So here I am. A fresh graduate student out of the hyped IIT’s starting a career at FICO. I look around myself, I look at the people I’ll be working with and I am disturbed. The realization of truth that I am surrounded by non-CS people, people who probably started coding only after graduating out of their universities, makes me miss my alma mater. But why ?

Well, IIT’s are definitely over hyped when it comes to imparting knowledge to students. However, the aspect of my campus life that I relished the most was the belonging to a geeky society of skilled coders. These are the people who wouldn’t care for the so called good programming practises, but none the less, would implement almost all of them, knowingly or un-knowingly. They would do so because of logical reasons, and not because someone instructed them to. They would hunt the internet to find interesting informations regarding the scripting languages. And these are the kind of things I do not expect from people not of coding background.

Coming back to the disturbing world of reality, I was shocked to know that people don’t even understand the significance of 80 characters per line thingy. They just do not understand the difference between tabs and spaces. Give them an Eclipse pre-configured and they’ll be happy coding their entire life using it, without ever caring how the code would look like if  a guy on a linux machine using vi and having 800×600 resolution chanced to look at the code.

My friend Naresh told me about the Shebang notation and the story thrilled me. It was an awesome idea not to add extension suffix when using scripting languages. The Shebang line contained  the information for any coder interested in reading the code. And now, when I tell my friends, the ones not involved in coding before getting into a job which requires coding, and all I get back is a bored stare suggesting dude-which-part-of-it-was-interesting !

I do not expect these people to feel the same excitement as I. For them, coding shall always be a way to earn money. For me, it is the satisfaction of producing a beautifully written code which gets me up every morning. For these people, writing a code is merely following fixed guidelines and structuring the code around them. I hate it if someone comes to me and says use addall() function instead of the add() because addall() is faster. No ! I do not want statistics. Come to me and tell me why addall() should be quicker. Lets discuss the internal implementation of addall() which causes it to become faster than the other. And by internal implementation, I mean I am prepared to get as deep as compiler or OS level implementations.

In IIT Kharagpur, the place I come from, we have this competition called the Bitwise. It amazed me to learn in my third year that if you use a general purpose function like strcmp() your code will almost certainly fail the time test. Upon discussions, I found out why. And now I do advise people to make custom pointer based copy and compare functions instead of using the all purpose ones. But will these people understand it ? Will they appreciate the complexity at such a simple level.

I never expect them to. To me, they shall always remain aliens in the wonderful world of coding. I shall try my best to make them interested in the non-programming aspects of coding, but will I succeed ? I doubt that.

I conclude with another example of a friend who was using Eclipse for the first time. She copied a piece of code from some site. Then she found out the refactoring bliss of eclipse and got her code reformatted. But instead of being happy, she was disappointed at the result. What was bothering her was that a function had been broken into 3 lines, that the complete for() statement was written across 2 lines and that the comments were also put in multiple lines, despite the fact that 1/4th of her screen on the extreme right was empty. She sat down and brought everything to single lines. The ugly code spanning screens pleased her. She was happy in scrolling righ to left and then back again, but would not consent to the 80 characters guideline.

These people will never understand why the confirmation to programming practises is required. They will never appreciate the simplicity of the logic behind each of the rules that they are told to follow when writing a program.

My friends refuse to use putty or an equivalent ssh shell. They would rather go through the pains of installing cygwin and some IDE within it. vi disgusts them !

My friends, if you are one of the others, you can never be one of us. You can never become a coder. The love for code comes from within a person. It cannot be produced, not at all by making someone code for 10 hours a day.

So tomorrow if you walk upto me and insist that everyone involved in software product development is a coder, then please, you could not be more wrong. The distinguishing quality is that a coder cares not for how a particular thing is done, but why is it done the way it is.

I miss IIT Kharagpur.

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But when it comes to cooking, you get instructions like – cook the rice for 5-7 minutes. Hang on! Which is right? Do I wait for 5 or 7 minutes, or do I average it out and turn off the burner after 6 minutes? And even the 6 minutes is subjective. You do not have to look at the watch to keep track of the time. Apparently, you sort of develop and intuition for cooking. Oh! these things always confuse me. And I always end up stuck in no-mans-land trying to figure out the best rescue strategy.

The other day I wanted to prepare dal. Now the receipe said that I had to leave the pressure cooker on full flame till it whistled and then sim down for roughly some 5 minutes. Fine! I waited for the first whistle, and then simmed down the flame. But the whistling did not stop and the receipe does not say anything about more whistling! Confused and not knowing what to do, I turned off the flame and opened the pressure only to find uncooked dal. Huh, so much for panicking. So I put the pressure back again on full flame waiting for the first whistle. I assumed that the whole procedure needed to started from start, which as I learnt later was wrong. At the end when I opened the cooker, I found my dal to be as dry as rice.

Ab main chala dal chokne. I do not know what it is called in english, so I’ll write the thing in hindi. Mom ne kaha tha ki pehle kalchul ko gas par rakhte hain, taaki paani sooch jaaye. Once again, no definite time defined. I waited a few seconds. Fir ghee daalo aur thoda der gas par garam hone do, was the next instruction to be followed. I did only to find oil sprinkle here and there. Reason: I hadn’t waited long enough for all the water to boil away.

Ab ghee karam hona tha thodi der tak. Once again no time period defined. I waited a minute and carried out the next instruction which was – ghee mein jeera daalo. And the minute I do so, the whole thing catches fire. Now I had seen my mom do this but it never caught fire ! Help Help!! I turned off the burner and then started to blow off the fire. After some efforts it subsided. I called up my mom to find that I shouldn’t have waited so long.

Ok! So I do the whole procedure again and was successful. It was now time to immerse the kalchul into dal. And the minute I do that, the whole thing sprinkled out with a hissing noise. Curse it! The kitchen was in a mess. But I neither had the patience nor the tools to clean it. So I just ignored the situation.

Yesterday, I asked the receipe of making kheer. Accordingly I bought sugar and milk from a shop nearby. Happy that I was about to eat kheer in half an hour, I set about cooking it. I took the packet of milk and started to cut it open, while also singing a I-Must-Not-Spill-The-Milk song. You must have heard the story of a man who was cutting the branch of tree he was sitting on? Well the same thing happened with me. The moment my scissor cut open the packet, I realised that I was holing the upper part which I was cutting off, and the bottom part which had the milk was unsupported hanging in the air.

Splash! I spent the next 20 minutes mopping the kitchen.

Why? Why does everything happen only to me? What the hell ever happened to beginners luck? I must read The Alchemist again.

By the way, if you are a person who likes the kitchen clean and tidy, beware before entering my kitchen.

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I remember, we were studying NP problems. Our professor introduced a function – choose(), which would choose a solution, and all we next had to do was to verify if the chosen solution is correct or not in polynomial time. Life would have so much easier if we had such a choose() method. Alas !

The joy of growing up and becoming independent comes with the pain of having to choose yourself. The responsibility of weighing one choice over the other now rests on you yourself. And my years of experience, however less might it be, has taught me that more motivated and clear your goal is, easier the task of choosing becomes.

Normally I am quite motivated. I know my goals. I have a very-long-term expectations and the path is vaguely defined. I am proud to say that usually my brain makes all the decisions, curbing whatever desires I might have had. I try to suppress my feelings and always think twice before making a decision. I try my best not to get carried away by the petty emotional attachments that I might have.

Yet, I am but a human. And just like any one else, I too am biased. At times it becomes too difficult to think clearly. The choice of path does not seem as intuitive. My actions tend to maximise local happiness, rather than the global happiness. Suddenly the control of my mind seems to waver a little, giving in to the temptations.

At these times I can actually hear my brain speaking out to myself. The brain tries to remind me how useless the temptation is, and how important the other goals are. But at these times it becomes a challenge to make the right call. What do I want ?

I have tried convincing myself that I have worked hard to be who I am today, and therefore, do deserve to enjoy the moment. And yet, this very thought reminds me that the work is not yet done. Its a long life out there, and a lot yet to be achieved. I remind myself that I am not the person I aspire to be, atleast not yet. The temptations, the fleeting happiness, the greedy solutions always tend to throw me off the track.

But come what may, I always manage to find my way back. And I think this is more significant. Though distracted, I fight hard to get back into the battle.

A similar dilemma greets me now. I have a good job with a decent salary in the city of Bangalore. An awesome team, some great new friends and a few of my best friends from college – I have everything I wanted from my first job. There is indeed a tendency for me to get carried away, to become complacent, to lose my focus.

Which is why I have written this post. This shall serve as a reminder to me that the life has just begun, that there are a lot of things to achieve. Now shall be the true test of my character, of my mental strength. I need to curb my complacency tendencies and set myself challenging targets. Yes, I shall talk to Navin and make sure that the half-yearly goals we set for me are tough to achieve.

Despite what I have written, I am confident that my mind shall win over heart, that I shall continue to be as focussed as I was just before the JEE. And whenever I shall feel my faith waiver, I shall read this post to remind myself who I truly am and what my goals are.

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F1 has literally shifted from on-track racing to board room meetings and negotiations. Ferrari is already out of the championship. So they seem to have devoted all their time to countering Max Mosely. Being the head of FOTA, they are pretty much in the drivers seat making all the crucial decisions. Thus we see Ferraris’ decision being backed by FOTA. And when Williams decided to leave the ranks and sign up for next years championship, they were suspended from FOTA.

Ferrari and FIA are aiming blows after blows at each other, refusing to buckle down below the other’s ego. And Bernie finds himself amidst this confusion, knowing pretty well that despite what Mosely says Ferrari’s role in F1 cannot be undermined. If Ferrari decides to pull out, Bernie could lose a lot, unless he manages to recover the loss by filing law suitz against Ferrari.

McLaren have decided to keep mum. Their position is understandable. Just recently they were pardoned for their lie to the stewards and are compelled to remain quite. However, even their participation next year is subject to conditions.

Its so sad for Brawn and Red Bull that all the drama had to unfold this year. Being the two leading teams, any other year they would have been the main target for the journalists and would have made it to the top of the magazine covers every issue. This year though, their achievement has been overshadowed by all the altercations and threats to sue.

But F1 is not the only sport attracting interest. Elsewhere in the world of soccer, Real Madrid has gone back to its big budget spending ways, tempting Kaka and Ronaldo to joing and resurrect a dying team. Playing second fiddle to Barcelona the whole of last year, Real have splashed lots of money to ensure that big names play for it once again. Kaka and Ronaldo should definitely strengthen the mid field. They are also looking to land in David Villa, but the deal has not been confirmed yet.

Chelsea should be the most worried at this time. With Deco declaring his interst to move away from Stamford Bridge and Caravalho also wanting to rejoin with Murinho, theirs is a depleted side. Their bid for Villa was rejected and Chelsea obviously will not be able to meet Manchester United in the pursuit of Frank Ribery. Pato wants to talk to his former manager before confirming his contract at AC Milan, but Milan spokesperson has ensured that Pato stays at Milan. Ageing squad of Chelsea needs more than one fresh pair of legs to challenge ManU or Liverpool.

Sir Alex also has a daunting task on his hands. He now needs to find a winger as good as Ronaldo, which is almost next to impossible. The void left by Ronaldo shall not be easy to fill. Despite what the ManU fans feel, Ronaldo was instrumental in setting up many victories single handedly.

Cricket has become more boring than ever. I shall not even waste another line to talk about it.

The next few weeks shall be quite interesting. F1 sees teams and administration go into a war. And the transfer market couldn’t have been more interesting than it already has become. La Liga shall not be a one sided affair the coming season. I hope more big names transfer this year. And for god’s sake, somebody come to Chelsea.

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My first job at Fair Isaac has almost everything I ever desired. I have my own desk, with reasonable amount of privacy. I have an awesome 4gb laptop. I am part of a great group of people, who like to party and travel places together. And the team is led by a manager who himself doesn’t care much about formalities and is completely friendly with us.

Our group of campus recruits has lots of good people. I have made some nice friends. And though shortly we shall be moving away to our respective teams, I hope to keep in touch with them and spend more time together. Luckily, a few of them are on the ground floor, the same as me.

As I mentioned earlier, my friends from Kharagpur shall be joining me pretty soon. Once they are here, it will be party time and lots of fun. Also Chuski will be coming for enrollment into the management course at IIMB. Yay .. a treat’s due .

The best thing however is that I have not yet managed to get the gas conneciton transferred. … So I am having to dine out everytime. Lucky me. Cooking alone would just be devastating. I have done enough cooking in Switzerland last summer to last a lifetime.

The only downside to the whole life at work is that using windows is mandatory. . I am already missing ubuntu. I am missing amarok. A new version of it has been released and I cannot test it.

Also, it was boring transitioning to Java. I am still in love with the complexity of C. Moving on is turning out to be difficult.

Sadly, now I have to go and get started on my Java project. Enough procastinating already.

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Starting the next week, I shall join the FICO, Bangalore. I am quite excited about the oppurtunity as I have received excellant inputs from my seniors and their friends regarding the kind of work that people do over there. Also I need a change from an university-like environment.

Now at Fair Isaac, apparently, people prefer Java over C++. Navin sir said that there are a group of people using C++, but the bulk of libraries and code is in Java. So it will be easier if I switch over to Java than C++, though it shouldn’t be a lot tougher sticking with it. And after giving it a thought, I have decided to learn Java. Learning a new programming language is all about going through its libraries and adapting them. It should be an easy enough task. Also since I have a basic understanding of objects, classes, inheritance and theior abstract nature, it should be easy enough.

The only thing I shall miss are the pointers. Sadly Java does not allow pointer access to programmers like the C does. I do not know the reason behind this restriction, but it sure makes me sad. Of late, most of my variables were being referenced by address and I was really getting into the habbit of using pointers. They make complicated things so easy to manage.

And then another thing is the usage of WIndows. I would really prefer Ubuntu for coding. I do not thing there should be any problem with using ubuntu. I just do not want to START to TURN OFF windows .

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Add the repositories for Amarok 1.4 to your sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bogdanb/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Add the key:

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
0×1d7e9dd033e89ba781e32a24b9f1c432ae74ae63

And then finally, update your sources, remove Amarok 2 and install 1.4

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove amarok
sudo apt-get install amarok14

That’s it. You are done. You have successfully installed Amarok 1.4 in Jaunty. Have fun.

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After all the speculations and debates as to what would be a just penalty for a team that thought lying is a better way to achieve glory, this was a shameful anti-clmax. A general sentiment echoed by most of the fans was of a constructor points deduction or of a single match ban. The earlier option was a better one as it sought to punish the team McLaren for instructing Hamilton to lie and yet allow Hamilton to maintain his stake for the world championship.

But as declared, McLaren are free to race with no punishment what so ever. However, if any fresh evidence becomes public showing McLaren scheming to grab the third place by lying, then they will be handed the three race ban. Ridiculous ! How many more reasons does one need to conclude that the pair were lying in the face of the stewards. And what other motive can there be except to gain an advantage. A second criteria for the suspended ban to become active is if McLaren indulges in any wrong doing in the next 12 months. This looks like a mother telling her child not to be mischievious, unless he wants to fofeit his chocolate for a day.

The FIA took a stance that mcLaren had brought the sport into disrepute by lying. Its intentions were always to punish McLaren. A mild pnishment for the constructors would have done. but showing complete leniency in this regard invites other teams to use unfair means too.

What the FIA chose to do was play politics. Yes, nothing but politics. The intended target was always Ron Dennis. He eventually succumbed to the overall pressure and had to throw in his towel. Mosely should now be feeling quite relaxed with Ron out of the way.

I personally did not want the McLaren team to he handed a heavy penalty. Afterall, the diffuser row was enough to distract the atention from the main agenda of the sport, and these court ruling should be kept to bare minimum. But why make all the fuss and then shy away. FIA has got no balls. Ferrari has always ruled the sport. FIA has been afraid of Ferrari breaking away. Now McLaren joins the rank. Welcome to a New World Order wherein the organisation chosen to govern the teams is being governed by the teams themselves.

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I needed a way to retain the last 50 lines of each file and discard the rest. This is when I stumbled across the tail command. It does exactly this ! All you have to do call tail -50 <filename> for each of the files. Sweet !

A simple recursive loop, calling the tail command for each file, and yay I am done with my work. Now it is the time to analyse the results.

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However, Amarok auto-detected ~/Music/ as containing all the media files. This is the default location where Amarok would look for the collection of songs. This gave me an idea to solve my problem.

I created a link for my audio folder in the Music folder. To create a link in ubuntu, grab the folder, press and hold CTRL+SHIFT, and drag the folder to the ~/Music/ location. And we are done.

Now all my songs are remembered and all the folders watched for collection.

So, as I understand from the bug report filed, Amarok fails to remember the collections if they are either not in $HOME or not on the same hard drive. Well, this should help. Thanks Mark Kretschmann.

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