Arnab's Universe

I love feeding on bits of information. The world is full of interesting things and the Internet has a thousand ways of feeding you all that.

If you are not this type of a person – and like to live in your own shell (nothing bad with that) – you can stop reading now – and use your time well doing something else. Like living in your own shell.

Back to the topic – I do skim most of the info dished out at me. Some I keep in my “hmmm” folder of my brain (you guessed it – doesn’t stick long), some I delicious-mark. The rest are the really interesting ones – I find it hard to not share with people I know.

Like this – http://bit.ly/17q25 written by @zen_habits (this article is on how to use twitter well – I have a truckload, or maybe a trainload of people I know, who tell me – “What is twitter anyway? Just another Social Media Platform? Why would I want to go to yet another site? Is Facebook/Orkut/MySpace/insert-your-fav-social-media-network<insert-your-fav-social-nw> not enough already?” This is an</insert-your-fav-social-nw> excellent article on why and how twitter.)

How can I not make my friends read this?

No more – I just twit it now – with the knowledge that whoever wants to eat info-blurbs like I do will follow me and read it.

That’s why I urge you my friends/social-beings/netizens, give the article above a read – here it is again for effect – http://bit.ly/17q25

You can follow me if you like – http://twitter.com/or9ob Or check out the people I follow – there are some interesting folks – and follow them instead.

If you are still not convinced and take nothing else from this blog, take this back – you can rest assured that you’ll get spam from one less person now on.

Just learnt from @IndianGuru‘s tweet about RubyRef – it’s an iPhone app for Ruby Doc.

Sound like a nice idea – however redundancy was already a thought by the time I went to the Appstore to check it out. However I am spoilt by free iPhone app already – and seeing a tag of $0.99 I didn’t care to even try it. Here’s why –

1) There’s hardly any time I am coding Ruby/Rails I am not online. And there’s really great free doc (rubybrain, railsbrain, and the excellent one stop shop gotapi). When I have these at a keypress away, why will I turn to the iPhone?

2) I find myself copy-pasting most of the time I am looking up some obsecure Ruby functionality. Agreed, Ruby makes it concise. It’s not like you have to a) code up an Iterator, b) have a while loop to go thru it c) and finally iterate, like in some other languages – Ruby is good at being concise. But still, you gotta cut-paste sometimes right?

3) I find myself working with different Ruby/Rails versions all the time. Ruby 1.8.7/Rails 2.2 at home, Ruby 1.8.6/Rails 1.2 at work (don’t get it started on why) – so I find rubybrain/railsbrain very useful for this purpose. I haven’t tried RubyRef yet – but looking at the screenshots it probably supports one version. Especially with Rails evolving all the time, we definitely need something like that

4) I haven’t talked about ri/irb combo yet – I find them very useful for Ruby docs. Right in the shell, no context switch to move to the browser/phone. Even if you don’t use them, having a downloaded copy of the doc (from rubybrain for example) will probably be much more easier to refer to than the iPhone.

I mean, I don’t see myself coding Ruby/Rails without a computer (at least now). As long as I have a computer won’t ri/irb/rubybrain/downloaded-doc be easier to refer than the iPhone?

I had all the intentions of trying the app out – but given so many good, free alternatives I don’t think I’ll try a 99 cent app.

What about you?

So I have not blogged for the 2-3 months now… That consistently keeps going the other way of my resolution to blog more frequently. Twitter has not helped either – http://twitter.com/or9ob

I find that twitter adequately satisfies my urge to burp out bits of info effectively… and thousands of other excuses… So lets stop that thread right there and concentrate on how the year was instead.

At the start of the year, I had just moved into a new city. Another 2000-3000 miles away from home. And at least another 1500 miles away from anyone I could call a friend with an honest face (so that takes out Social Networking Online pals). Agreed I knew Diganta (from college) here – and he was a cool guy to hang with. But he lived in Bellevue (10 miles from Seattle) – I did not have a car and we probably met once in 2 weeks. And he moved back to India in Feb! I had moved from the safety and security of an Indian company into an entirely different kind of organization (I moved from Infosys to Amazon.com in Dec/Jan).

Looking back – it wasn’t a such a bad decision after all –

1) By now I have made a group of good friends – ok – you can’t make college buddies after starting work – but these are a cool bunch of guys. Apart from other things, playing cricket with this lot will be a memory to treasure. The feeling of doing consistently good in a sport is cool (our team, Eagles, finished 3rd in the Cricket league this year – and got promoted to the next division for the next season starting in Feb. And (to a bit of my surprize) I did really well!

2) No regrets about my job – actually with each passing day, I am liking it more and more. I think Amazon and the bunch of incredible enginners have opened me up to a new world. I always knew I loved tech – but not how much. It is definitely an experience to work in such an energetic company and work with such geeky (no offense at all) brilliant people.

3) Got exposed to Ruby! For me, getting exposed to Ruby was by pure chance. The group that I joined was heavily into Ruby and was probably in a handful of Ruby-pro teams in the company at that time. I was open to experiencing a new technology while joining but did not know that it will change how I think about programming. Ruby is now mainstream and by no means I am an early adopter – but I am thankful that I joined the boat early. I was thrilled when I had started to play with Java and all the cool stuff with it (Unit testing, Continous build/integration etc.) – but Ruby has fundamentally changed the way I think about Programming. It is a joy for me now – I think I am a better coder now and I am making the right moves in my career.

4) And most of all – I met this beautiful person – Ujwala. If there is such a thing, she definitely fits me! And the happiness is doubled when she also gives back as much as you do… (We are getting married in summer’09)

I could probably come up with a few other things – but these are the highlights. So, all in all, not a bad year at all. In fact, it could be the turning point of my career/life – time will tell when I revisit this in 5/10/15 years from now!

So -signing off on 2008 for now!

Update on 12/24 – finally updated the photos. They have come out really well! Here’s one of the sunset – http://tinyurl.com/ArnabPicsSunsetGC. And another one of the highway along the hauntingly beautiful landscape – http://tinyurl.com/ArnabHighwayGC.

View the full smugmug gallery: http://tinyurl.com/ArnabAlbumGC

• • *My Maa is here for a month. Reached here this week.

This weekend we (Maa, Ujwala and me) are off to Grand Coulee Dam – the biggest concrete dam in North America – generates about 6500 Mega Watts – the highest for any dam in the world.

The drive from Seattle is beautiful – it passes through the Seattle hills/lakes, the Snoqualmie area (water falls, snow-capped mountains and passes), beautiful farm-lands and then on to the arid eastern Washinton area. The route follows the Columbia river and there are some really amazing viewpoints over the gorges along the way. There is a sound and laser show on the dam every evening from 8:30 PM (May-September) – the lasers use the dam as the screen! It is supposedly the largest such sound and light show in the world! The Columbia rivers history is depicted – so all that this weekend.

and the trip weather looks good: weatherbonk link

Now I seriously didn’t expect this from Apple. I was so-waiting for the 2.1 update to iPhone – and iTunes couldn’t install it or me!

and look at the awesome error message!

Go Apple!

Update after fighting for 20 min or so: I did a restart of Windows and iTunes – still got the same error.

iTunes documentation says I might need to upgrade my iTunes. So I go and click Check for latest version – and hey I am already on the latest one (iTunes 8).

Then I tried to upgrade iPhone to 2.1 again – and this time it worked. I have to agree to one of my colleagues – is Apple going the Microsoft way???