Of this and that …

It was quite a shock (well, OK maybe not a shock but a surprise but not a pleasant one ..) to learn today that one of the blogs on my regular-visit list is no more. I have no idea when that happened since I haven’t visited this particular blog in about a week or two but then again I’ve realized that I haven’t visited any of my regular blogs in a while now – been too caught up in my own stuff – which really is not a good thing. If we don’t have time for others, I feel that we get caught up in our own things and bend more and more inwards till we finally have no time for anybody at all but ourselves – and our troubles begin to seem more and more important and those of others not so significant. Not good – not good at all … I should make an effort to interact with others more but that seems to be not such an easy task for the next few weeks – or maybe even more for reasons that will be revealed eventually …

I watched a Hindi movie (an Indian movie in one of their languages which happens to be called Hindi) on Sunday and at first we thought it was a remake of "The Usual Suspects" but it turned out to be something else altogether. Unusual for a Hindi movie, the whole story was set in the US and in an American setting – there have been other Hindi movies which are set in the US but the settings were still Indian. This was different. It’s about a group of Indians who get together to rob an American bank. The story and the movie itself aren’t what interested me here however – it was the attitudes that the movie implied about the US and about Americans in general. In the movie, the characters say over and over again that if a crime is committed, it’s the Indians who get pinpointed. One character says that the Italians have their mafia, the Colombians their cartels, the Chinese their triads but the Indians only have police records because they are not organized.

Two things struck me here. One was that the America that I knew wasn’t *that* racist and the other was that we always talk in terms of race – even when we are supposed to be one country or one race. Heck, we *are* one race – the human race! But we always forget that and insist on branding, separating, classifying. I’m afraid that I’m guilty of that too since I will talk of Americans and Indians and Sri Lankans but in a sense, I can’t help but do it because people of specific regions or countries do seem to have their own attitudes. While this can be classified as part and parcel of human nature, you still need some way to identify the group and that brings us again back to classifications and categorizations and segregation. There is more I can say on this subject – actually there is more that I *want to* say on this subject but not now since I’d probably be meandering too much :p So let’s save that for another day …

I heard back from my contact about the sub-contracting project – looks as if it’s still on 🙂 We are still discussing details since he’s talking to his client who’s got to talk to their client – I have no idea how far down the chain I actually am :p But I did enhance the base CSV reader component yesterday by adding my own parsing routine. I set up a fairly complex CSV file – commas inside a value field, quotes within a string field … that’s all I could think of – and ran it through the new component and it worked beautifully 🙂 So I guess I am basically done with the base component since I can’t think of any further enhancements. I guess I’ll have to start work on the derived CSV component or start work on something else but since I have a habit of losing momentum once I stop a project, I probably shouldn’t do that – especially since this is a paying project 🙂

I tested the CSV reader component yesterday and except for a few minor bugs (which were fixed almost immediately) it worked beautifully 🙂 Of course, the CSV reading functionality is rudimentary at the moment since the component is capable of reading values separated by commas but would probably choke on something which is enclosed in quotes and contains a comma inside. Currently I’m employing some of C#’s built-in string tokenizing functionality but I will eventually have to write my own parser so that I can split up a CSV record according to my own logic. I’ll probably do that today since I kind of like this project even though it probably will not go anywhere further than this since I have not heard from the people who wanted to sub-contract me for a while now. Ah well – nothing lost really since I came out of it with a new ASP.NET component that I know I’ll end up using somewhere or other 🙂

Not much else going on – I know several people said that my last layout was “workable” <g> and I should probably be working on it but too many other things going on at the moment. I really should be getting back to coding as well but there are problems there too – I really haven’t come to like Delphi 7.0 and running Delphi 6.0 and 7.0 alongside of each other is causing certain problems on my system. I probably should either switch to 7.0 completely or decide to stick with 6.0 for the moment. I probably should do the latter since I know that all of the components that I use currently work with 6.0 but there is one hitch – I can’t work on Scope under Delphi 6.0. There always has to be problems – guess that’s what makes life interesting :p

These are some of my favourite things …

I’m still recovering from my bout of illness but then again, as those who know me are aware, this happens to me about once a year – it’s a cyclical thing :p It happens pretty regularly and has a known time frame for me to get well – I’m on my way to recovery except perhaps for a relapse – and that’s been known to happen too. There’s no joy in life when there are no surprises :p That actually brings up something that a protagonist in the latest book I’m reading – "Necromancer" by Gordon R. Dickson – says, or rather, is said about him. In describing his character, it is said that he can analyze isolates in anything and so he is rarely ever surprised because he knows that something is a logical result of the preceding moment or moments. I sometimes feel like that ….

But to get back on track, since I haven’t been feeling too well and was all alone at home for part of the weekend (my parents again went to the Kurunegala house but came back early because they were worried about me – which was sweet of them but I sometimes think that they worry way too much about me :p), I spent my time doing the stuff that I love to do. I’ve been reading – both "Necromancer" and a trade paperback collection of X-Men stories called "The Asgardian Wars". I finished watching the DVD collection of "Kindred: the Embraced" and also have been doing some PC gaming after a long time. Now the gaming is all Edward’s fault since he’s the one who got me hooked :p

Edward told me about "Dungeon Siege" and that it was a great game. I went and looked at the website and it looked pretty interesting and so I decided to give it a try. I got the game and installed it at work on Friday (it was a holiday and nobody was there) to see if it was interesting and I think I played for close to an hour – I brought the save game home with me and then installed on my machine at home and I started playing it Saturday evening and just couldn’t stop :p I played part of Saturday evening (had to stop when the mosquitos came out in force :p) and then started again on Sunday morning and kept on playing till about lunch time. I think I’ve put in close to six hours by now and while it *is* getting a bit repetitive (I mean the battles and the dungeon crawling) it still is very interesting. The strange thing however is that I don’t mind the repetitive battles and the incessant dungeon crawling on console games but don’t so much like it on PC – maybe it has to do with the fact that it is a bigger screen and a different controller? I don’t know … but I’ll probably play "Dungeon Siege" for a good while yet …

Thanks to all who wished me luck – and Collin, it took a *lot* of whining to get here and to stay here :p Actually, the new job (or the sub-contract rather) might not be materializing after all since there’s suddenly been a cessation of communication from the other end – of course, it could be just because of the weekend or it could be that they decided to go some other route. If it’s the latter, cest la vie 🙂 I did complete work on the CSVReader component but ran into problems in testing it out because for some strange reason, none of the Visual Studio .NET webform components show up on my machine at home. Of course, I’d upgraded that machine to Windows XP SP1 recently and had installed Visual Studio .NET after the fact and have not done any Windows updates on it since then (I’m on dial-up from home, what do you expect? :p) and so that might be the reason. I intend to take the code to work and see if I can make it work there since that machine has had Visual Studio .NET installed forever and has had all Windows updates applied except for Windows XP SP1 and IE 6 SP1 :p So I might be able to pinpoint where the problem is … I am already aware that I’ll probably need to do some debugging on the CSVReader component since I don’t think it’ll work right off the bat and so want to get this problem sorted, get the component working and then I’ll be done – unless I get the subcontracting job of course :p

Haven’t done much more in the coding-line since I’ve been busy with other stuff – since I prefer to keep this journal to just coding related matters, I guess you’ll have to go over to SM to see what else I’ve been up to :p

I am working on something pretty interesting at the moment – at least interesting for me, you might not think so :p How it came about is thus – I’ve been applying for jobs at various places and this week I suddenly heard from one of the places I applied at. They wanted to know whether I knew ASP.NET and when I answered in the affirmative, they said that they were still starting up the company at which I applied for employment but that they had a client who had an urgent requirement that needed to be met now. They wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking up the job and I said yes. From what I’ve gathered so far, the client wants a specialized ASP.NET component which reads and extracts data from a variety of CSV (Comma Separated Value) files in a consistent manner. It’s basically a method to import data from a variety of PIM’s (Personal Information Managers) in a standard manner.

While we have not come to an agreement upon the terms for the project nor received the go ahead from the client, I decided to spend some time working on the base class upon which the subsequent component that the client wants will be built. This way, I’ll actually know what’s possible and what’s not possible before I start work on the actual project because I hate saying that something can be done without actually having done it before and while I do have Visual Studio.NET and C# experience, and have even worked with CSV file access before using C#, I haven’t done something *exactly* like this and I am always wary of something unexpected cropping up :p So, I have been working on the base class which is simply a CVS reader component which can access any CVS file, figure out the number of columns and then output the data record by record in a manner consistent with other database access mechanisms. I am part way through with the code now but am actually getting the crucial bits at the moment and once it is all done, there still remains the testing :p

But my hope is that I will have a prototype to show the client when the go ahead is actually received and the client can confirm or deny as to whether this is what they had in mind. If the basic component satisfies the client, then I’d have made a head-start on the project and if it doesn’t, I’d then know what was wrong and be able to start the project with the necessary information and *know* that I had the correct input – so that I won’t lose much time. So either way, I guess it won’t hurt. Of course, there is the possibility that they might decide not to go ahead with the project but even then nothing would be lost since I would have come out with a CSV reader component that I can use in some other project :p

For I am a jealous people …

I finished Lester Del Rey’s collection of short novels a couple of days ago but I didn’t get a chance to write about his story that I was talking about in my previous entry yesterday because I got caught up in too many other things :p So I thought I might as well talk about it today since I still feel strongly about that story. As I surmised, the story indeed was about God siding with the aliens but it God takes a more active role than I had envisioned at the beginning of the story – God appears to the alien priests as he did to Moses and tells them directly that they have been chosen to inherit the universe and that they must wipe humankind off the face of the Earth. Setting aside the whole argument as to whether the story is blasphemous or not (since I have the feeling that some might consider it to be so), what interested me was the question as to what I would do if I was put in the place of Del Rey’s protagonist, the priest.

The story ends with the priest holding a mass where he tells everybody "God has decided to side against us, I can only say that he’s chosen a worth adversary" or words to that effect. The point of the whole story is that Man is the only creature that would fight against his own maker. I keep on thinking what I would do if I was in that position. Granted, in the story the aliens are made out to be totally inhuman beings who torture animals and people for fun and then eat them for food and even eat their own kind. So the humans seem noble to rise up against them but that just means Del Rey stacked the decks a bit.

I believe in a merciful God – a God who can understand the failings of humanity. While I’d be the first to understand if God were to decide to wipe out humanity because of our greed, stupidity, prejudice and the worst qualities in humanity that we seem to show more and more these days, I don’t accept it that God would choose a race that is essentially even worse than humanity to be our successors. So if God were to decide that humanity was just not worth salvation, I’d probably understand looking at the world of today but then again, I also believe that humanity has the potential to be so much more than we are because sometimes we show such courage, honesty, compassion, feeling and humanity that it makes me realize all over again what we as humans are capable of ….

I’ve put up yet another layout :p This time it’s water-based as opposed to the sand-based one I had up before 🙂 Incidentally, while I see the validity of Duane’s comment on the layouts not being professional, I really don’t see this site as a business :p To me, my software is something I enjoy and something with which I can help people – so I do it but I’ve never thought of it as a business and I probably won’t either since I have no plans to sell any of my stuff. So this site is at best semi-professional and at worst, just a guy trying to strut his stuff online :p I don’t want a layout that is clean-cut and efficient, I want one which is functional, aesthetic and also reflects a little bit of the personality of the site (hence that guy with the laptop who keeps on popping up all over the new layouts <g>). I know I’m not hitting the mark exactly with any of the layouts so far and that is why I keep on doing new ones. I probably like the latest one the best but the falling water effect isn’t really obvious in the frame that I did and so I’m not too happy with even that :p

In development related news, I finally managed to access the SourceForge CVS yesterday (incidentally, if anybody has problems with committing to SourceForge with WinCVS and Putty, you can now ask me :p) and committed my changes for QBoard. I haven’t heard from Joel since then and so I don’t know what he thinks of my changes. Either way, I’m probably done with that project since something new has just come up – a job to create a custom component for ASP.NET – so I’m probably gonna work on that one for a while. I really should stop messing around with so many development languages, shouldn’t I? :p

I’m still having SSH related problems with the QBoard stuff at SourceForge. I was hoping that I’d be able to commit to CVS yesterday but turns out that my SSH public key that Putty (the SSH client that I was using) generated was invalid – or rather that it was valid but not quite in the format that the SourceForge system expected when I entered it into their system. So I had to redo it yesterday and since that means another six hour wait, I couldn’t do anything yesterday either. I’m kinda getting fed up of the whole thing and if I can’t commit today either, I might simply opt to send the source code to Joel and get out of the whole thing since the work seems to be totally disproportionate to the end result :p

Speaking of end result, I totally agree with DeViLbOi’s comments about the new layout – it really is missing something 🙂 Hence the reason I put it in the test folder and asked for people’s opinion. I just don’t know what is missing but it just doesn’t seem to fit right. But I’ve since had another idea to modify that one (again) and so I probably will put up the modified layout again in a day or two (depending on how soon I figure out how to implement the new idea). My biggest problem seems to be to try to figure out how to execute a given idea – for instance, I want a falling sand effect within the space of about three pixels and I’m not sure I can achieve that .. I’ll probably end up with blotchy patches of brown and then opt to go with a full sand effect (as opposed to falling sand) and that would probably just look like a brown line :p Ah well, if I knew how to do everything I want to do, I’d probably be a graphic designer instead of a coder 🙂

Books and such …

I’m reading a collection of five short novels (they used to be called novella or novelettes depending on length those days but now there are only long novels and really long series :p) by Lester Del Rey and I keep on having this weird feeling that I have read them before 🙂 Be that as it may, I know that the latest story that I’m reading is going to end up making me think a lot. It’s called "For I am a Jealous People!" and starts off by introducing and earth which is being invaded by aliens and the main character is a preacher who is trying to hang on to his faith in God in these trying times. Earth seems to be at the losing end as the story starts and most of Earth’s setbacks in the war seem to be due to strange accidents such as a meteorite striking the stockpile of all of Earth’s missiles on the moon and burying it under a pile of debris, a tornado taking out the defence garrison in a city when the aliens land etc.

I have a strange feeling that the story is going to turn out to be about how God actually intends the aliens to take over the world (hence the "freak accidents" that help the aliens) but then again, maybe I *have* read the story before … I don’t know. I just know that it is going to bring up an interesting philosophical debate within myself as to whether we can ever really know God’s purpose and also as to whether we can understand what happens to us in the context of God’s great plan for all of us. Yes, I know that treads dangerously close to religious evangelism – and I don’t want to do that :p – I believe in God and there are certain things in life and in what I read which makes me think about it but that doesn’t mean that I should go around telling others to believe in God – to me religion is a personal thing between myself and God. But I do like to talk about the dilemmas and conundrums my faith brings up 🙂

I’d like to discuss how I see religion (not *my* religion or *your* religion but simply religion) and God one of these days but I just don’t feel like putting forth the effort just now. I’m still not feeling totally fit and this illness (if it runs true to course) will probably last for a week or two yet. The good thing is that this week is going to be full of holidays here in Sri Lanka. Today is a holiday because it is a Tamil festival and then Friday is going to be a holiday since it’s the full moon and we have every full moon off since it’s a Buddhist holy day. So I’ll have to work only one more day and that’s tomorrow and that’s fine by me 🙂