i’ve got a few options now. think of something technical, an issue i solved lately or some random technology i read about (like the ipad? ) and write something about it. but not feeling excited about the idea of doing that. even though its a fact that the 7-8 visitors i get daily (yeah you read it right, that’s it!) are the ones who search for my post on fixing webcam issue or generating combinations in PHP, i feel i should write some thing that i can read after years and feel good about or at least invoke some nostalgia.

so the next option would be to write about what has been happening in my life, my work, what’s going good, and what’s going extremely good etc. but i don’t know, i think i’ve become internet shy. i don’t feel like expressing myself or about my life in the internet anymore. i do use facebook or orkut, but only to see updates of my friends, their pictures, their activities etc, but i rarely update anything about myself or do any activity on it (apart from being addicted to farmville till i reached level 20 and it started becoming damn slow and i lost interest). i get a feeling, nah why would people want to read that, or hmm why the hell do they need to know of it!

after about thinking for 15 minutes now, i am able to come up with an option that would help me fill this blog post. since i used the word nostalgia a few minutes ago, i got a bit nostalgic and thought of writing something that i can remember about my school days. i do remember lot of things in my high school but i felt like recollecting things like in my primary school. the most memorable incidents i can remember of school life is getting on to the stage and presenting something in the assembly or for some CCA (co curricular activity). in my 12 years of school life maybe i would’ve gone on stage like 15 times. but each one of them were equally scary and exciting. the farthest i can think of is when i was in 3rd or 4th standard, that’ll be like 1994, thats like 16 years ago!!. i was asked to give a speech about Indira Gandhi on her birthday. My Dad being a good speaker, wrote me the complete speech. I still remember it had sentences like “Indira Gandhi helped in uplifting the downtrodden”. I don’t think i really understood at that age what that really meant. Dad even told me on which words to give stress on, how to stand on the stage and how to present it well. I practiced like lots and was all set for the speech day.

So it was time to present the speech. it was not exactly a stage but a small platform (i guess the platform is still there in front of our school, even though the place we used to have assembly has been occupied by big gardens! ), made in front of the school to hoist the flag. I started off with the words that anybody can utter any day (because its something that we heard everyday in the assembly) – “Respected Teachers and my Dear friends, today i’m going to present before you a speech about Indira Gandhi”. then silence. my mind went blank, i couldn’t remember anything, it was the first time my voice was being amplified through the mic. it was so weird to hear myself so loud enough that even people on the road could hear me! i try to speak and the voice won’t come out, hands and legs start to shiver. what was the first line, yes i can remember the down trodden line but what was the first line!. .. and so it was time to switch to plan B. thank god i had the speech neatly written and kept in my pocket, i wonder what i would’ve done if i didn’t have it with me, maybe i would’ve given up and just walked off, and later to feel humiliated and get bashing from the teachers?. omg!.. without no more hesitation took the paper out from my pocket and read the entire speech without any breaks!. even though during the speech many times i felt my throat go dry and wished i could get some water, i managed to finish it. and then the clap followed. not really because they listened or appreciated the speech, but because they do that automatically they hear the “Thank You” after every talk on the stage. But it was a relief, felt good. Mission Accomplished! oh yes, the mission to write a blog post too accomplished. even better, i got a title for the blog post too! – Mission Accomplished.

So here’s how you can download your entire site in one shot (sorry windows users this is only for linux). Many of you might be knowing it but thought it would be useful for those who were unaware of it. the easiest way is to use wget. it worked so smooth for me. here’s an example.

$  wget      --recursive     \
                 --no-clobber     \
                 --page-requisites   \
                 --html-extension \
                 --convert-links    \
                 --restrict-file-names=windows  \
                 --domains geocities.com    \
                 --no-parent          www.geocities.com/sonyontheweb/

Here’s where i downloaded my site to and its exactly the same as i had it on geocities. http://sony.sci-india.org/sonyontheweb/www.geocities.com/sonyontheweb/index.htm

Goodbye geocities! We all will miss you!

I got the hard copy of the zend certificate today. i had cleared the exam like a month back. with the certificate i got a sticker. stuck it on my cubicle.

The exam was not that tough. since i used to work with PHP i had a basic idea about all the things. i went through the study material on a weekend, revised it during the weekdays and took the exam on the next weekend. i guess i would’ve answered more than 75% of them correctly. the report they give doesn’t have any grade or marks. they just said PASS.

My name now shows up on the yellow pages too (here).

Some cases that do seem valid to me.

- i understand when some celebrities have a twitter account. it makes sense since they’ll be roaming around the world and they’ll be doing variety of stuff in their life which would be very interesting to the fans who follow him

- when news sites like cnn have a twitter its helpful since that helps you to get the news updates in a very short and quick manner

- that you got swine flu. would make a lot of sense so that people can stay away from you!

Some tweets i find weird and useless

- tweeint/RTing some links. why can’t they use some bookmarking sites or someting else to share these links. why bombard those links to all his followers who might not be interested to see it.

- tweeting very obvious/boring things like “went to office” . does it help somebody who search for “office” to realize that a person named you is going to office daily and is having no work to do and sends boring tweets??

- and most of the people twitter just to show off. for eg. “i’m waiting at the airport”, “i had pizzas for lunch”, “oh there’s a scratch on my new ipod” , “is working on some <jargon-here>!” , and some other tweets which only maybe intellects like Einstein can understand.

i wonder what Einstein would’ve tweeted if he was alive – “yay!, i figured out that E=MC^2″, that would’ve been a lot of information.

all these thoughts are making me nostalgic. everybody in their life would be feeling this. when they have to live alone depending on themselves. even though you earn a lot, not sure what to do with it or how to enjoy it. i still remember i used to collect money little by little and then buy some computer accessory. and the happiness you get at that time was awesome. it was a long wait and getting the thing you wanted. hmm, gone are those days. i just bought a 2.1 speaker last week. didn’t have to struggle to get money to buy it.. just a swipe of the credit card. now the speaker is in my front but i don’t feel the same happiness that i got when i bought it when i was at home. life is a big mystery. you never know what you really want in your life. is it money, is it lots of property? lots of happiness? lots of kids!?!? what’s it actually. ok let me not go into that infinite loop which doesn’t bring any answer.

i just opened this blog today and realized that i had written something only long time back. reading them i felt as if “did i really write them”. it was weird. . i sometimes feel that i can just start writing a novel. i feel like thoughts just flow from my mind. but it seems they are very random thoughts which any tom dick and harry can write. you talk about the tree then the apple then newton then mango then mango juice! what’s the fun in that? maybe some random freaky guy would enjoy reading it.

Picture Puzzle Game

Last week we celebrated Women’s day in our team. We all guys got together and planned something special for the ladies in our team. As part of it my task was to create some interesting game that the ladies could play. one suggestion was to have a picture puzzle game in which we make a collection of some hot bollywood actors and hide every picture with a matrix of squares. They get to chose the squares they want to open and the less no. of squares they open to guess the actor the more points they score. The previous night i tried searching a lot to get such an app. I was surprised that even though we see such applications in almost every quiz programs i couldn’t find any good app like that on the internet.

And finally i ended up creating the app myself. Didn’t take more than an hour (but had to really spend a lot of time to make that collection of bollywood actors). all i had to do was create some 50 divs (printed with a loop in PHP), float it inside a div that holds the picture, and for each of the divs give on click js action as this.style.visibility=”hidden”;. You can find the app here. Feel free to make a copy and use it if you want to. Happy Guessing!

Link to the app: http://sonyjose.in/labs/puzzle/puzzle.php

The movie was almost a disaster. The director has put in lots of efforts to make the movie very horrifying but somehow it didn’t seem to be and it was not at all captivating. The first half of the movie was good which gave some good hope and interest. But once the second half started it was pathetic. The whole story turned out to be so stupid in the second half. It was filled with some series of events which was very mediocre, and didn’t do justice to the story line that they had built up in the first half.

Kangana Ranaut has done a good job, she was the only character who was impressive. Director could’ve used her talent even more to make the movie better. The new hero Adhyayan Suman, did not seem impresive at all, even his lip syncs were incorrect at some point of time. The picturisation of the movie is something that i liked. The scenes would be really horrifying for kids. Even the animated graphics in the movie were decent. Compared to other indian horror movies that i’ve seen this movie is very much superior in terms of sound and visualization.

Only watch this movie if you are ready to forget about the storyline and is ready to enjoy the picturisation and sound. You can really enjoy the movie if you are in group and are ready to crack jokes and comments during the meant-to-be frigtening moments of the movie. If you are expecting to see a real horrifying movie then please don’t go for this. I would rate the movie 2/5.

Raaz – the mystery continues why the hell did we go for this movie ?? .

It was really a luck by chance that we got tickets for the movie “Luck by Chance”. Overall the movie is nice. But not an extremely good entertainer though. Had high exceptions about the movie since this was Farhan’s next movie after Rock On! (which was an awesome movie).

The movie is about the lives of few struggling actors who are trying hard to get a good break into bollywood. Farhan plays the role of a very confident guy who’s determined to become a big star and has been doing hard work for the same. the movie brings out some real truths about the lives of upcoming actors in bollywood. how they find it hard to make their way into the big screen in the presense of star kids (kids of yesteryear stars of the bollywood) who dominate the hindi film industry.

Unlike other hindi/indian movies the hero is not portrayed as the ideal human being (mariyada purishothaman ). in the movie the hero’s character does contain a bit of negativism. He is forced to follow a not-so-ideal path to reach stardom, which in a way brings out some truths about how things work out in this modern day world. Unlike majority of the conventional movies, the movie also has a realistic ending and not necessarily a happy one. Nice to see such bold experiments in hindi movies.

The movie is a bit dragging. It is more of a serious movie, lots of dialogues, which gets a bit boring at times. If you are looking for an entertainer then this is not the movie to see. But if you are looking for a movie with some real life situations this would be the one to look for. Few thing i liked about the film film – there are no fight seens, no masala songs and no out of the world heroism. Overall I liked the movie because of its realistic aproach. I would not be dong justice if i miss to mention that Farhan Akthar and Konkana Sen proves that they are extremely talented and have done a good job in this movie. If i’m asked to rate the movie ‘Luck By Chance’ i would rate it 3/5.

Life has been very monotonous. When i entered the IT industry about an year and a half back, had great expectations and was so much excited. all the excitement and enthusiasm are coming down, not really able to find what i really wanted. Oops, do i sound like desperate? No, i’m not, ok!!.

Yahoo! is a great company. There are many things i love about Yahoo!. For instance, the way information is free and accessible in Yahoo! is awesome. I get to interact with the GODs of the internet. I work for the Yahoo! Sports team. I do QA (testing). The Y! Sports development team is one of the best teams in entire Yahoo. Those guys really breath-eat-drink-sleep writing amazing code. They are pioneers in the latest of web technologies, whether it be high performance web-pages or flex or anything and everything.

KTHXBYE!

It had been a long time we were planning to go for some outing. Finally the day came. We had decided we are going to go somewhere trekking this weekend. Till saturday we just had a wage idea. Plans were not that solid. Had seen some good pics of sunrise in skandagiri so everybody wanted to do a (midnight?) trek to skandagiri. we were a bit skeptical about the idea of a midnight trek. but after reading numorous blogs about midnight treks to skandagiri we were convinced.

We took a car (ford icon) for rent. RP also decided to come so we had 2 cars and 7 people. Rohit, Royden, Sreejith, RP, Nimmi, Renu and me. We started of at 12 am. There was no much traffic. Enjoyed driving the ford icon. Nobody else was confident about driving so i had the luxury of driving the car. The road till new bangalore airport was super cool. The three lane road with very bright street lights. I could easily touch 110 kms/hr. Didn’t try beyond that, decided to be safe, afterall it was a rented car.

We reached chikaballapur comfortably, the route till there was pretty straight forward. we had some trouble finding the road to skandagiri from there.it was difficult to find somebody at that time of night to ask the way. we took a left from the main road and kept on going some 5km and we were reaching nowhere. it was kindof scary . we tracked back and finally got the right direction from one person. He told us that don’t ask for skandagiri but for kalvarbett. skandagiri and kalvarbett are the same. only then nimmi, renu and rp realized that they had already done a trek at kalvarbett. but they kindof comforted themselves saying that the other one was a day trek but this one we’ll be seeing the scenic sunrise.

We started trekking uphill by around 2:30 am. We got a guide (for rs. 450). It was pretty dark and it didn’t make sense to try trekking without a guide. it would be difficult for us first-timers to find the way. everybody started with full of energy but as we progressed little bit few among us started realizing that its not gonna be that easy. RP even started saying that he doesn’t want to continue and that he’ll stay there itself. then we took some timely rests, and convinced him and proceeded. it started raining slowly and it was very cold. the guide was going in front so easily in his rubber slippers and we were finding it hard with our branded shoes to climb up.

We reached hill top by around 4:45. oh man it was damn cold. and cold wind was blowing. there were lots of people in the hill top. it was like a crowded bus stop (rohit’s words). None of us were able to bear the cold so decided to have a camp fire. there were locals who were doing business of campfire too. we got one for us rs. 80. all of us sat around it and was trying to get some heat from the fire.

Slowly the darkness started going away. All of us were hoping to see the sun rise, but bad luck we couldn’t even spot the sun. It was very cloudy and we missed the sunrise. but then we didn’t crib about it, we decided to try some photography. we climbed upto the small fort(should be the highest point in the hill) and then took pics. we also tried taking pics of we jumping high. it was real fun. we also were trying out different attitude poses. some of the pics turned out really good and few others very funny. we explored a quite place in the hill top and we sat down to have the breakfast. we had carried some bread and some other food items.

We started the descend by around 7:30. It was cold and also lots of mist was there. it was difficult to see things beyond a limit. coming down was much easier. but we had to be extra careful because all the rocks were wet due to the mist. many a times we slipped but managed to keep the balance. coming down was really enjoyable we took lots of time, took breaks, took lots of pics. reached down by around 10:30.

All of us were damn tired and now the only thought was to reach home and jump in to the bed. everybody started sleeping in the car. i was finding it hard to control my sleep, kept some music and kept eating some biscuits to make sure i don’t sleep off . the traffic was more compared to the night drive. so had to drive slower. reached home by around 1:30.

It was a good experience. Enjoyable. Exciting.