some stuff

I have been thinking about this for a while now (infact for very long time like months and months you know).  What is negativity? A quick googling for the definition brings up many results, some of which are : “Indicating opposition or resistance”, “Expressing, containing, or consisting of a negation, refusal, or denial”.

Is opposing or resisting really an indicaiton of negativity? For example, when you say something or voice your opinion about something and the other person disagrees with you, is he being negative? When you force a bunch of people to do something and if one or two people don’t want to do it because they don’t believe in it and they inturn discourage others from doing it, are these guys being negative?

Is negativity a very subjective term? Would you call a person negative just because he doesn’t believe in what you are saying? Where do you draw the line between keeping an open mind and listening to his opinions/arguments and just shutting him off because it is just sucking up your energy?

Such questions were really troubling me for a long time.  How do I know if I am in a negative environment? How do I know if I am in an environment where people are smarter than the decision makers and they disagree for a reason? So, I thought I should put down my learnings here and open up a discussion (assuming someone reads my blog).  It would be nice to also keep a record so that next year, I can revisit this and may be laugh at myself for being totally wrong!

“oh, this will never work. I have seen it all before. It has not worked before and will not this time”

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard such things before. It could be anywhere, at work, in a social gathering anywhere. Personally, I get really annoyed by such statements. I have learnt to patiently ask them why they think like that, what information they have collected before making that statement and so on.

lesson 1: Always control your emotions, ask for clarity.

lesson 2: Educate yourself. Same things which were  an epic failure yesterday could be a big success today. There are so many external variables. Learn about all those and decide if that person is right or wrong.

lesson 3: Keep away from people who just whine about something without really giving an alternative solution.

lesson 4: When you are in the middle of a battle, have a open mind. When someone says you are wrong, don’t let your emotions take over. Only a man with great character can accept he is wrong and take action. It is not a sign of weakness (oh comeon, we all have read and heard this 1924 times). But there is no harm is repeating/reminding right?

lesson 5:  Once you are convinced that you are totally right, go for it. There is every chance that you are wrong and will screw it up big time but take responsibility for it if you really did screw it up. fire your ass off. Penalize yourself harshly so that you don’t do that mistake again.

If we all followed this diligently, we can live in harmony without bickering, ill feeling and what not.

Go back to an isolated place and just think about this for a while. These are so obvious things, but do you really do it? Saying is easy, putting your hands where the mouth is something else. Can you do it? Think!

If you have reached till here, you are awesome and I am awesome

That’s all from me. See you later.

Mahesh Murthy

It’s been almost a month since I have blogged. I didn’t have anything in mind to blog today but just to keep it going, I thought I write something. I just bought Programming Collective Intelligence and Building Scalable Websites . I am so looking forward to reading them. I just started with collective intelligence today.  I bought this one because we decided to read this in the book club at work. Usually, we read 2 chapters and meet once a week and discuss. It is real fun.

This time, I won’t make any promises of blogging about my opinions/learnings regularly (as I did for pragmatic programmers and failed gloriously). But, I will give it another try this time. I am setting an easy goal. 5 blog posts atleast dedicated to collective intelligence. Let’s see how that goes.

I thought I will start reading the other book simultaneously but I am pretty sure I won’t get to it. I have other things going on right now (I bought agile development with rails and quickly working through the excercises). The book is still in beta but that is fine. I want to get my hands dirty with rails 2 quickly and build something. I am lovin’ it!

Alright everybody. Time for some rails, ‘god of war’ on my psp and ‘lord of rings’ on my awesome projector.

The title says it all. It was an absolutely exciting adrenaline filled long weekend. This time around I got up on time to catch my flight! (For those who don’t know, I missed my vegas flight during the july 4th weekend because I was partying previous night and my alarm didn’t go off in the morning (debatable) but anyway that is history. I ended up taking the next flight and so all was good).

This time around, we hadn’t really made concrete plans. We knew that we wanted to do all kinds of outdoor activities but hadn’t booked anything, had done nothing. It is safe to say, I wasn’t confident how the weekend would workout. But you know, it is sfo. There is plenty to do there right?

But you know what, everything fell into place. We kayaked for a while in lake tahoe, then the next day morning we tried out water skiing.  ok, I have to brag a little bit now   I was doing it for the first time and I had only like 15 mins because there were 2 other friends who had to do it within a week. I was successful in getting up from the water and ski on the water for few feet. But then, I crashed right back into the water and it was over. But I was proud of myself!! Next time, I will try when the water is much warmer and there is less wind. But it was just amazing.

Then we did jet ski. man, those are POWERFUL machines.  It was absolute beauty riding them.  The max I went was like 50MPH and believe me, in water, that is lot.  Preetham pretty much freaked out when I went at that speed and hit a big wave! The water was too cold and we only lasted 30 mins before calling quits. It was lot of fun.

Then we went to something which I had waited my entire life to do.  guess guess?? jump from 15,000 feet!! oh yeah, you know what I am talking about.  skydiving it is!  I have always wanted to do it and it looked like, that day had arrived. We filled out forms (duh formalities), got the gear on and we were all set.  Then we sat in the plane and after few mins it looked like we had reached the altitude required to jump.  I asked the trainer with whom I was jumping if we were set but he showed me his instrument which measures the altitude (forgive me I don’t know the name) and it read 5000 feet. I was like  ??? wtf ??? We have another 10000 feet to go? I didn’t freak out.  It just made things more exciting.  And finally it arrived. I got instructions as to how to go about it and stuff. And then came that priceless moment. The timeframe between me peaking out of the door of the plane waiting to jump , then actually jumping out of the plane to the next 60 seconds when we would just fall before the parachute opens up, that was THE moment. It is just unforgettable. I don’t have words to explain that. Let me just call it “The sky moment“. oh boy, was that fun! I was screaming at the top of my voice for the next 60 seconds (but could hardly hear it), looking around everywhere, my ears blocked, oh it was a great feeling. The parachute opened up after a minute and we were in the air for another 5 mins or so and then landed nicely on the ground.  One of the most memorable days of my life …..

The next day was white water rafting. That was also fun. There were 3 -4 level 4 rafts which were absolutely exciting but the remaining were all level 3 which were fine. Overall, it was a good first rafting expedition. That was the end of the adrenaline filled vacation.

To top it off, preetham treated me in this fancy vietnamese resturants on the last day. I must say, it is one of the best foods I have ever had. yeah, it is right up there with the very few others in my list.

I installed hpricot gem in a non standard directory on my shared server on hostmonster. When I tried, require ‘hpricot’ in ruby it failed to load even when I set RUBY_PATH variable in my bashrc file. The solution to that problem is to do require ‘rubygems’ and then require ‘hpricot’.  Supposedly, the path is altered after executing rubygems to pick up from the non standard path as well. Thanks to guys in the ruby-lang channel on irc.

me learns something new today!

I finally got rails setup on my hostmonster server. They have some information about the setup in their knowledge base but that is a little outdated.  It needs to be tweaked a little bit to get it working. There are quite a few articles out there explaining how to get rails up and running but most of them are outdated. After some looking around and making 3 calls to the tech support, I got it to work. This is what you need to do to setup rails.

1.  Create a rails app whereveer you want in your home directory.

$ cd railsapp

$rails myapp

2. Create a symlink to the public directory from your www directory.

$ ln -s ~/www/myapp myapp/public

3. Create a subdomain pointing to ~/www/myapp. This will be url for your rails application.

4. This is how much the knowledge base goes upto. Note that you don’t have to do script/server start to start the server. They have already configured apache to run your application. All you have to do now is create a .htaccess file in the ~/www/myapp directory.  My file is here (rename the file to .htaccess) if you are interested.

5. Then go to the url of the subdomain you just created and voila! you have a rails app running ( I assume that you have created the database and have done all the usual stuff of settting up).

Note: Lot of people on the web had to change the permission to the directories and stuff. I didn’t do any of those.

Hope this helps someone someday! Let me kow if you have trouble setting up.

yes. I changed my hosting provider (finally). If you didn’t know, my previous hosting provider was 1and1. I moved to hostmonster this month. The biggest reason I moved here is because of the support for rails. I have started learning rails and really wanted support for it. I have a dual boot linux on my desktop but most of the time I am on windows primarily for 2 reasons

1. sopcast doesn’t work on linux properly which means I can’t watch cricket if I am on linux.

2. When my mom comes online, I voice chat with her and I am yet to find a way to get voice chat on linux IM clients.

So, the obvious choice was to move to a provider who supports rails. After some researching on the web, I narrowed it down to hostmonster. They are relatively cheap (6 – 7 bucks a month), they have good reviews, they already have rails 2.x installed, unlimited storage. Also, I was losing patience with 1and1 because of the latency and stuff and they were 12 bucks a month!

Thanfully I had only 2 domains hosted and so wasn’t too bad to move servers. I have pretty much got everything setup. A couple more subdomains and I will be all set.

Hope hostmonster doesn’t disappoint me. So far, it has been good except last night, server was down for 1hr because of some network issue. Hopefully, I will be happy with them.

That’s all for now. Now that rails is setup, let’s see how far I go with it. If any of you have some cool idea for a web application, let me know. We can together write it in rails!

I am turning full vegetarian for a month. Don’t know the reason. Just testing how hard it is going to be to not eat non veg every day! Also, to see if I lose any weight because of that. (I am not overweight mind you). The game ends Aug 15th.

If any of you can think of a new veg recipes, let me know!

I was in vegas for the long weekend and it was just “A”wesome. It was kind of reunion of undergrad friends. We all flew there from different parts of the country: chicago (me), atlanta (satish and deepak), seattle (naveen) and san francisco (preetham). That is what made it more special. We all met after a loooong time.

The pics are all over in 4 cameras. This is the first part on my camera. Check it out.

Insert at beginning of line by doing shift+i (I used to hit 0 and then i)

append to end of line by doing shift+a  (I used to hit $ and then do i)

As promised, I am blogging whatever I have read in the book till now. No wonder everyone says that this is a must read for a programmer. So, there is no format I will be following regularly to post whatever I have learnt. Today’s format is, I am putting the name of the section I read and the points I noted down from that section. So, here it goes.

1. The cat ate my source code

• The basic point is take responsibility for what you have done and don’t just give that lame excuse. Talk to yourself first to make sure you are not giving a lame excuse.
• Do not be afraid to ask for help. There is a saying, ” The greatest of all weakness is the fear of appearing weak”. Memorise this statement (I did it already!)

2. Software entropy

• Fix the broken windows. If you see something wrong in the design, fix it. If you leave it as it is, another window will be broken and on and on and you will end up with a pile of mess.
• If the code is already messy, do not get into the mindset of “Well, code is anyway crappy, I will follow suit, it is not a big deal”.
• If it can’t be fixed right away, atleast board it up somewhere so that you don’t forget.

* I wonder how strictly this can be followed or how many people really follow this? Any opinions?

3. Stone soup and boiled frogs

• The author gives an example of how two soldiers start making soup with just stones and how the villagers come together and contribute ingredients to it and make it a good soup. The moral of the story is, you be the catalyst of change. You start the process.
• The authors mention another interesting analogy saying a frog put in a boiled water jumps right out of it but when put in cold water and slowly heated up, stays there. The moral of the story is, make constant changes to your code, clean it up, remember the big picture always.