The best write-up for any programmer

I stumbled upon this wonderful article on programming by none other than Chuck Jazdzewski. It is quite simply the best and the most concise article on the difficult topic of “how to become a better programmer”. Though I have tried my luck at explaining that, it pales in comparison to this article by one of the grand daddies of the programming world.

Oh, and just in case you are wondering who the hell Chuck is, here is the info: Chuck was part of the core team of three great guys who designed Delphi, the other two being Anders Hejlsberg — the father of both Delphi and C# — and Gary Whizin. Chuck has since left Borland and is now working with Microsoft.

Again, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon it so soon but for the magic of RSS. Long live RSS! Long live Google Reader! Hey, but seriously, are you not using RSS yet? :).

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One year of blogging

Today, the 25th of October marks the first anniversary of this blog, and I thought it was
a good time to jot down my experience with the blogosphere so far. Needless to say, it has been an exhilarating and time consuming experience sitting down and jotting down all those words that make up the 72 posts that I have managed to publish so far, starting from this introductory post from last year this day.

I am thankful to each one of you who thought it was well worth your time to visit and read what I have to say. Some of you were good enough to leave thought provoking comments.
Though I might not have responded to some of the comments, it goes without saying that I have read and reflected upon all of them.

When I started this blog, I had no idea that I would be able to inspire someone to resume blogging and someone else to dive deep into RSS. During this past one year, I also discovered the magic of RSS, Google Reader and Flickr. I have spend countless hours browsing the web, and have tried to share the most exciting things that I come across.

The biggest impact of this blog on me has been that I have cut down on the personal mails that I had been sending out. I post the news and views to the blog, and thus do myself a favor by not having to send out separate mails to my friends. Most of my friends have been kind enough to adjust to this new format of keeping in touch. I think this is the way forward for most of us, at least those that have access to a PC and internet.

So what next? I would love to keep blogging about the important events in my life, sharing the photos along the way. I would also love to talk about things that I love, that inspires me or that I find interesting. So till my next post, stay healthy and be well.

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Honeymoon photos

As promised in the post in which I shared the marriage photos (or whatever is available as of now), it is time I shared the honeymoon photos [slideshow]. Wait! don’t click that previous link. A better way to watch them would be to read through the post, clicking the links provided below which are about specific places. That would be more convenient. I have provided links for opening the slideshow alongside.

To begin at the begining, we came back to Chennai (after marriage) on 09/11 by AirDeccan. Then on 09/14, we took the AirDeccan flight to Trivandrum where we stayed in a hotel [slideshow] for that night. On 09/15 we started our honeymoon trip by travelling to Alappey [slideshow] in a cab that stayed with us till the end of the trip. We boarded the houseboat arranged for us for about 22 hours. Needless to say, we had a splendid time [slideshow] in the boat roaming around the backwaters. It was absolute bliss!

On 09/16 we got out of the boat and travelled to Thekkady [slideshow], where we spend a couple of days/nights. We had a great time at Thekkady [slideshow]. We had a nice trip in the boat ride through the Periyar, though we were distinctly unlucky to miss meeting any elephant herds up close.

On 09/18 we left Thekkady and travelled to Munnar [slideshow], where we spend about 4 days/nights. Munnar was superb [slideshow] on days one and two. But on the third day it started raining and since we found Munnar (itself) to be very cold and since both of us kinda fell sick at Munnar, we decided to drop the Kodaikanal leg that was there in the actual plan). So we couldn’t watch the Kurinji flowers blooming on the way to Kodai.

Instead we extended the stay in Munnar by one more day and returned to Trivandrum [slideshow] on 09/22 where we spend the next two days receiving first my parents (on 09/23) and Preethi’s parents (on 09/24). We also used these two days to visit Papps temple, Saraswathi Amman and the Shangumugam beach [slideshow], not to mention catching up with friends and relatives [slideshow].

The two sets of parents reached Trivandrum so that we could carry out the second leg of our three week non-stop travel break — a pilgrimage to various temples in Kerala and Tamilnadu. More on that trip with pix tomorrow.

technorati tags:tvm, trivandrum, munnar, alappey, thekkady, shangumugam, beach

Blogged with Flock

Flock continues to impress

It has been quite a while since I last used Flock, and I had almost forgotten about it inspite of being impressed by it around this time last year. Today, I happened to chance upon Scoble’s latest post and there was a mention about a demo of Flock by one of its co-founders that was recorded by Scoble. I decided to download and put Flock through its paces.

I am happy to report that Flock has made impressive strides from the early days and it really does make the four common tasks (“fads” as per some) of the new age a whizz, viz., social bookmarking, photo sharing, rss feed reading, and of course, blogging, as you can make out from this picture:

Click on the pix to go to the Flickr page containing that photo.

Though I am impressed, the very fact that the latest version of Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox 1.x — and not 2.x that is in advanced Beta and that has tonnes of new features which beats every other browser out there — is reason enough for me to continue to stick to Firefox for the time being. For blogging I might use the Flock’s built in editor or continue to use the Performancing extension for Firefox. But I must admit that the Flock’s blog editor (using which I am posting this) is certainly pretty user friendly, though it can do with a few more toolbar buttons to adjust the font, its size, color etc. That is where Performancing scores as of now.

Thanks for reading thus far. Have a great weekend ahead.

technorati tags:flock, firefox, rss, flickr

Blogged with Flock

We are back in Chennai

After a small hiatus from the world of computers and blogging, I am back. It has been an eventful September, perhaps the best so far. We reached Chennai this morning, leaving our parents (two sets of parents, that is) in Trivandrum. They will join us in a couple of days time.

We are doing great and we had home made food today after a long time, with Preethi dishing out delicious chapathis, mixed veg bhajji, lemon rice et al. The food was palatable, and that is the best I can say about her today’s cooking. It is another thing that I finished everything ;).

Thanks to all of you who could make it to my marriage on Sun, 10 Sep 2006, and also to those of you who couldn’t quite make it due to various reasons, but did send in your greetings. Special thanks goes to (in alphabetical order) Arunachalam, Harish, Jiju, Mahesh, Raghu, Ramesh,
Sarath, Sunil and Vidya for having taken the pains to travel to Mumbai
and attend the marriage. Your presence meant quite a bit to both of us.

A special word of thanks goes to my cousins Reghu, Sundar and Anandan. Without them it would have been impossible to manage the event from the groom’s side :). Another round of thanks goes to my good friend Biju (my C-DAC mate) who helped me quite a bit with the logistics and accomodation in Mumbai. He was available round the clock (literally) to offer assistance and help sort out the various nagging issues we faced with the hotel accomodation at the 11th hour.

A big thanks also to Pradeep for not parafying my mega three week’s leave and also for the timely and highly useful gifts ;). A big thanks to Chandra for having been kind enough to allow me to keep his digicam for a month and more. We managed to take more than 1000 great pix during the honeymoon and temple trips, and I now have the tough ask of filtering the best among them to be shared! Of course, I also need to somehow send that digicam to Hyderabad, where Chandra has recently shifted.

The official marriage snaps are not available yet in electronic format, and I hope to get them soon (read sometime later this month). For the time being be satisfied with the ones Reghu and Biju took. There are no videos yet, though the official DVD has come out quite well. Let me see whether I can some how share it later this month. I will post frequently to update about the marriage, the honeymoon and the temple trip that we undertook with both the sets of parents and Reghu’s parents.

I am resuming duty tomorrow and let us see what is in store at work. Have a great week ahead and thanks for reading thus far.

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