Yesterday in a continuing series to a string of surprise appearances Himanshu Arora, who is another ACON from my previous batch, appeared talking to my PL (Nitin). It seems he is moving in to our project. He came down from Hyderabad and he himself got the news two days back. Now it seems he will join Piyush onsite.

The day before one of my junies needed help in their CRM assignment. I made his day by spewing a couple of pages of some of the best CRM stuff I’ve written, perhaps ever Again, when you get in the flow, there is now stopping, right? Dinky is coming to the DC today and I’m gonna make sure I get some IDs of junies. They seem to be so lazy to mail. Geez, how ironical!

Well, another good news is that, finally, my site appears right at the top if you type Arun Ravindran in google. Try http://www.google.com/custom?q=Arun+Ravindran this is really cool! Though there is another Dr. Arun Ravindran and an M.Sc Arun. V. Ravindran (My full name in Infosys!), I actually made it. The Google IPO is out and had a terrible start with the cutting down of the share price. Google is one of my favourite companies and this really broke my heart. I saw ‘Kill Bill Vol 1’ yesterday. The blood fountains and ‘wriggle the big toe’ sequences were typical Tarantino.

Today is the earliest I made to Blore office so far, excluding the first day of course, which is 8:45 pm. I finally shelled out the damn room rent which the receptionist (who BTW is a Kannadiga named Bintage!) was bugging me about. As expected it was too early for office. But anyway, at least, now I know.

These days I’m back to the MBA mode of thought. More business and money minded in every thought, all thanks to Shiv who gave me a reality shock the other day. It was actually not just because of that, we went down to IIMB in Bannergatta Road and got quite disappointed with the infrastructure. It wasn’t a big deal after all. The library had about 0.18 million books and in quite a disarray. I would love to be in my library anyday. But I must say there were some rare books which could have helped for my summer at least. Coincidentally, my “MBA timings” are also back, namely, 5 ½ hours sleep. God! What’s happening to me?

Oops! Time to get back to work. I just finished mastering XML Schemas and Nant, I’ve no idea what’s in store for me today.

I finally figured out what “foley” stands for in the list of film credits. It is simply recreating sounds in creative ways that production mikes miss in the actual shooting. It is one of the most interesting aspects of movie making according to me. Steven Spielberg ones remarked that sound tells more than half of the story in a movie. But foley artists look at the world of sound effects in totally unique way. Rather than recreate the sound by recreating the action what caused it, they look for other similarly sounding events. For eg: in the oscar winning movie Terminator 2, the methods used were:

Bullets hitting T-1000
For the sound of the bullets hitting T-1000 Gary Rydstrom(foley artist) slammed an inverted glass into a bucket of yoghurt, getting a hard edge to accompany the goop

The sound of the crushed skull
The sound of the crushed skull is actually a pistachio beeing crunched by a metal plate.

Read the full interview here for more details. I’m sure this is an area in Bollywood which is catching up as seen in some movies. Imagine sholay being reshot which realistic sounding gunfire and trains! I would definitely like to work in this area
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On my personal front, Archie (Archana) surprised me yesterday by “appearing” in the Bangalore DC. I was dumbstruck according to eye witnesses :). Well, later I met her friends Vidya and Hema. The former is her best friend in every sense of the word. We had lunch and seems, finally, I’ll have a contact in Bangalore who is quite aware of what’s hot and what’s not over here.

The guest house folks though always friendly and nice, have started pestering me with the strange half monthly payment thing. Their legendary averseness to cheques (they sent someone along with my roommate to convert his SBI cheque to cash!) is another headache. Well, looks like I’ve made lot of friends out here in the guest house. The most important of them are Anmol, Alok, Dhiraj and Ram (who are Samarth’s friends) and of course my roommate, Shiv. Would you believe that we talk for hours till 1 am most of the days? Well, we talk about a lot of stuff including his 7 year stint in US, films and of course game programming. That sums up the last couple of days, I guess.

It has been a while, isn’t it? Well it seems this blog has been receiving greater eyeballs than ever before, thanks to its reference in my signature line. Also I’m slowing redesigning the main site to make it similar to the design of the blog.

A quick update on me before I dive into my topic. I’m in the typical disarray mode right now. Work takes about 12 hours in a day. Traveling is approximately 2 hours and reading/T.V takes up 2 hours. I sleep for around 6-7 hours. The remaining 1 hour is all I’ve got for doing something creative. It is simply not enough!

Back to my topic, there is a certain part of me, which secretively tries to implement a mini-language in every project I do. I’m passionate about reading about new computer languages and their compiler/interpreter techniques. The inexplicable passion has driven me to learn at least 20 odd computer languages and still counting.

Though it is one of my interests, I wonder does it serve any purpose. The common reason most academia cites is the advantage of knowing various paradigms that will enrich your programming style in any language. But my take is that in reality it helps you in at least two ways: adaptability and judging suitability. Many times, I have been able to help people coding in language XYZ which I would be seeing for the first time. They would exclaim “Hey, but I didn’t find that in the manuals or even in Google”! What helps most of the time is that a language designer is one, like me ;), who studies all the existing languages before he makes a new one. Hence a many, many features are intentionally or unintentionally copied. Another advantage is suitability, if somebody is doing an AI program in javascript, I definitely know something is wrong. Most language are theoretically capable of doing everything what another language can, but the expressibility of each language makes it suitable for certain kinds of problem domains for eg: Perl for string processing. Only a person who has savored most of the offerings (i.e. languages) can save hours of programming effort and maintenance but choosing the right one for the job.

In the long run learning different languages or even applications always helps. No matter how difficult it may seem :)

Disclaimer: The following text is a semi-review of a book. Such posts will be marked with [“BOOKS”] prefixed at their headings until Blogger.com comes up with such a feature (which BTW will not take long)

The possibilities opened up by books are sometimes so immense that it can prove to be turning points. I stumbled upon ‘Opening the Xbox’ in a second hand book fair in Bangalore. For 200 rupees it gave me a fairly up to date recount of the extraordinary rise of Microsoft in the gaming industry. Written by a journalist, the fast paced narrative laced with references to gaming stalwarts gave a clear picture of the strategies required to survive in this cut throat business.

I’ve noticed that while Indian bookstores are inundated with books regarding learning new packages (from beginner to advanced “guru” levels), there seems to be a certain dearth of books offering an industry focus. For all you know this might have been an American edition (judging from the flap) left behind by someone. Well suffice to say, just my luck. Interestingly, the side effect of having read an influential book (influential? at least from my perspective, yes) is that you tend to completely agree with the book’s logic. I have often seen this with books by Ayn Ryand. For me, at least, my perspective of consoles changed so much that I was all for the go-for-laptop-and-Xbox idea. But much later it dawned on me (finally!) that for a serious game developer, Xbox offers no value unless he buys the Xbox SDK as well! Back to the PC with GPU-based card idea again.

Surprisingly, this is the logic of many serious non-game-developing gamers as well. This is perhaps they have other multimedia intensive uses like video editing/encoding as well. Anyway, from preliminary reports GPU is going to be an integral part of our PCs. Despite this, over here, only a handful, including your local hardware guru, knows even what it is.

I guess you can say the honeymoon period is over. In a wild goose chase that spanned over 3 DCs and many, many overnight bus journeys; I could have sensed something was happening. After nearly 6 weeks of ES University and many man-days later, when the wait seemed despairingly long, it finally came. Yes, the project I had been waiting for. About which I knew only three simple letters: U-B-S. But those three letters stood for the Trinity or the Thrimoorthis or the rather the undying quest for truth itself.

If you think I’m hyping you up, consider the facts. Among all the four projects considered for me. This is the only one that has:

1. Any connection to finance whatsoever. And boy, the connection is real solid. UBS is a Swiss bank and the second largest bank in the world
2. Only project which is starting from scratch. I get benefit of seeing the whole picture
3. No maintenance/support stuff here. It is a true consulting assignment with technical architecture designing. I get to see what I designed as a living, breathing system in UBS!
4. Opportunity for client interaction in my very first project
5. The only architecture I’m familiar with inside out is Microsoft platform. This project uses Microsoft BizTalk
6. The other thing I have risked to learn in TAPMI other than finance is German. I couldn’t ever convince myself for paying for German classes. But guess what, I’ll be in Switzerland, where German is very crucial to interact with clients.

The deal was not even inked when I was identified for it, but it came though. But, the excitement is really chilling for at least two reasons. Firstly, I’m might be too optimistic about the whole thing and I’m in for major disappointment later. Secondly, the responsibility is huge, it is a make-or-break situation. I have to really, really prove myself in this using a combination of my skills.

But I still prefer to see the bright side. In my brief tenure in the company, I’ve been surprising myself at my own agility. The agonizing decisions I’ve taken purely based on my gut feel, proved that I’m different from the bandwagon and rightfully so. The gift of serendipity to meet true and inspiring friends who just by a few interactions could enhance a facet of my life. Their rewarding companionship and support will take me I’m sure to where I belong.

Everywhere I traveled I felt every place will be your home; in fact, you need to just feel it. The structures, the roads, the streets names, the people are mere multiple facades to very same abode - Home. This is the religion of the global traveler, that - this is my global village. And guess what the religion just got a new believer :-)