I am watching the transit of Venus across the Sun. Cool!

Gregory (coulix-at-ozforces-dot-com-dot-au) is planning to translate my book to French during his upcoming semester break. He is from New Caledonia (a small French island in the pacific) and is now studying Computer science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He says that translating the book will allow him to get more skills and be useful at the same time!

Yesterday was such a blast with all my friends! 8 of us travelling on 4 bikes leaving at 4.30 am to travel more than 110 km (one-way, total of 220 km for the day) to go see a mango grove!!

We were woken up by each other through sms’es and calls to our mobile phones. We were going to Vinay’s town ‘Srinivasapura’ to see his mango farm. Biking long distances early in the morning is a total high for me! We were singing and joking and just enjoying the atmosphere. After finally reaching Srinivasapura, we had a scrumptious breakfast prepared by Vinay’s mom and sister. Then, we left for the grove. After some confusion (since Vinay didn’t know which farm was his….just kidding!!), we entered the place and we were just in awe at the grove. So much lush greenery and such huge mangoes!!

After eating some delicious raw mangoes (‘maavinakai’) and mango fruits (‘maavinahannu’), we started playing games. Believe it or not, we actually played hide-and-seek in the farm!! We climbed up the trees and were hiding in them! It was silly but it was so much fun

Then, we just took a walk around the grove and I was amazed to find out that their farm was about 15 acres! I could imagine going for a jog everyday if I lived there! Ha Ha. Then, finally all of us got back to our base, Vinay’s place. After a minor accident and setbacks, we took a walk around Srinivasapura having some delicious never-had-before-dishes such as ‘bread bonda’ and ‘Nannari drink’, we were just full.

Then, finally, we came back home and many in our group wanted to send sms’es but since there was no network, we had to climb to the terrace to get proper network. The taller ones helped out the shorter ones to send the messages by holding it high enough!!

We were all so bushed by the activities throughout the day, that we got some solid sleep. If I hadn’t kept an alarm in the mobile phone, we probably wouldn’t have woken up early enough the next day! We got up at 4.15 and then got ready to leave by 5. We were having so much fun on the road we converted a 2-hour journey into a 3-and-a-half hour journey!

Finally we reached Bangalore (I realized it because of the pollution), I got home, got ready, ate breakfast and came to Yahoo!

Life is back to ‘normal’…

We all thank Vinay for being such a good host and making sure we had such a great time!

Note: Snaps coming soon to a blog near you….!

There have been more than 3273 pageviews in the last 5 days (02/06/2004-06/06/2004). The majority of readers are, in order, from net, com and edu domains, Australia, Germany, India, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Finland, France, Netherlands, Austria, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, USA Military, Denmark, Poland, Israel, Switzerland, USA Government, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Mexico, Slovak Republic, Chile, Bermuda, Belgium, China, United States, Iceland, Romania, Turkey, Malta, Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, Greece, Malaysia, Thailand, Phillippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Croatia, United Arab Emirates, ….!

For more such updates, always check the home page.

My book is the top Tech Tip in the ComputerWorld.com AppDev Center today!

You can also access the story directly.

Sun is going to open source Java!! – now this is something really cool. The one thing that immediately comes to mind is that all Linux distributions can start distributing Java in the CDs itself and more software can be written utilising Java. So it’s a win-win situation for both the open source community as well as Sun Microsystems as well. The flip side is that it may lead to incompatibility issues if there is forking of the JVM but I think this issue may not be as big. After all, there is only one Perl base code out there…

Update: Sun has not made a decision to open source Java

As Forrest Gump’s mom says “Life’s like a box of chocolates – you never know what you gonna get”… You want to find out right now but you just can’t yet… There’s always a mystery… about my future and my history… On what could be and what could have been… But as far I’ve seen… There will be ups and downs… There will be smiles and frowns… There will be work and there will be fun… There will be struggles lost and won… I wanna live life to the fullest… I have this incredible zest… So much to do and so much to see… I invite you, my friend, to join me in this journey…

• ‘The G2′ Swaroop

Here’s something that’s really cool, a C Compiler written in Python! This is fascinating. I think it would be perfect for people like me who want to study a compiler – Reading Python code is a big bonus and it is a compiler for the C language which is the mother of all modern languages. I wonder how easy it is to make changes to this compiler…

I just wrote the only paper in our last semester of B.E. – Cryptography and Network Security (CNS for short). It was a tough paper! The questions focused on small things such as Hill Cipher for 20 marks! And the others were questions where we were clueless. It’s not fair. We chose a tough subject like this one because we wanted to ‘learn’ something and not study Management In Engineering (MIE) where questions like ‘Explain the difference between CV and resume’ fetches 10 marks! And that too, they get an easy paper!

I guess, VTU is not the place where you want to ‘learn’. It’s the place where you learn things by rote, write long answers with proper underlining and get ‘good marks’. It’s not the first time I’ve felt this way.

Juniors, one piece of advice, choose the path of least effort when choosing VTU electives. I’ve been bitten by wanting to ‘learn’ and by experience, my advice is to learn on your own. For example, since we are relatively free during 8th semester, I was able to do some productive work like my my book on Python.

At the end of the day yesterday, I joked (but unfortunately not smiling) that CNS stands for ‘Continue Next Semester’.

Thank god for my friends who helped me get out of my dejected mood.

Mono Beta 2 released! Wow, Miguel, Maurer, Pryor, Gonzalo, Kestner and the rest of the gang are really moving fast! Lots of improvements have been made especially the bug-fixing and performance enhancements. Can’t wait till 1.0!

If only, it worked on FreeBSD – my only gripe yet