Yay! Finally the search bots gave us a honorary indexing. :)
Hopefully most of the damage due to the url change will be undone soon.

I just finished reading Erik Meijer and Peter Drayton’s work-in-progress paper on programming languages and type systems. The paper as correctly noted in the beginning is written-to-provoke and I think this line of work is required today when technologies like .Net and the JVM have opened up possibilities of experimenting with languages and language systems and potentially reduced barriers for acceptance of new languages. The value proposition the expressiveness of a new language provides can be more readily accepted today in frameworks like .Net where a programmers existing knowledge/use of an API and an existing code base will not be lost by switching over to the new language.

The paper touches a large variety of topics and is more in brain dump of thoughts around the general area of type systems in dynamic and static languages. They also have some very interesting pointers and references.

The papers discusses type inference, programming by contract as opposed to having the type system as the only means of contract, subtyping and potentially expressing subtyping as programming by contract, type-directed lifting in Cw and how that can be used as opposed to non-intuitive reflective code.

The paper talks mentions the SqlDataReader – even if you don’t grok anything else in the paper, try and understand this part and try and see the need to a better programming language model – especially if you have ever worked on the data tier or business logic tier of an n-tier data centric application.

The paper also mentions lazy evaluation and about potentially deprecating the need for using eval if you have a better system in place for most of the common uses of eval.

On the whole it’s a paper that worth your time if you have started thinking about why when using C++ its so damn hard to get anything right, why C# cant be a little more flexible when handling collections, XML like or SQL like data and why languages like your pet python or ruby don’t make the mainstream.

http://pico.vub.ac.be/~wdmeuter/RDL04/papers/Meijer.pdf

I had been to my native place at Pala and Karimanoor this weekend. It was a nice drive along hilly country with lots of heavy downpour to give us company. The country side in Kerala is beautiful. It is probably one of the most abundant states in India with respect to flora and fauna.

Here is the gallery:

Gallery\Kerala1

Tried my hand at creating some sort of a photo gallery today. I updated the old image resizing progie so that it can draw borders and respect proportion when resizing images. I also wrote a ruby script that can generate an html gallery when it is pointed at a folder that has images and a description text file.

Download the updated image-resizing program, source code and ruby script here. The binary is .Net 2.0 Beta2. This is the previous blog entry about the image-resizing program.

That said here are two galleries I have uploaded:

Marine Drive, Cochin

Golconda Fort, Hyderabad

Now that I am at home I needed to start cataloging my data and getting things in order before I move on. I spent some time yesterday writing a small app to help catalog my CDs. I had a look around but most CD cataloging apps I could find were paid apps.

CdScan scans the CDs and lets you do a simple substring search (a little like the old Winamp J option) and also gives you an explorer kind of view of your CDs.

Its got a nifty little auto-scan option where you can simply set it to autoscan and keep changing CDs in your drive.

There are a whole host of features I can think of adding, but you might want to grab hold of it and use it to catalog your Cds and maybe add a feature or two (since I am giving away source code).

Download Binary: cdscan_binary.zip (250.75 KB)

Download Source Code: cdscan_source.zip (268.43 KB)

This is written using .Net 2.0 Beta 2, so you need at least the Beta2 runtime to get the binary to work.

Here are a lot of things I can think of adding, maybe you can add them for me –

-          wildcard and regex based searching

-          a more flexible explorer view

-          save more data for an item (EXIF data, Thumbnails, Text index)

-          more intuitive UI, with some helpful text messages…

As of 20 July 2004, I no longer work for Microsoft.

You are not going to be seeing any leaving Microsoft letters of the sort you may have seen from some ex-microsofties. I am going back to college. Over the years, I figured I don’t understand computer science very well. I figured I lack some fundamental things in my understanding of the way this science works. I love computer science and the only way I am going to be able to good enough to quit the field and probably go sell airplane rides for a living, is if I understand it better. So I am going to college.

I am joining Indiana University this fall for my Masters in Computer Science. I am navigating primarily by instinct right now, so I don’t have clear answers to ‘What next Rosh?’

I left Microsoft with very good opinions about the company. Easily the best company I worked for – for the quality of the work they do, for the quality of the people, for the culture and the spirit. I wish it was a much braver company with respect to taking risks, and boldly chasing after the next step in the everyday computing. I wish it leveraged its people better, I wish it was more about blood and genius and less about schedules and numbers. But it is easily better than most places that I have had the opportunity of knowing.

I am going to be thinking about a different class of problems for the next few years - problems about nature of computation, logic and mathematics.

The weekend I left Hyderabad I got to visit Golconda once more –

Golconda Fort, Hyderabad

I am now back at home, in beautiful Cochin –

Cruise boats at Marine drive, Cochin

After several months, and several ISPs, TMS is back up and stable. Which means that our blogs are live again.
Thanks Pandu

:)

"I am not sure I want to be perfect and finished. Talk about boredom..."
"Look at the sky," Don said.
"Well, it is always a perfect sky, Don."
"Are you telling me that even though it's changing every second, the sky is always a perfect sky?"