Devote to vote!

I had never been as busy in my life so far, as I am now. Work has occupied me so much that I can't even follow my favourite blogs regularly. Coming to the tidings,

1. marriages are happening,
2. recession is at its peek, and
   
3. Karmayuddh has started.

This year has been a period of marriages. A few of my classmates had got married in 2007. Interestingly, 2008 didn't witness any of my classmates tying the knot. Now, 2009 has already seen many marriages, with more to come. I wish the very best to all of them in their married lives.

I need not tell anything about recession. We are hearing about cost cutting and firing all around. Many of my friends have lost jobs due to economic slowdown for none of their faults. But life isn't cool always. We've to learn lessons from every part of our lives and move on.

Karmayuddh that I mentioned refers to two events. One being the Indian Premier League Twenty-20 cricket series and the other, and more important, being the Lok-Sabha General Elections.

We shall not abstain and shall make sure that only elite candidates lead our constituencies. After all, it is not a bad idea to spend one day in five years to decide the future of the nation, and hence ourselves.

Happy Voting!

People and their Priorities

I recently started another blog, exclusively dedicated to technology and computer related topics. It is TechnoTweak.com. If you have liked the technology related stuff I've written here in this blog, you are welcome to take a look onto my new blog and also subscribe to TechoTweak feeds.

I had no intention of writing this post till I received this comment from Shubha. When I contemplated on that sentence, I found it very true. She has nicely put all my thoughts in one simple sentence. People change when their priorities change.

A few days ago, I watched Dasvidaniya in which the protagonist changes drastically when he gets diagnosed with stomach cancer. He completely changes his attitude. He keeps a list of things to be done before he dies, and eventually achieves them. A fine example to show that the people change when their priorities change, and these priorities change when something in their life changes.

I have seen some of my friends staying invisible while chatting. When asked about it, a common reason I get is that they are busy and don't want to be disturbed by some people. Crap & cowardice! It defeats the very purpose of chatting. When work is of utmost priority, one can put the busy status. But putting busy status on and chatting freely is a no-no. If used unnecessarily, it becomes another instance of the Tola-bantale-tola (For non-Kannada readers: It's the same tale in which a shepherd shouts about the arrival of a tiger when there wasn't any, just to make fun of the villagers and eventually becomes prey to a tiger because no villager come to rescue him when there was a real tiger) and people keep pinging you even when you have put busy status because, by then, they would have known how busy you would be.

If a person is pinging you when you are busy, ask him to ping later. Even then, if that person is adament and stupid enough to bug you and you are so keen on avoiding that person permanently, there is an option for that: block. Block the person who bugs you and he will never see you online. Invisibility cloak is good for Harry Potter, not for we muggles.

Coming back to the main point about priorities, ask yourself a question: do priorities in life change abruptly? Generally, according to me, no. Even if they do, such priority works are of short duration, which don't have any long term effects. So, is it really worth and necessity to change ourselves for the sake of those small parts of life?

Share your thoughts on this and also your opinions about the new blog TechnoTweak.

Random thoughts... about 2008

I have seen people who write in their Orkut profiles, "I'm cool" or "I'm hot". I've even seen some guy who has written both. I am neither hot guy, nor cool. My body temperature remains normal at 37°C, unless I'm sick. And I am still trying to understand the meaning of hot and cool. Guys (and girls, if there are any), help me out here!

When I stay alone, I think. Not that I don't when I'm with others, but I believe solitude is the time when I get time to introspect, think about myself. It's the time when I laugh at myself for my foolishness. It's the time when I realize my mistakes. It's the time I repent for my mischievous behaviours and misdeeds.

People change. Not because Barack Obama has asked for it, but they change for a reason. They change when they grow. They change when they get good marks in classes. They change when they get awards. They change when they get good jobs. People change when they get new friends. And they change, abruptly, when they get girlfriends. They change when they marry. Amidst all these changes, people remain friends.

About two and a half years back I, along with Suri, started blogging. Then, it was just like a collection of some interesting and funny mails which I was getting. After a couple of posts, I found it useless and I stopped blogging. But Suri was very serious about it. He was literally going through all sorts of websites, from Technorati to hit-counters, from problogger to pre-blogger. Every night (yes, not day. Courtesy: BSNL Sancharnet) we used to chat hours together. That's the time people started calling me Goobe (owl). I still wonder how Suri escaped from that title. He used to talk about blogging, blogging and blogging. Eventually he was able to pull me into it. So I restarted blogging in 2007, wishing everyone a happy new year. I started writing posts at the rate of one per day. Suri read it. After continuing it for two weeks, I started showing my laziness and procrastination. The frequency of my posts started decreasing.

In spite of all this, my blog has more than 75 feed readers and has recently crossed 50000 hits. Not an award-winning achievement, but I think it is quite decent for a blogger like me, who posts once in three months. I thank all my readers, friends and those who have supported and backed me during times, good and bad.

2008 has been a year when I started working as an engineer (well, although I joined in 2007, we just had training), something which I dreamt right from my childhood. Apart from that, this year has been a year of ups & downs, just like every other year. I'm sure 2009 will also be like that. But we have forget the bad, cherish the good, and move on.

I wish you a very happy new year.

Code for Factorial, without Recursion

After having been declared to be an impregnable procrastinator by all my close-circle friends, after being connoted to update it by those who I didn't even know were reading my blog and after being told "Enough is enough, now update it buddy" by a few friends, I am in the same situation as the Indian government after the Mumbai attacks. I have no other go than updating it, at least for the sake of hushing them up till the next terror attack near my house. So here I go...

As you might already be knowing, I prefer calling programming an art to calling it a process. That's the reason I enjoy it.

Coming to the point, my friend cum colleague was trying to write a program for generating Pascal Triangle. I decided to play along and wrote a code. In the process, I wrote a function to calculate factorial for a number in an unusual way, without recursion.

Generally an incremental loop is used from 2 to N. But I used decrementing loop and here is the outcome (Code written in C programming language):

unsigned int fact(unsigned int n)
{

unsigned int f=n;

while(n---2)

f*=n;

return f;

}

Main thing I wanted to convey in this code is the while loop, which uses the unusual "--" & "-" operator pair.

It works similar to this loop:

for(f=n;n>=2;n--)

f=f*n;

Not a great piece of code, but I found it to be a little interesting. Hence the post.

Reviews - A Wednesday and Rock On!!

I never thought I would be writing a movie review in my blog. But after watching these two movies, Rock On!! and A Wednesday, (particularly the latter) I can't refrain myself from commenting on them. They are so good that you would regret if you don't watch them.

Rock On!! is all about a music band called Magik. Four men with a common aim join their hands together to realize their dreams. But, being amiss on a small issue, they depart. How they reunite and how one can lose his felicity is the gist of the story. It reflects everyone's life because of its flash-backs which push everyone to his vernal days.

A wednesday, on the other side, is completely different. No hero, no heroine and no songs. Not a typical bollywood movie at all. However, it catches attention right from first scene to the last with its tight storyline and outstanding acting by every single artist. Naseeruddin Shah steals the show with his natural performance. This terrorism-based story revolves around Naseeruddin Shah, who calls Anupam Kher (police officer) with specific demands. It's a small movie (by bollywood standards, with only a runtime of around 95 minutes) but with a big impact. It reflects the minds of the Indians and despises the corrupted Indian administration system.

I don't want to spoil your interest by telling more about these movies. On a scale of 5, I would provide a rating of 3.5 to Rock On!! and 4.5 to A wednesday.

Face Recognition - Ultimate feature of Picasa

A picture speaks thousand words. The internet is becoming full of images. Google seems to have found future in the cutting edge face recognition for the images. It has introduced face recognition for the photos uploaded by the users. If you have not explored this feature, I say, the right time is NOW! I am balled over in the first attempt itself!!

1. Select New Features at the top right.
   
2. Select See name tags in action.
3. Click Get started with name tags.
4. Click Try It in the right pane.
   
5. Click Start Processing photos.

Wait for some time. Picasa will scan all your photos and index all the faces found. It starts asking you the name of the person in the photos. The best thing is that it selects a bunch of photos, and all of them will be of the same person and its Suggestion is just marvellous. Most of the times, you don't even have to think before selecting the first suggestion. I can't explain the greatness of this feature in words here. Just use it and experience!!

PS: Google has already rolled out a hidden feature of face recognition in its image search. When you search for an image, say Sachin, the url of the image will be something like http://images.google.com/images?q=sachin. You can add &imgtype=face at the end of the URL, i.e., http://images.google.com/images?q=sachin&imgtype=face to find only images containing face.

Serial Bomb Blasts in Bangalore?

Bangalore was considered to be a safe place so far. But with the serial bomb blasts in Madiwala and surrounding places, I doubt it can continue to be so. News is spreading and details are not known.