Ramgarh Alumni's Friends

9:50PM - m17n and documentation

Everybody talks of i18n/l10n and code. Everybody also talks of code documentation (at least at a public API level. Now here is the problem that I face: I need m17n for API documentation. I can't think of doxygen/javadoc/M$ .net nonsense/POD or any such thing that has a notion of m17n. In fact, the problem is that it would be unwieldy to have documentation in even as little as 3 different languages along with source code.

I say here is an opportunity for the next big thing in language tools.

7:53PM - Aging "techie"

Here are a few incidents today that made me feel I am aging too much:

• I've been receving CMOS checksum error since the past few days. Finally decided to replace the motherboard battery. It took me some 7 minutes to actually figure out how to extract the battery. Makes me wnder if I'll ever be able to perform a similar surgery on a laptop.


• I was timing the performance of lower_bound for 100,000 objects with a simple integer comparator. Then I wanted to try it on java. This was my first program using generics. Also, I couldn't find the equivalent of lower_bound in java. Took little over an hour to get it running. Completely useless factoid: lower_bound on vector of stuct finishes off in about 1.2μs and my homegrown version on ArrayList of Integer takes 1.9μs. Though this is satisfactory, where is the JIT I wonder...


• I took way too much time (10 minutes) to write and time and url parser in perl for IIS logs.

10:09AM - Awesome Indian cooking site

A friend just sent me this link to Manjula's Kitchen. Pretty good site with detailed videos and all.

11:00PM - Black stripes

I have a wide screen monitor. I like watching movies full screen. Here is what happens:
* VCD bought from a store: Vertical black stripes (modifief for 4:3 viewing)
* Movie downloaded off the intertubes: Horizontal black stripes (16:9 isn't wide enough)

I guess I need to stop buying these legal VCDs until I start getting the wide stuff.

11:15PM - bash suicide

Here is a damage I unleashed on myself today:

1. Build nginx using --prefix=~/tmp/nginx
2. Realize that it has created a directory by the name ~ in the current directory
3. rm -rf ~
4. Aiee!
5. Hit Ctrl-C to realize it was still working on ~/tmp/ by some coincidence.