In case you haven't yet registered for the Linux Bangalore / 2004, you can do so here. You save Rs.200 by registering early for the event. The event is on Dec 1,2 and 3.

Using Design by Contract in C

After the initial enthusiasm of using Google desktop search, iam now figuring out that i do not have need for such a tool anyway. Let me summarise what i search on my PC on a day-to-day basis.
Source Code
I use cygwin for most of my dev work, and also various IDEs for building and loading code for my various target platforms. Most of these IDEs are good enough for searching source code symbols, and on cygwin, i have built up an useful array of small scripts over the years, which help me search source code without wasting a lot of time.
Documents
I have a huge collection of documents that i have managed to download during the course of my last five years of web surfing, which run into GBs of space now. Long before any of these search tools existed, i have made it a habit to properly organise my document collection into folders that make it pretty straight forward for me reach to a required document. Most of the older pdfs happen to be scanned images, which anyway Google search or the Windows built-in search will not be able help. And i have noticed that mostly i end up knowing whats the document title(or atleast part of the title) that iam trying to find in my collection, so Windows built-in search is fairly fast enough (if you enable the indexing service).

Now the other main feature that Google desktop search provides is the ability to search through my web browsing history. Call me a paranoid, but i have almost made it a habit to clean up my web history. my cookies folder, and my web cache every week or so, and so i dont have much use for a search tool there either. And even though the integration to the Google interface seemed like a cool feature initially, i have found myself too lazy to open up a web browser for just searching for a file. I guess iam too comfortable with locate, find and grep that replacing that with the desktop search doesn't increase my productivity even a little bit!

Raymond Chen has this interesting information on where windows applications were minimized to in the pre-taskbar versions of Windows.

Google acquires KeyHole, a satellite mapping firm. Unlike Mapquest and Yahoo! Maps, Keyhole also provides a 3D interface for the map details.

Finally, after 2 months in Houston, iam back to Bangalore. To a nicer and cooler climate, i should say! On the work front, it was two glorious months. Convergence 2004 was a high point of the trip. Will update the blog with convergence snaps as soon as i get back to Bangalore. Till then, see ya.

Simple Is Beautiful. A great article on writing simple and readable code.

Chasing digital music's 'codec killers'. news.com is reporting that a list of CD Audio tracks are creating problems for any encoding process. When you end up encoding these tracks you will either get a blurry sound, or will hear a very unpleasent sound. Iam not sure whether this has been verified with every encoder out there, so thats a good exercise for me.

Real Video of Karan Thapar's interview with J. Jayalalitha

We had a pretty impressive showing at Convergence 2004. Press coverage here, here , here and here

Choose Your Competition. A nice and interesting article. The more i read Eric Sink, the more i become a fan of him!

Stumbled upon this website which allows Kerry supporters in safe states to exchange their votes with Ralph Nader supporters in the battleground states. So it works like this. A Kerry supporter in a 'safe' state will be paired up with a Nader supporter in a battleground state, and each will vote for the other in their respective states. Thus in battleground states, Kerry gets the Nader votes, and in the 'safe' states, Nader gets Kerry votes. So Nader can be happy that his overall vote doesn't get affected and Kerry is with a higher chance of winning the battleground states. Nice idea, but people wont have to go to this extremes if the US president is elected just based on popular vote!

Wooing the Geeks

The problem with Google desktop search that i mentioned in the previous post, is slashdotted. Some more interesting thoughts there.

Installed the Google Desktop search! Excellent tool. It finds strings from test files, word, excel, powerpoint, AOL IMs, and much much more. And the Google integration makes much more easier to access as one of the tabs when we launch the google website.
But iam already seeing a potential problem. As i try searching for some term, it shows up files from all the normally unreachable folders of my machine, ie, web cache and other files which i wouldn't like someone else using my PC to look at! Sure using preferences, you can specify which folders shouldn't be searched, but if you know all the folders that well on your PC, you wouldn't need a search, right? But i cant stop using this wonderful tool, just because of this minor concern, i just have to make sure no one else accesses my PCs in my absence from now on! :-)
Iam not sure when Google will get this on Linux as well.

The Many Hats of Software Development

Google Bangalore to be 'ideas' centre. Sounds interesting!

Microsoft is offering Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 for a 45 day trial download. This is a full feature time-out version.

Coverage of Sergey Brin and Larry Page's visit to India.

Economic Times
International Herald Tribune
The Hindu
Hindustan Times

A font primer for Linux

Another interview with Linus

A very interesting article on the recent acquisition spree of most of the large companies.

Now, Windows users can also use Gmail's 1 GB space as a filesystem to read/write files. The Gmail space will appear as a seperate drive on your PC. Its still in Beta, but well worth a try!

Alan Cox on writing better software

Listening to songs from 7G Rainbow Colony. Really love "Ninaithu Ninaithu" and "Kanaa Kaanum Kaalangal". Nice songs!

Gary Kasparov on the need for courage in chess and business.

Sandisk cruzer mini

Just bought a Sandisk Cruzer mini 256 MB. Had been forced to write CDs everytime i want to copy something between my PCs. This works great and pretty small too.

On the lines of Google labs, Yahoo! has this website for the future projects they are working on.

A good set of free online tech books

Today's print edition of the Wall Street Journal carries 4 full pages of advertisement for TamilNadu. Mostly about why Tamilnadu is a very attractive destination for foriegn investment. As has been the ritual for every advertisement from the Tamilnadu government, it carries a few pictures of J. Jayalalitha and a full page interview with her. The interview is worth a read. Couldn't find any links on this, though.