I am enjoying the sleek UI that gmail provides you. For once I seem to be happy emailing without outlook express or Microsoft Outlook.

If you have a gmail id then do check out http://www.bladam.com/archives/0404202120.htm, some useful tips in there. I am quite happy about the dot tip [My email id is my Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com]. I wonder what will happen when somebody actually chooses my FirstnameLastname@gmail.com.

To check for name availability try

http://www.google.com/accounts/CheckAvailability?service=mail&continue=http://www.google.com&Email=YOURNAMEHERE

Too bad I can’t have pooja@gmail.com :(

Nonetheless, gmail did help while I was on vacation.

I am leaving for a vacation trip today. Its after 8+ years  that I am going to be traveling to Rajasthan, am quite excited. I am back on 17^th May. I am going to Baroda [Gujarat], from there to Udaipur. On the way back will be visiting Nathdwara and Bombay.

Will have lots to say when I am back. I wonder how life is going to be without a computer for 2 weeks at a stretch :)). I wish I had a digital cam, that is one of the things I am going to get soon after I am back.

Adios!

Today’s the 4^th...no the 5^th day since I started feeling sick [sick as in ill]. The reasons - not sure, except that I had this really stale milk peda from Woody’s at commercial street, Bangalore. I knew it was stale the moment I bit into it, I still gobbled down the whole piece to make it worth my money [I can be really stupid sometimes]. This was on Sunday evening, April 18, 2004. Monday evening my stomach started giving me trouble. Tuesday, it felt funny but I wasn’t sure if it was the Stress Management workshop or something else.

Couldn’t get sleep the whole night, neck hurt like mad. Wednesday felt giddy the whole day, and in the night again no sleep. Thursday morning I knew something was wrong and that I better see the doctor. I had developed these rashes in my whole body and the back of my neck was swollen. I stay with about 15 girls as a paying guest with a family. Now each one came up with her own reasoning as to what the disease could be. One said it could be measles/mumps. Another said it couldn’t be that since I had no itching. So it was more likely an allergy. One said I needn’t see a doc, she advised me to take an anti-allergy tablet and take rest. Apparently she had done that and had recovered. Another said run to the doc, she got an injection when she had the same problem and the rash went instantly. My maid said it was coz of the food poisoning and probably the egg I had had the previous night. My friend said it could be an insect bite. Well, I was feeling quite tired and restless, I decided to see the doc.

I went to a general physician on Thursday morning. He seemed quite unsure what the problem was. He said it could be an insect bite, allergy, acute viral fever etc etc. He gave me some medicines and asked me to see him again on Saturday morning. He asked me to see him the next day i.e. today if my condition got worse. I also took a blood test. I feel quite uncomfortable seeing a syringe go into my skin and even worse when it stays there and they draw your blood. As a kid I was a lot braver, there was a time when I could watch a nurse take a syringe, inject it into my vein and pull it out. Very normal. But that was long long ago.

The medicines gave me temporary relief. But today morning I got up feeling worse. I also think the illness is beginning to affect my head. And I don’t like it when I can’t think straight. I have been asked to take 4 days complete bed rest, Today’s the second day. I do not have a comp at home and so I keep running to my office [People think I love my office]. I thought I could print out some stuff, sit at home and read.

I am really sick of being this weakling for 5 days now. Can’t wait to get back to normal and do some work.I think I will visit my doc today evening itself.

Finally, setup Antlr to successfully generate the C# parser and lexer files.

I am on a win2k professional machine with Visual Studio.NET installed.

Things to take care of:

• Have one of the later versions of java installed and ensure that java is working fine [its in the PATH and stuff]
• Install the antlr binaries.
• Define a CLASSPATH environment variable to point to your antlr.jar file.
• The java.g that ships with antlr will not compile as it has an extra character in line 1627. Comment that line and it works as expected. [This file will generate those 4 missing files I spoke about in my previous post]
• The command line arguments to generate code is
  java antlr.Tool <filename.g> where filename is the path to your rules file. The expected language output is given in the rules file itself, by default it is java.

Quite neat.

Okay now the reason I was checking out antlr is so that I can start working on the DDL with Rosh. Originally we had used Lemon to generate the parser for us and used the parser tree generated to write further code. Recently we ported the DDL to .NET and are now considering writing a compiler for it. Instead of writing the parser by hand and the code following, I thought I would give antlr a shot and see what its generated files are like. Saves us a lot of time and lets us concentrate on the main problem at hand.

I like the exception handling that antlr does on its own and the way it leaves room for the programmer to add custom exception handlers. It wouldn’t have been a big pain to do this on your own all together, but like I said, it saves you time and lets you concentrate on the real issues.

I definitely do not believe in re-inventing the wheel J. Removing parts of the wheel and re-writing, adding to the wheel etc are different but simply re-inventing the wheel – NO. Time is too short.

I thought the day went well until I came to office and checked mail about an hour back.

Today I went for a stress management workshop from my office at Taj Gateway, Bangalore. We were about 20-25 people and the facilitator was a lady from Chennai. The workshop was in a huge hall with single sheets laid out on the carpet for each of us. We did some basic yoga, sitting, lying down and even walking around the place.

Three of the most embarrassing things we did today

-          We were asked to sit down, open our mouth wide, stick out our tongues as much as possible and pant like dogs. So we all go “huh huh huh…” This was an exercise to get our voices from our diaphragm, to conserve energy (like dogs).

-          crawl on all 4’s again like a dog in a square on your sheet. And facilitator said things like growl if somebody encroaches your territory, boy that was hilarious. [Just to tell you, we 25 people had people of both genders and almost all designations].

-          We were asked to just walk around casually in the hall after lunch until she asked to stop. After which we had to find a partner and look into his/her eyes until the facilitator asked us to stop. This was the most uncomfortable. We did that two more times, we had different partners each time. The fourth time, the lady asked to us to be friendlier and asked us to greet the other person with our palms joined in a Namaste, a gesture of kindness and love. Quite funny if you think about it, as we faced our partners in that gesture the facilitator continued speaking “give love, … admire the partner’s beauty … “ Glad it didn’t last long.

It was a relaxing workshop, especially since it wasn’t my daily routine and I could lie down after lunch J

I thought I would drop in at office to check mail, I have been expecting to hear from Antlr support and my university admissions. Come here to find that I have a reject mail from a university. And no mail from Antlr team.

I have been trying to setup antlr to generate C# code. It generates the java files as expected. Now the documentation for this talks about building a C# solution provided which has two projects. One of the projects has a few files missing. There is no mention of where to get the files from or how to generate them. I downloaded the binary and had the C# runtime dll required to generate C# code. Now again, there is no mention in the documentation about how to actually reference the dll in an example rules file that you write or what command line parameters/switches to include while running the tool.

After fiddling around with some example files and intelligent guesses when I tried running the tool for C# it gave me the standard error. The only relevant discussions I found were this, this and this. The last one talks about modifying the config.make file in V2.7.2. I do not have a config.make file in V2.7.3. [Also I think some of their example files are not right, like \antlr-2.7.3\examples\csharp\java\java.g has an extra paranthesis] I had spent two days trying to figure this out and had finally sent a mail to the antlr folk. Hopefully they will get back with some solution. I really wish their documentation was better.

I am going to download and try NAnt for the first time. I hope that can help me with the antlr setup also.

This title is from an article that Nishant forwarded to mvplist, A good write up and is quite true. I agree with most parts of it.

We see a lot of man-woman talk everywhere; statistics, percentages etc are flaunted. You don’t really need any sound proofs to be convinced that women are way behind men in numbers in the field of technology [and a plethora of other fields]. You occasionally get to hear reasons as to why women are fewer; with psychoanalysts talking about women thinking different from men and researchers giving numbers and theories justifying the fact that women are built that way.

Starting from the time a child is born we rub some of these long held beliefs into them. By the time the child grows to a mature individual, he/she has grown to believe a lot of our gender theory mostly unknowingly. Boys this girls that…talk is so deeply ingrained in us, we don’t even realize we are doing it. Involuntarily you say to a little boy “Stop crying like a girl”. You are convinced of your capabilities and limits [based on your gender] before you can venture into finding them on your own. This is probably the worst and the most harmful kind of brain washing that can happen.

“When a woman shatters these myths and succeeds in the technical field, she is made out to be a honchess, arrogant feminist or said to have slept her way through to the top. Instead of being accepted for their accomplishments, successful women are questioned as to how they became successful.”

Sad, but true.

If you have not had the misfortune of visiting one, great. Lucky you. You have no idea what you missed and you should not care to find out also.

During my 1^st grade my father took me to his dentist friend’s place to find out what could be done about my two canines growing behind two existing ones. Oblivious that I was, I happily went to his place and was asked to sit in this chair that looked like it was some kind of a space ship. It had these long adjustable arms and a huge set of lights connected to it from the back. Such a huge chair and a puny thing like me had to hop up and sit there. One quick glance around and I saw all kinds of instruments that set me thinking if it was a wise decision to come here in the first place. Scissors in all shapes and sizes, pincers, some things that looked like pliers, hammer and tongs and a whole pile of accessories, this added to the general grin on the dentist’s face made me very uncomfortable. Innocent as I was then, I didn’t realize that this was just the beginning and the worst was yet to come. He got me to open my mouth and examined it with some gadgets and said that he had to pull out two teeth to make space for the new ones. Dad asked him to go ahead. The old dentist then came with a syringe and that scared the hell out of me. It was my first time and that too in the mouth…uggh, definitely not a good first time. On asking he said he would give me an injection so it would not pain when he pulled my teeth out. He still had the grin.

I got 3 injections on my gums, boy I was mad enough to kill him at the end of it. You hurt me so much before pulling out my teeth, might as well pull them out straight. Finally with something that looked like a pair of pliers he pulled out my tooth – it hurt. Probably he never got the injections in the right portions or something. I asked him with all the cotton in my mouth if I could have both my teeth [that he so happily extracted], he said he wanted to keep it. Whatever for. So I went back home with all the pain, ill-feelings and two teeth less with a mental resolve that I would do all it takes to never visit a dentist again in my life.

Life went on happily and humans that we are I forgot the dentist and the tortures. During my 10^th grade my sis had her teeth growing in all directions. We were staying in Trivandrum near Medical College, There were doctors all around the place including my landlady who was a senior dentist at the Dental College in Medical College. My landlady suggested that she visited the hospital and had a cleaning + check up done. She was asked to wear braces and had to go every Saturday morning for a routine check-up. It so happened that one Saturday instead of my mother I went with Neha [my sis] to Dental college. Many of the junior doctors there are students, scary thought isn’t it. Things happened a lot faster than normal thanks to my landlady, no queues and no waiting. After the initial ill-feeling that I had thanks to hearing children cry, the general odour and old memories I looked around. Wow, lots of good looking young doctors. Hmm, not a bad idea to actually come here once in a while with sis ;)

During a conversation I just happened to mention to my landlady that my canines were a little behind the rest of my teeth in my upper jaw and she suggested that I go with Neha for a check up. During the check up I was asked to open my mouth. I opened it and they kept asking me to open it wider. Uggh, gross. They suggested that I wear one of those removable pair of braces for 2 weeks. To make these braces they need your teeth impression.

From the dental dictionary “impression A negative image of a tooth or dental arch. An impression is produced by placing an elastic compound like alginate in a preformed tray and inserting the tray into the mouth around the teeth until the compound stiffens. The impression is removed from the mouth and filled with plaster to produce an exact positive reproduction of the teeth or dental arch.”

So they put this pink sticky stuff in your mouth and you are supposed to sit there till it hardens. Besides all the sick feeling and wanting to puke, imagine the embarrassment. You sit with your mouth wide open and these good looking doctors keep passing by L [I was a silly teenager then…]

The other day I was talking to Rosh about dentists and experiences when we both came up a logical reasoning as to why dentists are so cruel. They are usually the ones who do not get admissions for an MBBS course and so take up BDS [dentists, pardon me for probably I know not what I say]. So probably rest of their lives they get all their frustration out on their patients.

I think I found my boggart.

I have been having tooth ache for past few days and I have been postponing visiting a dentist. This would be my third encounter, if it happens.

I recently read George Orwell’s 1984 and found it quite disturbing. Ever since, the number 101 has been spooking me out.

“'You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.'”

“'The worst thing in the world,' said O'Brien, 'varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.'”

“'In your case,' said O'Brien, 'the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.'”

The book gets very gross and leaves you with this sick feeling. In many parts of the book, you feel how happy you are; the way you are. They describe all the “normal” things like being able to talk and express and love as fatal deeds that people did not dare to indulge in.

Somewhere in the middle of the book the main character Winston talks about some things [that we comfortably take for granted], these lines keep ringing in my head:

“He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?”

Very touching and more than that creepy.

On a much lighter note, in Harry Potter a boggart is supposed to take the form of what you fear most. I wonder what it would be in my case. Ever thought about it?

I sometimes visit my college when I go home. Model Engineering College was this small college with just three branches when I enrolled for a BTech [1998-2002]. Computer Engineering [60 students], Electronics Engineering [60 students] and Biomedical Engineering [40 students] – so you know how small a place I am talking about. It is located a few kilometers from the city and every time I drive to the place [rather am driven, anyway that is just a minor detail that I shall blog about another day] I think about my college and how it might have changed. But I get there and bang…the whole world seems to be changing, the rest of Cochin is growing but here is MEC – it stands the same. Nothing changes here.

There is this ad that they play in some of the Indian theatres where there is this barber standing and happily serving his clients when in front of him the roads are dug and cables and pipes laid. Each time there is digging done, newer equipments used, better pipes laid..and the barber is the same, doing the same job, the same way. And there is “Mere desh ki dharthi...” playing in the background. That is a little like the way I feel about MEC.

However, this time I went I found a few things changing. And that is good. J For one there are more classrooms coming up thanks to the increase in the no. of admits in each branch. Some construction work was happening to set up a bigger Computer lab (CL). The principal said that he is planning to get about 84 machines with win XP. Wow…lucky students. I remember sitting before these unix terminals with lynx to check my mail during my first year in my CL. Apparently the college has got some huge funds and is thinking of the best ways of utilizing it. The students and staff are working on making proposals and stuff. Some of the juniors came up and spoke about their ideas including wi-fi, access cards for all students/staff, setting up forums on our college server etc. Good to see them coming up with ideas, but the problem with most students is that they get too ambitious and when don’t get the expected returns, give up very soon. Over the years I have learnt that it is better to do smaller things and get them working than setting big goals and leaving the work to your juniors to continue/finish. Our college programming group hash_define_mec is a little stable now with 200+ members including seniors. A few of us from my class had started this with the idea of forming a programming community in college, today its good to see that though not all of it, a few things that we wanted in the group has really worked out.

Hopefully, MEC will not be as secluded as it has been in the past and will grow with the rest of the world.

I had decided somewhere in my mind in the last 2-3 yrs that I would not get a cell phone, credit card and would not start a blog. Strangely in 2004 all 3 happened…all 3 after a lot of urge and push and force and argument.

Cell phones always seemed an unnecessary luxury to make holes in your pockets and to disconnect you from your immediate friends sitting around whilst you are busy chatting away with some one somewhere. Credit cards seemed to be an enticing evil that would sit with you unused and still cost you. I had seen my dad pay annual bills and some service charges despite not using it at all during my undergraduate study. Web log seemed to be something that I thought I never could do. An online diary…my God...that is exposing myself …and then writing for your readers…eventually you end up writing stuff that your readers want to read and not what you want to write. I used to write a diary only to whine and complain and the stuff that you normally wouldn’t want to talk or couldn’t find an ear to speak out to. No way am I putting it up on the internet in my name!

Well, well…I have denied the need for a long time; but have finally procured a cell phone which almost works. My parents kept insisting I get one; I finally got an antique handset from someone. I got the one year free credit card from Citibank; it almost became a dire necessity while doing online applications to American universities. And now I start a blog. Well honestly speaking, about a year back I did start a blog, an anonymous one just for the heck of it. Nobody knew about its existence, so I guess it is right to say that this is my real first blog.

So what am I gonna write here? Well, I am going to use this space to shout and complain about things not working in my life, to groan and whine about the atrocities of life and all the things that I don’t get to talk in person to anyone.

If you are still reading, welcome to my blog J. I shall look forward to reading your grumblings in the comments section and then we could be whining pals. If you are a happy person you can still come here, read my blog and be a happier person. [For its only when you see another suffer that you realize how comfortable you are]

So I am blogging, huh? Wow!