Now WTH is Blind Debugging? Well, thats what I have been doing for the past 2 weeks everyday for 14-16 hours a day! I am working on a new top secret project(!) where there is a lot of intercommunication happening between 2 systems. One of them is a master and one is a slave. The intercommunication happens with a list of complicated protocols. Now comes the bad part. I don’t have source code access to either of the systems and my task is to get some things working in both the systems!

 Available on: http://slideme.org/application/smsbiljett

This is for all the people who have been struggling to get a proper ticket on the buses run by Skånetrafiken in Sweden. As most of you are already aware, starting with 1st June 2011, Skånetrafiken local buses are not accepting any cash on board the bus to buy a ticket. One just has 2 options: either buy an SMS ticket or have a “Rabatt Kort”. As an outsider, it might be very difficult to get on a bus. Also the process of getting an SMS ticket is very cryptic. My new application SMS Biljett eases the process.

I received my free upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. Of course the free upgrade was free (as in beer) where I had to pay for the shipping charges, etc. which were more then standard shipping charges (around 17 USD). The other thing was that since I am living/working in Sweden, I got my upgrade in the Swedish language. The stupid thing about packaging for Windows 7 Home Premium (W7HP) was that one cannot change the language of installation. Now that was something which was available in Windows Vista Home Premium (WVHP) edition. No idea why it was removed from Windows 7. Maybe UI language elements were hard coded! I searched the net to find out that Microsoft only allows for language changes in Professional and Ultimate editions. That is not very nice to you Mr. Microsoft. It is stupidity to believe that all users in a particular region would want their OS base language of that particular region. But you may ask me as to why I did not order the English version of W7HP when I was ordering the upgrade? Well because I bought the desktop in Sweden and so it came loaded with a Swedish version of WVHP. Hence it automatically selected the Swedish version of W7HP because of Microsoft’s stupid policy to provide upgrade to Windows 7 in the same language as was in Windows Vista.

I was writing a small piece of code for Windows Mobile in C# and wanted to use GetKeyboardState() but after a lot of searching around found out that the API is not available. Also Mouse Hooks does not work in Windows Mobile. As simple as this information seems, it took me a lot of time to search and basically validate that information. Of course the various ideas and blog posts out there are pretty confusing and does not allow you to reach to a conclusion easily.

The topic is hot from the press, “iPhone 3GS suffers from heating issues”. According to reports, the new hardware which is deemed twice as fast as the original one also consumes more power and thereby heats up the device! Now was that a secret that more powerful hardware will consume more power and will need a better heat dissipation system? Heat dissipation and thermal issues are something that every hardware manufacturer is concerned from time immemorial. Thats why the microprocessor vendors had to stop pursuing higher clock speeds and focus on multiple cores instead. Also Intel had to redesign its heat sink architecture to support for higher heat dissipation rates and better thermal management.

Recently I was explaining a non-technical colleague of mine the differences between a source code and object code in our embedded platform and how we treat it from a legal perspective. I then searched the web for other related information and I found an excellent link which talks about expressiveness of the code be it a source or object or binary code. I totally agree with the interpretation in that paper.

Of course I am the critic reviewing the Raaz 2 movie by Mahesh Bhatt starring Imran Hasmi, …. , another actor and actress… What the fuck? What kind of critic am I when I don’t even remember the names of the actors/actresses in the movie? Well, never mind, infact after watching the movie, I felt that I had not only wasted 2.5 hours of my critical time but also wasted quite a lot of energy before the movie in speculation and raising serious expectations. So why am I wasting my time writing a review. Because there are lot of negative subtle messages in the movie which needs to be brought to light. Being an Indian and follower of Hindu religion, it amazes me that movies which are downright racist and making fun of the greatest religion in the world are made in India without any repurcursions neither from the media and nor from the people themselves. All of these does affect me since I am not living in India. Most of the people outside of India know about the great country from the movies which are produced there.

Recently I came across D programming language. It is the successor of c++ with some Java like features. Since I am a C/C++ lover, I have a stupid feeling when I start coding with either Java or C#. I still will give a try and see how many points does it gain on my scale. Though I haven’t seen any widespread use of D. D was invented by Walter Bright of DigitalMars in December 1999 (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?WhatIsD).