Roads, Bengaluru

I have a gut feeling that my observation is worth a paisa if not anything else. I'd to roam around Bengaluru this week, and couple of weeks ago on some personal appointments, and my observation is, a lot of narrow roads are not really narrow. What I mean by that is 1. There is no properly laid footpath

2. Only 3/4th of the road is usable. No vehicles can go on the rest of the road; as the finishing is bad, no body is willing to use that.

3. The lane markings on the road do not exist :(

4. Roads are patched in a very bad and unorganized way. They slow down vehicles as people brake more and more when they see humpy roads.

5. Potholes all of a sudden.

What I think is, either sides of the roads needs to be finished properly so that the entire road can be used for vehicle movement == Fix these. And the roads won't be narrow anymore to some extent.

I really really stick to my lane as much as possible. I try hard to be a civilian with common sense. I follow what Rahul Dravid's poster all over Bengaluru say: When on road, always say "Pehle Aap". Unfortunately, no body says, "Pehle Aap" to me :(

I don't know if anyone tried to measure the quantum of waste; fuel wastage, time wastage, delayed arrivals at destinations etc because of these under-developed, low-quality, worth-less roads. If the roads are really up to standards, I really believe a good amount of traffic gets controlled and it speeds up vehicles.

I'm not sure if Government is trying to bring in some standards to these roads. The pace at which the improvement is seen is very moderate. It seems these bureaucrats should realize, and work faster, and keep strict quality measures. Modi ji, please, please, bring in quality standards to these Government projects at ground level. Roads in particular are broken..

I pay a lot of money as tax, proud, and honest I'm. I don't cheat.  And when I hit a pothole, I feel like punching that road contractor right in his face, who did that low quality shitty work.

Tongue

Tongue is a small thing, but what enormous damage can it do.

I was trying to tease a friend of mine on a whatsapp group yesterday night. I sort of felt my joke went in wrong direction, however, I presumed that it wasn't so rude or not funny at all and it wouldn't disturb him. Like I wrote for myself a few days ago, on how I go beyond the limits in teasing friends, it repeated. This time, I was being careful, yet, I sort of assumed he would take it as a joke. I've seen him for taking things lightly. But looks like he hasn't been liking this.
Plus, as a bonus to screw my morning, a bad dream woke me up. It was quite uncomfortable a dream.
I decided, I will try my best, no matter how close somebody is, to understand my limits with my words. I will choose them carefully. It looks like I just can't be funny without being rude. :) Benign violation is the word I could recall for these jokes, and clearly, I'm not any capable of cracking them. :)
Watch that if you find it funny. I watched it a long time ago.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysSgG5V-R3U[/embed]

warp, a fast C and C++ preprocessor - outdated project

I'm writing this down to catch the attention of some folks who are into this warp/warpdrive or those who put this thing on github.
I've been trying to use compile and use it. With some tweaks, I could compile it. But, the source tree and files uploaded at git master branch at https://github.com/facebook/warp is somewhat outdated, and it is missing a whole lot of information.

Although I appreciate the contribution to open source from facebook folks, it seems to me that it is not done in proper way.

• There are plenty of hard-coded paths in Makefiles(ok, I can fix them),


• Missing scripts  - builtin_defines.sh is missing(its tricky to take a guess, and even if I could arrive at something, I'm not sure if it is optimum)


• Basic documentation going missing, example, the documentation says,

This will produce warp (the core program) and also the drivers warpdrive_gcc4_7_1, warpdrive_gcc4_8_1,warpdrive_clang3_2, warpdrive_clang3_4, and warpdrive_clangdev, each packaged for the respective compiler and version.

• but, none of the Makefiles build these drivers, which makes the whole understanding unclear.


• It is a pretty incomplete project uploaded at github and it asks for a lot of time being invested to get this tool working, which perhaps could have been easily avoided, making the contribution much more worthwhile at the open source standards, if someone from FB checked it more carefully and uploaded it to github.

I tried contacting nearly all of those who are contributors on github to this project to kind of help me by uploading that missing piece of information, and I haven't got any reply from anyone yet. So, I'm writing this blog post hoping to grab their attention or someone who knows warp/warpdrive better already so that the missing information could be corrected and the project is more useful.

Mighty Nature

It seems to me that there is nothing more helpless a situation for mankind than battling against nature.
There have been floods in Andhra Pradesh lately and there was a lot of disaster because of Hud-hud cyclone. There is this Ebola disease threatening people to death. And At my hometown, we are hoping for rains. This rainy season hasn't even been moderate for us. Hence problem for harvesting lands, drinking water etc.

No matter how boastful we human beings are about we building the next gen this, next gen that, killing animals for meat or money, converting green lands into barren land where skyscrapers are erect, it is only so as long as nature could excuse us. When She is tired of us, she would shake these dusty us off mildly like a bad habit.

It appears to me that Bangalore for example lost its glory of being the garden city because of overused everything. Deforestation can only be controlled by government and the impact of this isn't limited to that area alone but more surrounding areas. My hometown never suffered like this earlier. What's happening now is people started experiencing the sigh of helplessness as nature denies to bless us and we wonder why things are worsening for us.

Internet!

This weekend has almost been like a weekend without internet. I mostly spend my time on my laptop during weekends. I had plans to read some stuff on and off but without internet this plan didn't fall in place. It seems to me that I'm addicted to my laptop. While I don't see nothing wrong with it, I'm trying to figure something that keeps me very busy. Like handful of interesting work. I don't know when would I find that.

Limits

It seems to me that with friends, we often say things we don't mean especially when we are teasing them. :) I try not to go beyond my limits, but sometimes, very unknowingly I say things I do not mean, and mess things up. As my motivation is not to hurt them with my words, it keeps happening without my knowledge.
I think I know my limits now, and when to stop for the reason that although I'm fine to hear a rebuking voice from friends, I think I cannot take it and digest as I'm not so used to it. Nevertheless, when this does happen, I take a while to digest, and then I'm fine. I do not think I deliberately lose my friends for some silly reason. A Friend In Need, Is A Friend Indeed. :)

My One Cent Contribution To OpenSource

Last week was very discouraging. On a bad Friday, the running builds queue was too long, and the license constraints kept a lot of builds waiting for resources, and it was chaos. In the midst of all this, we have under-performing Linux boxes, bad NFS performance, and a g++ compiler that has just started compiling code slower than earlier.

This delayed the CI builds. Our ccache setup to speed up builds wasn't useful because of the various factors.

Now, everything is nearly normal as we dedicated a few Linux machines for CI, and CI builds run on these dedicated machines and builds are comparably faster with ccache.

And, more than what I learnt about debugging these nasty environment issues, I learnt about people and how much they react if something you own is not not doing well. It wasn't pleasant as everybody was under pressure. Understood.

By the way, in the processing of debugging these problems, I made a very tiny contribution to OpenSource and I'm happy about it. :) I'm a big fan of OpenSource projects. They are free, and everything is "open". There are no hidden intricacies, because, if you are capable, you can always go through the source code.

Anyways, I'm hoping that we solve the remaining problems, or get them solved. I'm glad I saved a few seconds of compilation time, and gave my cent to OpenSource.

A Recognition

I just won myself a recognition at the office in this month's "Star of the month" competition. It was for my one month effort to deploy, and stabilize ccache in our considerably large software project that I was awarded this. This was done keeping the build time, and the cost of ElectricAccelerator's license in mind. While I partially won by decreasing the build time by nearly 40% on an average, and meeting the first expectation, I failed to save the cost, as the pressure on resource crunch was huge, and we had to purchase more licenses.

We are aiming at our next promising thing, Tup, a blazing fast, and incredibly accurate, OpenSource build tool. While its adoption on the OpenSource world looks very modest, it is by far, the best OpenSource build tool available as of now, from what I know. I'm hopeful that this should help us accomplish both the targets, of increasing the developer productivity by not wasting lot of time waiting during building stuff, and saving the organization some cost.

I'm not going to quit until this Tup build system is rolled out!

2nd Blogging Anniversary

It has been 2 years since I started this blog. I managed to keep my rants published .. Yahooo :)

[caption id="attachment_757" align="alignnone" width="300"] 2nd blogging anniversary[/caption]

WordPress - you people rock! Thank you.

Songs, And Lyrics

I'm a big admirer of Trivikram Srinivas. There is magic in his writing as it elevates my energy when I'm listening to him watching him. I'm fond of lyrics, and dialogues that carry some kind of emotion written poetically, and I like the following song from the movie Attarintiki Daredi(Which way is aunt's home?) a lot. This song is a mix of a popular Annamacharya Kriti, with slightly modern but incredibly meaningful lyrics. The poets and singers are so blessed! I wish I could learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc4QzZYfS6o

A Tribute

It is not very often that you come across people who are so lively and full of life that you start envying them. Most of the time, I've some solution for any technical problem at our office, within our team. When it comes to life out of office, I'm still a rookie. Those who know me well keep repeating it.

I just wanted to leave this post as a tribute to couple of my good friends from whom I keep learning life lessons. I kind of felt it today. So, writing it down. No matter how difficult things are for them, they are nice and kind even when they do not have to be. The toughest thing, it seems to me, is to love no matter what, and live as life unfolds, happily and they seem to be very good at it. I'm learning from you guys. While I'm your mentor inside office, you are my mentors outside office. You are the best. I wish everything goes really well for you and you get around all the problems.

First Day At Gym

I've been laughed at sometimes for my lean physique. Those comments never mattered to me. But, as I am growing up, it seems to me that it really matters how I look. I realized how weak I am when I fainted in the gym on the very first day! It wasn't that embarrassing, though. It was, to be frank, without shame, the most wonderful thing of my recent days. For a few minutes, I was so blissfully asleep having no sense of consciousness and the whole world was so quiet and calm that I was in heaven. I really really want that moment back. The gym instructor had to sprinkle some water on my face to wake me up. I think it is quite common a scene for him as he was teasing a guy who was then entering the gym, when I was leaving, that it reminded him of that boy's first day. You are never alone. ;)

I'm writing this on my blog to keep my motivation up. I'm not going to quit this time. I WON'T. I will gain 10kg in the next 3 months. If not 10kg, some visible improvement in the way I look.

The concept of God

I'm on a weekend outing to the so called sacred places, planned to finish my trip on Monday. God is clearly a very ubiquitous thing and I don't consider having any qualification to talk about Him/it. But, when it comes to me believing it the concept of God, I think I'm clear enough, and not afraid to claim that I do not follow the herd or believe Him.
I do not like the general conventions as it seems to me that they are badly diluted, and
insanely commercial and the reason with which we do things are too selfish.

In nearly every temple I visited today(as many as 8), they asked us lit a Deepam. In some temples, it is up to you to lit it, but in some, they carry very special purpose that is clearly invented by some smart guy. When in case it carries special purpose, it is mostly related to the suffering of people, for example, for couple yearning for kids but haven't had one, for youth that aren't married, for families that have some kind of problems etc. I go mad with these. reasons. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a majority of us have started fearing God in place of worshiping Him. I don't find it shameful to write that I cried when I
saw someone I know praying for something going by this herd mentality, when they don't know if what they are looking for will do any good to them. It seems to me that those who worship find some kind of relief in doing so, and that's the best outcome of their prayer.

And Dear God, if you do exist, just come downstairs once, and claim all the money that people are offering,

and give us some plan on how it should be spent for good reasons. :)

The Difference

As I wrote in my last post, I tried solving the software build time problems by deploying ccache on two branches that have biggest build time.

I was hoping that our designer community "learns" and "uses" the easy and fast ways of building software as communicated. But, some of these guys are so ridiculously dumb that they are habitual to running one command, and they simply do not care for other build commands that are more apt. So, as my colleague said, I enforced ccache carefully to reduce build times. I am waiting to know the results during next week.

In the midst of these annoying problems, I'm often awestruck by the commitment, coordination, power of the open source projects. Being so disconnected physically, they are connected only via internet, or irc, yet, they produce wonderful products. In contrary at certain places, although people are sitting right beside each other, they do not follow the instructions given, creating whole lot of mess for themselves and others delaying the whole delivery.. I simply do not know whom to blame.. I wonder what is the difference between the two set of people..

Doing It Right, At Right Time

We have a serious problem at our office with software build times. I, being the guy who's supposed to take care of this system, sometimes go blank with no ideas in my mind to relax the situation. We have serious network issues, resource crunch, hardware limitations, etc.
I knew about the bottlenecks, however, what I did not do was, see what can be done quickly to settle things down to some extent. Perhaps, I was close to doing this, but in my own way, that wasn't the right way for our current situation. So, my boss called for a meeting and listed down a few things that can potentially help us to some extent.

From this point on, I started thinking what did I not do right, at the right time, and having that done, would things have changed? Well, even now, things are still bad, nevertheless, there has been a lot of things I really had thought about, that are now being raised by somebody else again, and to me, it appears like, I never pursued until it is complete.

That seems to be my first drawback. Picking up some task, but not driving it to the end.

Then, there were some issues in the past, I tried to address them, but as long term solution. No short-term solutions were derived by me. That seems to be my second drawback that is slowing me down. Not addressing the problem quickly in short term.

I did have some long term plans to improve this situation, even in the past, but, doing multiple things together is never beneficial. So, that's my third drawback. Pick one task, finish that up. Or have a schedule of time, for each task, and do nothing else during the time so dedicated.

Take no problem lightly. No matter how small the problem reported, understanding the problem in depth, and acting on it as quickly as possible. This hasn't been done by me. I did check the reported problems, but, never really had that added to my backlog, and closed it at the earliest possible time. That's my fourth drawback.

It, so, seems to me that Doing It Right, Doing It At Right Time is a good approach to any problem.
This has been my learning during the 2 days of this short week.
While I learn from my mistakes, and I have gratitude for the tips, I've no shame in confessing that I build hatred towards certain acts. Acts of sarcasm, especially when they are expressed indirectly, when things I do are not working although I put my best efforts. I try to shut my emotions, but, when there are no mistakes from my end, I find it hard to control myself.

Things are easy said than done. And I'm trying to do things..

 

The Only Person You Should Be Better Than

To someone like me who finds it hard to overcome thyself, the hardest thing is the following.

Picture Credit: http://thispageisaboutwords.com/



It is such an inspiring quote, but hard one to practice. I try to be better than what I was yesterday. Often I'm awestruck when I see people who stay happy no matter what. What an amazing strength they have. I often envy them, if have to be very honest. Envy them and try to overcome myself to push myself up by a considerable extent. It is when I fall doing so that I get that horrible feeling that shuts me down for a while, completely. I'm looking for that rhythm of life, if there is such thing existing. Have you found it yet?

 

Queen The Film

I watched the movie Queen this week. I booked tickets this time to avoid the queue.
The crux of the movie is a young girl who has grown up in an orthodox family finds her stance for the way she is, and I think by changing herself when she is pushed away by her fiance.

Picture Credit: Wikipedia



Although I couldn't understand every dialogue of the movie, I enjoyed watching it, and appreciated many characters in the movie. It seems, everybody has reasons for the way they are as shown in the movie, from the lead actress to her fiance, to her friend VJ to the prostitute from Amsterdam. The more we push our self to appreciate people for being themselves, the happy we keep ourselves, I guess or should I say, we do good by pushing people to change, but lose them if we don't do it in a sensitive way, as it happens in the movie? I wonder..
I'm often miserably confused, too. I find it difficult to decide what is good and what is bad.. Nevermind, the life still rolls.. The week still runs.. The years still pass.. :) 

The Deutschland!

I was on an office trip to Germany for the last 3 weeks. People seem to like these trips a lot, but I kind of didn't like it this time. I just did not want to go but I had to because of the commitments at office.

It was nice weather there. Brief cold, then sunny, and then rain, all in one day. No heavy road traffic. The buses, and trains arrive in time. Hot water always, heaters to keep the room warm, comfortable hotel room it was. Beautiful girls, kids playing with their bicycles with all merry, and those who sleep like they own the world, in the baby strollers. Cute, and adorable.

While all that is the good part of it, I kind of felt I was no where, lost some where, missing something, and I felt like turning the calendar dates quickly wanting finish my trip early.
Isn't it when you most want that the time just doesn't move fast at all? I was in that situation.
And I also know times when I don't want the time to run fast, but it does. Ah, bad time.
Nevermind, I'm back home. I finished the 21 days trip.

[caption id="attachment_688" align="alignnone" width="300"] Not the flight I flew in ;)[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_689" align="alignnone" width="300"] Its the same flight ;)[/caption]

The Disguise

I read a poem from internet and it made me think why we fear to be what we really want to be. Why can't we just say what we want to, be it good or bad. Why do we see wrongdoings, but never raise voice. Why do we try to be something we are not, just to be liked by people. Why the disguise of true self often times.

This quote/poem I just read is from a widow and it is about her agony. But it sure has the power to express, for good, saying what she is really going through, so honestly.