Digitally Toned

Obama reaches 2M+ donors! This really is a historic milestone

admin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:23:56 GMT

As the graphic says...

This is a very positive change from the recent political climate in the US. This shows not just the renewed interest of people in politics, but also a serious challenge to the big lobby run election campaigns of the yore!

Solzhenitsyn is dead...

admin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 02:07:24 GMT

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/03/solzhenitsyn.dead/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn

My impressions of Solzhenitsyn is mixed. On one hand I have high regards for his humanitarian contributions in exposing the cruelties of Stalinist Soviet regime. On the other hand, his thoroughly right wing social view has disturbed me quite a lot.

He was a frequent ideological presence in the heated discussions we used to have while in the engineering college and later in the lawns of University College, TVM.

Today, I remember him again.

Fallacy of "Pro" Life

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:51:00 GMT

Over zealous, and highly dramatized "concern" about "life" is one of the hallmarks of American Conservatism. A strong aversion to women's rights, especially reproductive rights is shared equally by both Christianity and Islam.

Bush administration has demonstrated their unwavering support for the religious right by issuing a regulation that defines abortion so broadly that it includes a wide range of contraception method including IUD as a form of abortion. This is outrageous.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/07/abortion-reprod.html

Hllary has a strong statement and urges everybody to go to her new website (hillpac.com) to sign a petition, but the website is still in its infancy. Too bad.

I will look out for more links on the story and actions.

Here is the Reuter Story

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1843863720080718

http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20080719/clinton_condemns_bush_administration_s_abortion_plan-id-1029881.html

Earth A Biography - Science/Nature shows and religious determinism

admin — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:49:50 GMT

The new three part series in National Geographic is one of the endless series of very high definition earth imageries that now fills the Science/Discovery/NG channels. This, like most other documentaries of the type gives a rather peripheral view of the earth and its evolution.

The series examines different aspects of earth's life through beautifully captured imageries, that rightfully stands at par with Planet Earth and Blue Planet.

I have not watched the whole of it yet. But from the three parts I have already watched, it feels a bit empty except for those gorgeous shots. Dr.Iain Stewart is not the most entertaining presenter if you ask me. But more than the presentation itself, it is the abundance of platitudes that kill the enjoyment.

Here is one example. The episode is Volcanoes and Iain is talking about the carbon cycle. The scene starts with really beautiful micro-shots and quite dazzling aerial and satellite pictures of the sea green with algae. Then he describes how algae absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and eventually die and sediment at the bottom of the ocean. Then comes the revelation! If the algae continues to absorb carbon dioxide, it will eventually thin out the green house effect and the earth will become too cold. That will be the end of life! He then continues to talk about the seduction as the tectonic plates move and the carbon in the sediment gets converted to carbon dioxide.

This is actually a constant theme in these science/nature shows. There is always this single overarching reason for life to survive. Reduce the temperature by a few degrees, a rogue meteor. This not just is limited to the destiny of life, but for the universe itself! Often you will hear if the value of cosmological constant was a bit off, or if the initial temperature of the universe immediately after the big bang was a little lower...

As I see it, these are the same fatalistic deterministic world views that is so ingrained with our age old views of the world, mainly controlled by theological dogma and mythological delusions.

Deterministic narratives of cosmology is fundamental to the propagation of religious dogmas. Any assumption of creation - as Einstein amply demonstrated - has to preclude any questions about a deterministic evolution. Remember, god does not play dice!!

We should, by now, know that there is not just one path that leads to the current state of the Universe. While past might be fixed, it does not, by any means say that this is the only possible current state. Nor does it mean that our past is the only way to reach here.

I am eagerly waiting to see a narration that is devoid of the fatalistic proclamations one of these days. May be I should watch Nova more regularly!!!

Phoenix has landed...

admin — Mon, 26 May 2008 03:43:54 GMT

We, me and Shobha had been waiting eagerly for this evening. Setup reminders in TV, turned on NASA TV in my computer by 5 PM. It sure was a nail biter. Shobha cried. I almost did. Ahh... what a wonderful landing.

No, I will not get into the politics of it yet. Today, lets all celebrate. Tomorrow we will analyze the return on investment.

Here is the moment of Zen!

Moment of Joy

Soon, there was a flurry of pictures from the lander. Watch them here.

Today I Cooked Rice

admin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:41:32 GMT

Well, that should not be a special news from someone from Kerala. However, it is different in my case. I have been living alone as Shobha is visiting Kerala. We just finished our new kitchen and I am still in the process of stocking it and getting familiarized.

I have not been cooking rice for almost 4 months in this house. When the old kitchen was demolished in January, I was left with a microwave and mini fridge in the bedroom. The work was completed in late March, when I left for India. I came back last week and was getting used to this new home. Yes, I love it.

yep. Here is a picture...

Any ways, while i sat down for dinner with the steaming rice, which was nicely cooked (I like it well cooked), Mackerel and Tilapia fried, chicken curry, Shanghai cabbage and broccoli stir fry and onions and tomatoes in yogurt (ohh my, that is a lot of stuff) in my big green plate, I realized, it is great to eat rice :)

This is a good day. Nice to see things slowly falling in to place around me.

Things I learned in my last trip to Kerala

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:37:34 GMT

I still love rain: I landed on the 22nd to the midst of a severe spring depression in the Arabian Sea. Really torrential rains for almost three days without a pause. A very nice reminder of the monsoons. Yes, it was disastrous, with large amounts of crops failing as this happened just when the paddy fields were getting ready to be harvested. The rain practically flooded large portions of the road between my brother's house and my sister's house between which I was doing most of the walking.
Kerala drivers are not reckless, they are incredibly patient: I am still afraid of traffic in Kerala roads. I do feel much better driving in the US where there are specific rules and people largely obey them. So, the apparent chaos of the TVM traffic baffled me for a few days. I was trying to imagine how I managed to go through this when I was driving. But, the number of vehicles where several times less then than it is now. The roads have not widened at all, though in TVM, the number of roads have increased. So, as I traveled (as a passenger) around TVM, I came to learn the incredible order in all this chaos. The fundamental principle in the dynamic - you will be surprised - co-operation and patience!!! Every intersection, everybody yielded, watched for others, took the least invasive route. Of course there were tyrants and hot headed drivers and novices. But they all worked within this system of yield and cooperation much more than I see in an intersection with stop sign in the US. We are still learning the wonders of double lane traffic, but I think we are much better and getting better as we do it more.
Kerala Govt. Hospitals are a good place to get health care: I know the maladies of our government hospitals from the corruption among doctors and staff to the lack of availability of equipments and sometimes medicine. But it does operate much more efficiently than many big hospitals in the US. It is quite amazing when you add the fact that most of the service provided by these government hospitals is free. I visited SAT, a hospital that specializes in women and children. It is where most of the difficult child births around TVM and possibly the whole of Kerala happens. In my own family, my elder niece had some complication during birth and was transferred to SAT immediately after birth in a private hospital. My sister gave birth to her daughter there as well. So, I am intimately familiar with the good and the bad. Knowing the amount of talent we have in there and the percentage of hard working dedicated people, with all the perceived bad, I will still trust SAT against any other private hospital and some of the hospitals around me in Philadelphia.
The political discourse in Kerala has not changed a lot: This is a good sign. It has not deteriorated any further. There is the usual penetration of right wing media and further marginalisation of the left voice. But, nothing alarming there. There are the beginnings of alternative discourse becoming more visible through blogs and some odd TV programs. Coming from the US, even the worst offenders of journalistic ethics in Kerala looks like a bastion of Journalistic integrity in US standards)
I love talking in Malayalam: I knew this. I have not done theoretical discussions in Malayalam for a while. Got some chance to do it. Loved it!
There are way too many Cuckoos in Kerala: Yes, there are much more than say 7 years ago. I lived in TVM at two houses and in Kochin at my wife's house. In all the three places, I could hear much more Cuckoo (Kuyil) songs than I used to hear before. It was a novelty to challenge a cuckoo song and make it "mad". But now, it is actually annoying at times. My sister complains about this one cuckoo which start singing at 4 am in the morning!! I should ask an ornithologist about this.

More to come...

I Did Vasectomy, And I am Proud of It

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:07:52 GMT

For a few years, we have been toying with the idea of getting permanent sterilization. However, since we have come up with a quite efficient plan of contraception and abstinence, this was not in the forefront of discussion. Last year, we asked our primary physician about it and he advised me to contact a urologist. Once I started the process, I soon found that it is not an easy thing to be done in the US, especially with the dubious status of my insurance. It was definitely too expensive to do without insurance coverage. So, when during my visit to India , I went ahead and did it. I went to the Sree Chithira Tirunal Govt. Hospital (SAT hospital for women and children. Yes, I know, not a likely place to do vasectomy) and did the Non Scalpel Vasectomy (NSV). Of course it was not among the most pleasant things done to my penis and ***. However, it was relatively low impact and I had to endure only minor post operative pain.

I know this is kind of a personal thing and might not be the best subject to discuss in a public blog. I am not that socially open person either. But what prompted me to advertise this was a rather alarming statistics. In the last year, among more than 150,000 sterilizations done in Kerala, only about 1,100, less than 1% were vasectomies. The rest were procedures done on women.

First I thought this might be a special case for Kerala, but soon it was clear that this is a global phenomenon. The percentage of males undergoing sterilization is much less than that of females. This is one of those hidden sexist actions we males do but never acknowledge.

The main two reasons for men not going for sterilization are two fold. One, they are afraid. Yes, as we men secretly know all this time that we are the meeker sex. We are afraid of so many things that might undermine our macho stature. Messing with our "Organ" definitely is the scariest things we could ever think of. The second reason is our opposition to random people handling our sex organs. The funny thing is that, we do not feel any angst when men and women medical practitioners pour over female genitalia for even the simplest of reasons as a fungus infection. It is with mortal fear men allow a doctor, male or female handling his "manhood". I think many of us fear a male doctor seeing it and judging the size of it. come on, what if his is bigger than mine and he actually sees it!!!

This is not an isolated statistics where women ends up doing men's dirty work. One other case is the HPV vaccine. The main culprit in spreading HPV are men who are the carriers of the virus. We all know that it is best to treat the point of distribution. However, the manufactures, even with indications that it will work just as well in men, went ahead and completed testing only with women (in developing countries, of course).

So, I had to announce that, I did go through NSV, I am proud of it, and recommend it to all men who does not want to have kids. It takes only a few minutes of your life, and has very minimal discomfort. I will take HPV vaccine if they are offered for men as well.

Hey, if you do it in India, you will even get Rs.1,100.00. I also strongly recommend you do it in a government hospital instead of private, where you can do it for free. If you do so, don't forget to donate the money back to the hospital. They need a lot of supplies that is hard to get through proper channel.

Before closing this post, I would like to thank the doctors, nurses and assistants of SAT hospital in Thiruvananthapuram who did my vasectomy, and all the dedicated and brilliant doctors and medical staff in the excellent government hospitals of Kerala.

I am really proud of my state :-)

Today I Heard A Historic Speech!

admin — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:09:47 GMT

Full transcript and video here.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGBbKG

As Days Goes by, I Like Delphi Less

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 07:12:40 GMT

There was one time, when I would have accepted a Delphi project over pretty much any other. However, last several releases of Delphi has made me change my mind.

Every release of Delphi after version 7.0 had been a total disappointment. Whatever is the official spin from Borland/CodeGear is, the botched effort at divesting and the following split up has made the products from them much less reliable.

Right now, I am using Delphi.Net 2007 and trying to use it as a first class citizen of the .Net languages. However, in every possible way, Delphi fails my efforts.

The IDE is still extremely unstable and has several quirks of usages. One of the most annoying is its disregard to relative paths, or library paths in general. It blindly adds whatever paths it can find, mostly the default project paths that points to your local documents folder.

What is more scary however is the behavior of the compiler. It has its own mind. You can compile the same set of projects 10 times without changing a single thing and have two or three of them failing mysteriously.

The latest disappointment was when I tried to create a Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) module in Delphi. I created a simple package in Delphi, with one class. Added Microsoft.Practices.CompositeUI.dll to reference, added the namespace and hit compile. Oops... There it is. An internal error. And the compile fails. After several tries and an hour or so, I reported yet another bug (my 25th or so in the last one year) to QC and started planning for alternatives.

And for Delphi, I am not sure how much I like it anymore.. Not a lot for sure.

Back in My Rocker

admin — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 03:25:08 GMT

I was off my rocker for more about 10 weeks now. Well, it is actually a recliner. Still, one of my asses favorite resting places.

We started a rather long remodeling project earlier last year. Well, the full story of that probably will follow. Early January, most of the ground floor was under construction and I moved all my furniture and other stuff to a mobile mini thingie. When I started the project I mused about how it will be to use agile methodologies to manage it. But, later I found an even better way. Let the contractor manage the project. Well, there had been quite a lot of changes and some overruns.

Today, Bob the Builder cleaned up the ground floor enough to bring in the furniture. Now, I am sitting in my spanking new living room, with shiny bamboo floors. Mmmm, living room is a wonderful concept. Especially, when your life is limited to one room for over 2 months!!!

Is Over-specifying Engineering?

admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:21:49 GMT

The commercial shows the car in the desert, climbing a hill, etc. The sound says, "you may never drive it in a desert or climb 70 degree slope... [] but someone might. Knowing that we cannot engineer anything less" thus spoke the new Mercedes commercial

And I am wondering, when did putting stuff that no one might ever need in every car become engineering? it is just obscene over indulgence!

It is a crime only if China does it

admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:29:53 GMT

US is getting ready to shoot down a defunct spy satellite. Read here. http://www.space.com/news/ap-080214-spy-satellite-shootdown.html. The funny thing is that US was causing so much noise against space arms race discussions put forward by Russia and China (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-02/12/content_7593704.htm) mainly pointing out Chinese action last year of shooting down a weather satellite.

This is yet another example of the unfairness and autocracy of the US administration when it comes to peace talks. Well, when a country spends more on arms than every other country combined, it is hard to believe there will be a reasonable effort from them for peace.

How to (Not) do a Survey

admin — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:30:35 GMT

Codegear today announced their developer survey for Delphi product line. See the announcement here http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges/2008/01/31/39017#comment-18925.

Being a long term Delphi user, and my strong opinions about the recent releases from Code Gear, I immediately went to the survey and started filling out. I enthusiastically started marking my choices for the questions. The first ones were simple radio buttons in a grid, which worked well.

Then comes 3.4

"Delphi Language Enhancements: For your development needs, please rank the following language features in order of desirability for Delphi/Object Pascal"

This is followed by 9 Combo Boxes, each containing 9 items each. To my horror, I realized that the combo boxes does not filter themselves out the already selected items. It took me quite some time to figure out the unselected items for the last three selections.

This however, did not deter me and I continued on. There comes question 3.6

"VCL Enhancements: According to your development needs, please allocate 100 points across the following potential VCL framework enhancements to indicate the relative amount of support and features you would like to see CodeGear focus on for your particular needs. Assign any amounts to each feature from 0 to 100, so that the total of all the entries is 100"

It took me a few moments to figure out what is required from me. There are 9 enhancements listed below this question with an edit box left of it. I am supposed to somehow split 100 into 9 parts, according to my preference. And, yes, the total should be 100. Is it just me or is this an incredibly inefficient way to get preference?

Ahh.. by the way, none of these answers are checked against clear invalid choices.

Good job Code gear, this survey is matched only be the quality of the products that are coming out of there!!!!

David I has piracy issues...

admin — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:15:25 GMT

David I of CodeGear has written a blog lamenting about the amount of innovation is lost through software piracy. The thing I noticed was the familiarity of this argument with the one that is put forth by RIA. Then he brings in some statistics to prove that about 35% of software "value" is being lost through piracy...

CodeGear is in a rather dangerous downward spiral in their long term strategies, and capability to deliver. Even after four releases, their new Delphi IDE line is bogged with bugs and serious performance problems. Severe fragmentation of resources into several new projects (PHP, Ruby) have not helped them at all. Instead of trying to find out why CodeGear is becoming more and more of a developer antagonistic company these days.

Instead of drumming that old drum that the RIA has been beating for sometime. Open up, look around, basically grow up!!

A Word About Mail Forwarding Etiquette

admin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 01:07:09 GMT

I am member of several mail groups, and have quite a few friends eager to show share some extremely informative or hilariously funny message with me.

I usually don't mind getting forwarded messages when the content is related to my primary interests or something relevant. But more often than not, these are pretty mundane, unfunny jokes and pseudo claims/information.

The worst offenders though are those mails with the forwarded message in attachment, often in a chain of attachments. So, if you want to read it, you have to open a series of attachment, and eventually you will find that obnoxious one line joke!!!

Anyone who forwards email to me, remember. If you don't have time to spend my reading experience better, DONT forward them to me...

My Vista does everything wrong... they want me to go back to XP...

admin — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 05:30:48 GMT

This is what Madam X (her own impersonation, I suggested Mrs.X) told us about what her computer tech told her.

Madam X is an artist, who has been using Windows XP for a while, and wanted to buy a new computer powerful enough to do serious graphic works. Mac was an option, but since both me and Shobha (my wife) are more familiar with Windows we suggested Vista. She went out and bought this pretty powerful Quad Core HP desktop with 3GB RAM and 1TB Hard Drive. Pretty impressive machine.

After a very brief honeymoon period, she started complaining about mysterious things happening. Sometimes, her computer did not allow her to open attachments of emails that she used to view without any trouble in XP. There was this mysterious problem of font settings never sticking in MS Word. There was other issues with creating labels, printing to her HP Laserjet, annoying popups, bizarre copy paste issues, etc. etc...

She had been complaining about this for a while, we first thought that it is just some teething troubles everybody feels when start using a totally new OS. However, her problems persisted and seemed to become worse by the day.

She had a regular computer tech who used to help her when she had issues before was reluctant to help her quoting his unfamiliarity with Vista. (A decent position I would say.. read on). So she called up the original seller Microcenter and complained about the issues. They told her to bring the machine in to see what can be done.

[The following is a paraphrasing, as we were not with her at Microcenter.]

She was first served by a technician who first did not believe her. He said that the problems are because she didn't know how to use Vista. However, once she started showing him the issues, he agreed. So the manager came in and did a higher level diagnostics. Again, after seeing the problems he was baffled as well. So he started telling her all the issues with Vista. He said that Vista is full of bugs and it will only be fixed when service pack I comes out. It is also possible, he said, that she might have gotten a particularly buggy version of Vista. (You know, like a lemon car). His recommendation was that she should consider going back to XP. Vista might not be the best OS for her, of course she will have to pay to put XP back in this machine. (This desktop is factory installed with Vista).

When Madam X emailed us that evening detailing her visit to Microcenter, we were a bit baffled as well. My wife started using Vista early this year. I had been testing Vista in a few virtual images and recently in my laptop. None of the issues she had been seeing were even remotely familiar to us. In both our cases Vista had been working rather smoothly, except for a Bluetooth driver issue in my machine and some early NVidia driver issues with Shobha's which had been since rectified. We invited Madam X and her computer for a lunch.

First problem, the computer has only DVI and we do not have any DVI monitors. (Yes I know, how sad...). Nor did we have an adapter. After some deliberations, I went out (reluctantly, come on it is a Sunday morning), first to a radioshack as I saw the thing in their website, and then to Staples. I came back and hooked up to our monitor, it booted fine.

The first thing I noticed was the number of things that popped up immediately on startup. There was this HP problem solver (or answer wizard or something) on top of the screen, which Madam X said did not answer any of her questions. Then there was this weird warning from some SuperSpy or something else Spyware program. Then there was a flashing screen of Symantec. Ok, first action - cleanup.

So I went to the startup programs and found some very interesting things there. First one ofcourse the SuperSpy thingie, which her Computer Tech installed promising absolute protection. Then there was an HP Toner Order Reminder (Sic), the answer wizard of course, and a couple of other quasi adware programs. We unselected all and restarted. Better, we can see the desktop now.

First Problem - Word does not obey default font settings

She uses MS Word 2003 for all her documents She does not like Times new roman (neither do I) and wanted all her documents to be Ariel. In her XP machine, she could create any new document and it always opened with Ariel. In Vista, she tried to change the font, but every time she opened a new document, the font went back to Times New roman. By the way this was the clinching issue for the Microcenter guy. (He called it totally bizzare and unexplainable)

Remedy, modify your default template (normal.dot). She must have done this when she first started using Word in her XP machine. But time is such a funny phenomenon that filters out only the crucial part of our experiences!!! So I started looking for normal.dot. Strangely enough it did not come up in my search, so Shobha started looking for it and within a second told me to look in Users/MadamX/Appdata/Roaming/Microsoft/Templates. Of course, there it was. So I opened it, changed the normal tag from Times new roman to Ariel, saved it back. We created several new documents and made sure that it is always Ariel. So, the first baffling bug in Vista is resolved.

While this was not too hard to find out for me and Shobha, there were a few things that were not very intuitive in these operations. For example, I would think that word should be smart enough to recognize the user behavior of changing the normal font to Ariel every time a new document is created. Second, I was unable to find a way to save the default template changes back. I am certain that i was able to do this without much effort earlier. Finding it in a hidden folder is not the easiest of things.

Second Problem - E-mail attachments that used to open are now cannot be opened.

One of her mailing groups used to send news letters that had extension of the month number to it. These were word documents, but, may be because it was saved from Mac did not have an MS word registered extension. So, when she tried to open this file, as usual the dialog came up warning her about the danger of opening this unrecognized file (with a lot of binary data ofcourse). When she said to go ahead, it showed the second dialog asking her to select a program to open it or look in the net to find a program. She selected to pick one from the list.. Boom, a dialog with a lot of red comes up telling her that windows cannot open this dangerous file.

Ok, this is frustrating. If Windows Mail knew about this file being a suspicious one and prevent her from opening it at the end, why did even go through the other two steps!!! Anyway, we told her that when she gets these kinds of files, that does not have a word icon to it, save it to the local folder and then open it from there. And this is not a good advice. The protection one gets from within Windows Mail against malicious files is not available from the explorer. But in this case, the sender is a trusted source. Once it is saved, one can follow the traditional way of picking a program to open the file, which in this case is MS Word. Once again, a bit un-intuitive that it first gave the user an impression that this process can eventually succeeded, eventhough Widows Mail could figure out that it is not the case. The messages were a bit too cryptic as well.

Third Problem - When a new mergemail document is created and gave the address in the first dialog box, print it does not do anything...

She showed me this, and yes, it does not (apparently) do anything. We repeated the step a couple of times, until we found out that if we want to see the new document, we need to press the New Document button after entering the data. Well, this time, it is equally a user error. The UI could give more information about the possibilities, but the help was very comprehensive. So I cant put the blame on Microsoft.

Fourth Problem - After creating a new label document, you cannot copy selected text. When you do a highlight, right click copy and paste operation, data previously copied was getting pasted. Whatever she does, the it never copies the intended text. In this case, we actually found that she was right clicking outside the selection, which in turn was unselecting the already selected text. Interestingly enough the Copy menu was still enabled. However, when you move to the next cell and right click paste, nothing happened. (We did not have a previous Clipboard content).

Shobha took over from me and gave a thorough lesson in copying and pasting and various tricks and tips. Thus that problem solved.

There remained other mysterious problems about backup (the desktop shortcut of backup turned out to be an XCopy batch file) and something else.

We finished the session by removing several programs including the SuperSpy ware and toner reminder (can you be more blatant!!!) and some other unused programs, set up windows backup to her removable hard drive etc.

Well, everything is fine for about 12 hours now. I am sure she will find other unfamiliar areas as she explore more and more. I am also sure that she is going to teach a thing or two to the expert who tells her that it is all because Vista is buggy, and she needs to go back to XP.

We, on our part, once again will be rewarded in hell for helping the Evil Microsoft Empire!!!!!

Northwest passage opens up

admin — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 18:26:47 GMT

Yesterday ESA finally confirmed that the Northwest Passage has opened up and is free of ice year round.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a program about global warming and this guy was predicting the opening up of Northwest Passage and that being a very critical step towards an irreversible trend.

Well, now it has happened. This is not just a climate event, think about all the new economic dramas that are going to play out!!!

Finally, I am free...

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:56:29 GMT

On Tuesday, when I was evaluating CodeGear RAD Studio 2007, I noticed that if I turn off my McAffee Anti-virus, I get the build done in about 20% of the time it otherwise will take. (E.g 3.9s to .7s.). On Wednesday, while I was booting up the computer, I noticed a prolonged delay in finishing the startup. When looked at the profiler, I found that three different McAffee processes monopolizing both cores of my 2.4Fghz machine. And then it came up with an important notification advertising their offer for upgrade. It was the last straw.

I have been noticing that whenever I had a performance degradation (yes, I do notice it when I run two copies of VS 2005, a Virtual PC image of Orcas B2, two copies of Delphi, Outlook, couple of remote desktops over VPN etc., which btw is my usual load.) I found that one or more of the several McAffee processes running vigorously. This is especially noticeable when outlook is downloading mails or when I compile/debug my code.

Though I had turned off whatever protections I can find in my copy of McAffee (which actually is just the scan from Security Center) I did not fully uninstall it. Today however, I found that it is up to its tricks again, this time by running on Access virus scan during a compile. So, here it goes. I promptly uninstalled McAffee.

I am a judicious user and don't install any and all free stuff in my machine. I think I should be fine. We will see. With my backup, restoring it wont take more than an hour or so even if I get a virus.

Choices, choices...

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 16:44:21 GMT

This is the message I got when I tried to turn off virus protection notifications... Which one will I chose !!!

Tale of Two Upgrades (RAD Studio 2007, VS2008)

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 04:57:04 GMT

In my years of working with Delphi, I have had to upgrade existing code base to next version. The only version I did not do this for was 4-5. All of these upgrades introduced breaking changes with varying effort to resolve. So, I have been expecting some things to go wrong when we attempt the upgrade from Delphi 2006.net to 2007.net, especially since it involves a change in framework.

Usually I do not complain too much about these upgrade issues. Most of the time the changes are result of improvements of language and VCL and it is a price I was willing to pay - until yesterday.

This is the story of two upgrades that I tried during the last two days.

Visual Studio Orcas Beta 2.

On Sunday, I finally installed Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. First I tried a small LINQ application which worked nicely. Then I went to read some documentation, which was very good for a beta 2. Next, I tried the new Client Management services and played with a few authentication options. While the documentation was a bit hard to find this time, once I found it, it was reasonably well written. After a few more poking around, I decided to check a good size project. So, I created a copy of a web project I am working on. This is based on DotnetNuke (more about this later). I have a couple of web application projects implementing my modules, a web service and a bunch of libraries. For data access I use NHibernate. I wanted to try LINQ for NHibernate the Alt.Net guys are cooking up. With a lot of skepticism I opened the solution. As expected, it notified me about upgrading the solution and started doing it. It did take a few minutes and it asked me whether to convert my ASP projects to framework 3.5. I said yes, it eventually finished conversion and opened the project. I pressed F5, it started compiling, started the ASPX development server, started my webservice, started my DotnetNuke web site and everything worked fine. I was really very pleasantly surprised. I can imagine the engineering effort that went into providing such a smooth experience. Achieving this in Beta 2 is even more commendable.

Codegear RAD Studio 2008 (Highlander) RTM

On Monday night I got the mail from CodeGear for RAD Studio 2007 trial. (I am still waiting for upgrade notification, which apparently is going to take two weeks). I downloaded and installed it. I do like web distribution and in my case, installation went without a hitch. It did take a long time to finalize the help file integration but I doubt if CodeGear had anything to do with that.

Once the installation is over, I started it up. I cannot comment on speed as this is the first time I was running Delphi in this laptop. Once it came up, I started looking around. Thought I will do the web application first. Created a simple application, pressed run. The firewall warning came up. Didn't think it was nice for a web application IDE. I was able to connect to the server from the browser without much effort. I was impressed by it. Well, I have always had good opinion about Intraweb.

One of the things I was expecting eagerly from Highlander was the MSBuild support. So, once I finished playing with the IDE, I tried a commandline build of my test application. We had been using MSBuild commandline builds for both win32 and .net under D2006 first using a set of custom tasks and recently using the tasks from D2007 Win32. We used a set of non-IDE projects for driving this commandline builds as Delphi has this really annoying habit of adding absolute paths to the project files. The commandline worked fine once I found the Rad Studio Command prompt with the necessary path variables.

This was followed by a series of efforts at opening my existing project group file. The first trial failed because I did not make the files read/write. The IDE went through all the 44+ packages and told me that the edit buffer is read only. It was also occasionally tried to open forms with custom components and failing to load them. So, I refreshed my view, made everything read write and opened the group again. The message window notified me of resolving or failure to resolve assembly references. Since my assemblies are not built yet, they also failed to load.

Once the conversion was complete, I selected the first project and clicked on Build All From Hear. Immediately, the build failed saying c:\windows\system32\borland.vcl.dll was not found. I started changing every one of the references (including the ones the conversion log said was resolved) and compile the projects one by one. Soon I made some mistake and the projects got corrupted again. Once more refresh of the view, another conversion and yet another try at compiling. Same result. Then I decided to close the solution and reopen it. Voila. it correctly found the Borland assemblies, but I found that all the assemblies that IDE failed to find (because they were not built yet) was redirected to (can you believe it) Windows\system32. Why on earth a .Net IDE working under Vista would assume that I generate (or third parties will copy) assemblies into windows\system32????

That takes us to the next iteration. One more refresh, but this time I decided not to try converting the solution. Instead, I deleted all bdsproj and bdsgroup files from my view, and created a new solution. I, then added each dpk/dpr file to the group, compiling each of them before adding the next one. It worked for most part. But then came the annoying bugs, but that is for another time.

The compile was not clean either. There were a couple of breaking changes, noticeably unavailability of implicit conversion of TDateTime to double and THandle to integer. I am sure it is defined in one of those units, but ofcourse the documentation does not say anything. Actually the documentation on converting win32 projects have not been updated since Delphi 2005 it seems!!!

10 years ago, I wouldn't have considered using Visual Studio for my development. Now, I just want to stop using Delphi.

How to add references to RAD Studio 2007

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:20:46 GMT

Well, CodeGear's new incarnation RAD Studio 2007 has its own set of quirks. While they have managed to do some improvement in the overall IDE experience (finally there are no red squirrelly lines under every other line of code).

Some of them are very blogworthy :-).

As part of some package refactoring I was replacing some references in one of our packages. This is what I got

You can see how it got a bit confused and started adding several imaginary packages to my dpk File. So, I did the right thing. Ran the project validation (a new menu item in project explorer) and it said there is nothing wrong with my project.

The next half an hour I first removed all the references, with not much result, re-added, removed from dpk, readded to dpk, and finally opened the dproj file in notepad and removed references manually. Doing this step twice seems to have soothed Delphi enough to start accepting my references. However, I am yet to finish adding this new reference. Whenever I do that, the IDE raises a null pointer exception and fails to add to the dpk file. Hmm, yet another quirk that I have to remember to tell all my colleagues.

I am finding quite a lot of them and writing up. Soon will put a bunch of reports in QC

Next stop Neutralinos...

admin — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 04:17:00 GMT

Now they have confirmed solar nutrinos. It is interesting to see more and more of the bizarre theories of quantum physics get empirically confirmed.

Next big thing is of course the Higgs and Neutralinos. Can't wait.

How to extinguish the Sun

admin — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 03:05:17 GMT

I was watching bits and pieces of a SciFi movie about solar flares igniting the methane in the atmosphere. According to the movie, this huge series of solar flares overheat the upper atmosphere. The higher percentage of methane (is this true?) gets ignited by this. This global level ignition of the atmosphere will eventually will consume all oxygen and cause extinction.

So, the hero, overcoming the opposition from the disbelieving officials, finds a solution. Explode some nukes in the Antartic, causing huge amounts of ice to evaporate. This will work as a huge fire extinguisher and we will be saved.

In the last scene, the bombs explode, hero's ex-wife watches from distance, the burning sky starts clearing from the north, and then, snow starts falling. Everybody claps.. world is saved.

Just one doubt though. If 5 nukes caused this snow, wouldn't the snow be radio active? Embracing the lesser evil?

This is definitely a must see!!!

admin — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:14:00 GMT

Some very true insights from a very unexpected place