It was early 2000. The recession was months away, the markets were at all time highs and techies were generally a happy bunch.
We had just done a major release and were waiting for fresh work from our client. Waiting is never an easy task, especially when one has had a busy phase just before that. IE and Outlook kept me engaged on otherwise boring days.
On one such day, I remember getting a mail from Vijay asking me to check out a new language called Ruby. Being a programming language junkie and having nothing else to do, I downloaded and tried writing a few basic programs. It
felt different and programming was fun again. In the coming months, I wrote automated test solutions with Ruby and cut down the time it took us (and our client) to test our releases.
Years passed. I occasionally visited the
ruby language website. Always left with a tinge of sadness, sad at the lack of popularity of this wonderful language among the programming masses.
Sometime last year, things
started changing. Came by way of a strange name =>
rails. Been following the buzz for a while now. Extremely happy for ruby for it deserves the attention.
Finally got tired of being just an observer. Took the plunge a few days back and
whipped up a small bookmarking tool. Put in a bit of AJAX as well to be buzzword compliant ;)
Will be doing more if time and work permits.
I am now aggregating
my flickr pictures on
tamizhan.com. Overnight, my plugin runs and grabs any new picture I post at flickr.
The sync is an one time static import i.e if I change the title of an existing photo in my flickr account, the change will not get reflected here. I thought of making it dynamic but that would mean checking every photo every night for changes, which has huge bandwidth implications as my flickr account grows (which it should in the coming year).
These fun projects are a welcome diversion, especially since I am having a hectic time at office.
Anyways, next on my plate is AJAXification. Probably followed by a grease monkey user script. That space is looking
more and more interesting with every passing day.
I am still very much alive. These days, time is mostly spent in excel sheets and microsoft project documents :(
Took a few photographs during my trip to trivandrum. One of my personal favourites,
A few more can be seen at
my flickr page.
Comments have been disabled because I got tired of fighting comment spammers. They seem to get around blacklists, captchas and what not.
Trackbacks are still available. Waiting for my first trackback spam...
Leaving you with a
quote,
“The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.”
- Tara Ploughman
india rajastan camel corp
Originally uploaded by FriskoDude.
The newest way I avoid getting bored is by browsing through the photos in Flickr.
Kerala-2
Originally uploaded by Little Johnny.
As regular readers might have noticed, I like photographs which capture kerala's rustic beauty. Flickr has quite a few of them of which this one caught my eye.
Got a bunch of great snaps of kerala from a website. A weekend cable blackout meant I had enough time on my hands to whip up some new designs to go with them. Nothing complex. Just some photos and colors to go with them.
Sreekanth has been sending horror stories via email about life at IIMA. Put together a bunch of smart people and you are bound to get a challenging competitive environment. But I didn't expect it to be this extreme :)
Bought a bunch of ghazals from landmark a week back. The Jagjit Singh ( live in singapore ) CD is heavenly. One of the good things about buying a live recording is the variations the singers bring in while rendering their hit songs live. Hariharan & Jagjit Singh are two singers especially adept at this.
If you are feeling really bored today,
follow this link.
To end with, lines from a song I am currently listening to,
tum itanaa jo muskuraa rahe ho
kyaa Gam hai jisako chhupaa rahe ho
aa.Nkho.n me.n namii ha.Nsii labo.n par
kyaa haal hai kyaa dikhaa rahe ho.
A random selection of photographs from
my Flickr.com account,
A couple of quotes I came across recently and liked,
“
Right in the middle of an ordinary life, Love came and made it a fairy tale”,
“
Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.”
- Alan Perlis
