Nirenjan’s Space

I got a bit of a shock when I opened my Yahoo! mailbox and saw the usage.

It’s a funny situation regarding my office mailbox. I take a day off and the next day I come back to find not one or two, but 48 new messages. To top it all, 45 of those are forwards. No wonder my mail server seems so slow…

While I was testing today, I found a peculiar similiarity between Greek and our own Tamil. The Greek word was Παλαιά which reads as “Palaia” (or “Palaya”) and the meaning is “Old”, atleast according to the manual I have in the office.

Yet another Deepavali has come and gone. I remember my childhood days when I’d have a lot of fun bursting crackers during the weeks preceding Deepavali itself. My uncle and I had great discussions regarding the Deepavali budget for crackers. He’d say Rs. 500 and I’d invariably order crackers for Rs. 1000. He indulged me back then. After the 7th standard when my parents, my sister and I moved to our present house, the want for crackers diminished, but not greatly. We’d go back there and burst more crackers for that old house had a huge garden which was suited for the “battle games” we’d play. We had a dog who was extremely fond of the crackers, especially those loud “Atom bombs”. He’d stay back until the bomb exploded and then start chasing the smoke trails. Sadly, his health was dwindling and his interest in the crackers as well. After he died, bursting crackers hasn’t been the same.

Slowly, my interest in crackers dwindled and my interest in computers increased day by day. My father’s office had given him a laptop for his use. The configuration was top of the line back then - 486DX2 50MHz, 8MB RAM, 250 MB hard disk, Windows 3.11. I succeeded in putting some DOS games, and invariably a few viruses into the laptop, which of course, had to be formatted to remove all traces of the viruses. My interest in crackers was still present, thought not much. But even that was lost once I bought my first desktop - a Pentium II with a 2.1GB hard disk, 32MB RAM and Windows 95. I’d be so engrossed in the games on the computer that I’d no longer burst crackers.

Although we no longer bought crackers, we still got some complimentary boxes from various places. When I totally lost interest in crackers, these were sitting idle, so the only thing left to do was to increase our distribution to the various people. Today, I dread the noisy sounds of Deepavali, a far cry from wanting to burst a 1000 wala back in 1996. The only wish I have is for a light filled Deepavali, not a sound filled one.

I don’t know if Guru’s site is up or not (seems extremely slow to me), so I’m just reposting this for everybody’s benefit. Guru’s site is back online, so there’s no need for an extra copy of an already long post.

The Deepavali edition of the CBM 2004 is taking place this Sunday, the 14th of November at 4:30 pm near the Schmidt memorial (yeah that big white hulk of crumbling rubble on Besant Nagar Beach), which is the usual spot for the meeting.

Check out Guru’s site for more details.

See you all there - hoping the rain doesn’t play spoilsport…

I’ve got a big project at work. There is a user interface which has to be tested. Sounds easy enough right? Actually, the problem lies in the fact that the UI is written for 11 different languages and I know only one of them…

What are the languages, you ask? English (the one I do know), French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and the last one which takes the cake - Greek. I’m only thankful they didn’t add Arabic and Japanese to the list…

It’s a kind of a pain in the butt. The software routine works if you run the program step by step, yet if you let it run all at one go, it screws up big time. This is enough to slow me down by a couple of days…

I got the Masala pack of Airtel activated yesterday and received the settings today morning. I’ve been playing around with the mobile browser all day. Surprisingly, I’ve been able to visit a lot of ordinary sites, including Kiruba.com and this very site which (to my knowledge) do not have WML files. The only thing is that only the text is shown and none of the images are present. Neither is JavaScript supported. But then again, it’s supposed to be free. As long as Airtel don’t present me with a bill for Rs. 1000 I don’t have any problems.