I follow a few friends’ linkblogs and find them quite useful. So I thought why not add one for my site too? I’ve now added the linkblog in the sidebar.

If you want to directly read the linkblog, here are the links (kinda recursive, ain’t it?):

• Linkblog page
• Linkblog RSS feed

Mulayam Singh Yadav says that English is the “the language of destruction, which has had a telling impact on the economy of India”.

It actually reminded me of an incident a few years ago. My family and myself were on a trip (somewhere in Karnataka, I don’t remember the actual destination) and on the way, we stopped by a lake. There was a huge commotion there. Somebody drowned. He was a student and had come with his friends from North India.

There was a warning sign in front of the lake not to enter the lake because it is dangerous. But it was written in Kannada. Those students couldn’t read or understand it. When his friends discovered that one of their group is drowning, they started shouting for help. A few people came rushing in but they didn’t understand Hindi, so they didn’t understand what was going on.

When my father and myself went to ask what was going on, the localite spoke to us in Kannada and said that if he knew about the drowning person, he could’ve jumped into the lake and saved that person, but he didn’t understand what the students were shouting about.

Now, consider this. If both of them knew a common language, wouldn’t a person’s life been saved?

That common language happens to be English in India. Now, imagine these kind of scenarios on a scale of 1,080,264,388 … we would have had utter chaos.

I hope people (like the person in question) forget their so-called ideologies and adopt some pragmatism instead.

Programmers are always on a never-ending quest for proper design of software. One of the buzzwords in this area is aspect oriented programming. I have heard of AspectJ and other stuff before but never cared/understood enough to take a look at it.

Recently, I came across the TreeCC program used in DotGNU and was amazed by its simplicity. Rhys Weatherley has written a neat and simple essay on TreeCC - it was an eye-opener for me on how proper object oriented design doesn’t always mean proper inheritance hierarchy or proper method overriding - it simply means a clean separation of concerns and concepts. This essay is a must-read for any programmer interested in good design, especially in compiler writing.

IronPython has been released as open source!! Get it while it’s hot at IronPython.com !

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

I finally got a decent 2nd line internet connection from BSNL - it’s great! It is an ordinary telephone line connection but I have never seen 4-5 kbps average download speed on a telephone line before. I then found out that my friends too surf mostly on Linux because it is a lot faster than Windows even with the same phone line!

So finally exams are over! I saw Varsham yesterday in Pallavi theatre. It was a streeeeeetched movie. These guys are so talented that they copied two scenes from Matrix and were able to convert it into a 3 hour movie! But some of the songs and jokes were good. Overall? Just time pass, yaar. But the songs are really really good.

On a completely different note, me and my friends decided to go to Lalbagh today for a jog. When we reached the Glass House, a couple of Doordarshan guys came over, stuck a camera in my face (while my friends fled) and asked me about the latest developments regarding Lalbagh. It went something like this:

Interviewer: The flower show will not be held inside the glass house anymore. What’s your opinion?

Me: Well, it’s a good idea considering that maintenance of the glass house has been so much of a problem. albagh is so big - they can have the flower show anywhere.

Interviewer: Lalbagh is being handed over to BDA. What’s your opinion?

Me: Jayakar Jerome has been doing such a terrific job. I’m sure Lalbagh will improve now that BDA is taking care of it. I have full confidence in Mr. Jerome.

Now, what’s the channel number of Doordarshan on my TV… hmmm…