I ma in Love....... again!

I am all excited! I have been having a whale of a time off late spending most of my time in my recent weekends with my new girlfriend. She is Gorgeous!

I am a hobby flyer and today i took her up into the air. We had such a wonderful time together and i just did not want to come back but had no choice. I am dead tired right now but all geared up to fly again in the morning tomorrow.

I am still excited! :-)

Eh?

Well! its been a long time since i have been here! I hate to say this... but i have been busy. More so off late. Currently, all i wanna do is wake up a little late in the morning. For just one day, wake up when i feel like it!

I am having fun. My work is great and i enjoy everything i do. Still i need to lay down sometime. I have so much packed in each day that i fall out of schedule if i feel a little lazy and act it. Hopefully, this is not going to be for too long.

I have a few pictures that i would like to post. I got myself an account with www.flickr.com but haven't figured out how to use it with my blog. Basically, i need the link to the image i have on flickr for it to be displayed. Flickr does not give me the pictures URL but the URL of a dynamically generated page that i cannot use. I know i have not tried enough to find out so i am hoping someone out there could show me how it works!

I have a lot to write here too... I hope to come back soon and and put it all up.
--
Cheers!
Kitts

A perfect Sunday...... Perfectly ruined!

Deepthi, my best friends ex-girlfriend, left for Australia, there being a onsite requirement from her clients. She was taking a flight to Bombay from where she would take another flight to Sydney and then to finally reach her clients in Melbourne. Well! the bad part here is that her flight to Bombay would leave at some 8:30am and her insistence that I be at the airport! At 7:30am on a Sunday morning?!?

My day was pretty dull and I could just not get my mind on work. I guess this showed when people that i worked with called me for any help or assistance or whatever they called me for!

Sohan, my best friend, and I went out for lunch and relived college days by just talking about it. While we were out we missed Katu very much knowing that he would not join us for many months. We spoke a lot, often not knowing what to talk about. We also would think about Praveen Reddy aka 'reddy cheddi' and Ullas. Reddy now lives in Bombay and was expected to come down here to Bangalore early March (Dude where are you? We arestill waiting for you to come!)

Later this evening, I visited Sohan's sister's house. Her three and a half year old adorable twins (a guy and a girl) were such a pleasure to play around with. As much as i enjoyed watching them play, they scared me to death every time they would do something crazy like stand on some stool and give me the feeling like they were going to fall. I would feel a chill up my spine whenever i got the feeling that they would fall and get
hurt and every such time, I could only imagine how my parents put up with me. I was a very naughty and a very rough kid. I have several stitches on my forehead most of which i got at around the same age.

Reliving old days and watching the kids play put me back into the right state of mind. I am back in business for the day when its almost over.

The problem really is not about the 'early morning' thing but a whole lot of other stuff behind the incident. But anyway for all those of you who are planning a journey and want me to come around... it would be my pleasure but please try and take a flight that leaves in the evenings or in the afternoons if its on the weekends. I don't mind late nights but please... no early mornings! This is just a preference but truly for friends, I am available 24/7. Friendship means a lot to me and it feels like one of the most important things in my life. Old friends are bestfriends.

Last rites!

I finally laid her down, she was just too weak to live any longer. She has been sick for a while though she had served me well, I had been hard on her in her last days. I have to admit she has taught me a lot of what iknow today, and i finally abandon her for someone better. I killed her!

I buried her but memories not destroyed. She now lays six feet under, or may be not! I installed Linux over dear Windows and she must have taken off the traces. Ah what the hell!? i just needed more diskspace and Windows was doing me no good... I haven't booted into it for a long whileand so don't need her!

Yes baby i am not two timing you anymore (?) i am now one hundred percent Linux user! Thats of course... when i have the choice! :-D

My current setup is like this; AMD Athlon XP 2600+ running SimplyMepis 3.3 with KDE 3.3

What i still want? A good graphics card, AMD 64bit processor, and yeah... a Laptop! :-) Thats it for now! (or is it?)

C++ and wxWidgets

I have spent most of the week learning. In the past, i have been programming in C for embedded systems and its been easy. Most, if not all, of my embedded work is aroun the Atmel AVR series of microcontrollers. I have then done some basic using Visual Basic on a need to do basis. I never have wanted to do any programming on the desktop but now need to do that as well. Visual Basic/Studio is an easier choice but i am currently kind of running away from Microsoft. I could rather say i am running towards open source!

I evaluated some options and finally chose to work with wxWidgets. wxWidgets is an amazing piece of work, but it requires that i program in C++ as it is all about classes. It is a library of classes with API that allow you to program for almost any platform. Write once.. compile anywhere, even for GUIbased programs.

Well all of this is nice but moving from MS Visual studio sure is not easy. Of course i can use wxWidgets in VS but remember what i said before about open source? Visual studio so well laid out and MSDN is a boon to developers. I am also a newbie to C++ (any suggestions on how i go aboutit?) and that complicates my enrtry further!

Still.... I will go, I will see, I will conquer!

I had an interesting evening today. I needed to spend a couple of hours waiting till my mom finished with some work that she had. I tried to hook on a date and take her out for coffee. I guess the girls i called freaked out that I called. I was third time lucky, when she agreed but then put up conditions!!!!

Well! alright, i went out but it taught me a lesson... that i need to call and keep in touch more often than i do... at least for times like these!! hehe :-)

My Cousins Wedding

Last week i was in Hyderabad to attend my cousins wedding. It was'nt as much fun as my other 3 cousins weddings in the past, the first of which was fun for my own personal reasons which had nothing to do with the wedding!

Then there were the other two weddings where we had a load of fun. They were well organised and everything went smooth and as planned. I played an active role in wedding preparations which exhausted me and the people that i *helped* as well! :-)

The most recent wedding; the less said the better. Letting go of the wedding and considering just vacation i took during the time, it had some good and some pretty bad unexpected experiences! I am not going talk about my personal life so i will leave it there! :-)

Anyway... there was one lil kid who took my attention in the wedding hall. He was less than 2 years old, wore glasses, was squint and loved music. He kept trying to learn how instruments worked and enjoyed the music played by "Marriage music" band (i am not sure what they are called). I got a picture of him with me. Of course i took the pictrure on my phone in low ambient light so its not clear (Give it a break... its just a camera phone!!!)

(I just discovered now that i cant post pictures if i did not have it somewhere else on the net!!! Damn! now i have look around for a place where a i can store my images. I think i'll try flickr. Any Suggestions?)

My old friend... oceans apart!

Last week, on Thursday, my good friend, Karthik, aka Katu, left for Australia. He has gone to pursue higher education but currently has no plans to return after completion. I know I will miss him. I miss him already!

Katu and I have been together through school and college ever since I have been in this city. I have been here in Bangalore since 1989, my Third grade. We have been good friends since Eighth grade. Off late we have not been meeting very often as availability of time has played spoilt sport, yet, I knew that we could meet if we put out a little time for it. Now I know that we cannot even if we wanted to. It is the internet age, I know. We can email and keep in touch but knowing the distance in geography makes it feel different.

Long Time!

It Has been a long time since i have made a post here. I thought i could put up some pictures. I have a lot to write in here but am currently short of time. So for now i shall take the easy way. I shall come back again with more to post. There is one thing however, that i would like to talk about. Why Blog?

A few days back, i caught up with a few friends. It was a long time since i had met them and my guess is that it will be a while before i meet them again. There came the topic of us all being busier in life than we used to be and unable to catch up with each other often. Times when we would spend hours on the phone with each other updating the other of things that happen in our lives, our moods and a whole lot of other nonsense. The point is that then we would repeat a whole lot of stuff. Each time with another friend or a group of them. When we blog and friends view it, the message is conveyed to all of them. Yes, the individual attention, the affection are all now missing but hey you cant have it all! There are only 24 hours in a day and not much we can do about it. At times i think that if i could quit sleeping completely, then too the time in a day would not be enough for the number of things i wanna do and learn on.

Well! I am young now and now is the time i should try and learn as much as i can, for i know that when i am older i would probably be unable to grasp the many concepts making my learning curve steep. When and where will i draw the line? Never!

Edit: I removed the two images here as i noticed that they were preventing the page from loading.

The Email Test

I configured blogspot to receive my blogs my mail and need to check if it
works fine. I will mostly be posting by mail now on.

Edit: I removed the image here as i noticed that it was preventing the page from loading.

Open Source - How do they do it?

Off late my heart beats in sync with everything that is open source or free (free? Yeah! That’s understandable!). I first started using GCC and other GNU tools for my projects. Then I moved to Mepis Linux as my desktop OS. I have no regrets here and in fact feel that some are these “open source” tools are better then their alternately available commercial ones. With all these there is still one thing I fail to understand. How do contributors to “open source” actually survive?

I understand that these projects are supported by contributors distributed all around the globe and that they have been on from a very long time. However, I notice that there are some key people working on projects that are developing at a very rapid pace. It appears to me, from the credits, that there are lesser number of people working on a given open source project than there would be for a equivalent commercial one. I don’t believe that these projects can be done by a small bunch of people making their contribution for its development during their free time. I believe that it takes all their time. Further, it would very difficult to make context switches between very different projects. Between one type of work that a person does (read official) to another (read personal or these “community” projects) the mindset can be very different and could to take considerable time to make the context switch!

I continue to fail to understand “How do they do it?” How do they make a living if they were full time on these projects? Well maybe some day I will understand this, but for now I am reminded of a line from the movie Gladiator – “For they first time has a slave stood more powerful than the Emperor himself”. Ok that line may not be verbatim but it still means the same. :-) In the given context, I would say that these hobbyists, who work with passion, stand more powerful than a commercial or the so called “professional” corporations.

Irregular heh? I agree

Alright, I agree i am not very regular in blogging. It is a little difficult to set apart time for it till i get used to it that it becomes a routine. I am a very social guy preferring to meet people in person. Ironically I started blogging as I could not find the time to meet up with friends. Most of my friends are not bloggers and hence it as of now does not make much sense in me blogging when only I have to read what I post and can read only what I post and if there is no one to read my blog and post comments! :-) Well! I know things will change soon and that others would start making their presence online in places other than instant messengers. I'll wait :-)

Linux..... still to be conquered!

Nothing much today.... Ive been exploring Linux and its possibilities.

I am totally impressed. I used to evangelize WinXP before but now on it is going to be Mepis Linux! :-)

For the things i did today.... i got bluetooth working on my linux box and can now communicate with my phone. There are somethings that i am used to and still need to work on to be totally comfortable with my Linux box.

One is get my bluetooth phone to work as remote control for my comp. This i know is possible; just needs a little more effort from my side.

Second i need to introduce some way of shutting down my system when i dont use it for long. I have a habit of sleeping to music. When using windows, i set my power options so that the system would hibernate 10 minutes after the playlist is completely played in Winamp. I will have to compensate for this in Linux. I cant keep my system running all night, just so that it can play for the first half an hour that i need to fall asleep!! :-( Again i know i can write scripts here to work with by bluetooth phone, but thats an extra effort i need to put. I would love it if i got a ready made solution for this initially while i script a more customized solution.

newbie to Linux!

Ok i accept it... I thought i was good and that there was nothing beyond my reach.... I was stupid!

Ok so i was good and felt so as long as i was using the "user friendly" Windows XP. but then i moved to linux and started to feel like a moron! :-( Hey its not my fault thats the way the OS was... Now tell me, you are used to having all the basic stuff working and you would like to work on all the kinda advanced stuff and with some idea move to linux, but then all the basic stuff, like sound etc dont work, and you are to spend time setting all that stuff (while learning this new OS).

Well! i was frustrated. I had tried RedHat a few times and gave up. Now i came accross SimplyMepis, the live CD. Boy! was it good! I have been using it for a month now and slowly moving out completely to Linux! :-) I like Mepis it is a true "point and click" OS. I had all the stuff working right from the start. Now here i must mention that i am a music lover and need it playing all the time while i am working. How frustrating can it be if thats what you need to work for to get it up and working?

I spent the day today getting some of my necessary apps working on Linux. More interestingly i got Mozilla Thuderbird installed on windows and on linux and now i share the same mailbox between the two OS's!

Linux! here i come! I like being here and i am here to stay! :-)

My first web log

Ok here i am.... making my initial presence on the web! :-) I like being here.... but i dont know how much i can put up in here. I like my life to be private so i doubt putting up a lotta personal stuff in here and also.... i dont have a habit talking about myself or the things i do and blah blah blah.... but maybe that'll change!! :-)