Year end wrap up

With 6 months of blogging and close to 4,000 hits behind my back, I can look back and feel happy. This was one of my achievements this year. Generally was born in June 2006 and has been constantly growing till then. Among all the million and zillion blogs in the universe, mine is a tiny speck. I didn’t start this blog to make a difference to the world or to bring in world peace. I started it to share a few thoughts, ideas, hacks, tips and generally, talk.

I blog about my work. I use some hacks, write some scripts, find some tools to make my life simpler and I share those with you. I find out how to open an explorer from the command line, I figure out how to enable msbuild in cygwin, I discover a helpful Enum method and it’s all there for you to see. I have been working on C# for the past few months and you can see a lot of posts on that.

I blog about my hobbies. I wrote a post on multiple row toolbars in Firefox (which has been attracting readers ever since), I discovered Ranorex, the GUI automation tool. I try my hand at writing at times and I post occasionally on that. You can see posts on phrases, books, ads etc.

Travel is another passion of mine and I blog about it on my travel blog, Aseema. Yet another blog of mine, My Book Shelf is dedicated to book reviews. Music, which is an important part of my life gets special attention on this blog, Saregama. So, Generally is my play area where I try different games, try a few hacks and share a few jokes.

This will be my last post for the year. As I bid good-bye to the year that’s going by and extend a warm welcome to young 2007, let me end this post by listing some of the posts which I am proud of. If you are looking for something else, the sidebar is always there.

Mumbaites: really rude?
Origin of foobar
Exposing your .NET assembly through COM
C# and typedef
Multiple row toolbar in Firefox
Finding number of elements in enumeration
Windows Hack: Open an explorer from the command line
I don’t know and I don’t care

Happy Holidays and wish you all a happy new year. May life treat you better this coming year.

Coding and writing short stories

Having tried my hand at the creative side of life (read “writing stories”), I have often heard from the veterans that one needs to read a lot to be a good writer. I couldn’t agree more. You see how writers play with words and you are tempted to do it yourself. You read a good piece and say “I wish I had written that” or “I wish I could write like that”.

I felt the same when I saw a piece of code today. It’s written by one of our senior most programmers who I am in awe of. It’s around 15 lines of Perl code. It’s neat, compact, efficient and awesome! It took me 20 minutes to figure out all the constructs that piece of code used. I admit I am not all that familiar with Perl.

This led me to this thought: Do you need to read others’ code to become a good coder? Certainly. If I hadn’t looked at the Perl code, I would have never imagined one could write code like that! Sadly, I don’t even remember when I read somebody’s code because I wanted to read it. Code review, code digging, debugging – I have done all this. But, reading code for the heck of reading it: No.

Lesson learnt: Read more code from this senior programmer.

C# Properties

I am sure you would have used Properties if you have written a fairly large C# program. I too have. Many of them.

A word of caution about it though. Properties are methods, MSDN calls them special methods. Either way, they are functions. The stack is modified, variables are copied, function is executed, a value is returned and stack is modified again. All this to access one variable.

If you declare a member variable as private and give users complete access to it by using get and set properties, then it’s certainly a better idea to just remove the properties and give direct access to it. Imagine the number of function calls you will be saving.

Moreover, in debug mode, if you add a watch on a variable, the get property is executed every time to refresh the value of the variable. I know time constraints don’t hold while debugging, but yoy may manage to speeden up your debugging process by a itsy-bitsy amount.

Wanna know my caller tune? Call me! No, thank you.

A new annoying thing has cropped up among the youngsters these days. Caller tunes. I call up my cousin to let her know the phone number she wanted and as soon as I dial her number, I here Himesh Reshammiya crooning “Aashiq banaya aapne” in his utterly irritating nasal voice.

I dial my friend’s number and I here “Dhoop nikalti hai jahan se”. This time at least the song and singer are worth listening to.

Another friend of mine who is a sai bhakt has “Om Sai” chanting. It doesn’t make it any less irritating, sorry.

Why don’t these people realize that this is as idiotic as it can get? It’s like having “Bheege Honth tere” as your ring tone and it rings at its fullest volume in your office. Don’t people know anything about professionalism? I over heard a manager lecturing his subordinates about office etiquettes. He was telling them things like “Put your phone on silent” and “Don’t have loud (read vulgar) songs as ring tones”. Same with caller tunes. Imagine your boss calls you up to remind you about the client meeting and hears the song “Humko tumse pyar hai” or “Koi nahi hai kamre mein”? Would you want to be in his position? No Sir, not me.

It’s time people realized that with these ring tones and caller tunes, they evade others’ personal spaces. More importantly, they end up looking stupid. Please. Don’t do it.

I don’t know and I don’t care

Of late, I have realized that I am not that well read about technology as my colleague. He is a junior to me, still he knows a lot about stuff that I don’t. I started wondering why this is so. I thought may be his college was better and he actually learnt all this when he was a student. The moment this thought came to my mind, I knew it can’t be. No engineering college in India can teach you about Processing or OpenGL, right! As I interrogated myself more, I could pin point to one small thing which created this huge knowledge gap between me and my smart colleague. It’s one sentence actually, “It’s not my field.”

Whenever I came across something ‘new’, I would relate that to the work I was currently doing and I would either read it further or discard it saying “It’s not my field.” More often than not, it was the latter. This Not-my-field attitude is quite well summed up by the joke

Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Because they will say “It’s not a software problem. It’s a hardware problem”.

No, I did not make that up, but the stark reality hit me after I heard this joke. Damn it, I am one of them.

As I peeked into my habits further more, I realized it’s not limited to just technology or my profession. I do this all the time. I am reading the newspaper and I spot a news about the President of China visiting India. A thought runs across my mind: “How does it matter to me? It doesn’t? Then skip the news.” I spend 15 minutes reading the newspaper. 7 minutes are spent reading the supplement and 2 minutes in comics. By the end of it, I am no more knowledgeable or aware than I was 15 minutes back.

This astounding discovery has depressed me so much that I have started to regret all these years which I have spent with this I-don’t-know-and-I-don’t-care attitude. If only I could reverse the earth and get back all those precious moments. Better late than never. I could have continued like this if not for that colleague of mine. Right? Thanks, buddy. You don’t know how much of a help that was.

Blog shy?

Why do people start a blog and not share their blog URL with others? I thought the main reason why you wrote a blog was to let others know what you think/feel, ain’t it?

Oh, oh, don’t look at me. I know, I am equally blamed for doing this. To answer this question, I would say I don’t want to give out this blog URL to others because I don’t want to associate my name with this blog. I don’t mind if someone discovers my blog and appreciates/hates it. As long as they don’t know the hands and the brain behind those posts are mine, I am fine with it. Why, you ask? Well, I don’t know. May I am blog shy. I write short stories under a pseudonym. If someone reads my stories, I am fine with it. They shouldn’t know that I have written it.

but I don’t like being popular, being famous. I can’t stand compliments (derogatory or otherwise). I want to be in a haze, behind a veil and quietly see what people are saying about my blog. Not that I get a chance, because people don’t say much! So, why not leave a comment, huh? Go ahead, make my day!

Do you have a Googly name

Have you ever googled your own name? Your significant other’s? Your boss? Your school?

9 out of 10 people will answer yes to all the questions above. (Don’t ask me where I got those statistics from. Hey, the very fact that you are reading this post is enough for me to make up those numbers!)

International Herald Tribune has a very interesting article about how Google has pervaded our lives. She narrates a few incidents where her Googly name (yeah, I made up that word. Googly name: n. A name when Googled returns accurate and more hits) has worked against her.

Funnily enough, she has written this article under a pseudonym.

16 things I did not know about Windows XP

Thanks to StumbleUpon for the link.