Aah! its good fun to be blogging after a long time now. I had a sort of internal deadline a few days back and life seems generally peaceful since.

Which gives me room to write about lots of things that I had been meaning to write about.

Hyderabad and life

Hyd has so far been a fun place to be in. I stay in a one bed room apartment that is about 3 to 4 kilometers from office. It is a nice locality with few houses that are well distanced from each other. There is a lot of open land and a nice backdrop of rocky terrain.

Having done little other that computerese the past few years, it is good fun to be maintaining a house and to be figuring out some cooking. Also one of the newly picked up interests is cocktails. I have not been drinking too many yet, but I am beginning to realize that there is this entire subculture to preparing and inventing cocktails which would be good fun to explore. This blog may well stop being about computing totally and be one about cocktails in the tear future. Like one of teh books I picked up about cocktails said “learning a lot about being the reason why people have a good time“.

The thing about making cocktails is that its really hard to get the right ingredients when you are starting out and there is no really easy way to experiment and learn – things start seeming uniformly good or bad after a few drinks.

I am also (by my own definitions) beginning to turn into a master chef. I keep having vague sentiments about being a chef or a bartender as an alternate career track. Since I am a relative new comer to drinking alcohol (yes) and to cooking, both of these might take a while – however I am looking forward to evenings with friends and home made cocktails.

Microsoft

Working at Microsoft is different compared to many places you would work in India. Other than the technology, and the other stuff that I could go on about endlessly - like my manager potentially filing for nearly two dozen patents this year - at Microsoft the senior guys tell you things like “plan things so that none spends the three day weekend at office”. Its nice to be in a place like this. Its highly individualistic, you are given ownership, you are expected to run your own show, accomplish more five fold of what you would do at another place and do it in style – and have time for things like learning to be a bartender. :)

More Life

I have been having conversation with all sorts of people. Its hard to find people who believe in computers for love of the machine and logic. Its even harder to find believers. Lovers and believers... I am also beginning to realize that talking to people who have a life outside of computers can actually be fun, strangely. :) And in computing I have been some smart folk and some of the prostrate masses as well...

I had a conversation with a couple of folk some days back, who believed something to the effect that Windows should not penetrate the academia, because if it does, 'people will not learn anything'. The argument was that since windows is easy to use and that the IDEs and such were fairly complete people would never understand how the underlying things ever worked. The argument was also heavily biased towards the command line and how Windows does not encourage you to use the command line even though the command line is intrinsically better. That kind of talk gets a rather more measured response from me these days that the push-comes-to-shove responses of some time back. Its actually an interesting exercise to see how people can cling onto opinions because they implicitly see a certain safety in having them, as opposed to letting go of them.

Today there was conversation about piracy with some other folk. Should Microsoft be cracking down on piracy legally because piracy does actually causes material harm? My stand that was that it shouldn’t as things are right now. I feel that some pieces of software (not just from Microsoft) are actually rather expensive for the Indian-rupee economy. Piracy would be far better handled if prices for certain pieces of software were actually reduced hand in hand with awareness about what offers and alternatives are available. The user groups and the communities can and will play a very large part in this. Once I think the systems are in place, and they are getting in place as we speak – there are offers and options available that people simply don’t know about – then might be a better time to tighten the legal crackdown on piracy.

Can we ever completely eliminate piracy? I don’t think so – but that is not necessarily we are trying to achieve. We can easily make a large portion of the people who are presently not using legal software to start using legal software by making them see value in it. There are simple value propositions like free upgrades and patches for legit systems, possibly vendor provided antivirus packaging, support, merely the fact that you are doing something morally correct which when know would change the minds of many people. Will there always be freeloaders? Yes, but that is not the problem that we are trying to solve here.

Learning

I spend some time with someone at Microsoft showing how to use the fabled windbg. Really interesting. I guess I am so impressed because I haven’t used a debugger very much at all in the past. Most of the code I have been writing has always been debugged with some variant of the ever useful printf-debugging. I wish I was doing that with Govind Kanshi at Bangalore.

Among new pieces of information, there is a new public drop of Monad beta available. Take a look.

More Microsoft  

Microsoft is full of internal websites about every conceivable things in the org. We have HR, Library, internal resources etc etc lots of the standard stuff. Then the interesting stuff like websites for each group – like one about the debuggers, one about sfu, one (or more) about every conceivable product that you can think of. Its like a whole ecosystem in here comparable to that outside.

Microsoft also still has a small company attitude inside in the sense that a lot of decisions and flexibility is left to the choice of those who wield, rather than be dictated randomly by a higher authority.

The peace that I mentioned at the start of this post maybe changing – my project is going to be part of Longhorn… what good fun.