Technology Indroduction: My Early Years...

I've been involved in Computer Science and Technology for my entire career, and for a good portion of my education before...

I was interested in electronics and tinkering around with Radios and Tape Players from the time I was in 5th grade. My mum, who worked in Indian Institute of Science, helped me build a 555-based flashing LED for the school science fair when I was in 6th grade. My interest in electronics remains until this day...

The first computer I wrote any software for was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum - while I was still in high school. A couple of friends and I then went on to build our own Zilog Z-80 computer. We wrote programs for these machines in Basic, and using PEEK and POKE to write stuff into memory was considered cutting-edge!

The first computer I owned was a Macintosh Plus - which was the standard-issue computer for the class of '93 at Dartmouth College. The whole concept of event-driven programming and visually appealing user interfaces was a sea-change from the low-level, command-line based, DOS programs I had written until then.

I managed to find a balance between the powerful GUI-driven paradigms of the Mac and the NeXT boxes found in the computing clusters at Dartmouth with the command-line and shell-script heavy environments of the unix accounts given to us at the computer science department, so to this day, it's nice to feel at home in both worlds.

It was here that I made my first contribution to global software - a fix in Emacs, submitted and accepted!

It was at this time I was offered an internship at Microsoft Corporation, and I had the good fortune to work on Excel 4.5 as a developer in the Charting Group. This introduced me to visual debuggers, x86 assembly code, and production-grade software engineering methodology. Very useful exposure...

I then spent a short stint at Oracle Corporation after graduating, in the Oracle Forms development team. This was my first experience using industry-strength VMS and Unix tools, and working in an environment where portability between dozens of environments was concern #1. I must say that I really didn't appreciate the experience I got there until much much later...

My big break was in 1994, when I joined Microsoft Corporation as an employee in the Microsoft Project group. Microsoft Project was one of the coolest, albeit little-known, applications in the Office group, and the team was an extremely talented and hard-working group. In a lot of ways, this was my baptism in fire, and I don't think I had a bigger influence in my career than my team lead and colleagues in those days at Microsoft.

One of the tasks I was assigned was to help sever the connections between the front and back ends of Project, so that the back end could be replaced with a powerful new custom database. This experience had me touching almost all of the grungiest parts of a version 5 application and gave me a real appreciation for solid software architecture - one of my driving passions to this day. The importance of writing clean, maintainable code within a clean, extensible architecture was driven home so forcefully that I cannot imagine working any other way. It is indeed a valuable skill to keep a balance between performance, future extensibility, maintainability and coding efficiency.

In addition to this, this was also where I learned the importance of building and maintaining a proper development environment - I became intimately acquainted with the versioning and build processes, identifying and applying software tools and hardware knowledge.

My first new software project was a project that eventually served as the prototype for SharePoint Portal. The small team that worked on this was on fire to use the collective knowledge to set the foundation for a solid product with a long future, so architectural purity became a driving design guideline. It also introduced me to XML, and gave me a serious primer on database design and usage. Again, I would only appreciate the nuances of what I learned much later...

I then moved back to India for personal reasons, and joined the fledgling Microsoft India R&D Private Limited, where I worked on what was to become Visual J#. Although some of the work I did here resulted in my first US Patent application, it was becoming clear to me that the time had come for me to move on...

In March 2000, I resigned from my post at Microsoft, bringing to a close more than 5 years with the software company. By all accounts, these were enjoyable years, where both skills and friendships were forged, and which set me up for the next part of my career...

More Flora..er..Pictures

It's that time of year again...

January 26 is the Republic Day of India, and in Bangalore, where I live, the local botanical garden puts up a massive flower show.

I've not been to the show since I was a kid - and it's mayhem out there on the 26th...so Mum, Smitha and I went out there on the first weekend following...

Smitha wanted to learn how to use the 30D, and I, not having much of a clue myself, thought I'd try a few shots as well.

We shot almost exclusively with the 75-300 lens. The camera was mostly on High-speed Multi-shot mode, and the lens got a chance to show off the ability to take technically difficult shots of flying bees and beetles...in focus, natch!

The gardens were still crowded, and the amount of litter everywhere was appalling - yet another indictment of what people who keep their houses spotless will do in public...

I've uploaded the pictures with reduced resolution to save space. Track back to me if you want any picture in full resolution and I'll do my best to e-mail it to you :)

Enjoy!!

Flora

Flora, Fauna and other Wildlife

Here are some of the pictures taken on the Ooty trip with the 30D.

The picture quality in some cases has been compromised because I aggressively compressed them on the camera. I need to get a 4GB card (or two) to allow me to take the pictures RAW.

The kit as it stands now is the 30D body, Canon EFS 18-55 and Canon EFS 75-300 IS.

The pictures have been uploaded without the corrections proffered by Picasa. So there! :)

Enjoy

Flora and Fauna

The Ooty Trip: Jan 15-17 2007

Smitha!

Smitha, my wife, is my favourite photography subject. Usually she acquiesces to my insane demands to "stand here...look there...there...THERE!!!" by gritting her teeth - which makes her smile look wonderful on camera!
She was sitting around while I was fumbling with the 30D the moment I got it, and I managed to squeeze off this spontaneous portrait.

Canon 30D, 70-300mm IS, flash

November 7-10 2006: Sydney, Australia

Sydney Opera House

All these pictures were taken with Smitha's handy Creative DiViCam. This was taken from a boat as we took a tour of the Sydney Harbour.

The Coat Hanger

Smitha and I in front of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. Someday we'll go on the Bridge Climb!

Pipe Organ, Sydney Opera House

A friend works in the Sydney Opera House so we got a bit of a tour of the inside. This is the pipe organ in the main hall.

Gimme..Gimme..Gimme..

So...

I feel more and more like a Luddite these days...

I still have a laptop which weighs about half a ton, is made of pig-iron and runs on coal and steam...

I keep thinking that someday I need to get a new one, if only to retire the mule that hauls it around for me, and I keep looking for that new feature that will finally make me give it all up and buy a new one...

It's a Dell Inspiron 8200 more or less gifted to me by a good friend - and against all odds, it's survived around 3 years with me. I love its 15" screen with 1600 x 1200 resolution - makes it easy to see a reasonable block of code in Emacs or Visual Studio.

So I lied - it was a cutting edge machine in its day...

The real problem is that while it's bulky and really does give my arms a workout carrying it, it is perfectly sufficient for my use - and I do actually write code and stuff on it :)

What I actually noticed is that over the last few months, my travel kit has grown to prodigious proportions with power supplies and adapters of all shapes and sizes, so my next purchases will all try to minimize the number of wall-warts and bricks I need to carry around to stay powered up...

• One laptop from the mesazoic era with its brick...
• Pair of simple headphones and mic for Skype...
• Mobile phone and its wart...
• Bluetooth headset - ok..so I'm not a Luddite after all - and its extension. The extension plugs into the phone's wart so it's not so bad...
• A small point-and-shoot digital camera (for undercover paparazzi work :)) and its charger
• USB Multi-card reader...
• assorted cables...
• assorted adapters to deal with international power socket form factors...
• A small USB web-cam..

Now this is after I got rid of

• The PDA and its charger - my phone does a reasonable approximation thereof
• The CD-player and its charger - my phone plays music in Offline mode, and I can always boot up the laptop...

And I didn't buy an iPod for roughly the same reasons :)

What would be lovely is if the laptop:

• got a lot smaller (yes..that's within reach) and had battery power to last an 8 hour flight (that's OK too)
• could play music without having to have it open and turned on and taking up my tray-table on a flight (the newer HPs do just this - score! :)) and
• have a fast-enough startup time to actually use as a PDA to check flight schedules and things (this should be easy...my antediluvian Dell comes out of "Hibernate" in 12 seconds flat...)

Now...

...if only the laptop could also act as my mobile and use/charge my headset, I could get rid of having to carry my phone on my business trips - my laptop could just be in my backpack as always and I could take calls on the wired or the bluetooth headsets...or heck - just get rid of the wired headset and buy a bluetooth noise-cancelling headband with mic. (Yep - I really was lying about being a Luddite!)

This shouldn't be too difficult to do - the newer cars already have the ability to accept SIM cards and behave like telephones - muting the music and routing the call to the audio system of the car - so why not on a laptop?

So that's what its going to take for me to buy a new laptop...

Goodbye Old Friend...

I just upgraded to a Canon 30D from a Minolta 800si film SLR.

I've shot a lot of stuff with the 800si - bought it before a trip to Bryce Canyon in the US - but time and technology move on, and after a lot of compromising (mostly in the form of Digital Point and Shoots), and after a trip to beautiful, picturesque New Zealand with nothing but my Nokia N70 camera-phone, I finally chanced upon an opportunity to get a Canon 30D.

We went to the Himalayan foothills for the New Year and I shot a couple of rolls with the 800si before finally switching. I think the film roll is finally going the way of the polaroid...

Took the 30D on a trip to Ootcamund - a hill station close-by - and shot a bunch of water-birds in a bird sanctuary. The machine feels good. I have to still get used to the spot-metering and the AF, but it was a good first outing.

I'll post a few of the pictures as I get the time...

Arrrghhhhhhhh...phewwww

Well..I'm finally here.

What I really want to do is have my other blog's posts moved to this one so I can use my johnazariah.blogspot.com address as my main blog...

Can't figure out if it can be done...

Oh well..let me start with this address then!