Pick of the (last) week

A little late this week. Better late than never I guess

1. Chinna Chinna Aasai by A.R.Rahman in Roja. Gets me everytime
2. Mun Paniya Yuvanshankar raja’s best melody to date. The instrumentation is too good for words.
3. Thirupathi ezhumala venkatesa by Deva. Ganaa at its simple best! Deva simply rules when it comes to gaana. Maybe it’s because gaana can’t be *inspired* from other songs, if you know what I mean
4. Hurricane 2000 by the Scorpions. I never liked rock as much until I heard this song.
5. In my place by Cold Play. Inspite of all the noise, this song still sounds melodious to me

Social Service

Lisp tutorial
Read this for more info

And no, I haven’t read the book yet

Pick of the week

I recently saw Mark Chu-Carroll friday random ten articles and liked the idea. So here’s the Indianized(or rather tamilianized) version for your taking – My Pick of the week! A list of five songs that have fascinated me over the week.

And the winners of the inaugral edition are…

1. “Maha ganapathim” from Morning Raaga by Amit Heri and Mani Sharma. Vinayak Chathurthi special! The best rendering of the song I’ve heard to date. Suda Ragunathan at her best. I don’t know what happened to the Mani Sharma that composed for this movie. All his other movies seem third rate compared to this one. I almost refused to believe that this was one of his works for a while.
2. “Yennadi Muniyamma” from Vaathiyar by Imman. One of the few remixed songs that still sound nice! Karthick has done a great job in rendering the song
3. “Dreaming of you” from the Scrubs OST by The Coral. I still can’t figure out why I like this song so much. I almost feel disappointed that its only about 2 minutes.
4. “Yentha kuthariyal varuvaan” from Satham Podathey by Yuvanshankar Raja. The movie that marks yuvan’s return to good music. He’s finally back to his old form after a huge pestering pile of noise he’s composed in the recent times. Shreya Goshal’s shines with her ability to set the mood for the song
5. “Kallori Salaikkul” from Sivapathikaaram by Vidyasagar. Probably the only song about college life that makes sense. I’m still trying to find out who wrote this song.

5 things I learnt at Amazon

It’s been a exhilarating four months at Amazon, or atleast it will be in another eight days!

Coming fresh out of college, I learnt a lot about the difference between being just a programmer and a software development engineer. A programmer is someone who just codes what you tell him to; a code monkey, so to say. But a software development engineer is “a biological machine that automatically converts coffee and beer into code”!

This big lesson apart, here are a few other things I learnt so far,

1. Your 10K+ code with all it’s fancy architecture and flawless implementation is worth nothing if it’s not solving the business problem that it was needed for. Understand the context of the problem before jumping to conclusions.
2. Sending your code review without proper comments is *much* worse than walking naked on the streets
3. 5 minutes of extra thought at design time is 5 hours in dev time. Sketch up a rough design even if your writing a script.
4. 1 hour into reading the fine manual is otherwise 10 in writing your own code.
5. Using an unstable library is like shaving in the dark. You’re bound to cut yourself if you don’t know what you’re laying your hands on

At the end of the day, work is a lot of fun (and a lot of TT ). I find it hard to go home

Hackzor debriefing session

I’m planning to have a little tutorial session on how Hackzor works and how it should be working on Saturday. My juniors Alagappan and Vijay have already guaranteed their presence.

If you’re interested in developing Hackzor, just drop me line so that I know your coming. I’m primarily looking at my college juniors (CEGians) to take this further(since CEG is our only customer for now )but others are welcome too!

Place: Cafe Coffee Day at Ascendas
Time: 3:00 PM on September 15th (Saturday)

P.S: For the uninitiated, Hackzor is the little mess that Prashanth and me wrote for the online programming contests at Kurukshetra and Abacus

A five pointer on Hpricot Vs REXML

I’ve been learning to parse XML in Ruby for a while now using Hpricot and REXML. And here’s essentially what you should know if you are going through the same path

1. Hpricot(as of this writing) is still *very* incomplete! It’s doesn’t support everything that you would want to do in Xpath. I had to jumps through hoops to get a few things done. REXML on the other hand works like a charm. Hpricot also behaves weirdly(and unpredictably) at places.
2. Hpricot has parts of its implementation in C and way faster than REXML.
3. I like the Hpricot syntax, which seemed more natural than what REXML uses
4. REXML is very adament about content errors and would refuse to parse a document having a single misplaced ‘&’. Hpricot never complained.
5. REXML is in the standard library