Of love and other matters of the heart

I just finished watching a Tamil (Indian language, also one of the three major languages used in Sri Lanka) movie that moved me and also made me travel back in time. It was about this guy named Hari who is loved by a girl – Sapna – and who rejects her because he doesn’t love her but is in turn rejected by the girl he loves – Raji – because she doesn’t love him in return. Sapna is bitter and wants revenge but Hari is not bitter at Raji but instead wants to continue his life but says that he will always love Raji and want to see her happy. Added to this mix is Raji’s childhood friend (I forget his name) who also loved a girl but was rejected and is now slowly wasting his life away thinking about her. Hari advices this guy and tells him that the best respect he can show his love is for him to live his life with his head held high but the guy commits suicide because he can’t face the fact that the girl he loved is getting married. (Yes, committing suicide on the failure of your love, or even because your parents oppose your love, is fairly common in this part of the world …) Hari says that he cannot respect that guy because he took the coward’s way out. And of course, this being the movies, Hari finally does win the love of Raji but that’s another story …

The movie evoked a lot of feeling in me because I was in Hari’s position at one time in my life and I do understand his stand and agree with him. I loved a girl once for around ten years but in my case she loved somebody else. I did tell her that I loved her (after ten years), or I think I did but am not too sure since I wasn’t very coherent :p Anyway, she and I continued to be friends since I felt the way that Hari did but maybe I wasn’t as strong as Hari and so needed an excuse to blame the girl anyway or maybe it really was so (I can’t be objective since I am involved in it ..) but I felt that the girl took advantage of the fact that she knew that I loved her and would do anything for her still. Be as it may be, I left the country and lost all touch with her and so don’t know how things are with her anymore, even after my return.

I’ve loved others since then but have yet to find the kind of love I seek. I often wonder if this is because I expect too much from love – I expect it to be the way it is portrayed in books and the movies (at least some of the movies – probably not the Hollywood ones <g>) where love is not a passing infatuation and an excuse to jump into bed but is rather a strong bond, a true understanding between two individuals. Almost a linking of minds you could say. A union between two individuals who understand each other totally and want to spend their lives together because they can’t imagine living life apart from each other.

Of course, that does beg the question of what would I do if I found such a person but she didn’t love me? I guess the only thing I could do would be to cherish that love and go on, maybe things will change in the future and she might love me or maybe she won’t. Either way, there is always the memory of what you had and if you stay friends, you at least have a good friend even if you might not have a lover. Of course, I just have no idea if such love exists or if I’m just chasing a pipe dream. I know that such love exists from my end but is it just limited to me? Or are there others who feel like me? Others who search for such a love? Or is the rest of the world just jaded people who know that all such things are just fine confections woven for our entertainment and I am the only naive fool around? :p I don’t know and to be honest, I don’t think I care either. What I feel and what I dream of will always be real to me and even if I don’t find the kind of love that I look for, there is at least the hope of finding such a love to keep me going …

I’ve been silent for a while now … partially because of reasons that I’ve cited over at SM but also because I’d lost all track of time :p Wow!! I had no idea that it’s been a week since my last post … But I’ve been busy. Even more busier than usual actually :p I started work on this video edit last weekend which kind of grew into a many headed monster like the mythical hydra <g>

When I originally started the edit, I was simply going to splice a few video clips together just to test out the new desktop machine and also to sort of re-familiarize myself with Adobe Premiere. But I had so much fun with the job that I decided to go further. I added music and then wanted a music editing program to do a better job. So I got CoolEdit (but I still haven’t used it actually for reasons that will be made clear as we go on …) Then I wanted to do a title sequence and so I loaded up 3D Studio Max 5.0 since I knew exactly how I wanted to do the title sequence. By this time, my hard disks were groaning since I had only two – a 5GB and a 4GB and I’d already installed a couple of games (Neverwinter Nights and WarCraft III) which had taken a hefty chunk out of the 4GB drive.

By this time, I put off the editing and stuff and had decided to get a new hard disk :p This took a while while I did the necessary research and stuff and along the way, I decided to get a new burner as well since the burner on my Notebook is only 32x4x8 and I could get a Sony 48x24x48 (which could be firmware updated to 52x24x52 if I really needed all that speed) for pretty cheap. The CD-ROM I had on the desktop is an old one and it wouldn’t recognize certain CD’s I’d burnt. So a new CD-ROM really was needed unless I wanted to access all the one’s that wouldn’t work, through the network by putting them in the CD drive on the notebook :p Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I got an 80GB hard disk and the CD burner and then began the whole saga of swapping out the old and putting in the new etc.

I decided to keep my old 5GB drive so that it could serve as a scratch disk for all the vide editing software etc. The 5GB had my XP installation and since I really didn’t feel like doing another installation of XP, I was going to keep XP on it but uninstall and reinstall all the apps to the new hard disk but then I discovered that I couldn’t move the Documents and Settings Folder to the new drive as well since it was a system folder – bummer! I knew that if I left the Documents and Settings folder on the 5GB drive, it probably would fill up pretty soon and be useless as a scratch disk. Plus, I like things neat and orderly anyway and having the OS on one drive and the apps on another somehow grated against my sensibilities – don’t mind me, I’m weird :p So I partitioned my 80GB into two 40GB drives, backed up some of the stuff I wanted into one of the new partitions and started reinstalling XP.

Here comes the bit where I always mess up :p XP, warned me that it couldn’t recognize the partition on the 80GB drive and offered to delete the partition and recreate it and I, not reading what the message said properly, assumed it was talking about *one* of the 40GB partitions, told it to go ahead. I realized a split second after I pressed the ENTER key, that I’d just deleted *both* partitions on the 80GB drive and so had lost my backup data! Ah well … Anyway, the XP installation was faster than ever and took only about 17 minutes :p I spent yesterday reinstalling all my apps and putting in all the new Premiere helper apps and plug-ins and transitions and stuff that I wanted to work with and got my desktop somewhat back to a workable state. I’m still working on that …

Oh yeah, had an interesting problem along the way – I had my documents folder on the original installation set to be accessible only by my login and I couldn’t access it at all after I reinstalled XP ;p Not even after I’d reset the security settings. Fortunately, I had the original installation of XP on the other hard disk and was able to boot into that installation, copy over the contents of the my documents folder and then boot back into the new installation of XP and access the stuff. Makes your head hurt doesn’t it? :p

Of terror, war and incipient madness

I’ve been rather reluctant to write in my journals these days both because of lack of time and also because I’ve been feeling the need to distance myself from the rest of humanity lest all its dishonesty, greed, war-mongering and plain lack of care for its fellow members drives me over the edge to join their ranks. Harsh? Yes, perhaps so but that’s how I feel.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a huge explosion here one evening. Our whole house shook and some of the neighbours had the glass on their windows break due to the force of the explosion. Everybody came out of their houses (it was evening) and began speculating about what it must be. It turned out later that a fireworks factory close by had caught fire and that the explosion was a result of that. But at the time I thought, the people in Iraq must be feeling a hundred times more than what we felt due to one single explosion. Yes, this is going to be about the war since it seems to be dominating everything else and I wanted to remind myself of a few things lest I too forget as time goes on like most others of the human race.

I had decided not to write anymore about the war when war started since there seemed to be no way to achieve peace and so it looked as if we just had to wait till things came to their inevitable conclusions. However, I since then feel the need to document some of the events/feelings from the current moment since I have a feeling that certain events are going to play out over and over again – just as they did when the US wanted to go to war in Afghanistan. I’ve been thinking about things and it seems to me that the US is running scared – they lived a peaceful life as the top dog of the pack and suddenly they wake up to the fact that no matter how powerful you might be as a nation, there are individuals crazy enough to attack you. So the US (and here I mean the government rather than the people of the US as a whole) decides that it’s time to show the world that you don’t mess with the US and go unscathed. So they come up with all this hoopla about how they are going to get Osama and attack Afghanistan. Months later and many civilian deaths later, Bin Laden still roams free and everybody has forgotten what originally happened and what the US originally claimed.

Now the pattern repeats again in Iraq. The US claims that they want to get Saddam out of Iraq and go in. Again saying that civilian deaths will be avoided and how they have smart bombs etc. but the results are the same. Many civilian deaths later, the latest stand from the US government seems to be that it doesn’t matter if they get Saddam or not, as long as he’s out of power, they’ve achieved their objectives. Not quite what they said when they started this whole war. And what of these elusive weapons of mass destruction? Now they say that Saddam might actually have spirited them out of the country and so they might not find any – thus actually saying that the fact they don’t exist is proof that they do exist. Ah the tangled mess we create in politics!

I sit here wondering who America will attack next in its fear and the need to show that it is still top dog. Maybe North Korea? Iran? Syria? I don’t know but if the pattern continues, I can only hope that the world wakes up to the fact that they might have to unite against a tyrant such as Germany led by Hitler during the second World War. Yes, I’m saying a tyrant and I’m comparing the US to Nazi Germany. Most Americans probably are going to be outraged, say that America is nothing like Germany under Hitler. But *if* America continues its aggressive behaviour, that’s exactly what America will be and I sincerely hope I am wrong because I don’t want another global conflict to take place – there’s been way too much blood shed already.

Sometimes I wish that I can take Bush, Blair and all these other pro-war leaders and their families and put them in a house which is under heavy shelling and then see how they like war and all this "collateral damage" that they are so casual about. I really am beginning to despise rich and privileged leaders who are totally sheltered from the effects of war and who’ve never had to face war in their own lives, so casually ordering a war that affects the lives of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Maybe its time that we went back to the era when the leaders had to be at the forefront of the battle instead of hiding in some bunker thousands of miles away. Maybe *that* will prevent the slaughter of more innocents but I doubt even that …

I’d had some troubles connecting to an Oracle 9i database from Delphi the last time I tried to do some coding for the company using Delphi and Oracle but this time I first looked over at torry.net and discovered several freeware components that connected directly with Oracle databases and one of them was updated to include Oracle 9i access – some of the others might have worked as well but I went with the first one that worked and was really comprehensive and had the source included :p Anyway, the database access part has been as smooth as can be but I decided to make things more interesting by going with the DeveloperExpress ExpressWebFramework for doing the actual GUI <g>

While the ExpressWebFramework looks great, there really isn’t much documentation for it except for the help files and some FAQ’s on their site and the included demos. So I’m kind of struggling with how to do certain things and with some of the errors as well but I seem to be making progress as well. I’ve got the login screen done and have the main interface kind of in place too but then hit another one of those undocumented/unidentified errors. The problem is aggravated by the fact that I use Opera as my browser and it seems to have this weird caching system where it displays a page it fetched before even when that page has changed. It’s been irritating me a lot since I’d be faced with an error message when the page is actually working and Opera was actually displaying an older page and sometimes I’d be looking for the error for a while before I remembered to refresh the page in Opera. Ah well, I’ll get there eventually … Actually, once I sort out this one particular problem in the main interface, I should be almost there since the rest will be just designing different pages to display or edit the data but you never know :p

Well, QDesigner was almost exactly what I was looking for as far as a visual database designer went and I was able to diagram the Blog data structures successfully using it. However, before I could begin work on designing the database structures for the new version of Blog, I got landed with a new job at work – or rather, an old job that needed to be done again :p I’d done this internal system for managing the archival footage used by our company (which is a television production firm) which used Visual Studio .NET for the frontend and Oracle 9i for the backend. I’d done the system close to a year ago but they hadn’t been using it much but suddenly they wanted to use it again. However, in the meantime my machine had been raided for hardware and one of my hard disk’s removed – the one which contained the Oracle database that I used for development work :p

The production Oracle server is supposedly there but that had gone through several formats and OS reinstalls and so the Oracle database is supposed to be on backup. But for the moment, there is no production instance nor my original development database available. However, I’d done database structure exports a while back and so I decided to set up Oracle on my machine again and while I’m at it, re-develop the system using Delphi since I’d been having problems with Visual Studio .NET. I hate having to deploy anything with Visual Studio .NET because it seems to involve such a lot of effort and sometimes things seem to work for no apparent reason. For instance, I would have a connection to the Oracle database from inside the Visual Studio .NET environment but when I deployed the application, I’d find that there was no database connection! I’m tired of trying to debug this kind of problem and so think Delphi is the better way to go. Plus, Delphi now offers some really nifty web frontend development tools and I want to get to grips with those. So it looks as if I’m going to be busy with that for the next few days …

There have been no responses at all to Geek for Hire – no that’s not true there was *one* response but that’s a strange story in itself :p Or maybe it’s not such a strange story but pointless action always mystifies me. Anyway, the way the consultancy page at Geek for Hire is set up, is as three steps – OK, actually two but it sounds better to say it’s a three step process <g> The first step is to pay the consultation fee via PayPal and then the next step is to send in the consultation information. However, since the process is forms based and I didn’t want to actually do a lot of coding to ensure that the first step had been followed before allowing the second step, you can skip the first step and go straight to the second step and that’s what the person who sent me the single consultation seems to have done <g> I got a query about doing some WSH-base scripting and I replied to the person and told him that I’d be happy to do so as soon as he paid the consultation fee but never heard from him again. I guess maybe he thought that he’d see if I’d respond or something, or maybe he had nothing better to do at the moment … just seemed a pointless thing to do to me that’s all …

In the mean time, I decided to get back to Blog re-coding yesterday. So I wanted to first come up with the new database design for the unified Blog/BlogMan architecture :p Of course, this led to me thinking that it was about time that I documented all the database structures and did a visual design and that got me looking into visual database design tools and the rest of the day passed by in me looking at various tools and downloading the ones I thought might actually be useful 🙂 I found three that looked to be good – VisualCASE (I forget the URL), DeZign and QDesigner from Quest.

I didn’t like VisualCASE since it was Java based (I find Java based tools slow to run and hate having to have the JRE installed for them to work – just a quirk on my part so don’t go telling me all about how great Java is since I do know … I code in Java :p) and I did download the trial of DeZign and got it to work but didn’t really like the way it let you do a visual design – such as how it defines relationships between tables. QDesigner still hadn’t completed downloading when I left work (it was 70+ MB and we have a very slow connection during the daytime since everybody is on …) and so I’m hoping to try it out today. Maybe that will be the tool that I’m looking for. If not, anybody got any other suggestions? Incidentally, I’m trying to visually represent the existing Blog data structures before I do a redesign – don’t know if I mentioned that or not.