Chatman Diary

Very soon, we all will be mature and morose enough not to act dumb or randomly. Let us take this opportunity to do some crazy things that we’ll remember forever.

I feel sad at times to look back on things to realize what all we could do before and cannot now.

1. We could bunk classes, we can’t bunk office.
2. We could hang out with friends, we can’t any longer.
3. We could chat with friends on the phone almost daily, now once a week feels frequent.
4. We could get the bikes and hit the road, pick buddies from their homes and go on trips. Now we need to plan months in advance.
5. We could say/do dumb things all day, now we better get our act together (we are professionals).
6. We could blow up all pocket money on food/drinks in one shot, now we better save to ensure sustenance till end of month.
7. We could go on college fests, take part in contests. But now, we just have meetings to attend in office.
8. We could go to movies (even if 1 hour later than the start) any time, any day we wanted to. Now we have to wait for the weekends, and might still not have company of enough good friends.

Life has become more serious than ever before. 2.5 years into the professional life, I feel things are going to get further downhill from now. The fun days are behind us. Period.

The year seems to be coming to an end. 2011 was one of the bad ones in life for various reasons. It is impossible to list all the various reasons for this without annoying some asshole or the other, but it just suffices to say that it was a year of setbacks, disappointments and realizations. The single most positive development was me getting a Nokia N9. Heheh, okok, there were other moments better than this, but just couldn’t resist the temptation to mention it.

At the beginning of the year, I had the company of various people. Some were assholes, some were really good friends and some were colleagues to draw inspiration from. I end this year with absolutely nothing to do with them anymore. By the grace of God, circumstances have forced some leachers out of my life, and I couldn’t have done any better at that wilfully! Hence, the positives far outweigh the negatives, trust me. So, expecting 2012 to be a step forward in life. Welcome 2012, I’ll value each day carefully towards a happy fulfilling life ahead.

Life has changed. Earlier, we could just write about all the shit we did as effortlessly as we did them; be it freaky trips or bunked classes or missed exams or trips to restaurants. Now, not only are such events hard to come by, but also writing about them isn’t really appealing (or good). I’ll just try to sum up recent days. They have been really bad!

Manas fell ill, had to resort to medical care back in Allahabad.. Why so? Despite running continuous high fever for a few days, a Hyderabad hospital prescribed him “crocin” to run the fever down! And, not just Manas.. I fell ill, got admitted into CMH for a couple of days. And these are just a few highlights of the tip of an iceberg.

Anyway, will try to keep writing again, soon.

Thanks to Pavanesh who got me a superbly cool golf putter as a gift for my upcoming birthday gift! It looks something like the picture on the right.

I used to play this with my grandmother who had taught me these verses. We had a great time when I was small. She also taught me some cool origami tricks, will try to remember them.

Ikiri mikiri cham chikiri,
Chamé kaata mojumdar,
Dé élo damodar,
Damodarér handi kudi,
Taité boshé chaal kudi,
Chaal kudithé holo béla,
Bhaat khabiaai jamaai shaala,
Bhaaté podlo maachi,
Kodal diyé chanchi,
Kodal holo bonta,
Kankshiyalér maata!

How to:
The kids sit in a circle and place their hands in the centre with fingers spread out. The song is sung with great gusto and one kid touches every finger in turn, progressing in a clockwise direction. The finger that gets touched when the last word of the song is sung is tucked under the hand it belongs to and the game goes on, with the song being sung anew. A kid who “loses” all his fingers is out of the game. The last kid standing (sitting, rather) wins!

Yesterday, had fruitful “business” discussions with Mitali, Pavanesh and Vivek. It seems the plans seem fit and ready to be proceeded with. Yes, “business” stuff!

After a year of disappearance from normal life, I have changed and been rendered unfit to be described in one or two words — words like “techie”, “nerd”, “geek”, etc. Pretty much the opposite. I’ve started taking travel more seriously, writing micro/macro blog posts more often, reading “non-tech” stuff with more passion, and of course, utilizing my intellect more on the lines of entrepreneurship.

Recent trips to Mysore, Mekedatu and Kalyani was part of a series of one big eye-opener: travel is fun. Playing around with a GPS is even more interesting! Looking forward to taking up more trips, more GPS traces, more fun and less (but productive) work. Hoping to bring this blog and my fellow bloggers back to life (Anshul, Akriti, Mitali, Anshima ma’m: are you reading?)

It all started with a mistake, committed early on in my life. It was decided (by me) that I don’t deserve the honour to hold a passport in life. This decision was fueled by the more fundamentally governing decision bestowed upon me by cooler powers that “thou shalt be lazy in life” In pursuit of this cherished holy grail of my life, i.e. to do everything at the last moment, I decided to push the application for my passport right till the last moment.

[Note: I never got to complete this blog post. I am leaving this one be as a "contd...", but if you know me, you'd understand that I never complete "contd..." tasks ]

Hello everyone, was away from the blog for a long time. Now that we have Python support in Anjuta’s master, I’d like to take the opportunity to appeal to you to kindly review it so we can get enough confidence and feedback on it before subsequent releases. If you can help with ideas, bug reports, patches, would be simply awesome! Thanks!

I am back to blogging again. My last blog post was from Allahabad, my home town. Now I am some 1800 kms away in Bangalore. A lot has changed since I last blogged.

• My friends aren’t there with me, I am all alone.
• Am no longer in United College of Engineering and Research. I have joined AOL’s Bangalore Development Centre. I am working on the Single Line Search box project for MapQuest. I’ll blog about this soon.
• I didn’t have internet connectivity until about 3-4 days back.
• Most importantly, I am nearing the finish of the Anjuta Python plugin now.

All the features work now. I just need to smoothen them out. Autocompletion, autoindentation and calltips work. Rest of the fancy features like refactoring or PyLint checking or Python debugger might find a place outside the scope of the core language support plugin, which will be the next thing I will work on after the GSoC ends.

Now, some minor features, some bugs and lots of testing remain. I hope to wrap up all the features before the “suggested pencils down” date of 10 August, and start extensive testing. Above everyone else, I would like to thank Sebastien Granjoux, my mentor, and Johannes Schmidt, co mentor, for helping me every step of the way. If all remains fine, I’ll finish the plugin before the deadline of 17th August in a acceptable/stable form.

Would you like to test the plugin and give me some feedback before the deadline ends for final submission, please? The link to the project is here (also listed somewhere in some panel on the right). [Test the plugin against the Anjuta SVN trunk version]

Thank you everyone!

Here’s a game I just played and won. Higher rated player, time pressure, yet I did fine.

IChattopadhyaya [WHITE] (1301) vs. blacksunrise [BLACK] (1422)

[Can't see the PGN Viewer? Click here]

Final Position:

And here’s the pgn:

[Event "FICS rated blitz game"]
[Site "FICS, San Jose, California USA"]
[Date "2009.05.18"]
[Time "14:28:14"]
[Round "-"]
[White "IChatToPadhYaya"]
[Black "blacksunrise"]
[WhiteElo "1301"]
[BlackElo "1422"]
[TimeControl "300+5"]
[Mode "ICS"]
[Result "1-0"]

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 g6 5. Nc3 Bg7 6. Be3 Nf6 7. Bc4 O-O
8. Qd2 Re8 9. f3 a6 10. g4 Qc7 11. Bb3 b5 12. h4 Nxd4 13. Bxd4 Qg3+ 14. Qf2
Qxf2+ 15. Bxf2 Bb7 16. O-O-O Rac8 17. h5 b4 18. Na4 Rc7 19. hxg6 hxg6 20. Rh2
e6 21. Bg3 Rc6 22. e5 Nd5 23. Bxd5 exd5 24. Rxd5 Rxc2+ 25. Rxc2 Bxd5 26. f4
Bxa2 27. Nc5 Be6 28. Nxa6 Bxg4 29. Nxb4 Bh6 30. Nd5 Rxe5 31. Nf6+ Kg7 32. Nxg4
Ra5 33. Nxh6 Kxh6 34. Rh2+ Kg7 35. Kc2 d5 36. Rd2 Kf6 37. Bf2 Kf5 38. Rd4
Rc5+ 39. Kd3 Rb5 40. b4 Kg4 41. Ke3 f5 42. Be1 Kh3 43. Kf3 Kh2 44. Rd2+
Kh3 45. Rg2 Rb6 46. Rg1 Kh2 47. Rg2+ Kh1 48. Kg3 d4 49. Bf2
{Black resigns} 1-0