Fancy this Jam?

Hmm, some people say Google has the potential to be the new evil post M$. But you got to admit, there are some things which they do pretty well. Amongst that list, is the Google Code Jam. I participated in it once 3-4 years back. I would say it is kinda favored to those who are used to heavy API based C++, Java programming. More so for string manipulation based programming. For me, who has been mostly doing do-everything-yourself C language coding, it gets a bit (not very though and this is not to discourage C coders at all!) tough timewise. But nonetheless its a pretty interesting activity to participate in. Click here for this years details. Happy Code Jamming!

Get and Spread FireFox!!

One way to take a stab at M$'s evil world domination plans. Replace Internet Explorer with the Firefox browser! Infact 17th June is download firefox day and they are aiming to set a Guinness World Record by targetting 5 million downloads in a single day (scratch, scratch - no one knows the existing download record though).

I have already downloaded and added my 1 to the global counter :). Infact downloads from India seem to be around the 35,000 mark. Wake up Indians! download now!

The global count appears close to the 5 million mark already! Check it out here!!

(P.S. This posting was done out of Firefox 3 :))
And here is my certificate!

Coordinated debugging

I code in C mostly. I err and hence I debug too once in a while :). Have been using plain gdb for user-land program debugging for quite a while and it serves all my needs. Fast, from the command line, all the required bells and whistles (including readline) and I don't need no more.

And I even wonder how people use bulky IDEs like eclipse just to debug their programs! But lately, I wanted to browse the source code automatically while debugging. The alt-tab combinations to switch from gdb back to my source files in vim was getting a bit too tardy for me. And I had actually started considering thinking about an IDE (yuck...). But no more, presenting gdbtui!

Its gdb itself, but with the added convenience of co-ordinated source code browsing from within the terminal window itself! I was definitely happy to discover this gdb add-on today! Here is a screenshot that someone posted on flickr for you guys too. Definitely worth a try!

RailsConf - Day 4

Final day! We had to check out from the hotel in the morning itself. Denis, George are seasoned travellers and they were all ready and packed up at breakfast time! I was having some trouble adjusting to the additional 3 hours of lag introduced by travelling from the east to the western parts and arrived late for the breakfast too because of it. Denis then told me to check out of the room in 5 minutes. I made it in time by unceremoniously stuffing clothes, etc into the bag. My bag is a bit heavy. I always commit the mistake of carrying more clothes that I end up wearing on my visits :(.

Denis/George were going to speak about our RubyES - Ruby Enterprise Stack using PostgreSQL. We reached the convention center and prepared some pamphlets to spread the word about our session which was at 10:45 AM. Since it was the last day, the crowd was somewhat thinner at the venue than before. The session went well with a good round of Q & A at the end. Go here if you want to learn more and would like to play around with the stack. And if you want to know what I did in this stack, you can check out my screencast here too. The screencast was created using Jing. Check it out, my voice shouldn't scare you away :)

It was a half day session and our flight was at 9:55 PM. So we spent the remaining time at the bar in the Marriott that we had been staying in. We watched a bit of Shallow Hal, with Jack Black still being funny everytime I watch it. Denis and I also nursed some beers. I also had a shot of Goldschlager (which actually contains pure gold in it!) towards the end to get me into a sleepy mood for the flight :)

Got on to the flight to end my first RailsConf. It was not too bad!

RailsConf - Day 3

Day 3 was the last day for the exhibitions. So we again had good attendance at our booth. One thing that we noted was that all people tend to use MySQL as their database of choice just because everyone else is using it! Many did not understand the difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL and hence why they should use PostgreSQL in the first place. All of us tried to explain as best as we could but here is a link which explains in greater detail as to why PostgreSQL is a much better choice as compared to MySQL.

The breakfast and the lunch facilities during the conf were excellent and the Portland Convention Center is a huge facility indeed. But since there were so many attending the conference, it was pretty hard to get onto the wireless network there. One thing though that gave me some sort of a complex during the conf was that almost everyone who came to the conf were using the Apple Macs! I felt out of place with my lenovo thinkpad there :). Also many companies like Sun, Thoughtworks held a lucky draw and the winners were awarded free Mac Airbooks towards the close of the third day! Yup, I did enter but was not lucky this time around. Maybe next year. I did get my share of free tshirts though ;)

We ended the day by having dinner at a sports bar where I introduced Denis, George to some cool Ultimate Fighting Championship fights :). Denis refused to believe that it is a sport as he likened it to dog fights.

Saturday was also the occasion of the Rose Starlight Parade and Marathon so there were a lot of people out on the streets. It was good for me to see families sitting along side the road waiting for the marathon and the parade to pass by. I stayed around for a while to cheer up the guys participating in the marathon, but as it got a bit chilly later, I prefer to watch some of the action from the comfort of my hotel room before retiring to bed. Final day coming up tommorrow!