Rough Road !!

Is what certainly participants of the reality show MTV Roadies have to tread on! I have never watched the earlier series completely ever, but this time I have been following these bunch of people around their international sojourn with one eye open. It's an interesting show in many ways. For one, people get to bike around for fun doing odd stunts here and there.
But what is more interesting is to see this game bring out the beast from within you! I read Animal Farm some time back and the summary there was that "All animals are political by nature". The same applies to this show, and it brings out all the machiavellian instincts to the fore out of these participants. Guys and girls alike, scheme, plot, curse, form temporarily beneficial bonds only to regroup in distinctly different ways on the exit of one participant every week. I think its a remarkable display of the entire possible range of human behaviorism necessary for survival and to stay in the game till the end. Check it out whenever you can and marvel at us complex beings :)

Tarantino Valentino!

So, another Valentine's day is around the corner. Am sure, we will see the usual self-imposing moralists breaking some hard-working man's greeting cards store on the occasion. Am sure, the price of a rose will shoot up to justify your LOVE on that day. Am sure, couples will try to be as effusively mushy as possible on that day. Am sure, an inappropriate number of candles will be sacrificed at the altars of the 'them-lit' dinners on that day. Oh am sure, that all love related cliches will abound on that very day.

Its a bit ho-hum actually if you ask me. Pi too was not enthused by my suggestions of a working lunch or a definitely-crowded dinner routine. So for us, its going to be an evening show of "American Gangster" - the recent Denzel Washington starrer, supposedly an excellent telling of a true crime story!! Romantic - eh ;)

Open Contributions

One of the things that I wanted to do on joining my current place-of-work was to contribute in an open source manner. But whoever thinks contributing to open source is a piece of cake is mistaken! First of all, most open source projects are thoroughly professional nowadays. PostgreSQL is a prime example. It's not as easy as submitting any piece of code which compiles and works, to be pushed into the product. Infact, its an arduous journey where patience is a great virtue to possess. It starts off with one identifying what the project needs. Many projects have official TODO lists around which make the job easier. Then an important thing is to identify which is the piece of the pie that you can eat - meaning identifying the work item which you think you can contribute to as per your current capacity/knowledge of the code base. After that begins the journey of putting your case in the community mailing lists. The list does make it hard on you by trying to ask all kinds of difficult questions. Why should we do it, why and how you propose to do it, will you be able to do it. It's all in your face literally and can easily intimidate a person and to make him think twice about contributing. Patience again comes to your rescue. After the list agrees that something should be worked upon, then one starts coding and producing work-in-progress patches that should be periodically sent to the list just to let them know that you are not in deep slumber pondering over the work. Some good souls, even take it upon themselves to test your work out and provide constructive feedback. Some established souls, take a look at your work-in-progress and can immediately suggest further course of actions, feedback and the likes. Then comes the final day, after toiling around for quite a while, when you submit the final code and it gets committed!

How do I know this - you ask. Well, I too have been brave enough in the past to take on this path and have succeeded a wee bit in making humble contributions back to my current favourite open source project - PostgreSQL. Today PostgreSQL 8.3 was released and it was gratifying to see my name as one of the contributors to some new functionality added. Now that I have been through this before, its a bit easier and I will definitely be contributing to the future releases whenever I can.

CARnama!

So, I like big cars. I am an average Indian, but when it comes to cars, most Indians prefer small cars. Its a no-brainer then that Nano is an indigenous product and from the looks of it a nifty little one at that.

Lately, I have been harboring thoughts of upgrading my car. And when I say I harbor thoughts, I don't just keep the thought ship docked at the port, I actually venture out to deep waters. Whether the thought ship reaches its destination or not is another matter :)

I had zeroed out on a City ZX GXi model, but my amigos mentioned that for it's worth one does not even get safety features like ABS, Driver/Passenger side Airbags. I mean, WTF! for the price tag, I had thought these mid-sized cars should have everything thrown in, leather seats and stuff!

After some hours of internet research later, SX4 seems to be the only car which has everything thrown in (yeah, even an input socket in its music player, for your IPOD like gizmos).

Hmmm, sad part, I don't like the way it looks and reports say its difficult for 3 people to be comfy in the back seat. Looks like this thought ship might just get watered out soon :p

BARE facts!

So my 8 year old nephew is lucky enough that he gets to go visit his relatives in this famous beachy tropical island called as St. Maarten. The beaches and the blue waters will put our beloved Goa to shame anyday.
But what is luckier is that he checked out some Nude Beaches too while he was there!


So he comes back and proudly shows some of the pictures that he had clicked whilst on the premises. Apart from the sensationalism that we might usually associate with this, it was actually refreshing for me to hear him out talking about it normally. In our days, at his age, had I uttered something along these lines, a sound admonition would have been just around the corner, not to mention my lack of modesty and moral values :)

Whatever be the case, one thing remains constant: "Boys will be boyz" ;)!!

Now: Various Artists!

I have always wondered when people answer the question "So, what kind of music do you like?" with very specific answers. Answers like "strictly golden oldies songs for me please", "definitely, not the present day crap", "rock only rules" etc. etc.

When people ask me this (I don't get this asked too often, now that I am married for quite a while though :P), I am a bit confused. Now, don't think that I am a die-hard music enthusiast, who sleeps/eats/drinks/lives/[insert every other emphatic verb/adverb] music. I like my music in small doses when I like it.

It was just today morning that Pi put on this nice marathi CD, the song was "Kevha Tari Pahate" and it made me get out of my bed and listen attentively to the melodious tune. Or it can be "Fast Car - Tracy Chapman", this was the first English song that I liked. Or it could even be Usher, belting out "Yeah, Yeah" or "Let it Burn". It could even be Linkin Park, Jagjit Singh, Pearl Jam, KK, Khare-Kulkarni in any random order and varied doses for me.

Ok, so the point I am trying to make is why people want to straight-jacketise themselves and declare that they like a specific genre only? I don't know about others, but I kinda like my taste - spread over, diffused, noisy, melliflous, headachy :)

People care to enlighten me on why they prefer a specific kind of music? Till then I am cruising on my Fast Car singing -

"You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
You leave tonight or live and die this way"

SUNny days for MySQL

Ok, so after a late night bachelor party - nah, they are not *so* interesting as the ones we see on 'em stupid movies, but it is a lot of male bonding (read card playing, liberal profanity usage, eating-drinking binges), I trudge late to office in an auto rickshaw. (My car was stranded in the office parking overnight, since I did not want to drink and drive). To add, my rear is not used to the spinal jolts one experiences in our famous Indian auto rickshaws - yeeooouch.

Anyways, the news of the day that awaited me was about Sun buying out MySQL for 1 Billion $$$$!! Thats a lot of monies for an open source company! For an analysis for what it means to us, take a look at my CEO's blog. Interesting news to get first thing in office.