Mockingbird Nest

After a long hiatus I have decided to start posting again. Let's see if I can do it this time :-)

 

Recently I saw some demonstrations of IP-TV. Believe me or not but this is the future of television. Here is an excellent article by Seattle Times on Microsoft's role in the next generation of TV services

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002551027_msfttv10.html 

Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple and a professed Microsoft hater, has developed a cult status in the world of Software and Business. He came back from nothing and created the IPOD phenomenon and got the company back on his feet.

He gave a speech at Stanford University's graduation cermony to motivate and encourage young people who are just starting their career.

It is an interesting read. It can be found at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html 

I also recently read in an article that when he was young he was roaming in India and other countries with almost no money

Speaking of motivation for people entering their careers, I read an interesting book called "Nobodies to Somebodies- How 100 careers got their start." about this topic. The authod of this book is a Microsoft employee and I came to know of this book in an internal website. I have finished this book, and I will be posting chapter by chapter summary of what I learnt.

Microsoft has turned 30, we had a company meeting which had the same theme. This milestone has recieved lot of press in both positive and negative terms.

Microsoft has a website showcasing some of the achievements over the last 30 years.

Check it out at: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/goingbeyond/indexFlash.html

 

 

Today I was reading Effective C++ , by Scott Meyers  which is one of the best books on C++ (albeit for advanced users) and I remember that I had the good fortune to hear Scott Meyers speak.  Two weeks ago I attend the NorthWest C++ User Groups meeting. This is a user group of C++ developers mostly from Seattle area who meet once in a month to attend a talk and socialize. Scott is an amazing spearker, I was anticipating a good talk as his writing style is equally interesting.

I have read this book once already, but now that I read through it again I feel I am learning lot of new things. If you are programming in C++, I will strongly recommend having this book in your arsenal.

 

We are juicing up our bedroom and making it more up-to-date. One of things I am doing is changing all the receptacles (sockets for plugs) with new ones from Home Depot. I had changed some of them previously in the living room and other rooms, so I was fairly confident. I turned off the power supply and I did not check each receptacles individually but changed all of them together. When I turned the powe on, the breaker tripped. Obviously I had a short-circuit somewhere. I suspected that one one the receptacles might be guilty and I opened it again and tried it again, it still won't work. Then I tried with with couple of other ones and I finally isolated a receptacle that seemed to be causing the problem. Then I tried wiring it correctly and it just won't work.

So, what's the relationship between memory leaks and shorted Electrical Wiring. Programmers reading the blog will appreciate the mess and trouble it is to debug a memory leak in a program. The approach used to find the leak and fix it can sometimes be similar to the above experience. You see crashes and errors in your program but you are not quite sure how to get to the root cause of the problem. Sometime it takes hours and maybe even days before the leak can be found. My experience with the electrical socket was similar, the real problem was somewhere I was not expecting it at all. After fixing it, everything worked honky dory...

 

While Studying in Roorkee we accidentaly laid our hands on a magazine called JAM . I think it was brought in the dorm by Gaur, via Delhi. We all fell in love with the tongue-in-cheek humor related to college life. I accidentally browsed onto the blog of its editor. Through her blog I realized that there is an active community of Indians who are blogging away. Her blog has very interesting articles pertaining to youth in India