New horizons & concerns

2 posts on the same day!!! Someone must be thinking that I am making up for my relative absence in the blogsphere.

Well I am not so absent! I am on twitter most of the time. And might continue to remain so if twitter doesn’t get blocked in my office anytime soon. Recently I find that I cannot be on twitter as frequently as I used to.

The reason: caught up with some work, away from my pc most of the time, and my mobile internet sucks. But mainly its work. It is researching new stuff, doing some web sites, etc. All of this because I have become a full-time developer in the ofc. Got recently designated as a sr. programmer.

I’ve done a couple of projects that has got me thinking about what is required to keep the show running from a continued production standpoint. You just can’t do the development and cut the ribbon for production to commence. You have to virtually be there all the time, even if it annoys those who have higher stakes in running the show. This is just another facet of the call center life – one that is not bragged about mostly.

But life is not without its share of criticisms and prejudices. I don’t know whats the road ahead. But who does? Life is still going to be like a coconut that fell into the river stream. It can only go where the currents take it to.

PS: borrowed those words from an education seminar I attended way back while I was in school. Still true today wrt students who do engg/medicine counseling.

Router Consequence

Got a new credit card and all. They said that I had to spend something above Rs. 1000 to activate that crap. And I was looking forward it. I figured I wasn’t so indulged into the world of credit cards; so why not venture into it.

So my thoughts were instilled with what to buy for myself that would cost around that much? I thought of buying a titan watch. So I visited ebay.in, checked out on the prices, fixed a budget, and was prepared to make the purchase. Had a model and an appropriate price in mind too.

I shouldn’t have done that

I went to the titan showroom in velachery, and was disappointed to know that the model I had in mind was not there and the price was not what I expected it to be. ebay sells things cheaper! And then I was focused on buying a watch from ebay itself. Then as I saw all the models; titan was not really my style. I mean it wasn’t what I liked. There were cheaper watches that looked even better! Classic! May be prosaic, but classic.

The only dilemma was how am I supposed to spend Rs. 1000 with a watch which costs much lesser than that…?

At around that time (i.e. the same week), my room mate was demanding that we somehow share the internet connection we had. He had a modem splitter in mind. But I wasn’t too sure of it. We asked the broadband customer service if this was a good solution; they said it could cause network problems. It looked like a small device almost like a telephone socket. My room mate was suggesting we don’t buy anything too costly. But my mind was somehow fixed on buying the router. It would save us the headache.

So I went on ebay again, looked up at the prices. I was going to buy it from some shop in velachery itself. I was hoping to achieve a good bargain. And again the prices were dismally too high. Damn, ebay sells better and cheap! Out here most wireless routers start from Rs 2000. The non-wireless routers were priced around Rs. 1600. On ebay the same wireless router I looked at cost only Rs. 1500. Plus, shipping and that came up around to Rs. 1600.

I thought to my self, ebay it is… Thus I have ended up with a wireless router. And I used my credit card to pay for it too. Lets see how the bill haunts me though…

Because of my routers wireless capabilities I used my broadband connection to connect to the internet via the browser in my mobile phone. Gmail, and twitter mobile sites downloaded in a swish! It is awesome. I had downloaded some cool apps from the nokia ovi store for my mob (nokia 5800). It would have taken eternity if I had connected to the site and downloaded with the internet connection provided by my mobile network (aircel). Plus, now my room mate can sit and do his research for online stock trading and stuff and I can do my research and blogging at the same time.

This wasn’t my first purchase from ebay though. I purchased a clipper for my dad. In the end, I don’t know, a simple credit card ended up making me buy everything off ebay.

Clumsy Gadget

Well, one night I was sitting and doing something on my comp when suddenly my room mate calls and says, there was an earthquake in our office! At first I blurted wha?!!! His ofc is on the taramani rd; not really that far if you go on a bike. I never noticed anything, and I didn't believe it was an earthquake at first.

Well some tweeters from chennai did post about experiencing mild tremors and the sorts. Thats when I confirmed there had been a tremor. I live on the ground floor so I couldn't feel anything. Mostly people living in high-rise buildings would have felt the vibrations. And if I am correct it was because of an earthquake in Andaman or somewhere near the coast of Japan.

That twitter search page came in handy for this particular event. The neat thing about it is the real-time info - the minute I post something, if you search for it, its there. However this was not the first time I've used twitter search. Remember the time when the news channels & papers announced there were about 7 deaths in chennai due to swine flu; I did actually think if finding out if people going to work were wearing masks!

Nevertheless, I found the thing useful to a certain degree. Then I wanted to keep track of such trends. In order to make this task easier I thought I get a iGoogle gadget designed to do so. I couldn't find the perfect one. So I built one. It is not so perfect, but it is more or less real-time. At least the posts will keep updating.

If you looking to add this gadget in your igoogle page there are a couple of things to do. First go to the page where you usually go to add stuff (click on the Add stuff link in your igoogle page). If you look closely there is a link which says Add feed or gadget. If you click just paste the url given below, and click on the Add button

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/115976558690780681327/the-twitter-search.xml

If you are lucky this should work else you'd get a message saying not found. I don't have a solution to that as of yet. But if that happens I can suggest some workarounds.

PS: anyone is welcomed to change the look & feel of that app. If you ever decide to do so just preserve the 'by deostroll' part.

Facebook presence

Hi, I am able to post to my status line on facebook via twitter. All you need to have is a twitter account, a facebook application by the same name, and any one of the various twitter clients via which you can post your tweets to twitter. This may not be such an exciting news right now to some of you, but it saves the effort; I can just keep posting at one place, and both my twitter & facebook pages gets updated. Well, not that people are dying to know 'what I am doing' or 'what's on my mind' you can still keep in touch.

I was kind of researching if this particular feature is available in the other social sites like orkut & myspace. Thats when I learned about opensocial. Opensocial is very vast. And all I can say at this point is that applications such as orkut & myspace use opensocial to manage their social data - i.e. your friends in your friend list, and data pertaining to each one of them. Facebook uses (I don't know what to call it) facebook's own way to fetch social data!

I did get pondering sometime back about how my tweets actually possess the ability of creeping into my facebook, and I came to this: there is probably a middle man which communicates with my facebook profile and my twitter profile; something which is not part of facebook or twitter to be exact. It is a server running outside of twitter and facebook, and it is probably owned by some generous person. So is my theory. I really don't know how it actually works!!!

If the previous oara has struck you curious, you are probably en route to becoming a geek like me. :)

I'm also searching for blog service providers who are friendly to programmers. I mean I am not expecting a greeting card from them on friendship day or something; I am looking for a service which allows you to post code directly (you know without having to tweak the html and stuff manually) into your post while composing. Thinking of shifting my programming blogs...

20090723

My life was like a documentary these past few days. :)

Parents at home are not doing their best in terms of health these past few weeks. I had to go home and be back a few times to take care of things. Presently they are staying in my sister's house. My father is suffering from diabetes, and it has passed a stage where he shows symptoms of damaged nerves and foot problems. He cannot walk these days without support. My mother on the other hand requested to have a home nurse around as she finds it difficult to manage my father alone. I am not all that happy with the way parents are suffering but I have to acquiesce with the fact that life is not without its slew of problems; we just have to keep moving on.

I on the other hand had an idea to shift to calicut in search of a job. But that is not a very good idea since the economy everywhere is somewhat down. But I've dropped that idea since my sister had given me assurance that she would take care our parents. Thank god I have a compassionate sister and a brother-in-law. And even so, I am still not happy, but I think this too will pass like everything usually does.

Although I am not desperate to settle down, I have told my sister and parents to arrange for a bride. But I don't think the TAT for that is going to be very soon. (Meanwhile I do have an MBA to finish). :) It seems my sister is also arranging for my cousin, Ajesh, who is currently in IIT, Chennai, doing his M.Tech. Perhaps I can expect to get married after he ties the knot. But I do hope that this will bring my parents to action and good health.

Yesterday on the way back to chennai, in the train, I was kind of thinking about all the stuff on the internet designed to make people interact with each other, and all; you know blogs, facebook, orkut, etc; I just kind of realised that you cannot simply take your entire life to the web. There is always a catch - a level of insecurity with most of our thoughts - and if you really look at them, they don't really last that long in a person's life. Our insecurities change, from time to time. If I did blog about them and people read it, they would react to it in different ways which could later on disrupt your peace of mind. But if you act on it wisely it is always healthy. This message goes out to all those who have recently found all/any of the above internet phenomenae interesting... And those who still want to let out what they feel they are perennially insecure about I suggest taking a book and a pen, and start writing...