Nay, it is God. Coupled with the usual unix shell commands, a bit of awk and a dash of sed, there’s no limit to what you can do with perl. I’ve been dabbling around with the scripting language for years, but when they landed me at the client site (which at times can be like sitting next to the mega-ton class bomb you helped build), I had to apply it in earnest.

So the PM asks me to fish out some trades that meet a very specific set of criteria from our text records. This of course, is in the aftermath of yesterday’s tumble in the US markets. The conditions are distributed among many multi-gigabyte files and I open my mouth to say “impossible” with a Dilbert-esque wave of my hand but I end up saying “very very difficult”. She says to give it a shot and I dive into the scripting. Three hours, 300 lines of perl later I have it. And I do my “I feel good, ta da da da da da da, I feeeeel good…” song and dance, which I do in place on my seat. Those who have seen it would tell you what a rare sight this is. That just lightened up an otherwise gloomy day. Now I’m not even going to look at my C++ until I know it can’t be done in perl.

The chocolate covered ’space’ cake I got for the engineering team. Looks like the ordinary outof Fabulous but that’s just camouflage. Guess everybody’ll be as high as U-2s and singing “Yo ho and UP she rises” by the end of the day. Surprise surprise. Only hope Rover’d be there for ground handling once it arrive. To be delivered pronto now. Let’s see. Hmm.. Just feel a bit nervous but this is going to by fun.

Yes that’s true. ConnectU sues Facebook for Code theft. They say that the university student they hired to code for them stole their IDEAS & created facebook, & now connectU claims the ownership of Facebook.
Facebook is very popular by the time but connectU has fallen short.
Facebook created by Mark Zuckerberg is having a 31M user base & ConnectU has a 70k user base. Things will be restarted by 8th august.

due to unavailability of INETA speakers.. we had to postpone the deep-dive ..sorry guys

new dates will be announced soon, when we get a confirmation from INETA

Sounds weird? Firefox now has it’s own social networking platform. Firefox lovers come & join. You ca post photos,videos, find friends who are using Firefox & it will be a better helping platform for Fx I guess. I’m already there as chanux fox [First Sri Lankan ] . ah…It’s name is “SPOT THE FOX“. So go now & be a part.

Once you’ve been to Broadway, you sort of have to reassess your, er, assessment of the Colombo theater scene, which, from what I hear, has fallen into some disrepute.

So I finally did Broadway. Went to see the allegedly “global smash-hit” Mama Mia at the Winter Garden Theater (50th street on Broadway). The performance exceeded my expectations primarily because I expected it to be a girlie flop (and no, in this context, ‘girlie’ is not meant to mean ’scantily clad’). The musical featured most of Abba’s best hits, sometimes with slightly changed lyrics. I recovered from my Abba craze about ten years ago, but the performance was quite agreeable. The lead actress (the daughter) could use a few more singing lessons though.

It’s obviously not fair to compare Broadway and the Lionel Wendt, but here goes. The biggest difference, I guess is how natural the acting and dialogs are compared to local theater. Maybe it has something to do with how well an accent like the Sri Lankan accent be both natural and loud enough at the same time. Or maybe our actors are a bit too melodramatic. I really don’t think it has much to do with budget. Mama Mia had only one set that revolved to represent two locations, one elevated platform and only a few props (compared to all the bells and whistles we had in Venice). The last scene was a masterpiece (spoiler): two people silhouetted against a large moon may look cliché in a romantic movie, but on stage it looked spectacular. The effect was achieved with simple light projection. Not too many points for storyline, but that wasn’t what I was there for anyway. Oh, and less slapstick than what you’d get from a typical Stagelight and Magic production.

Getting to the theater was a drama on it’s own. The five of us boarded the subway from downtown Manhattan on a train that we thought was going uptown (our ‘leader’ had been here for years, so we followed him into the train without any doubt). A few stops later I vaguely hear “this train is… Brooklyn-bound” among the usually indecipherable subway-ese announcements. Panic begins to set in as the three guys realize the train just left the last stop in Manhattan island in the wrong direction (Brooklyn is south of Manhattan, on the other shore). Panic worsens as we realize that we have only 30 minutes to make it to the theater and that somebody has to tell the girls. Surprisingly, they neither cry nor throw things when we tell them. We make it to the theater with just one minute to spare. So everything is super, except that I have to rubberneck to see the far left corner of the stage. Dear big-haired gentleman sitting in front of Center Orchestra row T 109, I hope you’re happy…

A Rafale from Aeronavale Task Force 473 performs a touch-n-go on USS John Stennis, with PIGDIN in foreground

IMing is not something I do to live, but a subprocess of my day job. But on first day at work I found out all the engineers were connected via Y! IM network so we could talk without leaving desks. Previously I used Google Talk in Web, but since we were in Y! I had to use the Y! Messenger briefly. Then I remembered that old copy of GAIM I used to have on some dusty CD and brought it in and installed it. Since then stuff has been flowless [other than ogling Y!’s Weather feature plugin while I briefly used another engineer’s computer]. GAIM sometimes was a bit reluctant with file transfers, especially incoming. Then suddenly and inexplicably I lost smileys. Today I got the newest version of GAIM [I woke up in the morning and thought ‘I’m going to get the latest GAIM version today!’], renamed Pigdin apparently due to some lawsuit with AOL. It’s excelent but everyone is stuck with Y!’s messenger I don’t know why. I got the spellcheck feature by accident actually, but it’s cool. The interface is markedly polished, and processes have slightly changed, but Gaim is still Gaim.