Friday 2 January 2015

Yet Another New Year

Welcome to the turn of the calendar and an increment to a number. Hope something exciting and not-done-in-the-past kind of initiative happens. In your lives and mine.

Unlike last year's first post, I wouldn't be specifying quantified targets for myself on the personal front. But, one thing that I learnt during 2014 was that online presence is a key differentiator/value-add in the current times. Check Michael Peggs if you are not sure about it.

Therefore I will just have the numbers denoting my online presence at the beginning of the year, which I will compare with those at the end. They are:
Twitter -- 2440 tweets, following 15, 62 followers
Facebook -- 320 friends, member of 22 groups
Blogger -- 103 posts (including 40 in LiveJournal)
Short films -- Ray Mahruwi Productions = 7
Github -- 2 repositories; raygate = 560 KB, ruwi = 228 KB
My main statement during 2014, if I may characterize it so, has been the MH T-F-B rule :
Tweet your thought, Facebook your fun and Blog your business. Complementary to my 3-2-1 rule.
The 3-2-1 rule is:
Post 3 tweets per day, 2 FB updates a week and 1 blog post per month. More is better.

There is some automatic behavioral pattern of a person on each of the social media and you project one kind of persona at each place. Think what you post and don't post on LinkedIn.

Some times I start writing a FB update and then wonder whether it should be a blog post, rather than a FB update. But then the MH-T-F-B rule kicks in and asserts that size does not matter, nature does. So, if it is fun, it stays on Facebook, even if you like the way you have authored it and the number of words it developed into.

But one can deviate from this rule. After all, this is the new year. And my rule is not mandated by the site or the Government. So I have selected three such FB updates and am collating them here, for a one-of-a-year kind of blog post. Hope you read and enjoy. And have a masterpiece of year ahead.


A. 13-Dec-2014
I think I may have been posting too much of short films stuff on my FB page. My philosophy (oh wow, I too have a philosophy) is : Tweet your thought, blog your business and facebook your fun. And software is business and short films are fun. But I realize you have to intermix the three tools. Too many short film updates and no software updates makes jack a dull boy.

So here are a couple of WTFs that I went through recently. By the way, WTF is not what you think, it is web-technology-funda that is something you discover while doing programming of web applications.

First, you know your Eclipse java is 1.7 and you have set it as your workspace & project version and everything works fine. But then you bring maven and it starts complaining it cannot find tools.jar. This leads to a few head scratches because you know in the file browser that the jdk1.7/lib has tools.jar. So wtf, wtf, wtf, echoes in your mind. This time, wtf is what you think it is and not the funda one.

So then after a lot of stares, you narrow your eyes and see that the maven error message is trying to find tools.jar in the jre/../lib folder. For the non-programmers and non-command-prompt-users: double dots means one directory up. So maven goes one directory up and then goes into the lib folder and searches there.

Then you narrow your eyes further down and then discover that the jre you pointed to is a root jre and there is no folder one level up to go to and find a lib folder. The jre probably came when one of the sites I visited asked that it requires Java to run and I said yes. Shit, how were the classes compiling all these days? Probably from built-in eclipse jdk or something. Whatever!!

Then the idea strikes, and you change the installed jre in eclipse to the jre inside the jdk and not what the oracle guys installed for run time of their marketing apps. And then maven finds tools.jar. Phew!!

WTF (web-technology-funda) : always point to the jre inside your jdk, and keep this as a first checkpoint in your mental Eclipse check list.

The second WTF is, even after configuring your eclipse project to java 7, maven does not compile multi-catch statement as it is not supported in source 1.5. Once again wtf, wtf, wtf, echoes your mind. This wtf is what you think it is and not the funda one. You are sure you have had jdk1.7 configured in the previous step.

So you stackoverflow and stackoverflow. For the non-programmers: what this means you search and navigate the questions in stackoverflow.com. After a futile search, you google and google. This does not need explanation. Google as a verb means search the web using Google.

Then after a lot of futile hits, hidden in the apache website pages, you will find a note: "Also note that at present the default source setting is 1.5 and the default target setting is 1.5, independently of the JDK you run Maven with. If you want to change these defaults, you should set source and target."

Why the heck can't maven plugin for eclipse detect the java version and default to it. I can understand the raw plugin from apache as to their default, but m2e developers can and should do this extra step.

So you add the following xml to your pom.xml and get rid of the unable to compile error.

WTF (web-technology-funda) : Make sure pom.xml maven compiler is also configured to the java version you want to use, as follows:
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<version>3.2</version>
<configuration>
<source>1.7</source>
<target>1.7</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>

B. 13-Jul-2014
MH philosophies and insights
========================
  • Hum vote lagate hain, sarkar wat lagati hain. If you are upset that onions cost 15 Rs/kg and frustrated that you have power cuts for 2 hours per day, then you vote a new government in, and get to buy onions at 45 Rs/kg and have power cuts for 6 hours per day.
  • If you want a small car buy Maruti Swift, if you want a big car buy Toyota Innova. Any other car does not give enough reason or value for your money.
  • The best place to cut your nose hair is the car, using the rear view mirror.
  • Too much discipline is indiscipline.
  • If you can't take more than one philosophy in life and can have only one as your guide here it is : "Find what you love and let it kill you" (by Charles Bukowski).
  • If you want a funny moment all by yourself, shave your right armpit with your left hand (if you are a rightie) or left armpit with your right hand (if you are a leftie) and slow dance as you do it.
C. 27-Jan-2014
What a hectic weekend. Met Nadia briefly on Friday evening with a friend, sent a couple of official emails from home because could not send them from office as the day went freaking fast with discussions, scoured through a dozen magazines, and then the Airtel 3G dongle went phut.... so kept calling Airtel support and fought with the guy till 4 a.m. in the morning, sorry Mahesh (airtel guy) you guys suck, you could not even tell how much was my usage so far in the plan, realized that the issue is not getting anywhere. Saturday, first thing called Beam cable, gave the sales guy a copy of Aadhar card and a passport size photo, booked the 4 Mbps plan, paid him six months rent, later went to Bharat gas to submit Aadhar card, and in the evening watched Yevadu at Vishwanath, Kukatpally, helped by Azeem (my brother in law) who had taken the tickets and sent it to the theatre through an associate. Kinda liked the movie, don't look at me like I'm crazy, it's easy to make an intellectual art movie and earn reputation, it's difficult to make a masala movie and make money. Sunday, Beam guy came and laid the cable into the house, then a home lunch consisting of rice, chicken and charu, followed by Beam net connection enablement late afternoon, so just browsed at Beam speed (long live capitalism and competition, fuck you Airtel 3G), felt like surfing on steroids, updated the brew packages on my iMac, then went to RK Plex, Banjara Hills where Rayyan played bowling for the first time at Spin Bottle and Bowling followed by barbecue dinner, unlimited barbecues and buffet, mocktails and lots of Kinley bottled water at Unique barbeque and was watching Katrina Kaif's Kamli song of Dhoom - 3 on big screen but unable to hear the song due to the blaring music, caused a revelation. Which is Katrina Kaif's inner thighs convey more emotions than her face. Phew!!!!!

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