Found this image via FriendFeed today, and I've got to say, it's very reassuring (and yes, I know it's not an official Obama poster - yet it has that satisfying tone to it). Enjoy it and Believe!!
Saturday, September 13, 2008
A very reassuring image
Found this image via FriendFeed today, and I've got to say, it's very reassuring (and yes, I know it's not an official Obama poster - yet it has that satisfying tone to it). Enjoy it and Believe!!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Blah...
I'm bored, don't have much to do, and can't think of an interesting topic to write about. So here's a brain dump.
I've been sick for the past week - a cold I caught last friday when the power went out at 1 in the morning, leading me in some hot & humid weather, to go take a shower at 2am, followed by me strolling on my balcony for an hour afterwards. The next morning, I woke up to a running nose, blocked sinus' and a sore throat. It got incrementally worse from there on out. I finally recovered enough this thursday to go back to work, only to find that my head hurt in the A/C there. My mother too, fell sick this week. She had to undergo a surgery for an "obstructing hernia". She's better now, but let's just say she gave us a scare for a little bit there. Fortunately, my dad was around and was able to handle things (he was supposed to go to Beijing the night my mom was diagnosed with the problem). There is now some discussion around me and Ayush going to KL when dad has to go to NYC (4'th - 14'th Oct). That might end up happening, in which case I'll have to take even more days off from work.
I've been reading a lot about Sarah Palin and the resurgent McCain campaign. I am a bit scared about how big of a bounce they've got from her selection. Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy was a 5 minute conversation with the average voter. He sure sounds right seeing the kind of reaction Palin is getting. As Matt Damon put it (quiet well, in my opinion) - it all seems like a bad Disney movie - where the hockey/soccer mom suddenly becomes the president. I truly am scared of seeing another Republican administration in power - I honestly do believe that it would be a very bad thing for the US and the entire world.
Back to personal issues, I've been fighting myself, trying to figure out exactly what I should be doing with my time, and life. I'm constantly conflicted about studying for the GRE, paying more attention to work, or working even harder on my project. I want to just go all out on the last of those, but for a myriad of reasons, am unable to yet. The major one, I think is 'cause I'm not getting the backing I feel I need to be able to do so. Support from my parents is luke warm, at best - and realistically, I don't expect more from them. But then there's R (he doesn't want his name out in the open) who has these bursts where all he'll discuss is how we grow this idea, and then completely stop talking about it for long periods of time (like we haven't spoken about any of this for the past 2 weeks). I'm trying to figure out if I think I can do this alone - but so far, I don't think I can. It's not that I need someone to help me write the code - that I'm confident I can do. It's that, I need someone who can prop me up - who has more confidence than I do in me (and in themselve). I also want to work with smart people, and I have always counted R as one of them - somebody smarter than me, whom I can learn a lot from. I guess, all I can do is hope things work out, but keep a back-up plan in case they don't. I honestly think I've come too far to give up now - I see this as my way out of the mundane life that is working for a company. I want to do my own thing - create something new - innovate - help people in their regular lives, and along the way, get some fulfillment.
I've been sick for the past week - a cold I caught last friday when the power went out at 1 in the morning, leading me in some hot & humid weather, to go take a shower at 2am, followed by me strolling on my balcony for an hour afterwards. The next morning, I woke up to a running nose, blocked sinus' and a sore throat. It got incrementally worse from there on out. I finally recovered enough this thursday to go back to work, only to find that my head hurt in the A/C there. My mother too, fell sick this week. She had to undergo a surgery for an "obstructing hernia". She's better now, but let's just say she gave us a scare for a little bit there. Fortunately, my dad was around and was able to handle things (he was supposed to go to Beijing the night my mom was diagnosed with the problem). There is now some discussion around me and Ayush going to KL when dad has to go to NYC (4'th - 14'th Oct). That might end up happening, in which case I'll have to take even more days off from work.
I've been reading a lot about Sarah Palin and the resurgent McCain campaign. I am a bit scared about how big of a bounce they've got from her selection. Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy was a 5 minute conversation with the average voter. He sure sounds right seeing the kind of reaction Palin is getting. As Matt Damon put it (quiet well, in my opinion) - it all seems like a bad Disney movie - where the hockey/soccer mom suddenly becomes the president. I truly am scared of seeing another Republican administration in power - I honestly do believe that it would be a very bad thing for the US and the entire world.
Back to personal issues, I've been fighting myself, trying to figure out exactly what I should be doing with my time, and life. I'm constantly conflicted about studying for the GRE, paying more attention to work, or working even harder on my project. I want to just go all out on the last of those, but for a myriad of reasons, am unable to yet. The major one, I think is 'cause I'm not getting the backing I feel I need to be able to do so. Support from my parents is luke warm, at best - and realistically, I don't expect more from them. But then there's R (he doesn't want his name out in the open) who has these bursts where all he'll discuss is how we grow this idea, and then completely stop talking about it for long periods of time (like we haven't spoken about any of this for the past 2 weeks). I'm trying to figure out if I think I can do this alone - but so far, I don't think I can. It's not that I need someone to help me write the code - that I'm confident I can do. It's that, I need someone who can prop me up - who has more confidence than I do in me (and in themselve). I also want to work with smart people, and I have always counted R as one of them - somebody smarter than me, whom I can learn a lot from. I guess, all I can do is hope things work out, but keep a back-up plan in case they don't. I honestly think I've come too far to give up now - I see this as my way out of the mundane life that is working for a company. I want to do my own thing - create something new - innovate - help people in their regular lives, and along the way, get some fulfillment.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Why I use vim!!
It's been a while - life and other things have kept me busy. Anyways, what better way to return than to write about something I have not talked much about in the past - technology.
So, coding is my profession - I enjoy coding - nay - love it (given the right circumstances). And one of the biggest weapons in a coder's arsenal is his/her IDE. Well, mine is vim (vi improved). I have been using vim on and off for a few years now - but mainly as a text editor. I had never considered using it as my main development tool until recently (2-3 months back). Boy was I missing out. I've been using it to write everything from Python to HTML/Javascript now and been loving every bit of it.
The main (and rather obvious) reason is it's amazing ability to make text editing fast. Visual mode is the best invention mankind has made since the wheel. It allows me to remove and add text about as fast (maybe even faster) as I can think of doing it. Want a word gone - done. Want a line gone - done. Want to replace a line - line gone, cursor at beginning of line - done. I can keep going on. Gone are the days when you have to use your mouse to select a word, or a whole line. w,b,j,k,h,l allow me to move around in lesser time than it would take me to move my hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, find the pointer, bring it down to the text I need gone, select the whole thing and hit delete. In-fact, now when I edit text in a browser (like this blogger textbox for example), I find it tedious to delete things, or add things.
But more than that, it's ability to double up as a IDE is what has me truly amazed. The amazing set of plugins around it (for example snippetsEmu) make it a breeze for me to write my code and get the right text in the right place ASAP. Other things like omnicompletion, code highlighting, line numbering, syntax checkers, class definitions etc. are icing on the cake. And the biggest win - it works on all 3 of my development platforms (Win, Max and Linux - yes I work on all 3). Setting it up on my windows machine took some doing (had to compile vim from source) but once it was done, everything worked exactly how it worked on my other machines. No more switching between IDE's and no more learning new commands (thanks, but no thanks, TextMate).
I do have a couple of gripes though - I would like to see some straighforward way to refactor my code and I would like to see integration with my vcs (git). I have tried out a plugin for the latter, but couldn't get it working within the 10 minutes I gave it a shot for.
In anycase, vim is an amazing text editor/IDE and anybody using anything else (with the exception of Eclipse for Java) should consider switching. I haven't tried Emacs, but after learning vim, I don't see any value in it - I've got all I need (and more).
So, coding is my profession - I enjoy coding - nay - love it (given the right circumstances). And one of the biggest weapons in a coder's arsenal is his/her IDE. Well, mine is vim (vi improved). I have been using vim on and off for a few years now - but mainly as a text editor. I had never considered using it as my main development tool until recently (2-3 months back). Boy was I missing out. I've been using it to write everything from Python to HTML/Javascript now and been loving every bit of it.
The main (and rather obvious) reason is it's amazing ability to make text editing fast. Visual mode is the best invention mankind has made since the wheel. It allows me to remove and add text about as fast (maybe even faster) as I can think of doing it. Want a word gone - done. Want a line gone - done. Want to replace a line - line gone, cursor at beginning of line - done. I can keep going on. Gone are the days when you have to use your mouse to select a word, or a whole line. w,b,j,k,h,l allow me to move around in lesser time than it would take me to move my hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, find the pointer, bring it down to the text I need gone, select the whole thing and hit delete. In-fact, now when I edit text in a browser (like this blogger textbox for example), I find it tedious to delete things, or add things.
But more than that, it's ability to double up as a IDE is what has me truly amazed. The amazing set of plugins around it (for example snippetsEmu) make it a breeze for me to write my code and get the right text in the right place ASAP. Other things like omnicompletion, code highlighting, line numbering, syntax checkers, class definitions etc. are icing on the cake. And the biggest win - it works on all 3 of my development platforms (Win, Max and Linux - yes I work on all 3). Setting it up on my windows machine took some doing (had to compile vim from source) but once it was done, everything worked exactly how it worked on my other machines. No more switching between IDE's and no more learning new commands (thanks, but no thanks, TextMate).
I do have a couple of gripes though - I would like to see some straighforward way to refactor my code and I would like to see integration with my vcs (git). I have tried out a plugin for the latter, but couldn't get it working within the 10 minutes I gave it a shot for.
In anycase, vim is an amazing text editor/IDE and anybody using anything else (with the exception of Eclipse for Java) should consider switching. I haven't tried Emacs, but after learning vim, I don't see any value in it - I've got all I need (and more).
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