It's been a long time that this has been getting postponed for, but here it goes - this is my first blog entry. Well, it's not a real blog entry, in the sense that I and not typing this into a blogging software but rather am typing this into a word document. In time I will find a blogging engine or write my own and have this up on the net.
I am a computer science graduate from Model Engineering College, Cochin and am currently working with the great Indian software industry at Bangalore. I work with this technology called .Net - if general computing holds an interest for you, then the term might be familiar.
I have a homepage here:
http://www.thinkingms.com/pensieve/homepage
where I have some work that I have done, handful of articles and other stuff related to my general existence and interest around computers and computing.
I indulge (or at least used to) in a certain manic amount of programming. I am not very old in computing, as old as some people I have had the pleasure of knowing. My first real exposure to programming was in the summer of 96, when I started out with programming on Foxpro (yes, believe it).
Strangely as fate would have it then, a lot of Cochin city was running old boxes and 386 machines were a luxury. So it was like I had the chance to grow up in a time warp. And needless to say, most machines ran (the now mythical) DOS.
DOS programming, especially once you start playing around with TSR's and SVGA and writing GUI routines and simulate your own multitasking environments was a very special kind of education. I don't know if any of the future generation will ever have that pleasure and honestly, since I have never seen it any other way, I wonder if they will ever see these things and feel the joy of writing values onto your VGA card's control registers.
It's been a funny trip since then and I presently spend my time of Windows boxes. I spend my time exploring *nix boxes for a while in between, but try as I might they did not hold my fancy very much. Probably I learned things the wrong way, but I used to compare things to what I could do in DOS and that just killed the joy in everything.
In that sense .Net is probably one of the few real pleasures that I have come across. A very sensible mature platform with very good design choices and excellent implementation. Some of my early attention to .Net seemed have got me some attention too (http://www.microsoft.com/india/mvp/indiamvp.aspx#RoshanJames). I also try and stay true to my C/C++/Asm roots. I also have an indulgence in Ruby (the programming language) - Ruby is an excellent dynamic language with support for neat constructs such like closures, iterators, dynamic interfaces, mixins and more. It also brings continuations and some real beasts of programming as well, in addition to being a fully object oriented general purpose interpreted language with a nice libraries and good integration of regular expressions and flexible collection types in the language. One difference with Ruby and other languages, esp Perl (or what little of it I have tried) is that Ruby actually makes you feel happy while writing a code; unlike the sort of happiness you feel when you are glad you have finished coding.
In addition to the 'way of the code' I like music - Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, U2, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, John Denver, Don McLean
I think I will stop on my first entry now.
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in first place. Therefore, if you write code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
- Brian Kernighan
Apr 13 2004 Tuesday 01-18AM