Gym

Finally after one year I'm back to gym again. I ran for 1.5kms on the treadmill and was pretty happy about it. Then the instructor took some 7-8 of us and started doing some ground exercises. The guy almost killed everyone. All i could hear was groans and moans :). It was fun. With the help of this instructor and a paintbrush, i intend to become like SRK.

BTW, if you want real inspiration keep Daniel Craig in your mind while doing exercises (suggested by my ex roommate cum drinking partner)

Programming fonts

I use windows at work and use Courier New as the font for programming purpose. (It's the default in eclipse, visual studio 2005, idle etc). Now Microsoft has come up with Consolas, a monospace font for programming purpose. A monospace or a fixed width font is one whose characters have same width. Courier New is one such. A monospace font would look ordered and you can draw tables etc easily because all characters are of same size. Try setting your ide's font to Ariel or Verdana (which are not monospace) and see the difference. You won't be able to code in those fonts. One of the fonts which i loved coding was a monospaced font in Gnome Redhat 7.0. I believe the font was BitStream Vera. Anyway Consolas is the new font which i like in windows and it simply is the best. Try it out. Make sure that you have ClearType switched on. Below are some code in 3 different monospace fonts from my system. (blogger screwed the images totally, so better try it out in your system and see the difference).

Courier New

Consolas

BitStream Vera

OpenSocial

So Google today released the OpenSocial apis. Funny that the google pages look very similar to facebook developer pages. Google is using the atom format for data exchange. It's time to look inside atom.

past

i ran
i ran with the memories of the past
for the past holds the heaven
and everything else is just nothing
-dog

Battle without honor or humanity

From XKCD

That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.

Within Temptation

I've been listening to Within Temptation's songs for last two days. Sharon Den Adel's voice feels like Evanescence's and to some extend Dolores O'Riordan's voice.

Here are some of their songs

Angel


Memories


And this is the song that got me introduced to them


somebody point me to more songs like these please :)

Portal

nice .. now i need brains also

Wish you were here

Data Visualization

Some of these sites are downright sexy

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

substring bites

Last week i copied some string splitting logic from C# to Java and didn't bother to test much. Today i fired up one of the Duet appointments and typed max value in the location field (256) and it bombed! .. after debugging i found
C# substring is - substring(startIndex, length)
Java substring is - substring(startIndex, endIndex)
crap.. Java's is more like Python's where it's called slice syntax - str[startIndex:endIndex]
but we don't have slice syntax in Java or C# .. and i like C#'s better

random

Martin Fowler never ceases to amaze me. I was banging my head over timezone issues yesterday and today morning i see this. He gave Microsoft Office the worst timezone experience award. Interestingly i'm working on the exact same thing for one of the scenarios. I do think trying to be clever might ruin user experience. We have 3 major layers (outlook, java server, SAP backend) with each running in 3 different technologies (.Net, Java, ABAP) glued together using XML and proprietary protocols. The nuances of each of these technologies bundled with the bugs in them makes life a living hell.

I saw The number 23 yesterday. Neo ruined the movie unknowingly :) few years back. I'm also finding number 23 at many places. I look at my phone and its extension is 4739. Add it, you will get 23. Phone displays today is 07.09.07 again 23. My birth date is August 15 (15-08) again 23. My cubicle no is 23! Not so creepy anyway :)

QuakeCon 2007

QuakeCon went by and i didn't even know sigh :(
Id announced their new game Rage. It runs on Mac, PC, XBox 360 and PS3 from the same source base. The major technical feature is MegaTexture where artists now don't need to worry about the texture size and they can make surface as detailed as they want without performance hit.
The major announcement for me was that Quake 3 is going to be made a web game. It's called Quake Zero. Anyone will be able to connect to internet, download Quake Zero client(?) and start playing online for free. They will use advertisement business model. Id is now split into two teams and one team is doing this work. The other team is working on Rage.
You can download the keynote from here.

The next best thing after tabs

http://www.cooliris.com/Site/index.html

Amazing

Will iphone blend?

Will it blend? is the question

Hans Reiser

I try to avoid judging people. I do it anyway sometimes, but when i think it in larger context it makes no sense.

Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused of Murder

Neverending white lights

Use ClearType!!!

Apple has released safari for windows. So i downloaded and started using it. The first thing which i noticed was the fonts. They were smooth. It brought back memories of Gnome, Microsoft Office 12, Iternet Explorer etc. A little investigation pointed to this post by Joel Spolsky. Next thing i did was enabling ClearType on my XP.

If you are using Windows XP and haven't enabled ClearType, please do it now. The quality of fonts is amazing. You are going to love your coding, reading whatever!

Carmack unveils Id's latest game engine

Wolves

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow-maze-spell.html

lolcats

I Can Has CheezBurger?

Read the story

and this LOLPython :)

IN MAI datetime GIMME date LIKE DATE

SO IM LIKE FIBBING WIT N OK?
  LOL ITERATE FIBONACCI TERMS LESS THAN N /LOL
  SO GOOD N BIG LIKE EASTERBUNNY
  BTW, FIBONACCI LIKE BUNNIES! LOL
  U BORROW CHEEZBURGER
  U BORROW CHEEZBURGER
  I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER
  HE CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER
  WHILE I CUTE?
      I AND HE CAN HAZ HE AND I ALONG WITH HE
      IZ HE BIG LIKE N?
          KTHXBYE
      U BORROW HE

IZ __name__ KINDA LIKE "__main__"?
  COMPLAIN "NOW IZ" AND DATE OWN today THING
  IZ BIGNESS ARGZ OK KINDA LIKE 1?
      N CAN HAS 100
  NOPE?
      N CAN HAS NUMBR ARGZ LOOK AT 1!!
  GIMME EACH I IN UR FIBBING WIT N OK?
      VISIBLE I

xkcd also?

Previously Part1, Part2, Part3

Dreams

There are dreams. Some for which you would stake your life. Some achievable. Some worth. Some impossible. Some you wish had happened. Some you wish would never happen.
Do i have an advice? maybe no. maybe..

Well, the past is gone, I know that. The future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That's it.

Mental Frames

Paul Buchheit writes...

For example, if you are interested in startups, but work in a big company, you are in danger. If you stay there too long, you will be drawn into the big company frame shared by the other "lifers". Startups will all seem too risky, frivolous, or impractical, and you'll spend the rest of your life in that big company (and posting bitter comments on TechCrunch).

Sigh.

Patents

Mark Pilgrim on patents...

The patent was original, it was innovative, and it was still shameful.

It’s hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren’t worth a damn anyway.

Days go on and on. They don't end...

Saw Taxi Driver this weekend. Twice. And as if that was not enough, it came in TV at night. Coincidence? I've been wanting to watch this movie for quite some time .. make that some years. I guess i saw some pics of this movie when i was in school. Right time to watch the right movie. The music haunts me ..

Processes

Guido says

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Adminspotting

AACS in limelight again

Kevin Rose writes

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

via Freedom to Tinker

Scott Adams is mad!! and funny as hell

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/oh_deer.html

Yet another day

So let me start blogging here again. Frankly i have been shit tired of everything. The new year eve was one of the worst day of my life. And what followed was even more worse. I started a private blog, and I'm sure reading it would inspire many people .. but it's private :) ..
I've been watching movies a lot these days. Few of the ones i remember are

Little Miss Sunshine made me think how screwed up other peoples life were.
I loved After The Wedding. I loved the mood of the movie, though towards the end it was not so great.


The Quiet was a shit movie. I watched it for Camilla Belle. I did like her in When A Stranger Calls.

Children Of Men was a disaster. I expected a lot hearing it was a science fiction, but all in vein.


The Illusionist was the last movie i saw. I really like it. Edward Norton is fantastic.

AACS is unbreakable

Read from Freedom to Tinker one, two, three, four, five, six, seven

Geek under Development

http://blog.yuvisense.net/2006/12/09/interview-with-sriram-krishnan/

missing foss.in

I wont be able to attend foss.in this time due to office work. Sadly i know foss.in is much more important than anything else. Last year i spent time with my friends, meeting interesting people, hanging around google, yahoo stalls .. solving puzzles, hearing from people like Rasmus .. it gave me inspiration for the entire year .. i hope what i am doing now compensates for that

De-Scheming MIT

Read De-Scheming MIT

Content-wise, the class is a mix as well. The first four weeks of C1 will be a lot like the first four weeks of 6.001, Abelson said. The difference is that programming will be done in Python and not Scheme.

Java GPL'd

http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/

Its our time to see things ..

:)

Passionate vs Professional

A good read from Kathy Sierra http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/11/two_simple_word.html

BTW guess whose name is in the acknowledgement list of the new _great_ book Java Generics and Collections

Dilbert Blog

If you dont have dilbert blog feed in your reading list, add it now .. this is one of the high quality blogs out there

London

Bateman
You think your heart broken is pain?
You think losing God is pain?
Mate.. i went through that trivial shit when i was 20..

Google Reader

Google Reader just go enhanced. It was a pain earlier to use google reader without support for hierarchical structure. Now it looks more like gmail ui. I am going to use google reader from now on.

Fuck'em

Recently i talked with my friend from college. We talked about java, ai, c#, computer science in general etc. I felt great and wanted to learn and work more. Now compare that with the kind of talks we have in our office during breakfast or lunch. Every day in the morning you will be reminded that you are poor, dont have a house, you are fat, you are dumb and they are smart in life and what not. Consider lucky if you dont have to go through all these. Fuck'em fuckem all.

Fill in ..

I dont like the rice served at my home anymore .. sigh .. we use boiled rice but white one .. and now i have gradually started a liking towards the red rice .. which i think is a good thing as im not locked in to my home food anymore :) .. or maybe it may not be the exact version of rice which i used to eat earlier .. which brings me to this question
suppose you come late from office .. i mean really late .. like around 2:30 in the morning and you find that your friend has locked house and gone somewhere .. you dont have any other contacts in the city .. you are very tired ..there is a basement in the building and there is a coffin .. will you sleep in that ? .. you can listen to this song while thinking ..

10minute movies

Saw "The Hire" series today .. these are short ad movies of BMW done by directors like John Woo, Guy Ritchie.. i saw some of them on my way back to home from office in shuttle .. during car chase sequences i felt like i was there in real :)

Static Checking

There are many things a compiler does which helps a programmer. Let me give an example of my recent experience

String name;
if (i == 0) {
name = getName();
if (name.equals("x")) {
doSomething();
}
} else {
name = getAnotherName();
if (name.equals("y")) {
doAnotherThing();
}
}


this is perfectly okay .. if we had forgotten the call name=getAnotherName() in the else condition, compiler would crib saying that name is not initialized.

Now in many code i see that people have a tendency to declare
String name = null;

in this case if you had forgotten to call name=getAnotherName() in else, the compiler would pass as name is initialized to null. And at runtime you will get a NullPointerException as you are doing null.equals("y")

In some places initializing to null cannot be avoided, but i believe, wherever possible dont initialize to null, it will help you

Lucky Number Slevin

Good One.. watch it

Getting Hired

Worth reading .. i will write mine later

http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/2006/08/getting-hired.html

Closures for Java Woohoo!!!

Java is back in radar

Read Neal Gafter's blog .. link1, link2, link3

The proposal is here

Discussion at LtU .. and blog from Gilad Bracha

I'm Loving It

My team has gone for outing, I'm alone in my bay, Entire people(IMS group) at my floor are celebrating their 3rd year with grandeur, I have cancelled my leave for next week and i'm cancelling my bus ticket to hometown where i meant to go after one year, Team mates call me and say "Fuck You" and i'm searching for String.EqualsIgnoreCase in C# .. i'm loving it :) .. reminds me of my final days in Cognizant ..


"Remember, when in doubt.. Fuck"
Al Pacino to his cat in Scent Of A Woman

Gah!

This has happened couple of times


And then this while uploading ...

2001: A Space Odyssey

Saw 2001: A Space Odyssey yesterday along with Prashant. It can be classified as one of those WTF? movies .. Zeus and Neo, i recommend this for you



Wouldn't it be great if "Once Again" had same statement as above?

chick x duck

Joey: Hey, i was thinking if our chick and duck had a baby
Chandler: ?
Joey: then we could call it "Chuck"
Chandler: or we could call it "Dick"

stairway to heaven

stairway to heaven

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to heaven.

There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven.
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it makes me wonder.

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west,
And my spirit is crying for leaving.
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees,
And the voices of those who stand looking.
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, it really makes me wonder.

And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason.
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now,
It's just a spring clean for the May queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on.
And it makes me wonder.

Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know,
The piper's calling you to join him,
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul.
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.

And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

comfortably numb

comfortably numb

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

Come on, now.
I hear youre feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain,
Get you on your feet again.

Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts:
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ships smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I cant explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

Ok.
Just a little pinprick. [ping]
Therell be no more --aaaaaahhhhh!
But you may feel a little sick.

Can you stand up?
I do believe its working. good.
Thatll keep you going for the show.
Come on its time to go.

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ships smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin.
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.

coming back to life

coming back to life

Where were you when I was burned and broken
While the days slipped by from my window watching
And where were you when I was hurt and I was helpless
Because the things you say and the things you do surround me
While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words
Dying to believe in what you heard
I was staring straight into the shining sun

Lost in thought and lost in time
While the seeds of life and the seeds of change were planted
Outside the rain fell dark and slow
While I pondered on this dangerous but irresistible pastime

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the moment had arrived
For killing the past and coming back to life

I took a heavenly ride through our silence
I knew the waiting had begun
And I headed straight..into the shining sun

drool

What wouldnt i do to get my hands on these. Btw its a toddy shop .. see the photo

Wanna get inside Google?

This made me sentimental http://benjismith.net/index.php/2006/06/07/interviewing-with-google

dogfriendly

Tim Sweeney at E3 2006

Here is an interview with Tim Sweeney at this year's E3 Expo. He also expresses his thoughts on Carmack's MegaTexture

Update:
Here is an interview with Carmack at E3, the interviewer is annoying though

Kripa on Duet

In someway im connected to duet. Here is my colleague's blog on the same

Carmack's new Mobile Game

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent%20Updates

Satisfied

I loved the San Marino race yesterday. Michael the man!, of course ppl are bound to disagree for some reason or another. But i loved every moment Alonso tried overtaking Michael and failed. Inspirational :)


Saw From Dusk Till Dawn and i must say Robert Rodriguez got steel balls to do that stuff.


You can watch it for at least the Salma Hayek dance sequence. The song+dance was one of the best, and she's got the young innocent look. Ive been infinite looping on that song over the weekend.

which reminds me of the movie Four Rooms i saw sometime back. It is directed by 4 ppl with Quentin and Rodriguez among them. It is a funny movie and Tim Roth rocks.

The Wheel of Time

I have been reading Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time". It is a great fantasy book(s). Currently im approximately in the middle of first book (The Eye of the World). If everything goes well, i plan to read the series completely (Currently there are 11 books and dog knows how many more he has planned.) I only hope he doesnt die before he finishes.

Schrödinger now and then

He is now 4 1/2 months old, and the older photo was taken when he was around 1 month old. Now you might want to know his breed. Im fed up of hearing this question, so im gonna let it out. He is of Dan breed, more precisely NaDan.

V for Vendekka

Saw Vendekka on friday. It reminded me of The Mask of Zorro for obvious reasons.

XPS 600 Renegade

Dell just announced the XPS 600 Renegade. It is one of the most expensive pc's out there, and costs around $10000. Lets see what it has
Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition dual core processor overclocked from 3.73 to 4.26GHz
2GB DDR2-667
Dual 160 GB 10,000 rpm Western Digital drives in RAID 0 configuration
Secondary WD 400GB 7200GB Hard Drive
and now the main part
Quad-SLI system with 4 GeForce 7900 GTX graphics card with 512MB mem each .. my dog :0
The 7900GTX was released just some weeks back!
Ageia Physx processor for physics
DVDBurner, Klipsch Pro Media 5.1 speakers or Logitech Z-5500 500 watt 5.1 digital surround speakers, Sound Blast X-Fi Fatality sound card with front-side controller, 30" LCD with resolution 2560x1600, 10 USB 2.0 ports

links 1 2 3
Zeus (or is it USMAN?) come on!

Drool C Programmers

F1 Season

The Three Stars

Hats off to Kimi for finishing third after starting from the last .

Alonso said - ''I'm surprised he was on the podium because he was starting from the back, I thought Jenson (Button) was third. I think he did a good from where he was starting.''
Michael said - "He's very quick. How quick, we'll find out''

Also nice to see newcomer Nico Rosberg scoring the fastest lap. Seems like its a good season ahead.

Emacs learning curve

Irréversible

The Horror! The Horror!

online tools

Web has progressed so much that some people have coined buzzwords like Web2.0 .I will explain some tools which i found interesting
Blogs.
blogger, wordpress ..
If you are reading this, you already know this. If you dont have one, start one now!
RSS Feeds.
Dynamic content sites like news sites, blogs supports something called RSS feeds. You can subscribe to these feeds and use a feed reader to read them, just like mail. I think Joel Spolsky once remarked the difference between reading a feed and going to the site. Its like looking every second whether it is 3'o clock / setting an alarm for 3'o clock. There are many varieties of feed readers ranging from desktop clients, browser integrated to online ones.
Desktop.
RSS Bandit, Omea Reader etc.
These readers also support tabbed browsing.
Browser Based.
Firefox builtin live bookmarks, Opera, IE7 If you are using Firefox, you can get good plugins like Sage. The builtin live bookmarks are pretty primitive. Opera has a very good feed reader integrated. These tools have added advantage that if you are browsing a site having feed, a button will be shown in the address bar which you can click to subscribe. In desktop/online clients you have to manually copy paste the rss link.
Online.
Bloglines, Google Reader, Newsalloy
Advantage is that you dont have to install any client side things.
Opml
Most of the readers support something called Opml format. This represents your collection of feeds. You can import/export opml. Once you create your opml, you can experiment with various clients. (opera9 supports importing/exporting of opml). Try out some opmls from http://indibloggies.org/nominations-2005/
Bookmarking.
del.icio.us, furl, scuttle, google bookmarks, yahoo myweb2.0
These sites support saving your bookmarks online. There are many advantages like being able to access yor bookmarks from any computer, accessing others bookmarks etc. Many of them allows accessing others bookmarks as rss feeds. For eg you can access my bookmarks here. So if you have any interesting links to share, share it using these tools Posting a bookmark while browing is easy. You just need to get the bookmarklets from these sites and click on them. del.ici.ous supports firefox extension which is little more easy. Also there is another browser called Flock (built on top of firefox) which makes it very easy to add bookmarks. It also support client side caching of your bookmarks
Many of these tools (blogs, bookmarking sites etc) support something called tags. This is the category which the link belongs to. You will be able to access the popular links for that tag etc. For eg this is the link for popular links tagged with name ai in del.icio.us
Online chats.
gtalkr, meebo
Again advantage is you dont have to install any client side things. meebo supports multiple chats like yahoo, aim etc
Picture Sharing.
Flickr
Here you share your pictures. Flickr has tagging mechanism like del.icio.us
Blog Searching
Technorati, Google Blog Search, Icerocket
pretty much self explanatory
Dictionary
Answers.com, wikipedia
If you need to know about anything, just go to these sites and search. Most of the browsers support adding search plugins to these sites.
News sites
digg, slashdot, reddit
Of course i will link only technology sites :). digg is one serious contender for slashdot. You have to subscribe to the feed because it spits out tons of news items in a day.
Im not saying anything about podcasting as i dont use it now.

onlisp

Pleasant surprise in the morning. Paul Graham's OnLisp is now free. Go get it http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

emacs

I was a vim user. But i always wanted to switch to emacs. I ve heard that vim can do whatever emacs can. Anyway .. after i started exploring lisp, i heard from lisp community that how good emacs was. So i bought "Learning GNU Emacs" in the hope that one day i will learn it. I use command prompt (windows) quite often in my office. One thing that bothered me was running so many command prompts and switching between those. So for all those ppl who suffer these things, im going to write how to use emacs. Start using it. Get the installation from here (windows).
After extracting, run addpm.exe from bin.

note:
C means Ctrl and M means Alt. So C-x means pressing Ctrl + x. C-c C-x means pressing Ctrl + c + x (ie hold Ctrl and type c and x). C-c x means Ctrl + c then release Ctrl, press c

Useful Commands

Opening a file - C-x C-f
A prompt comes below (near status bar) asking for file. you can use TAB for navigating directories or files.
Quitting a Command - C-g
Often you start typing some command and want to quit (ie escaping .. note ESC doesnt work that way). Use this.
For eg. you wanted to open file and did C-x but but you want to cancel it. do a C-g
Quitting emacs - C-x C-c
Saving a file - C-x s
Saving to another file (Save As) - C-x C-w
Saving all opened files (see buffers) - C-x C-s
Windows Commands
Emacs can open many windows inside it. Often it happens that some command or command completion opens a new window and your window splits. This will be annoying in the beginning. Use the commands below to navigate windows.

Going to other window - C-x o
Maximizing current window (current means where cursor is) - C-x 1
Splitting current window - C-x 2
Note that if you open new file after this, file will be opened in that window.
Splitting current window Vertically - C-x 3
See that C-x 2 opens window horizontally. Also you can use this and previous command inside a subwindow also.

Buffers
Buffers represent all the open files and buffers not connected to files ;). If you are using the GUI version, you can see the buffers in the menubar. You can switch to the buffers from there.
Going to another Buffer - C-x b
Press enter. This will go to the previously used buffer
Listing Buffers - C-x C-b (see the difference between previous and this command. In previous you needed to release Ctrl after x was pressed, and in this you need to use Ctrl for both x and b)
This will open another window listing all the buffers. To move to that window use C-x o, or use mouse. You can navigate through lines using 'n' and 'p' (next and previous .. You can use C-n instead of downarrow or C-p instead of uparrow. In Buffer List you need not use C-n, instead you can use n itself .. similarly for p). To select any buffer you can press '1'. This will make that buffer in a maximized window.
There are some other useful things to do in this buffer list. Like if you want to delete some buffers press 'd'. A 'D' will come next to that buffer. To undo anything press 'u'. Finally to execute these press x.

Closing a buffer - C-x k
Press enter. To close many buffers see above

Editing Commands.
This section will represent all the basic things like cut, copy, search etc.

Up Arrow alternative - C-p
Down Arrow alternative - C-n
Left Arrow alternative - C-b
Right Arrow alternative - C-f
(i suggest to use these once you get comfortable with emacs, otherwise all these will garble your brain)
Refreshing screen with current line in middle - C-l

Moving to start of line - C-a
Moving to end of line - C-e
Moving to start of file - M-< Moving to end of file - M->
(use shift key for '<' or '>')
Selecting some text (for copying or deleting).
Use C-space for setting a mark. Use arrow keys (or alternatives) to move to the location till you want the text to be selected. (By default it will not show selected region highlighted. See using .emacs file (below) to how to change the behaviour)

Once you have selected your text use below commands for copying, pasting etc
Copying Text - M-w
Cutting Text - C-w
Note that C and M (ctrl and alt) have many similarities in commands
Pasting Text - C-y (this is called yanking. in vim teminology yank means copy, but here it means paste)
Undo - C-/ or C-x u

Incremental search - C-s
Incremental search backwards - C-r
(note use C-s or C-r multiple times to find previous thing)
Ordinary Search - C-s enter

Running any command - M-x
I heard you can run any command using this. Type M-x and press TAB to see various commands. One example would be killing current buffer by M-x kill-buffer. Renaming buffer by M-x rename-buffer

Running command prompt or shell - M-x shell
enjoy. you can rename the shell to some other thing using M-x rename-buffer, and open as many shells as you can
Previous/Next commands in shell - M-p and M-n

Telnet - windows telnet doesnt work in shell. You need to dowload say jtelnet
(a java app). put the jar in CLASSPATH, and run
java thor.app.tenet.
One good thing is autocompletion of directory/files work probably because in shell.

.emacs file
In *nix .emacs resides in your home. in windows if you do a default installation, i think it takes from C:\. See the windows installation faq. Note that in windows it is named _emacs not .emacs (windows wont allow you to).
You can highlight the selected region by appending this in your emacs file
(transient-mark-mode t)
You can use syntax highlighting always by using
(cond ((fboundp 'global-font-lock-mode) (global-font-lock-mode t)
(setq font-lock-maximum-decoration t)))


Im a little bit tired now (no breakfast and lunch) .. if you want anything else do comment, i will update

rant

After all the comfort i had, im finally moving out of campus. New project, new manager, new place, new everything. I'll be moving to nearby location where neo was earlier.. slightly depressing. Since its last day in campus, we went outside for lunch. It was a good restaurant .. we had crab, squid, prawns and whatnot .. quite a feast.

I saw doom on monday .. it was ok. At least someone liked it.

Its a good four day weekend coming .. and am planning to watch the videos (around 10GB of divx) of sicp (book is available online). If you are a computer science student, do watch/read it. This is what they teach in MIT

garbage

Occasionally i go through python dev mailing list for interesting things. Today i came across this
where Guido says
>> FYI: Real libreadline is GPL, and rms made a point of forcing
>> (Aladdin-licensed) Ghostscript to remove stanzas from the Makefile
>> that allowed linking to it as a user option. Ie, this particular pain
>> in the neck is deliberate FSF policy, to encourage use of the GPL.

>Can we just all agree that RMS is an asshole now? Bah.

I respect both RMS and Guido and its funny how Guido doesnt like RMS. Another one here
"Citing RMS's insanity is a great way to get my blood steaming." --GvR

I remeber Guido getting an award from FSF. Some links 1 2.

Long before when ppl where using Tcl as glue language, RMS wanted to get a real language(he didnt like Tcl), Python was suggested. I think it was dropped as it was not under GPL. They set out to write Guile. I wonder where python would have been if it was chosen ..

Zinda

Last week my original intention was to watch the movie Zinda, which ended up with collectivechaos. I felt the need even more so me and my friend sneaked out of the office yesterday at 3:30 to watch Zinda. nowrunning showed the move time as 4:40pm in PVR. We reached PVR only to find out that it had already started at 4:10. Since the website usually doesnt go wrong, we checked other classes and needless to say, it was there in gold class. The tickets in gold class will cost you 500Rs. We felt dumb to leave after all these efforts and decided to watch it from gold class. Out of the 500, you can claim 150 for food (i bought a 150Rs chicken roll .. wonder there was any chicken in it). The seat was great with buttons to adjust the positioning. You can make it a bed .. anything.


Coming to the movie .. well it was good. I always like dull colored movies ;). John Abraham was great.. and so was his hair. I remembered seeing a particular fight sequence in some movie (i think Zeus got it sometime back) .. and yes it seems Zinda is a ripoff of oldboy. Anyway good going Sanjay Gupta.

updtate:
My friend forwarded me an article on rediff
What i want say to these kind of people is just to shut the fuck up. If you dont like the idea .. dont watch it. Im tired of watching the silly bollywood movies. Zinda was an entertaining movie and i liked it. If its copied from somewhere, well i say it has been copied good. Without Zinda, i would have never came to know about oldboy or its concept. So its much better than watching nothing. All you pathetic critics out there .. eat shit and die!

spring summer fall winter ... aah crap

After one day of procrastinating over going for a movie, we set out yesterday for an ambitious goal of obtaining tickets from pvr on a sunday evening. It ended up with me, prashant, his friend and his friend's friend going for an "art movie" as i would call it (note: except for me, all others are regulars). There are a bunch of people called collectivechaos conducting this. Neo and Zeus .. you miss this crap :D
So what was the movie? .. it was called spring, summer, fall, winter...and spring. Here is my rather intellectual understanding of the movie


master and student - student harass animals - master punishes - student grows, so does master - girl comes for treatment - student screws girl - student screws girl multiple times - master sends girl away since she is recovered (of course because of screwing) - student runs away to find girl - girl runs away with another man - student kills girl - student returns - master punishes student - detectives come to catch student - student taken - master commits suicide (to a snake :? whatever) - student returns - student repents - lady leaves boy to student - lady dies - student the new master, boy the new student - loop

That would quite sum it up. Anyway i liked it and might go for it again. Hopefully no one from collectivechaos reads this blog, lest i might be burned alive!

reverend blogs

reverend has a blog. He also has a site. Read his "Shadows in John Carmack's next engine" post.
I installed Quake4 in my work machine and it didnt work :( . Then i installed it in my laptop .. and it works!! . The graphics is pathetic, but playable. I didnt find any single player deathmatch, did they remove it? (i installed demo)

Who are You?

You scored as James Bond, Agent 007. James Bond is MI6's best agent, a suave, sophisticated super spy with charm, cunning, and a license's to kill. He doesn't care about rules or regulations and somewhat amoral. He does care about saving humanity though, as well as the beautiful women who fill his world. Bond has expensive tastes, a wide knowledge of many subjects, and his usually armed with a clever gadget and an appropriate one-liner. James Bond, Agent 007 75% Batman, the Dark Knight 71% Lara Croft 63% The Terminator 63% Indiana Jones 63% Neo, the "One" 58% William Wallace 54% El Zorro 42% The Amazing Spider-Man 33% Maximus 33% Captain Jack Sparrow 33% Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com

Guido Hired

Wow .. Google hired Guido Van Rossum!!! see the news here
Ive been wondering when this will happen .. Hope this will fast forward python development.

As Good As It Gets

I saw As Good As It Gets . Its a good movie. I loved the scene where he looses the dog and starts playing piano and then laughs at himself saying "for a dog". And yes how can you forget "You make me wanna be a better man" dialogue.

Dog

Dog in the house

buhahahaa

world is my loo

hydraulically pressed fake bone and joy

wine? .. hmm

better off with milk


closeup


yum .. sudoku

Not named it yet, i have suggested the name Schrödinger

PathFinding 2

I had earlier promised of explaining pathfinding through obstacles. Well i just wrote a quick applet to show it (using astar algorithm). Unfortunately its time for me to leave, so will explain later :).
Use
CTRL + left click to set predator
ALT + left click to set prey
click and drag to create walls
right click to solve

To clear use ALT + right click

yeah, i know that i should not be a ui programmer