days. But I feel that the combined effect of cleaning house, shopping, placing diyas, doing the puja and bursting the crackers really light the festival for me :-)
And so this year too, we spent one full day shopping and then cleaning the house. And Kush had a whale of time lighting his sparklers and then running to hide himself when a bomb was lighted. But the best of show came around 10 PM, when a gentleman decided to entertain the society public. He had these big boxes, which on lighting up sent numerous rockets up which would burst in the air sending bright sparkles all around. Add the sound of a big gun going everytime a rocket would be forced on its journey up and then imagine the chaos of sound and light and smoke filling in the air,reducing everything to becoming a spectator. It was fun when the first box was lighted up, it became torture after 5th one and the 7th one had completely lost its charm. It was like we just wanted some respite from the light and sound show. And then the next morning, we saw the field littered with torn pieces of paper and remains of crackers and the big boxes. What a waste !!!

new beginning and fear

2009-10-13T06:57:00.003+02:00

Fear of the unknown is long accepted to be a part of life. The prehistoric man would hesitate in taking a new path or going to a new place because there were so many unknowns on the way. and the familiarity of routine breeds a pretense of being safe and secure in the big bad world. the unknown always appears to be frightening because one doesn't know anything about it. once the unknown has been explored, it loses its sting because then the mind can safely categorize it. And so when I got this tentative new opportunity, the initial feeling of euphoria soon gave way to fear and trepidation. How will the experience be? Will it be worthwhile? Or should I wait for something else? Well, honestly, it is difficult to predict the future and so I have decided to go with the flow. This brings me to another point. Why are the astrology and related things (tarot, i ching) so very popular? I think it is also related to the fear of future. Future as it stands is always uncertain and uncertainty breeds fear. And so to beat the fear, it is always better to consult the oracle. And that's how the fascination of humankind has grown with any kind of tool which can predict the future of give indication of nature of outcome. To be very honest, I have been following the astrological predictions for my sun sign for some 2 months now. But it has all been bullshit. Generally written in a very round about way, it is always (and that's the rule) circumspect and hollow in content. One can keep on following these predictions and not know what is going to hit him in the next moment :-)
So, after all these months and countless sites, do I feel comfortable in following the advice given for my sun sign? No, if I really want to feel for the outcome of some action, I only have to open a book (any book), randomly open a page and randomly draw my finger on a word. The nature of that word will give me clues. And this is not my concocted brew. I had read about it long time back when I was religiously reading the Hindu scriptures. And I saw it again in the Messiah by Richard Bach. Use it. You will feel the magic on your fingertips.

Trip to Vaishnodevi and back

2009-10-06T15:38:00.003+02:00

For a long long time I had been postponing the trip to Vaishnodevi, not because I didn't want to go there but because I had this genuinely sincere belief that I will truly have the call from Ma "chalo bulawa aaya hai" :-) Well, finally no such message came and I had to agree to the trip planned from 2nd to 4th Oct. The original idea was to land in Jammu on morning of 2nd and then straight away go to Katra, check in a hotel and then avail the helicopter service to the shrine. We managed to meet the original plan till the hotel check in part (train reached Jammu at 5 AM on 2nd), but then found out that helicopter service is over booked. Rather than risking life and limb on ponies, we all agreed to leg it up. For Kush, I decided to carry him on my back.
After all the bathing and breakfasting and security procedures, we started climbing up at 1 PM. Straight away I realized that the uphill climb was very very arduous, more so with Kush in my arms. I had to take a break every 75 steps or so and by the time it was 2:30 PM, I hadn't even reached the 1st stop Charan Paduka situated at a distance of only 2 kms. After some discussions, Meetu prevailed on me to hire a pithoo, a coolie to carry Kush up. And then we started the real climb. After we reached Adhkwari ( a distance of 6.5 km), we took the newly laid path straight to Bhawan, a distance of 5.5 kms. This part was easier as the climb was not as steep as compared to earlier path. To cut a long story short, we all reached Bhawan by 6:30. And then found that the darshan has been stopped till 9 PM. We all waited and waited, and the hunger and tiredness made us snappy and angry. I couldn't figure out why we were being made to suffer like this, but wait was all we could do. Finally at 9 PM, the line started moving, but by then we had run into a problem. There was no space in the locker and we had many items to store. So another long wait for locker space. At 10:30 PM, we joined the line. The line moved slowly and finally at 12 PM, we finally had the darshan, a quick 2-3 seconds look up of the pinds. Then we dragged our weary bodies to claim our things from locker and had some food. We decided to take ponies for the downhill journey. We had to find 4 but we could find only 3. I couldn't get a horse for the downhill journey and so with a heavy heart and still heavier legs, I started on the downhill journey, alone, disappointed, angry with everyone. After 9 Kms of constant walking, with some 30 seconds break thrown in, I realized that I could walk no more. My knees trembled, my legs didn't want to move. It was when I couldn't bring my body to move an inch that I heard a comment from a little girl behind me. She was happy that the trick her mother had taught her was holding her beautifully on her trek downhill. The trick was simple. Instead of going down in a straight line, start jogging left and right so that the body is moving constantly at an angle to the road unfurling below one. I followed it and was able to drag myself to 1 km of my destination, the auto stop. But for the last 1 km, I would never have understood the meaning of pain. Every step, every movement was a very very painful jab, every breath reminding me that I needed rest. Somehow I dragged myself to the auto stand, took an auto and reached hotel room at 4:30 AM (all done and dusted in 23 hours flat !!!). I had made the downhill trek in 2 hours 20 minutes or so. But I was really really tired. When I entered my bed, I had tears in my eyes, tears of relief. It was an incredible feeling. The remainder of night flew away and I woke with pain all over my body. And then I realized the import of all this meaningless trek taxing my body, causing so much pain and discomfort. It is after suffering pain that one can really feel the bliss and the blessings. That's the idea behind that arduous trek up and down.

my first action game

2009-09-21T09:35:00.003+02:00

Finally, after lot of issues and bugs, I was able to create a shooting game. It is a very simple game with balloons on screen (dancing pseudo randomly) and with a gun on the bottom of screen which can move left and right capable of shooting one bullet at a time. If the bullet hits a balloon, score is incremented. So simple yet so problematic !!!!
First of all, for the sprites to be displayed, paint() method should not be overridden, at least by a novice like me :-) Once I figured that out, I modified the game to see the balloons on screen. Then came the logical part of arranging it, setting up the gun, fixing the bullets, checking for collisions. Once it was all done, I realized that on pressing Fire the game starts but it also causes a bullet to fire as the bullets are sent on pressing Fire key. When the game starts, the jvm or kvm assumes that the fire key is still pressed (it was pressed to start the game) and so it sends the bullet up. This caused a lot of consternation. I skimmed the net to find some help but it seems there is no way to clear the keys (at least I couldn't find any till now). So I created another form to force the user to click on play to start the game. That solved the problem for now.
The game is running well on my A1200. It lacks a lot of features, mostly sound, and there are some bugs too (once moving the gun caused it to enter an endless loop, that was funny :-)), but yes now I have truly entered the land of sprites. Now I can dream of making some sophisticated game with some real sword fighting (my son has been demanding it for some time now....)
The Navratras are here and there are a lot of things that I wish for and keep on praying for. But these things are between me and my maker. Here is hoping for better times.

morbid thoughts

2009-09-20T10:59:00.004+02:00

this whole last week has literally flown by, with clock ticking so very fast !!!!!
we have had guests, one of them a very very sick cancer patient. on wednesday, we got the news that the doctor has given up on him giving him at max 3 months to live. it was a sad news and i became party to the decision of not sharing this decision with his wife, lest she starts creating scenes. anyways i am not fond of her. she talks a lot, mostly nonsense to my ears. ever since her husband has been stricken with this deadly disease, slowly killing him, she has taken up this role of a tragedy queen, always moping her eyes and generally seeking sympathy. Even when the news of looming death was broken to me, I didn't feel an iota of sympathy for her. On Saturday, some test reports came in which resulted in dramatic change of prediction from the doctor. Now the timeframe has jumped to 5 years at least. Well, great news !!! or is it bad news? the cancer treatment takes time, requires patience and costs a hell lot of money. With the retired person soon burning through the savings, it becomes a decision of whether to prolong the agony of one man or to to prolong the savings needed to support the bereaved family. A sad state of affairs, but c'est la vie !!!!
last night, my wife asked me a simple question. What would be the gentleman thinking of now that he has learnt that he still has some more time on earth? Will it be about money? Will it be about his past life? Will it be about the decisions that he has made here, about the sacrifices, about paths not followed, about lost love? What would it be that he would be thinking of, when he goes to sleep? I was taken aback by the question. First I tried to wriggle out by proclaiming that I am not yet 33, how can I even pretend to understand what a 75+ man would be thinking of? But the logic didn't cut ice with her. Then I changed tack and argued that my thinking has always been different from people around me but my wife won't let me slip so easily, agreeing with it and how she totally understands it, but still would like me to put myself into his shoes and share my thoughts on it. So, then, with no way out, I really started to think about it. If I were terminally sick, what would I be thinking about? And well, for me, the lost opportunities, the paths not taken, the regrets of not following my heart, lost love came back flooding me with a severe intensity. These were the only thoughts that came to me, regret the only emotion I felt. And so we talked into the night, pondering on the silly question "what would have been if I had done this and not that?" "phir kya hota uske baad?"
I also remembered the Virginia Woolf's classic "To the Lighthouse". In that book, she has created a character who is always seeking sympathy, who is forcing others to take pity on him, forcing them to take a forgiving stance for him. This character generated a lot of ill feeling around him, even filling his own children with revulsion. I shared it with my wife and told her that the lady is doing the same thing, forcing others to do something that they don't want to do, generating a lot of bad will around her.But who is going to bell the cat and share it with her? so be it. C'est la vie!!!!

Hangman works on my A1200

2009-09-11T13:27:00.002+02:00

Finally I got the hangman game working on my A1200. It has 2 dictionaries and looks decent when it runs :-)
So, I was finally able to handle the user key presses. The game logic was convoluted but eventually it all worked together. I have this feeling that the code is a trifle inefficient right now, but it is good to go. The help page needs work but it can wait :-)
There is J2ME Polish that I must get my hands on. It has custom forms and other goodies that I need to know to create a better user experience.
Now a bigger exercise. A game which will have sprites. I am going ahead with my images. After all the intent is more important than the letter.

Hangman with J2ME

2009-09-10T15:07:00.003+02:00

I had intended to start with another mobile game which would have sprites and collision detection and action and sword fighting and what not :-)
But the plans ran into rough weather as I could not create the images. When I tried creating the hero, my wife told me it does not even resemble a human or an alien. Forget about the sword. Suffice it to be said that the sword was a cross between a monkey's tail and some threads running here and there. So I haven't yet given up the hope of working on the game. It just meant that I need to spend more time in using GIMP to figure it out.
Well so I started work on a version of Hangman game. The idea was to create a simple game which will have a dictionary of all the cartoon serials that Kush watches. And then to add more dictionary with other words that we want him to learn. See the hidden evil intention of making Kush learn even while he is happy gaming :-)
Now this hangman sounded very easy theoretically. But it is a tough nut to crack...
After 3 days of working on it, I have the framework ready, but the game logic is not working properly right now. I had realized yesterday that the toughest part was to represent the keys and to get the user input. I came up with a smart work around, but the trouble with being smart is it leads one to uncharted territories. As of now, the only trouble is to make the selection go around the keys so that the user can type in the characters. I hope to complete it tomorrow.

my first game using j2me

2009-09-04T07:13:00.004+02:00

Finally, after lot of reading and lot of pondering, I got started on designing a simple game so that I could test my knowledge. I zeroed on a Trivia game as it is really simple to design. One question will follow the next and at the end a score will be displayed. I used netbeans as the ide. Well the game got designed rather quickly but I ran into rough weather with image display and audio playback. After some googling of concepts, i was able to display images, add a midlet icon, play a tone at the end of game in the simulator. It was great. But then I transferred the jar to my motorola a1200 handset and immediately there were problems. The image at start won't display. The game would hang.
I kept reading about Motorola handsets, but to no avail. Finally I realized that it is the java applications manager on the a1200 which was not able to cope with the amount of work being done at runtime. So I got the images created in constructor of canvas. Still it won't work. I had made canvas runnable, but then I removed it, thinking it might be because of the 2 threads running concurrently that could cause the problem. Still no success !!!
So today I fixed the form for right answer and wrong answer and got them filled in the constructor. During run time I would just choose the right form to be displayed. And so the game finally ran its course on A1200. But the image at startup won't display. I read a lot about paint() and how setCurrent(canvas) will call the paint(), but for some foggy reason, it didn't work on A1200. And all the time it would work on the simulator.
And then I stumbled upon it. In the sample code on the internet, I saw that the anchor "Graphics.TOP" was being used in conjunction with "Graphics.LEFT". And I was not using the TOP anchor. I immediately changed it and finally I got the results that I wanted. A simple trivia game that will display an image at the start and run its course properly. Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now on to bigger challenges. A new adventure game which will have a lot of sprites action and of course sprites collision detection.

exercises in meditation

2009-08-27T09:32:00.004+02:00

It has been a long journey this, from January this year till date, looking for that elusive perfect job opportunity. It has been a bit of roller coaster really, what with one bad news following another, with one setback closely following another and sometimes piggybacking. When I look back, this year has been the hardest of all my years here on this planet and I have gone through some really really bad years.
But apart from the usual complaining mode, I also feel that this passage of time has been really beneficial for me. One needs adversity to really know oneself, the depths of despair that one can go through with only hope providing succour to the aggrieved self. I have changed a lot. My ego has taken a harsh beating and it has led me to discover the world in totally different light. I have softened my stance on lot of things and I have mellowed down a lot. More over, I have stopped hurting others with my barbs and comments. And I have been doing a lot of breathing exercises and some meditation exercises.
When I first read Power of Now, I was intrigued by the idea that thoughts can be stopped. It was a novel concept for me because you see I believed that thoughts are what have shaped me. And I love thinking. It could be about reading what is in front of eyes and reflecting on it. It could be a problem analysis. Or it could be just plain day dreaming. Thoughts have raged inside me, egged me to say or to do things. And to imagine a state of being where thoughts can be stopped so that the self can be heard. Wow !!! But no matter how hard I tried, I always failed. The thoughts were always there. I tried some pranayam. I tried living in the now by being more aware of my surroundings. But everytime I would check, the damned thoughts were always there. I couldn't stop them, couldn't control them. But gradually I could fashion them. I would constantly check on myself and if I felt that I don't have to think this way, I could coerce them into thinking something else. But when I would close my eyes to just be in that moment, the noise would return. A fragment of song, a tune, a face, a scene would start playing again. And so it continued. Then I read a book of Tibetan philosophy on meditation. I liked the idea and gave it a try. Well for one ephemeral moment, I felt I was really in the moment. And then it was gone because you see I was trying to record my emotions and that, my friends, is a nagging thought running behind the scenes.
But today finally I broke the shackles. In the morning, when I sat down for the customary session of closing my eyes, of focusing on my breath and of de-cluttering my mind, it suddenly happened. I was focusing on the middle of my eyes and suddenly everything started glowing yellow, like some light. I immediately opened my eyes and I saw that the sky was covered with clouds. I closed my eyes again and after some time again the yellow light turned on. As I kept focusing, some random thought kept disturbing me. But rather than giving up, I persisted. And for some seconds, I felt peace and tranquility. I was suddenly happy, relaxed. And I realized no thoughts !!!! For some seconds, I dwelt there, happy to be there, just being fully present in that moment. And then when I tried opening my eyes, they wouldn't open. It was so relaxing, so peaceful that I didn't want to get out of that state, even when a little voice was now getting louder to break out of it. Was it trance? I don't know but I was able to open my eyes. I felt wonderful then, very happy, very content. This is how I want to be. After all these years of torture and suffering the constant howling of idiotic thoughts, I was finally able to quieten it.
Well the feeling didn't remain for long. Pretty soon, I was in my car, driving towards office and the regular jams and honking jolted me out of it. But I am going to try it again, tomorrow and every day.

exercises in business development

2009-08-25T12:39:00.003+02:00

The past few days have been crazy. It just seems that gods are not smiling at me. I keep on praying so hard for things I need, absolutely need to retain my sanity in this depraved, crazy world and the gods in their infinite wisdom keep on denying me. I keep on searching for some clue as to understand how I fit in the grand scheme of things, but my finite learnings have a limit. On the personal front, this whole month has been very very harrowing for me, enough to send a normal person down the spiral of depression. "ye to main hun ki is haal me bhi zinda hoon"
On the professional front, this whole month has been exercises in futility. I finally got the work I really really wanted to do. I have always known that I am a seeker, that I thrive when I have to read something about a lot of something. But I sometimes falter when I have to focus my research on only one topic. As such, reading tenders and writing business proposals is a dream come true for me. In this one month of August, I have read about Intelligent Tutoring Systems and how it can be implemented using AI and Java and I have read about Electronic Records Management System and about moreq2. So far a very good month for me :-)
I also read a lot about J2ME programming and I have finally figured out a simple enough game which I can develop over my free time and over weekends. I need to start on the coding part of it now. This should be a fairly simple trivia game, which should allow me to write and test my own game. Once this is done, on to bigger things....

Janmasthami, Independence day and loudspeaker songs

2009-08-15T06:14:00.002+02:00

You would be very familiar with this pattern - everytime there is a festival, people just have to demonstrate their enthusiasm (their affluence...) by being as loud as possible. I mean the colors are loud, the jewelery adorned by women have to be loud, and who can even ignore the bleating loudspeaker blaring one cacophony after another.
yesterday it was Janmasthami, the birth of Lord Krishna, celebrated by lots and lots of people. the morning began on a peaceful note, but then soon descended into chaos and it became noisy. But it was nothing as compared to today. Today is Independence day and the loudspeakers have started blaring from 9:30 AM. I don't know when will they stop. I think there is a rule in Delhi which prohibits loudspeakers after 10 PM so that people can sleep. I remember when I was a child in Bhagalpur, it used to be pretty lawless then. People would keep on blaring loudspeakers throughout the night and if someone would dare protest, he would be threatened with dire consequences. It used to be sleepless nights for all of us back then what with one loudspeaker blaring from one direction and the other loudspeaker blaring from another. Since then I have detested loud music and I have hated all those people who go around disturbing others in the name of celebrating something, those lousy insensitive uncouth fools.

Kush has turned 5 !!!!!

2009-08-06T11:44:00.002+02:00

Time really really flies, there is no doubt about it. I was blessed with a son on Aug 5 2004. He was so small then, so vulnerable, so innocent. I could hold him using one arm only. I remember that initially it took some time before he started recognizing me and accepting me as someone who is always around him. I remember that when ever I would shave my facial hairs, he would stop recognizing me :-)
Now 5 years have gone by and a lot has changed. He is now able to conjure up stories and narrate them well. He is still very young. Sometimes when I am lying in bed in the morning, I hear his little feet tapping on the floor as he runs from living room to bathroom, little tap tap tap, furious little slaps on the floor as he flies to bathroom so that he can be back before the ad break gets over. Now he prefers noisy little toys, especially those of Ben 10 franchise. Sometimes he creates such a din that it is almost impossible to sit through it :-)
We celebrated his birthday yesterday. Lots of relatives turned up to wish him. And he was very very happy. Usually he goes to bed by 9 PM, but yesterday we could manage to put him to bed only by 10 PM. He was very very tired and he was still singing "happy birthday to me!!!".
I sometimes wonder about the limits of memory, about how much can it store. And I have come to a sad conclusion that old memories fade rather quickly yielding their places to newer ones and that bad (sad) memories get imprinted on the walls refusing to fade into oblivion. Everytime I start thinking about the past, the regret and the pain of missed opportunities, of what could have been, come rushing in. In a sense, "power of now" was right. Past has got no place at all except giving us opportunity to learn something. Otherwise it weighs us down with its unbearable weight. Future is something that is still unborn (bhavishya ke garbh me kya chipa hai koi nahi janata :-)). But the Now as the present moment is the key. And it holds true for my relation with my son. If I start reflecting on it, I would tend to remember his tears and the callous manner by which I denied him something that he desired. And the regret will completely overshadow the happier moments. But of course it is not true. The landscape appears tinted because my memory tints it in a certain awful manner.
I love my child unconditionally. I have genuinely tried to make him happy and content. I want him to remember me fondly when he grows up and moves on with his life. I want him to look at his childhood days with fondness and I want him to have happy memories of his time spent with us. I had read somewhere that the nature of memories of early childhood drives the nature of personality of a person. So a happy and secure childhood will give way to serene outlook and a scarred nightmarish childhood will give way to suspicious outlook. I have been a cynic and suspicious all my life and I don't want my son to go through the hell that I have gone through. That is the only present I want to give him.

android phone costing more than 30K in india !!!!!!!!

2009-07-31T12:28:00.003+02:00

This was a blow by the way, a major blow. I was at HEC when i had first learnt that Google's Android is being used by HTC to launch a mobile handset in USA. Ever since, I had wanted to lay my hands on one. Now HTC has brought Magic to India with Airtel and they are going to charge more than 30000/- for it. This is so awful. The same mistake was committed by iphone people who priced it way high above the normal price and then later were found unable to comment on the low sales. I mean this kind of price is too high. There are idiots who love to buy these handsets to display their affluence, but for most of the people this is unreachable and once their interest dwindles in the product, nothing can shake it off the shelves, nothing.
I hope better sense prevails and they bring down the price. I read another report which said that close to 18 different models will be entering Indian market, all of them using Android, by this year end. I guess the prices will stabilise then.
On another note,I stumbled across gameboy emulator for mac. Great !!! so you can download the gameboy game on your mac and use this emulator to run it. I downloaded kigb and one game from internet and it worked, though the screen size was very small and it lost a lot of resolution when i stretched the window to a reasonable size. but hey, it worked didn't it? great job!!!
With the weekend almost here, the only thing I want to see is 6 PM on the clock so that I can pack and leave for home. 2 days of bliss and rest beckon me !!!! I hope I can catch up somewhat on Android this weekend.

Beer, Wolverine, Perian and other stuff

2009-07-29T08:24:00.004+02:00

Days are just slipping by me !!!! it is already nigh about end of July and there are still a lot of pending issues to complete. You must have gone thru this phase, lots of small, niggling items that need your attention, almost crying to get your attention and you just simply don't have either the patience or time to address them. I have got almost 15 such items on my plate and I need at least 2 full days to complete them. Am targeting this weekend (there goes my quiet time...)
Last Friday, after almost willfully forcing myself to abstain from alcohol, I went to a hotel with Sachin and had 4 beers. Great Beer !!! Taste was exquisite. Original idea was to down a quick one and go home but after 3 hours and 4 beers, I still wanted more :-) Thankfully had the sense to stop and to drive carefully home. made it safe that night although had some motorists honking madly at me on the Ashram flyover. must have done something crazy although can't remember it now :-)
On Saturday, played a Wolverine game MRD escape and wow, that game is addicting!!!! My son and i have almost completed the game and we had a lot of fun out of it. That made me think about quality time to be spent with children. I mean, honestly, is playing an online game with your son a good way to spend time? The only rationalization I can proffer is that we both had tonnes of fun and I guess that part is important too.
On Sunday, I downloaded a pirated version of a new movie (won't tell you which one) from a brand new site (won't tell you about it either LOL). I ran into a problem immediately. It was an avi file and quick time won't run it citing lack of some codec and realplayer will run it but won't play sound. So, I started looking for ways to make it run. I downloaded xvid codec for quicktime. Video started running, but no sound. Downloaded audio codec for quicktime, but no luck. Then I ran into www.perian.org. Wow !!! great job and that too done as open source. I don't know why but I have lot of trust in these open source software. It is my dearest wish to somehow contribute to open source with something, I will find a way to do that. And after I installed everything, well, the movie started playing with proper sound and all. The quality of movie sucks but what else was to be expected. I still have to watch the movie though :-)
Delhi had lots of rain on Monday 27th of July. It was enough to flood the roads, break apart the roads, fell down the trees and create traffic snarls. I was stuck for about an hour before I could find my way home. A 1/2 an hour journey turned into 1 and 1/2 hour nightmare :-(
On Tuesday morning, saw news report that there was a huge huge jam near Ashram flyover and I immeditely dropped any plan to drive to office. Did e-commuting. When Kush came from school, he was pleasantly surprised to see me home so we had an impromptu pillow fight before he was sent to take a bath. Well, he didn't disturb me much in my work, he is a nice obedient kid :-)
There is a timer ticking for me. I can't say much right now, but the winds of change are blowing and clarion calls have been sounded. I will come back to this in another post.

Wine, Darwine and Windows games

2009-07-27T11:52:00.004+02:00

Some time back I had installed wine to help me run some windows exe. At that point of time I had downloaded a game (exe, what else) which Kush much enjoys playing online. Unfortunately it never ran using wine giving some errors but for most of the part remaining silent, very silent. And I became busy with making Mediclik run on my Mac. Mediclik runs well using Safari or Firefox, but calendar widget never worked. So, I went around scrounging for a tool which would help me install IE. I found one. It is called ie4osx and when I tried installing it it demanded Darwine. So even when I had Wine, I installed Darwine and ie4osx installed IE6 on my Mac. Using this IE6, I was able to run Mediclik and test the calendar widget (worked very well). Thanks to ie4osx team !!!!
With the Darwine came the WineHelper which supposedly ran the windows exe. And I remembered the half done job of making game.exe run on mac. So the fun began.
Test with Darwine. Gave error that some library can't be loaded, Flash can't be loaded. I installed a Flash10b.ocx using Winetricks, but still the same problem.
I used Wine and well we moved on to one more step. I could see the game window, but the game won't launch.
I kept searching over the net, but drew a blank. At this point of time I almost gave up.
Just to test if the setup is all right, I installed another game and tried running it with Wine. It did. But Darwine gave problem again. But anyways, at least I can run some game. I had read a refrain repeatedly on the net that there are some games or apps which won't run with Wine or Darwine. So maybe the first game falls in that category.
Maybe if I get some time, I will see if I can make Darwine run the first game. The errors are understandable there :-) I never said solvable, did I :-)

Mediclik and License server

2009-07-24T09:27:00.003+02:00

after all the hullaballoo about the chat and ireport tool creating problem, I found the problem to be a jar file in the lib folder, which on removal solved the problem. so, Mediclik application is again running beautifully on my Mac. The only thing that doesn't work is the calendar widget. I am using safari and firefox, but can't get it to work. I have seen it work on IE on XP so I know it works. I did a google on it, but the results were disheartening with claims that calendar widget doesn't work on any of the browser on Mac. pathetic state of affairs, if true :-)
so, we are onto the last lap here. Mediclik is almost stable with all the features that we had decided. right now look and feel are being changed and after that comes the hardest bit of it. you see being a startup, Chiasma solutions is very afraid that once someone buys a CD, he/she may hand it over to the freewheelers who will use it but won't pay us. Sort of like software pirates at work !!!!
biggest challenge is how to stop them. the approach we have taken is to make the user register with us online. this will be a one time operation, but has to be done so that we can authenticate it with the side effect that we will also be able to allow only one installation from one CD by uniquely identifying the CD and disabling any other installation from that CD. Now the fact is that the target audience, the small clinics, may not have internet connection. This was my biggest concern but it was decided that the salespersons will have some data card with them that they will use to connect to Internet and help the buyer to authenticate their software version. This to me is a highly flawed strategy which is going to cause umpteen amount of trouble. Imagine a salesman walking some medical clinic guy through the steps needed. What if the data card does not work? What if the salesman is unable to do what he is supposed to do? We have to arrange for their traninings etc. But as of now, this approach has been decided and if it sucks then we got to live with it :-(
now the next part of agenda - install IE8 so that i can run the calendar widget and work on my gaming experience :-)

Mediclik, iReport and chat

2009-07-23T09:56:00.003+02:00

Well, well, well, what do we have here?
a tool which runs as a web application on Tomcat, which uses iReport tool to generate pdfs for reports using jrxml and jasper files and which now has support for chatting.
Now, it seems that iReport and Chat won't work together :-(
I think the problem is with the jar files in the lib folder, but this has to be found out...
For chat, 2 new jar files have been added and that complicates thins for iReport. What's the link b/w two? need to find that out.
On Tuesday night, my wife lost her aunt. She was in coma for last 1 and a half months in Apollo and the end was prolonged. First we heard of cardiac seizure which was then rectified. Finally at 11 PM, the inevitable was declared. It still came in as a shock. There were many many things to do after and that took quite some time. Past 2 days have just gone in a blur.
I came to my desk on Thursday and find this seemingly idiotic problem of ensuring that 3 tools run together. Well, life goes on.

sweet smell of success !!!!

2009-07-21T07:57:00.003+02:00

Finally, after a lot of heart burn and lot of fixing issues, Mediclik ran successfully on my MAC.
here are the detailed steps :-)
1) create a war file using all the source files and jsp pages. make sure that library has all our libs too.
2) deploy the war using Tomcat. there is a lib file for jdt core inside TOMCAT/lib folder. copy that to Tomcat folder in the lib folder. change context.xml to mention reloadable = true. add all the lines for db connectivity.
3) make sure that mysqld is running. i couldn't connect to mysql initially so changed permission on the files and folders being used by mysql.
4) create databases using script
5) click on the link of deployed war file. voila !!!!!

it took me close to 7 days and innumerable hours. but it is there running now.

The next step on the agenda is to make games run using wine. right now if i try a graphics rich game using wine, nothing happens. on the net there is someone who claims that apple implementation of xcode is all broken. So that's the next step :-)

I also want to read all about AppleScript and about Symbian.

Plus one simple game development using J2ME. Target this weekend.

mediclik won't work on my mac !!!!!!!

2009-07-20T06:37:00.003+02:00

if the last week was crazy, this week including the weekend was crazier. i had been testing mediclik, our product, on windows and then suddenly i had this bright idea. Why not bring it to my mac? and so started the whirlwind of installing one application after another. install mysql? check. install tomcat? check. install mysql connector? check. use netbeans to create a war? check. deploy war using tomcat? check. login to application? fail.....
change track. use netbeans to create a war using existing resources. deployed it successfully. login failed again.
check if the db connection is ok. there are no logs so no idea. verified that every service is running properly.
use netbeans to create a new war but moved the folders inside WEB-INF. war created and deployed successfully. this time at least login screen opened properly. wrong login gave error. correct login gave nothing. the screen didn't change.
checked all the classes. realized that some files are not being compiled. error is that it can't recognize json objects. did an internet search for the same. found a good article. did things accordingly. compile failed again.
and so on and so forth. i will find something blocking, check it out on the net, try things and find that things are still not working. gooodddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd!!!!!!!!!!
i must admit that the feeling of dropping everything was sometimes overwhelming, but i have persisted nonetheless.
Apart from this never ending cycle of changes to make mediclik work on my mac, I did find time to chat with Abhishek about starting part time on mobile application development which if successful could lead to a new company and about job scenes in Bangalore. things are bad these days even in the silicon valley of India.
Did read some articles on game development using J2ME but these are simple games and simpler articles. not much to talk about, not much to learn. I am looking for a really good book on J2ME game development.
In trying to find some good games, I was given some SIS files by my bro. Now SIS is a symbian file which can run only on those cellphones which are symbian compliant. Motorola is not. Motorola quit Symbian group as it felt that Symbian group is being hijacked by Nokia. As of now there is no tool which can make SIS file run on Motorola phones. Looks like this is another agenda item on my plate. I am going to read about Symbian now.

J2ME, Macport and Wine

2009-07-16T07:31:00.003+02:00

The whole last week was crazy. After I gave up my efforts on realistically getting my hands on some code files for mobile games using Java decompilers, I started concentrating on creative aspect of it. Imagine me developing a brand new game for my son!!!!!!!!!
The idea just kind of kept growing on me until I was unable to shake it off. It just looked like the most important thing to do. So after I started dreaming about it, I knew the time of the idea had come. I looked around on the internet for common tools to develop games. There are games based on Flash, on PHP and finally using Java. Now Java is a language I understand. So more digging on it revealed the names of J2ME. More digging led me to microemulators and other plugins that need to be installed. And so after a long long time and downloading lot of files, I was able to set up the environment, ready for some action. Now as per the 2nd step of the agenda, I am reading a lot about game development constructs, the methods, the design etc etc. So far it has been fun !!!!!
While on J2ME and game development, my son came up with another request. He wanted to run an exe file on Mac. Now it can't run, see. Exe is meant for windows not Mac OSX. But my son wont' listen. So again searched on internet and rammed into MacPorts and Wine. Wow!!! A windows emulator on Mac !!!! After I read a lot about how to install these cool applications, I was able to install MacPorts. But then I needed XCode. So I became member of ADC, downloaded XCode (1gb) and installed it. Right now Wine is being installed. Hopefully by evening I will have it ready so that my son can run his game exe on my Mac. things that you need to do for your son !!!!!!!!!!!
Apart from all these esoteric geeky stuff, I also read Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage. It is really really bad. I had loved Paulo's Alchemist, but this book had no believable characters, no great philosphical discussions, nothing working. My advise to you will be to avoid this book. Just reread the Alchemist once again.

java decompiler

2009-07-09T14:17:00.002+02:00

Well, you see, my son has grown fond of playing games on my motoming and well there are certain games which are freely available but their source code is not. So that I always had jar files with classes, but no java files. And well, my apple of eyes has certain problems with some games "papa, ye nahi chal raha", "papa ye sirf nokia ke liye hai". And to be very honest, I am not the world's best programmer so I can't really churn out code for a brand new game for him. But after working in software companies for 8 years, I have learnt a lot about code reusability and how much easier it is to understand a given piece of code and doing changes on it :-)
Now, with a jar file of classes, I can't do much, can I? So, I started searching for java decompilers freely available on net. I ran into JDEC 2.0 and well I tried it. it gave me mixed success. For all java games fanatics, it is common news that game developer of asteroids has placed the source code freely available. So for the class file of asteroid, JDEC ran swooningly well. But for another game, where the name of file was a.class, it gave an exception "string index out of range" and it kept giving this error for other files that i was interested in. I couldn't decompile any other single file using JDEC, it was that bad. And I kept getting the same error. The error was always in JDEC source code file and to my surprise I found that I have only the class files in JDEC folder. and so guess what, i turned the tool on itself. When JDEC tool finished decompiling the error throwing file, I got a java file but of course I couldn't find the error. The line numbers had been mashed up or something like that so I couldn't locate the error throwing statement and so to bring a long story to end, JDEC has been totally ineffective for me.
And so now I start again. I see that there is another tool called JOD which I will try now. More updates later...

After a looooooooooooooooong time !!!!!

2009-07-03T12:21:00.004+02:00

Well, I am back after a really really long hiatus !!!
Many different events have occurred with my completing HEC diploma, my fruitless efforts to find a job in Europe, my coming back to India, my joining a startup and many many trials and tribulations to settle down.
Well, this post is dedicated to the startup Chiasma Solutions and its flagship product Mediclik. Now when I joined this company, work on Mediclik had been meandering and my first reaction was to admit defeat and focus energy on some new work. However because of some curious turn of events, I was forced to sit back and take a relook at the product.
Mediclik is a web based application designed for small clinics and nursing homes. The key word is small. This product is not meant for big hospitals. Rather it tries to address the real life needs of small to mid sized (50 - 100 patients) nursing homes. Well to cut a long story short, the product is now complete and ready to be showcased to the world. Take a look at the image above and check out for yourself the cool looks !!! This is from one login only. We provide 4 different logins for users from admin to operator to in house pharmacist and doctor. The product looks awesome now :-)
Well my part of the job is to find an audience online, so I studied all the cryptic sounding and really mystifying concepts of SEO. I tried adding mediclik to some online directories (free of course) and well nothing ...
It seems that for any reasonable chance of online success, one has to be ready to shell out big bucks. This is really awful because we are a startup and we really don't have the big bucks to splurge on marketing gimmicks. As of now, we are trying out other avenues too like making cold calls to nearby nursing homes, but the conversion rate is not really taking off.

newbies shining !!!!

2008-09-05T02:30:00.000+02:00

Since yesterday, we have seen a deluge of participants. They have swarmed us everywhere, in the MBA lobby, in the Expansiel, on the lanes of HEC. They are the Sep 08 batch, who have come to get started with their MBA.

Just talking to them took me back to January, when I had come here in my pursuit of the great dream. They had the same questions and most importantly same sense of disbelief on learning that landing a job is not that easy as they had imagined it to be. It is an amazing feeling, knowing that the end of road is nigh. After just 4 months, I will be on my way of internship and then a job.

My much deserved break from 8 years of non stop work will be over and I will embark upon a new journey, which should be more fulfilling that what I had before. At least I fervently pray for so :-)

I was the new intake co-ordinator and thanks to HEC Connection forum, the new participants had already seen my face. It feels great to be recognized by them. I am simply loving these moments :-)

Waiting for Godot

2008-09-02T13:16:00.000+02:00

From today, lil Kush has started school again. I am getting bored and sick of waiting for something to happen. To while away my time, I had volunteered to become new intake liaison co-ordinator and now the new admits are coming in. right now it is just a trickle, the flood is expected to be on 4th and 5th. Well, good luck to them all. HEC is indeed a good choice. I have been here for 2 core semesters, and I have loved the great teachers, great ambience and most of all the smiling helpful faces of administration and everyone on campus. That has indeed been one of the greatest take away from this place.

From next week onwards, my classes will start again. We have something called the live case. Should be fun.

Now that the vacation is getting over, retrospection mood is creeping in. What did I really do all these days? I don't think that I will ever get a chance to enjoy 2 months of blissful vacation again. As usual, my focus had always been on personal comfort. So, slept well :-)

Also, we watched a lot of movies, really an awful amount of them. Right now, I don't have a desire to watch any other movie. BTW, if you haven't really done it, go watch Dark Knight. It is indeed a very good movie.

But did I really work on something concrete? Nahhh. Nothing on personal development, nothing extra work on the Business Plan that I have to work on, nothing really...

God, I really love to do nothing :-)

But now, it is all going to be over and I can't say I am terribly unhappy about it. So, still waiting for 8th.....

2008-08-31T12:35:00.000+02:00

It has been now 8 months here. I haven't been blogging away for quiet some time, and now I am back !!!!!

Well, the past 8 months has simply flown away. When we came in here, we knew it was going to be a tough ride. But so far so good :-)

After 2 trimesters here at HEC, Paris, I think I know what I will be doing after my MBA. I still have a lot of open questions, but I now feel that I have progressed on the path that I had chosen. And that matters a lot to me.

After 8 years of putrefaction, while pretending to be enjoying myself in a claustrophobic world of pretense and hypocrisy, it sure feels to be heaven here, where I can share my thoughts without fear of backlash, where I can speak out against anything if I so feel like to without expecting some wise ass to take the high ground.

Well, looking forward to start of classes now.

We started on vacations in July and we still haven't come to the end of vacation period. Wow!!!! French people really know how to enjoy themselves.

On a personal note, here is a small video of Kush, playing piano. Enjoy!!!!

one month gone

2008-02-03T17:39:00.000+01:00

one month has passed away just like a snap of fingers, or more like whiff of a smell. i can't even say that we are settled in Jouy En Josas, what with so many things still to purchase. the pressure of course work has started big time. assignments, presentations, group work, conferences, parties. sometimes, you get this strange feeling that there should be more than 24 hours in a day to get some good sleep, as sleep is something you start to compromise on.

good part is i have started a small regimen of exercise, which goes hand in glove with all the walking that i have to do here. HEC campus is on top of a small hill and the Jouy village is downhill. so you stroll down to the grocery store and you huff and puff on your way to campus. i must have lost around 4-5 kgs and that is not a mean feat, if you think about it.

i have just undergone a terrific experience of a 3 day seminar on intuitive intelligence. it was profound as it challenged so many basic tenets that i had about intuition, about creativity, about emotional experience. i was so moved by the experience that i could not sleep properly on last saturday night and was still up by 4 AM on sunday to reflect and retrospect.

there is a huge challenge coming up. i want it for myself (i am selfish i know), but i will have to wait and watch and prepare myself for it, both emotionally and mentally.

right now, i am running late on marketing assignments, so i will go, slog.

Enjoy

hec paris

2008-01-27T18:53:00.000+01:00

currently i am in hec paris, doing my mba. imagine starting studies again after 8 years of work exp :-) feeling can't be described in words.

HEC is indeed a great college to be in. the ambience is great. the spirit of co-opetition is encouraged, which just means compete with your friends but also co-operate with them too.

i have been here for the past 3 weeks, meaning i joined the jan 08 batch here. it is indeed a privilege to be here, with such talented persons around.

i am hoping to start a blog for my experience here, but let us see how much time can i spare after all the studies and assignments.

i will end this blog by saying thanks to all my well wishers and especially to those without whose help i wouldn't be here.

so, cheerio and enjoy

dinner with old friend

2007-10-21T09:41:00.000+02:00

last night, we had invited an old friend and his wife on dinner. well, they made it on time despite heavy rains. But after some time, we realized that we had run out of conversations ideas. and even though we were meeting after one year, we spent much of the time watchin T20 match b/w india and aus, which india won
Seems like, if you lose touch with your friends, a lot of water flows under the bridge and you lose out on the common points. And then one fine day, when you meet again, you want to share a lot, but you hide behind pretence and your ego and don't make any attempt to connect with the other person. This happens even when you will go all lenghts to help the person. Seems such a contradiction, but i have lived with this feeling for long.
i know sometimes it bothers me, but i guess i have learnt to accept it and move forwards.
Till the next time, Ciao

First posting on blog

2007-10-20T12:05:00.000+02:00

Hi,

i had a really big desire to create my own space on web, to put down my ideas and thoughts some place. writing them down on a scrapbook or a notebook was getting tedious.

there are so many things i would like to add here, but I guess that will take some time.

as of today, i am expecting a friend for dinner. meetu has been busy since morning to make the dinner special, which i simply fail to understand. but she believes in extending great hospitality, so i accept it out of respect for her. has been running since morning. to make things worse, had a dinner and drinks with Sachin and right now my energy level is a little bit on the downside :-)

will come back soon.