This week ...

... I broke the 6-figure mark. But I have paid a very high-price ...

current affairs

There is this emptiness within me, even though things are going great. I got great colleagues. A great career. I have been promoted and I am on the verge of buying a new condo.

Then I see all these happy people around me, and they make me angry.

God, its good that no-one reads this blog. It would be a positively life-sucking experience to read this every day :)

Anyways, here is to those who have a need to be happy...

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The Prince and the Orc

And the Orc must kill the prince. Because all Prince trample Orcs...

I met an old friend yesterday

That friend is a feeling.

The feeling of being sucker punched in the pit of your stomach. So hard that the esophagus cannot react. You are left with an open mouth, stooping, though staggered a bit, but still standing somehow. Gasping for breath.

Having met this friend several times in the past, I thought I could handle it. God has his plans for me. He keeps me running into my friend just as I begin to forget him.

Finding a home

So, I am beginning my search for home. Today was the first day that I actually went to see a property. This was my first physical movement towards that goal.

And the showing agent could not get the electronic code for the condo to work !!

Nice start...

FUCK

MICROSOFT.

DEGENERATE TOOLS WITH NO SUPPORT

Thailand

Ah man - I could settle down there, for sure !!!

In other news - I never thought I would run into this place in bangkok !

Indian Idol 5

For some unknown reason, I never can get tired of this series. Frankly I don't really care who wins or loses (unless total crap like Sandeep Acharya beats someone like Karunya).

My guess is that I enjoy the auditions because one gets to see all kinds of sperms that made it to the egg....

Another powerful reason is that it is eye-opening to see a lot of kids from humble backgrounds vie with each other. I bet it would be ripe material to write a thesis if I were a sociology student.

Indian Idol 4 ....

So finally ... my days are being occupied with the fourth season again .... Last year was a revelation in the way large numbers of people from the north east came. This year also there are a few from the North East....

I think it must be the effect of some major impact participants like Meiyang Chang and Amit Paul... but it seems that a lot of folks from the North east are participating (& actually succeeding!) in these shows. There is this cute girl, Saurabhee (I think the spelling should be Saurabhi) ... she sings well and I wish her the best...

How long I have waited for this day .. when we come together like a nation & become more familiar with each other .... other wise , till now, it has always been a freakin maidak wala attitude towards other cultures that all of us have stories about ...

An xbox way...

I had a lil problem this weekend. This might be of interest to geeks who play on consoles.

My roommate left for India this Friday & I finally got an opportunity to hookup my XBox 360
to his HDTV. Since I had been playing on my SDTV till then, the difference was ...lets just
say... noticeable :) I could actually read the handles of my team members !!

My problem came when I tried to go online. Since I had been using the XBox downstairs
where my wireless router & cable modem also reside, it was straight enough to plugin
the internet cable into my console & the router. But there is no cable point on the first floor
of my home (Or I am too lazy to look for one)... so the problem was to get internet
working ...

One solution could be to move his rather big HDTV downstairs ... but nah ... I am too lazy
for that. Another solution could be to buy a wireless addon for my XBox. Nah .. I am too
cheap for that. Then suddenly *it* dawned on me. Read on.

I had installed ubuntu on my laptop recently (dual booting with Vista). I thought it
might be possible to use that laptop as a router for my internet connection. I could use
that cable to connect the console to the laptop and then use the wireless connection
of the laptop to login to XBox live.

It turns out that this is indeed possible. All you have to do is install dhcp server on linux.
You can use the synaptics package manager to look for something like dhcp3.
Once the server is installed you will need to make changes to 2 configuration files.
One is /etc/default/interfaces (I think). It contains the name of the interface on which
your DHCP server listens. Look for a line that starts with interfaces (the file is a simple
name value pair). The value for this key will most likely be empty. Just add the interface
name within quotes. In my case it was "eth0". You can also add multiple interfaces as long
as they are separated by space. Like "eth0 eth1"....

The other file you will need to change is /etc/init.d/dhcp.config (I think).
I am not that good at remembering these names. There are a lot of tutorials on the net
that tell you these specifics.
Basically, you will need to add details like the range of IP that can be handed down to
clients by your dhcp server and some other details. But HERE IS THE PART that is missing
in those tutorials. I was not able to get the dhcp daemon up & running till I made these
changes. First part is that you HAVE to have a valid DNS server name in this config file.
Following most tutorials, I was just adding some random DNS servers or the ones that
are already present in my resolve.config file. Since you can add multiple DNS servers
separated by space, it is important that you add the IP address of the interface that
you earlier marked for listening by DHCP. You can get the inet address by simply typing
$ ifconfig
on your bash shell. (or whatever shell you use).

The second major part is that you have to include another section called "name server"
in this same file where you specify the fixed address of the DNS machine. Since you
already marked the inet address (above) as a valid DNS machine, you can simply
add a section that maps the inet address to the MAC address (also retrieved using ifconfig)
in this file.

Thats it you should be done. You can run the dhcp daemon without fear. Your XBox will
connect with internet allowing you the immense pleasure of shooting people between
the eyes on XBox live.


Happy gaming !!

why does linux suck...

Why. The question comprises 3 letters. W-H-Y.

So I think I would be able to contribute the latest, greatest application to Open source movement & I download Hardy Heron to be dual booted with my Vista business.
I download Eclipse too and see if I can get it to work with Subversion.
No dice.
God knows how many things I have tried, but I still keep getting the "Cannot load default SVN client".

This whole usability is where commercial desktops win over open source.
And that shall remain the case in the foreseeable future.

Wow .. its been a long time.

2007 is ending and i did not blog !!

Phew ,,, another year on this planet gone by .... And this traveller is already tired..

Anyways, I have recently turned pretty serious about my finances ... Technology has seemingly lost its charm now .. or may be I am having a mid-life crisis with technology. I think for an average joe like me it does not really matter whether I like coding or not ... my kind is better off loving the paychecks that come in periodically.

I am 28 and only now I realise how stupid I have been about not caring for the 401(K) that my company offered me. I have never bothered about wealth management. And that sucks.
Anyways, I hope to change all that pretty soon.

Talking of investments, let me warn about E*trade. No, its not about their recent sub-prime mortgage problems and stuff like that. I know E*trade is a safe bet and the company is not going away anytime soon. I opened a CD account on Saturday last. Then a savings account on Monday. Its been 4 days and yet I do not see those accounts in my E*trade login.

Thats sucks as I wanted to start saving immediately. Then I call them and they cancel those 2 accounts and create 2 new ones and still after 2 days I dont see them in my login.

Why are some companies so bull-headed that they cant improve thier services even when they are in dire straights???
I thought E*trade would pull up its sock after what its going through ... obviously this company is not going to learn anything anytime soon....

webbrowser control sucks ...

I am not able to get this control to work on IE 6 machines without a memoryAccessException being thrown. Is this freakin rocket science or what ?

Oh and by the way I have a fact of the day today:
While loading sos.dll in your Visual Studio, if you find that the application is breaking then make sure
that the target application is NOT associated with any external tool; like the Application Verifier.

Save yourself some trouble ...

Finally ...

.. I managed to clean my room on Sunday. Damn I love it now :)
Cleaning your room from time to time is a good practice; everyone should try it ...

VS Problem

While doing the transition to VS2005 of a web service, we came across the following exception at runtime:

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeaderException: Server unavailable, please try later ---> System.Configuration.ConfigurationException: WSE032: There was an error loading the microsoft.web.services2 configuration section. ---> System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: WSE040: Type xxx.CustomUsernameTokenManager, xxx could not be loaded. Please check the configuration file.
at System.Configuration.BaseConfigurationRecord.EvaluateOne(String[] keys, SectionInput input, Boolean isTrusted, FactoryRecord factoryRecord, SectionRecord sectionRecord, Object parentResult)
at System.Configuration.BaseConfigurationRecord.Evaluate(FactoryRecord factoryRecord, SectionRecord sectionRecord, Object parentResult, Boolean getLkg, Boolean getRuntimeObject, Object& result, Object& resultRuntimeObject)
at System.Configuration.BaseConfigurationRecord.GetSectionRecursive(String configKey, Boolean getLkg, Boolean checkPermission, Boolean getRuntimeObject, Boolean requestIsHere, Object& result, Object& resultRuntimeObject)
at System.Configuration.BaseConfigurationRecord.GetSection(String configKey, Boolean getLkg, Boolean checkPermission)
at System.Configuration.BaseConfigurationRecord.GetSection(String configKey)
at System.Web.Configuration.HttpConfigurationSystem.System.Configuration.Internal.IInternalConfigSystem.GetSection(String configKey)
at System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.GetSection(String sectionName)
at System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.GetConfig(String sectionName)
at Microsoft.Web.Services2.Configuration.WebServicesConfiguration.Initialize()
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at Microsoft.Web.Services2.Configuration.WebServicesConfiguration.Initialize()
at Microsoft.Web.Services2.WebServicesExtension.BeforeDeserializeServer(SoapServerMessage message)
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---

I had to spend some time fooling around the net to find the resolution. But I got it in the end.

The reason is that name of the dll that is output has changed in VS2005. Its usually called App_code. So kust make sure that your web.config file contains this dll name rather then the name
of the DLL based on the namespace that you are working on. The section is: securityTokenManager

Movies of the week past....

Sleepless in seattle - everybody knows about this one ....

Kings guard - Passable. Looked like a British TV serial !

Mystery men - Funny. Not exorbitant. But funny.

Breakfast at tiffanny's - Ah. Nice old classic. Check it out if you find it.

Of mice and men - I was not impressed by the story as much as by the acting ability of John Malkovich. Text book performance for aspiring actors. Simply too gud.

Raise the red Lantern - Lovely movie. I initially thought its another crap chinese movie. But if you
can sit through the first hour, this is a high impact movie. The first part is very "artsy" that really
bores me to death, but towards the end, this movie really comes out into its own !

Life. As it comes by.

These are bad days all around us.

so here we are ....

another week goes by and some more movies seen ....
Best movie I saw: House of Fools. Unfortunately there was some problem half way through the
DVD. But whatever I saw left some impression. Go and see the movie for yourself.

Another nice movie I saw was Sabrina. It was an old classic that I wanted to see for a long time.
But a movie that really touches you is "The Joy luck club". Its about 4 friends and their life stories.
The movie itself is in English but almost all the characters are chinese.
Verdict: Dont miss if you get the chance.

Then of course, I saw the Bond movie: Octopussy. Not much in it ... unless you are a Bond afficiando.

Highlight of the week ? I got myself a twin bed ..... and drove it all the way from the city on top of my neon. On the way back, we lost our way completely but I finally managed to reach my destination. As always ;)
And I got to do parallel parking in real time ! If I may say so, I did not do a bad job of it too :)

This week I also did some shopping in Gurnee Mills ... I hate shopping like the next guy but I
HAD to get myself a belt in any case. And now my room is complete.

Oh hell, did I tell that I ordered me an iPod also !

the week gone by ...

Another hectic week ... its same old same old life going on.

Muslims continue to provoke Jews in Israel.
In Bangladesh, and India, Muslims continue to kill or rape Hindus.
In UK, Muslims continue to conspire against the very people who gave shelter to them.
In sweden, the whites continue to defend their women against the Muslims who seem to rape
them with impunity.
In Canada, Muslims continue to DEMAND more rights.
In Saudi Arabia, Muslims continue to trample the non-muslims' religious rights....

And life goes on ....

Last week I saw soo many movies. Prince Caraboo - a time-pass kind of movie. Dead Poets' Society - engrossing movie. After watching this movie I can confidently say that Shahrukh
Khan, the muslim actor, virtually slaughtered Robbin Williams' character.

Then I saw, "A kid in King Arthurs' court". Another time-pass.
Lastly, I saw the BBC version of the childrens book, Narnia- The Lion, The witch & the wardrobe :)

Moving on to the weekend ... I had some fun last night ... went out with the boys for bowling and pool. Returned home at 2 in the morning ... most of the guys were half-drunk by then and immediately hit the sack ....

This week I continue my sessions with Hollywood.

More Later !

Baby's day out !

This has been a nice week. There were a lot of showstoppers at work. And I slaughtered them all.
Ok, there were some other people with me too. Ok there were more then 'some' people :)

Anyways, I went to this kewl chinese sushy place (sushy is chinese ??) near my home. I guess one
can always trust Anand to find out the best places to eat out. He has earned his girth ;)
The coolest part was - I ate crabs for the first time. Boy, they are tasty !
Did not take the octopus though; will do that next time.

I also went to the Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett. This is one temple that I could not locate on
the net. The address available on the net does not really correspond with any place in the maps.google.com DB !
Anyways, I decided to go ahead with the trip. The plan was to reach Bartlett & then follow any desi
that we spot :P A long shot, but it almost worked. We reached the Metra station in Hanover Park
& still could not locate any desi in a car. Then suddenly we saw this lady in salwar-kameez coming out of the train. Swallowing my pride, I decided to send Rishikesh to ask for directions to
the mandir. Thus armed with the directions, we finally reached the temple.
And boy - is it BEAUTIFUL. I am sure in the night, it would look even better. There is a nice
Mukhya Dwar, and then the main temple itself. There is another building adjacent to it which
houses a store + kitchen + huge reception area. All structures are intricately carved with various
figures from mythology or reality.
Since we reached around 12:30, we had to wait for the opening of the 'Kapat' till 4 pm.

Finally we had darshan, prayed for some time and left for home. What did I ask the lord ?
I prayed that may India prosper, may muslims die. Dharma ki vijay ho, Adharma ka naash ho.
Rishikesh asked me what I had asked for & I told him.
He went quiet on hearing what I had asked for :D

Anyways, we also made some funny videos there ! & took some snaps etcetra etcetra

God bless the jews.