Computers and Internet

Text Editors

I am not a *nix commands expert … but a professional? So why not relish educating my brother a couple of nifty commands, especially – find and grep, which he was looking into at the time. You can find a few more here if you are interested.

So much for the command line, watch out for the overdose¹. I find it funny when people, especially developers, copy files on the command line on a Mac (or Ubuntu for that matter); I mean files on the local machine. Specifically, they either copy the file (Cmd-C) via the Finder and paste it, or worse drag and drop, on the Terminal ²(/posts/text-editors-rundown/#fn-1559-2). Our next laugh is about editing local files in vim 😆³.

Written in Stone

This article was published also on LinkedIn.

Academia

The Mamallapuram Shore Temple, constructed on the deep southern shores of the Bay of Bengal, is one of the oldest stone structures on the planet. It was built around the beginning of the Anno Domini (AD). The site consists of three temple structures, subsidiary structures, and statues primarily built with granite. Prominent statues are that of a lion and elephant with great significance in the way it was rock-cut. Chariots are the primary subsidiary structures other than the temple. It is inevitable not to be marveled at the temple design, intricate and precise carvings and inscriptions. Carvings are made on a monolithic rock on which the works of an elephant and its ear with its loose skin are nearly impossible even today. Inscriptions, according to linguists, is poetic and metaphorical, a sophisticated language nevertheless. Another marvel is Krishna’s Butter Ball, a massive boulder of rock sitting tight above a rocky slope.

A funny moment of IoC

IoC - Inversion of control, is a design that enables fluid flow of control by decoupling tight dependencies between the portion of a code that exhibits behavior and another portion of code that provides required functionality. One form of IoC, as we know, is Dependency Injection (DI). For instance, a TextEditor could refer an ISpellChecker instead of direct coupling to a specific implementation of spell checker thereby enabling the text editor to switch spell checker or even use more than one. More ...

Dealing with Bad Code

Read this fine article by Joel Spolsky: Things You Should Never Do

It is a great article, one that invokes mixed feelings. The article talks against rewriting (large scale) software…..from scratch. Joel was kind enough to consider all those who write software as true programmers; people who give enough thought and not just code up something that works. However, it is far different in the real world. That said, I am neither completely in disagreement with Joel nor am I advocating to rewrite large scale software once the code is identified as a mess.

To Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie¹, whom we all know as the creator of the C programming language passed away on Oct 12, 2011. We have lost one of the brilliant minds of mankind. I owe him this post for he has been one of the greatest inspirations in my life and the very reason that I am into programming.

The first time I saw Ritchie’s picture, for a moment, he looked like Jesus to me. I would say that the divinity in his face pulled into the world of programming.

Meeting Martin

You may not know the guy in black. You should definitely be knowing the guy in green. Don’t you?

I am not a patron of his philosophies against planned design. But he sure is a great guy with lots of good ideas. It was nice having an hour long chat with him.

The WD Anti-Propaganda Campaign !!!

Thanks to the internet. If nobody else bothers or understands what loss of data means, you can shout it aloud here. I lost 500GB of data - every moment of my personal and professional life captured in bits and bytes.

It is a Western Digital Premium Edition external hard disk (USB/Firewire). I bought it despite my friend warning of bad sectors and hardware issues that WD is known to have. As with any story, one fine morning, I was copying some songs, pictures from my pen drive to the hard disk. All of a sudden, the hard disk and my laptop hung up. I restarted the system thinking I would make fresh start. But to my dismay, all my drives on the hard disk had vanished like dust. I tried connecting and reconnecting a few times, the drives showed up once or twice like a sick man’s last few breadths.